Stephen Muecke

TRAVELLING THE SUBTERRANEAN RIVER OF BLOOD: PHILOSOPHY AND MAGIC IN CULTURAL STUDIES

This article argues for a philosophical and ‘magical’ turn in cultural studies in order to account for multidimensional aspects of rituals which work to reproduce cultures. It is suggested that those Western disciplines which have dominated understandings of Aboriginality in Australia are anthropology, history and literature and that they have done so with two important reifications: the social and the word. A philosophical rereading of a major interpreter of Aboriginal religion, W. E. H. Stanner, discovers a text dominated by the referent, enlightenment secularity, and a lack of self-reflexivity typical of his time. The more recent work of Jose Gil and Michael Taussig allows for immediate and performative body–country relations (examples are given from indigenous and state rituals which use the trope of blood). Powerful events in the indigenous and non-indigenous historical landscape are thus described in vernacular terms without recourse to the displacing categories of social system or text. The article...

CULTURAL SCIENCE?: The ecological critique of modernity and the conceptual habitat of the humanities

Should cultural studies defend itself against charges of ‘postmodern cultural relativism’? Does anyone believe that their own culture is ‘just one among many’? If we do not believe that the differences among cultures are just so much dressing up, that the differences are arbitrary, then there must be something at the core that really matters. This core is verging on the absolute, or the sacred; and its passionate defence is at odds with liberal pluralism. Anthropologists have been good at discerning the core values of the exotic cultures they study, but not so good at reflecting on the core values of their own democratic western cultures. The ‘architecture’ of western modernity (its concepts and practices) remains obscured for a reason: it is increasingly unsustainable from a generalized ecological viewpoint. This ‘generalized ecology’ asks questions like ‘who or what has the chance to exist?’ In a foundational moment, Durkheim used the primitivity of Australian Aboriginal religion to shore up the project of modern social science in Europe, and in the process gave the sacred a ‘social function’. I will argue that as ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ knowledges negotiate with each other the sacred (that absolute I will never relinquish) is expressed, not as a normalizing ‘function’, but as cultural excess and sustainable life-line. It is now time to mount a critique of European modernity from an ecological platform in which indigenous knowledges play a significant role. This is not because indigenous people are ‘closer to nature’, but precisely because they have no interest in any generalized Nature. It is the European invention of this scientistic metaphysics of a singular Nature that stands opposite, and enables, the muddled pluralism of contemporary cultural studies. When, with Bruno Latour, we open up ‘natures’, and ‘bring the sciences into democracy’, then we can negotiate with a range of stakeholders about what really matters in a situation.

From ANT to Pragmatism: A Journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI

Abstract: Bruno Latour and Antoine Hennion have been travelling companions for a long time. In order to discuss concretely the possible relationship between the humanities and Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, this article retraces exchanges that actually occurred at the CSI, in a common effort to rebuild links between political, scientific, and artistic representations that had been disconnected by the traditional disciplines. Under the heading of a “return to the object,” Hennion draws a kind of partial archeology of the Inquiry by confronting in particular his own work on music, amateurs, and attachments and the actor-network-theory developed at the CSI. The review of reciprocal exchanges is woven between problems to do with science and technology, on the one hand, and culture, on the other, allowing him to address concepts and issues such as mediation and its contrast with translation, the question of attachments, the criticism of Bourdieu’s critical sociology, and the revival of pragmatism in social inquiries.

Narrative and intervention in aboriginal filmmaking and policy

Response to Marcia Langton, ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television...’ An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. Sydney, AFC, 1993, pb 93pp.

Intensifying the tourist experience: 'Survenirs' at Daly Waters Pub.

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The writing laboratory

An experiment in both form and content, the essay lightly adopts an Australian storytelling style to perform its material as it narrates a road trip across central Australia. Arriving at the Daly Waters Pub in the Northern Territory, the travellers are taken by surprise by the strange décor. It is a place made significant by the multiple ‘authorships’ of hundreds of tourists. Visitors have left not only ID cards, pictures, and signatures, but also flags, number plates, thongs, caps, and bras. We analyse these traces left by travellers as objects of exchange that signify people’s desire to mark a place and use this phenomenon to introduce the idea of a complementary concept to that of the ‘souvenir’, and which we call ‘survenir’. The palimpsest effect of these survenirs (since none is erased) introduces time by accretion, rather than by chronology. The sociality generated through ‘survenirs’ is not just among humans but among all sorts of things, concepts and affects that assemble to create Daly Waters Pub as a tourist destination made not for, but by, its visitors. It is a materially interactive site composed by them.

