Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism
258
Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism
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Overview
In Economies of Abandonment, Elizabeth A. Povinelli explores how late liberal imaginaries of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance make the global distribution of life and death, hope and harm, and endurance and exhaustion not merely sensible but also just. She presents new ways of conceptualizing formations of power in late liberalism-the shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it has responded to a series of legitimacy crises in the wake of anticolonial and new social movements and, more recently, the "clash of civilizations" after September 11. Based on longstanding ethnographic work in Australia and the United States, as well as critical readings of legal, academic, and activist texts, Povinelli examines how alternative social worlds and projects generate new possibilities of life in the context of ordinary and extraordinary acts of neglect and surveillance. She focuses particularly on social projects that have not yet achieved a concrete existence but persist at the threshold of possible existence. By addressing the question of the endurance, let alone the survival, of alternative forms of life, Povinelli opens new ethical and political questions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822350842 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/11/2011 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 258 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Economies of Abandonment
Social Belonging and Endurance in Late LiberalismBy Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5084-2
Chapter One
The Part That Has No Part
Traditions of Dysfunction
In the southern winter of 2009, a debate raged across reviews, blogs, emails, and scholarly essays in the wake of the publication of The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. The book was written by Peter Sutton, an anthropologist, and promoted by conservative pundits such as Christopher Pearson of The Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Sutton argued that policy makers and academics should focus on Indigenous social traditions as the primary source of Indigenous social dysfunction. Forget problems of structural racism and state neglect, the central cause of Indigenous impoverishment, ill-health, and educational stagnation was Indigenous people's "ancient need to pursue family loyalties over essentially foreign ideologies such as the doctrine of the common good" and "traditional medical beliefs and practices" that blocked "certain preventative and curative health measures." Indigenous Australians, he implies, must walk out of their communities, leaving their ancient ways behind. Sutton seems sure where they are going: modernity, where common goods prevail rather than sexual abuse, family loyalties, and strange beliefs about bodies. In a review of the book, the economist Jon Altman notes its deep vitriol, surface bitterness, and bizarre accusations. Among its strange assertions and beliefs about knowledge and embodiment is this one: "Many of the academics who I knew who reacted negatively to the intervention as a whole ... but failed to give primacy to the fate of so many children, were also childless."
The questionable dichotomies and sexual economies that appear to organize The Politics of Suffering should not be quickly dismissed, however. They are symptomatic of a broader conservative agenda in contemporary Australia that sought to, and has been quite effective at, hegemonizing the political and social field by using images of primitive sexuality to figure an absolute difference and hierarchy between the modern and ancient, personal freedom and customary constraint, depersonalized common truths and identity-based prejudices. Sutton himself hoped that The Politics of Suffering would provide positive support to the controversial 2007 Australian federal Intervention in Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory. The "Intervention" is shorthand for a set of policies that the then Liberal-Conservative prime minister, John Howard, put in place in 2007 in the wake of the Little Children Are Sacred report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. In the name of a national emergency in Indigenous child sexual abuse, Howard's government assumed broad and unprecedented powers over Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, including Indigenous welfare, education, land tenure, and health. The era of cultural recognition and reconciliation was over, Howard declared. The governance of the prior, and the sexual dysfunction at its center, would no longer extend to Australia's Indigenous inhabitants, and the sooner the inhabitants of Australia accepted this the sooner the harms of the past could be extinguished. The federal government would, forcibly if necessary, puncture the sovereignty of Indigenous communities and liberate countless Indigenous children who were languishing in their broom closets—worse, being raped in these sealed- off spaces, their abuse aided and abetted by childless advocates kowtowing to the sanctity of traditional law.
What would the anthropologist Johannes Fabian make of The Politics of Suffering? In Time and the Other, Fabian characterized the relation between anthropology and its object as a "political cosmology," at the center of which lay a constitutive contradiction. On the one hand, "anthropology has its empirical foundation in ethnographic research, inquiries which even hard- nosed practitioners carry out as communicative interactions" and, on the other hand, "when these same ethnographers represent their knowledge in teaching and writing they do this in terms of a discourse that consistently places those who are talked about in a time other than that of the one who talks." Demonstrating how the event of ethnographic narration was misaligned to the narrated event that provided its foundation allowed Fabian to align the writing practices of modern anthropology to the historical desires of a "modern Hegelianism," in which the function of the non-Western other is to entail a Western unfolding. The problem with modern anthropology, according to Fabian, was that the contemporary ethnographic subject, often a single individual, was continually transfigured into a mass subject living in the past tense. People's contemporary lives were reduced to a set of ancient needs: the durative unfolding present was narratively transfigured into a frozen past perfect. Sutton's text would seem an exemplary if belated case in point.
