Minutes, 4/10/08: Colin Gillis/Elizabeth Povinelli

Present: CG, Anne DeWitt, Jeff Glover, Andrew Goldstone, Gabriele Hayden, Ben Labreche, Patrick Redding, Jordan Zweck

Due to the negligence, prompted by excitement at the discussion and absent-mindedness in equal parts, of AG the minute-taker, the following notes on the discussion are short. CG has generously supplied the typescript of his lucid introductory remarks. Participants are warmly invited to restate or elaborate their comments here. For the full minutes, follow the link below.


Colin Gillis: Introduction. Povinelli is an anthropologist. Her first two books, Labor's Lot and The Cunning of Recognition, are about the place of aboriginal peoples in Australia's multicultural liberal democracy. Studying the process by which indigenous people in Australia constructed themselves as subjects in order to gain recognition from the Australian government, and her own deeply disorienting experience moving between queer culture in North America and the indigenous social world of northwestern Australia, has allowed Povinelli to see that the discourses of individual freedom and social constraint--which she refers to as the autological subject and the genealogical society--are what constitute bodies, sociality, and love in late liberalism. Povinelli describes The Empire of Love as a critique of Late Liberalism. I understand "late liberalism" to mean a political philosophy that originated in Europe, became the ideological basis for modern Western democracies, and has been exported and continues to be exported to such an extent that has become globally hegemonic. The core commitment of liberalism is liberty--the belief that humans are naturally free; and that any restraint on individual freedom must be justified. In other words, liberalism conceives of persons in terms of individual freedom and social restraint, and implicitly values freedom and self-determination.

Why does Povinelli prefer the terms "the autological subject" and "the genealogical society," or "autological discourse" and "genealogical discourse," to "individual freedom" and "social restraint"? I think it's because these terms provide some distance between her critique and the vocabulary of liberalism, because they clearly signal that they describe forms of discourse and not material realities, and because they're more flexible--genealogy isn't negative, like social constraint, and it includes things like kinship; and autology isn't automatically positive, like individual freedom, and describes individual freedom as a process of self-actualization not a given fact of natural reality. In the introduction to The Empire of Love, Povinelli defines the terms this way:

By the autological subject, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism. By genealogical society, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances. (4)

In the chapter of The Empire of Love from which the selection in the packet is taken, Povinelli uses a sore that she acquired while living in the aboriginal community in Belyuen as a way of exploring how her body is constituted by autology and genealogy. The social world of Belyuen is one of thick kinship relations and face-to-face sociality: there, people live in poverty and in nearly constant physical contact; sores are common; and doctors regard them with indifference. The social world of North America, specifically Montreal during the diver-cité gay pride festival, is one of stranger sociality: people take individual responsibility for their health and are obligated to warn potential sexual partners when they have an infection; they expect to live a long time; sores of the type that Povinelli has are rare and potentially a cause for great concern among the doctors she visits. Because autology and genealogy are configured differently in the social worlds of Belyuen and Montreal, the sore actually is two different things in those social worlds--if Povinelli were an aboriginal person who had lived all her life in northwestern Australia, she would accept the sore as a fact of life; or, if she were a North American tourist who had visited some exotic locale and picked up the sore there, she would see it as a medical emergency. But because Povinelli herself inhabits the stranger sociality of North America and the thick kinship lifeworld of Belyuen simultaneously, the sore is neither one of those things--her flesh is actually strained between two incommensurate lifeworlds.

What her experience with the sore reveals, I think, is two things:

1. That it is possible to manage the way one's body is constituted by autology and genealogy. The meaning of the sore--which seems obvious in each separate social world--is actually something that Povinelli herself can and does alter as she moves between them. She thinks carefully about what she tells and doesn't tell her doctors in North America so that she can receive treatment, without causing too much alarm but while also being responsible. And, in Australia, she seeks care in a way that others wouldn't: she has the sore treated with minor surgery and she asks that her friend cut the sore without feeling sorry for her; she can hold herself down for treatment, as she puts it. Her ability to manage how her body is constituted in these different social worlds opens up space for experimentation with new modes of life.
   