Materialities of tourism in the twenty-first century: A very brief introduction

The university creative writing teacher is marking the roll at the beginning of the first class. ‘‘Now, who is present? Or rather, to use Bruno Latour, ‘How many of us are there?’ Who and what do we really need present here to make this a good workshop, or rather Laboratory for Writing Experiments? A teacher?’’ He raises his own hand. ‘‘I guess so, ‘present,’’’ and pretends to mark himself down as in attendance. ‘‘A seminar room? Check. Electricity? If the lights go out, we will be in trouble. Check. Students? And have you paid your fees? If not, you wouldn’t be here (better make sure you get your money’s worth). What about the more ephemeral? What kind of atmosphere do we want here, combining your complex desires and ambitions, with my slightly complex desire to ‘enjoy my job’?’’ he asks, himself as much as them, musing now: ‘‘How are we connected to each other, and even to the broader environment, so that we have some kind of common purpose in being gathered here together, rather than just pursuing our individual lives? Could our happiness together in this environment, for fourteen weeks, be important?’’ Our Laboratory, then – he continues, by way of explaining the opening gambit – will be an assemblage of things conductive to our literary purposes, whatever they may be. We can thus experiment with the admixture of things: concepts, technologies and methods, arguments and stories, figures of speech and modes of inscription, human beings, and lest we forget the dead ones, the ghosts of the literary past and the ways they find to keep talking to us. The concept of experiment advanced here is quite different from the one used for years in ‘‘experimental writing workshops.’’ It is not just about playing variations on the compositional elements of the text. With Latour, I see the experiment as collective experimentation. Neither text nor author is on its own. In our lab, we will experiment on ‘‘the attachments and detachments that are going to allow it, at a given moment, to identify the candidates for common existence, and to decide whether those candidates can be situated within stephenmuecke

Contingency Theory: The Madagascan Experiment

The ‘material turn’, seen across a number of disciplines in recent years, turns, in this issue, towards tourism studies. From its early appearances as ‘thing theory’, marked by Bill Brown’s special edition of Critical Inquiry in the Fall of 2001, it has had renewed impact in the social sciences, even though parts of anthropology would insist that they have always paid profound and detailed attention to ‘material cultures’. What changed, for instance, with the impact of Bruno Latour’s (2013) insistence on the agency of things and his inclusion of non-humans in a reconfigured governance model, is that objects achieve a surprising ‘vibrancy’ (Bennett, 2010). To coin a slogan, the newer materialist turn enjoins us not to see things as all being dead in the same way (merely material, all composed of atoms), but being potentially alive in their own unique ways. Objects and non-humans are not just there to serve us, or, for the gaze of the humanities, to provide rich textual or symbolic ‘readings’. ‘We’ are no longer looking out and interpreting the ‘world’ across an imaginary but powerful divide. There are complex pathways of humans and non-human entanglement that need to be traced along knowledge

“I don't think they invented the wheel”

Contingency, in its Latin root, is about touching, bordering on, reaching, befalling. In this, its first application as a concept driving new ethnographic practice, it avoids the quasi-scientific tendency to circumscribe a community or body of data. Consistently unsystematic, contingency theory welcomes stray facts, complexity, intuitions, and feelings. In this article the writer visits Madagascar contingently, encountering texts, people, and events.

No road (vague directions for the study of tourism)

Modernity must have come from the East, surely? When Captain James Cook, in his early modern conveyances, sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, he was the bearer of new technology, ideas of progress, and all-powerful science and reason. Modernity must have begun in Australia at this point, it must have flowed one way from Europe, for the “stone-age” inhabitants observing, laughing and resisting had nothing to offer in this encounter, at least that is what the wisdom of two hundred and twenty years of colonisation has determined. They seemed to lack that philosophical, political, economic and industrial complex that was European modernity in full development at the time. In fact, they were seen, as many other indigenous peoples, precisely as a primitive counterpoint to that modernity, defining it by contrast and confirming the Europeans’ advantage. In this paper I want to suggest that indigenous modernity is indeed possible, not as a full-blown political-industrial complex, but as a predisposition to (both) resistance and adaptation to the rapid changes introduced by invasion and colonisation. This modernity is quite distinct from European modernisation processes since it developed its own forms, later including modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Was there not a hint of disappointment when Cook writes: “they seem’d to set no value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one article we could offer them.” By definition, the indigenous people cannot be modern, because they refuse to participate in the economy whose logic would have them, in the end, assimilating. We are careful, now, in our relativistic way, not to designate the whole of European civilisation as superior to the one it would largely displace, but we are happy to allow one of its minor but key concepts – the modern – to continue on a search and destroy mission. The indigenous Australians were not “modern” and are still not, as far as one of the protagonists in the following debate is concerned. Under the banner “Kurnell’s European Symbols Facing Axe,” we find an evening tabloid in Sydney reporting on the plan from the National Parks and Wildlife Service to redesign the site where Cook landed. The plan, From Middens to Monuments will include the removal of trees such as Norfolk Island pines (they have a “European look”) to “return the land to its