Fabian insisted that the people anthropologists speak with—or more broadly interact with—are not in a different time from the interactional encounter itself. And his point was to demonstrate how locating them in another time (the past perfect of the genealogical society) aligns the anthropological narrative with the most conservative of Western civilizational philosophies and agendas. Sutton's reverses this argument. Because contemporary Australian anthropologists refuse to speak "honestly" about the harms of traditional Indigenous culture, they are unable to understand that the time of traditional custom is out of joint with modern society. It is this temporal dissonance that is causing the present social dysfunction in Indigenous communities. This ancient past has no place in a nation defined by the promise of freedom's future. Thus, from Sutton's point of view, anthropologists aren't producing the past perfect of Indigenous society; Indigenous people are doing that. Anthropologists are simply refusing to accept its irrelevance in contemporary, freedom-embracing societies.
We should be wary, however, of wallowing too long in a self- lacerating version of anthropological exceptionalism. After all, narrative maneuvers of time and the other—or what should be more precisely called tense and the other—within the political cosmology of anthropology are located within the broader social tenses of late liberalism. These social tenses are heard not only in Australian anthropology or in Australia even if they have a particular narrative form and force there. It is this broader system of late liberal tense and governance that interests me. In this chapter and the next, I examine this system of tense and governance through the shifting terrain of late liberal recognition in the wake of the consolidation of neoliberal rhetorics and institutions and the elaboration of new concerns about state security in the shadow of 9/11. As the dominant technique of the governance of difference in late liberalism, cultural recognition manages the difference between policing and politics in Jacques Rancière's sense; namely, policing as the management of a given distribution of social places and roles, ways of being and saying such that some activities are visible and sayable (are located in the order of logos) while other activities appear to be nothing more than noise (are located in the realm of phonos); and politics as the transformation of phonos into logos and a subsequent emergence of new distributions of visibility and sayability. In Disagreement, Rancière draws examples from classical Greece and contemporary labor and new social movements. For instance, he points to the plebian uprising of ancient Greece and to black, female, and homosexual claims on public rationality. His purpose is to demonstrate the difference between political acts that transform the background assumptions of logos and policing practices that merely rearrange elements while leaving the background assumptions intact. How does the politics of recognition in late liberalism manage the difference between police and politics, the actual world and the potentiality embedded in the noise this actual world faces and helps to create? I examine these issues in this and the next chapter in order to make a space for subsequent discussions in chapters 3 and 4 about the maneuvers of social worlds and projects who are addressed by, exist in, or are a result of these tactics of recognition and social belonging.
In this chapter I discuss in some detail two seemingly unrelated cases: the politics of the Australian Intervention and the jurisprudence of spiritually based drug consumption in the United States pivoting on the case Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal (2006). As I noted in the introduction, these two examples cut across state and national borders (Australia and the United States), involve different kinds of social panics (sexual panics and drug panics), and focus attention on different aspects of the state apparatus (parliament and judiciary). Moreover, the two social worlds and projects differ significantly in relationship to the governance of the prior in late liberalism and in relationship to the entanglements of power and the will. In the case of Indigenous Australians we seem to be witnessing a structural relationship between the state and Indigenous people that is independent of any particular person's will to be different. Members of the União do Vegetal congregation would seem a more stereotypically volitional form of association. Additionally, the two cases seem to relate very differently to the governance of the prior—the Indigenous Australians are a clear and forceful case of the governance of the prior, the União do Vegetal congregation is not. And finally, the Australian state and U.S. judiciary seem to come to opposite conclusions: proponents of the Australian federal Intervention in Indigenous life argue against protecting traditional customs, while the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. UDV offers constitutional protection to religious expression. But I am not aiming to produce a comparative sociography of late liberalism, at least not comparative in the sense of comparing two distinct entities in order to produce a higher order unity.
Instead this chapter first discusses each case as it reveals how late liberal governance makes use of an array of social tenses to legitimate its powers over life and death. Second, I discuss how this mobilization of social tense manages the potential eruption of noise (phonos) such that the fundamental ordering of social roles is not disturbed. And finally, I examine how this management of noise faces and creates new social projects and worlds. I focus on these three aspects for several reasons. First, I want to demonstrate how the tense of the other is available—is at hand—whenever the problem of cultural recognition arises. As my introductory reference to Fabian's ground-breaking work meant to suggest, noting that the other is continually interpreted vis-à-vis a temporal inflection is hardly a new insight. I spend the time elaborating this point in order to show that the tense of the other is not only always at hand when confronting the problem of cultural recognition, it is also a demand placed on others to give an account of themselves in terms of the social divisions of tense. But I am also interested in how the tense of the other is entangled in the recent permutations of the late liberal governance of difference under the shadow of state security. How in paying attention to the local textures and potentialities of late liberal recognition can we begin to map the contemporary securitization of alternative worlds?
Understanding social tense as a demanding environment internal to late liberal recognition allows me to make my second point—that the divisions of social tense are a part of a unified, if mobile, discursive field that makes maneuvers within it appear as if they were antagonistic to it. As I hope to make clear, the support of Indigenous tradition and the subsequent assault on the same unsettle a certain level of political organization even as it conserves another. Ditto with the União Do Vegetal case. But the purpose of my discussion is not to adjudicate what actions are instances of policing and what are instances of politics in Rancière's sense. The immediate goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the common policing function operating in social and political debates in Australian and the United States. From what perspective are the disruptive debates about Indigenous traditions and the alternative religious practices political events? What kind of political events they are? And, in light of these questions, what would it be to engage politically in late liberalism? I will begin with the Australian invention and then move to Gonzales v. União do Vegetal. I conclude with a discussion of the part that has no part in these debates.
Sweeping out the Broom Closet
On June 21, 2007, the then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, declared a "national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory." Howard's declaration came in the wake of the Little Children Are Sacred report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. As I noted above, in the name of this national emergency, Howard's government assumed broad and unprecedented powers over Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, including Indigenous welfare, education, land tenure, and health. Howard's announcement came with carrot and stick. As a carrot Howard promised millions of dollars for Indigenous health, education, and employment training. As a stick the federal government assumed control over seventy-three Indigenous townships through the forcible acquisition of five-year leases over townships on Indigenous-owned land, community living areas, and other designated Indigenous areas and sent, under the cover of military police, medical personnel to conduct compulsory sexual health exams for all children under the age of sixteen. "Business managers" with powers to control and direct all Indigenous programs and their assets, including the monitoring of all community communication and video equipment, were also sent to take control of all Commonwealth programs in Indigenous town camps and rural communities.
One of the first actions of these business managers was to shift Indigenous workers from the Community Development Employment Programme (CDEP, a work and training program within a social welfare framework, loosely called "work for the dole") to welfare. Publically proclaiming its neoliberal ("enterprise culture") commitments, the federal government nevertheless began the Intervention by shifting as many Indigenous people from the CDEP to welfare as possible. This shift from work to welfare was necessary if the federal government wished to control the wealth and spending of Indigenous people in remote communities and town camps. For legal reasons, persons on the CDEP couldn't have their wages managed. Once all Indigenous people were placed on welfare, payments could be tied to school attendance and other behavioural indices; furthermore, fifty percent of payments could be given in the form of debit cards that restricted purchasing choices of Indigenous men and women to selected stores for selected items while prohibiting other purchases such as alcohol and pornography. But shifting Indigenous men and women from CDEP to welfare came with a dramatic lowering of incomes in a population already suffering general and sustained poverty. Speaking to Leon Compton on Darwin ABC radio on July 23, 2007, Mal Brough made the link between welfare and social control explicit:
COMPTON: Are you saying that money from CDEP is the problem in child sexual abuse and alcoholism and violence?
BROUGH: Absolutely, there is no doubt that there is a contributing factor beyond the CDEP payments and because for all intents and purposes they are a welfare payment—it is the cash that is being used to buy the drugs and alcohol that have caused so many ... so much of the pain for these children. There is just no doubt about that.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Economies of Abandonment by Elizabeth A. Povinelli Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Child in the Broom Closet 1
1 The Part That Has No Part 47
2 The Brackets of Recognition 75
3 Road Kill:Ethical Substance, Exhaustion, Endurance 101
4 Events of Abandonment 131
5 After Good and Evil, Whither Sacrificial Love? 163
Conclusion Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies 187
Notes 193
Bibliography 211
Index 225