2. That the incommensurability of the discursive constitution of her body in Belyuen and in North America has dire material consequences. It is the reason why her indigenous kin are condemned to live what is essentially a slow death while her friends in the North America expect to live a long life and structure their sexual lives in light of that expectation. Ghoul health--which Povinelli defines as "the global organization of the biomedical establishment, and its imaginary," around the fear that the next plague is the real threat that haunts the global division of developed and undeveloped worlds--arises from and produces her sore's double meaning. Certain populations are stuck with horrific health conditions because healthcare resources are distributed according to a discursive distinction between the ordinary bodies of stranger sociality and the exceptional bodies of persons who inhabit a thick kinship sociality.
   

Povinelli wants to show how autological and genealogical discourses shape life on a huge scale, from the personal experiences of her and her friends to the uneven distribution of global resources that has emerged in the wake of settler colonialism. In a word, she wants her work to be disturbing: Disturbing is a good description of the effect of reading these essays, and it is a keyword for Povinelli: she wants to dislodge critical discourse from its moorings in Late Liberalism and find a vocabulary capable of describing the complexity of social relations in the world that has been created by the discourse of late liberalism. This is how she puts it in the introduction:

My goal is not to say yes or no to individual freedom and social constraint, the intimate event or the genealogical society. All I can hope is that by understanding how these discourses work to shape social life, we can begin to fomulate a positive
political program--something I have begun to describe as a politics of "thick life"--in which the density of social representation is increased to meet the density of actual social worlds. (21)

Now we should talk more about how Povinelli conceives of social representation as a positive political program--this is the question of mediation that Andrew raised on the using theory blog. Bracketing this question for the moment, I think that the first part Povinelli's argument--that our current modes of social representation are incapable of describing the "density of actual social worlds" is immediately valuable to us as critics.

I think one of the most basic objectives of using theory is to be disturbed. We read theory so that it will shake our preconceptions, make us disillusioned with our current vocabulary and our current set of analytical tools, and feel that we urgently need to replace them. The best theory also disturbs our assumptions about who we are as scholars, and what our duties and responsibilities are both to ourselves and to what we study. Now, the specific way in which I'm planning to use Povinelli is less profound, but I think it models one really practical way that we can respond to something like The Empire of Love by changing our day to day practice as critics. In about two weeks, I'll be giving a paper at the ACLA for a panel on sexual tourism. The paper is based on a short position paper that I wrote for a seminar on the same topic last fall for the MSA. It compares two texts: "The Woman Who Rode Away," a short story by the English writer D. H. Lawrence; and Season of Migration to the North, a novel by the Sudanese author al-Tayyeb Salih. In "The Woman Who Rode Away," an unnamed female protagonist leaves her family and, motivated by a primitivist fantasy, travels to a remote indigenous tribe in the mountains of Mexico. Once she arrives, she is promptly captured, drugged, and then ritually sacrificed in an ice cave. In Season of Migration to the North, the protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, a Sudanese man, travels from the global South to London, the colonial metropole, to study; and, while he's there, he plays on English women's primitivist fantasies, has sex with many of them, marries one, and eventually murders her. He then returns to Sudan, marries a Sudanese woman, and then disappears (it is suggested that he commits suicide); at the end of the novel, it is revealed that in his home in Sudan, there is a locked room containing an English library and a portrait of his dead English wife.

My seminar paper used these texts as examples to argue that the structural violence of colonialism foreclosed the possibility of intimacy between colonizer and colonized. And that the violence in these stories literalizes the fantasies domination and submission with which imperialism is inextricably bound up. Reading Povinelli has altered my original argument and provided a better, more precise vocabulary for articulating it. Now, what I am going to argue, is that moving between incommensurate social worlds unmoors the identities of these two characters. And this unmooring reveals that the liberal humanist claim that what makes us most human is our ability to recognize and value the freedom of another person in our intimate lives is also what sustains the structural violence of colonialism. Lawrence and Salih aren't just interested in the fantasies bound up with imperialism. These texts explore the way in which love is a site--in fact, the site--in which imperial power is deployed and can be resisted.

Discussion.Our discussion returned multiple times to the question of the historical presuppositions in Povinelli's text. When and how did autological and genealogical discourses arise? Are there aspects of these discourses which are not products of Late Liberalism? Jeff Glover wondered whether the tendency is to imply that indigeneity and traditional culture simply have no existence before liberal discourse imposes itself and creates them as an other; but for JG, oral culture is real and does have a history which is not restricted to the genealogical discourse invented by settler society. CG replied that perhaps Povinelli is saying we don't have the right tools for thinking about the pre-colonial period. AG wondered whether autology and genealogy might not be highly generalizable concepts, far predating modern imperialism and modern liberalism. Indeed, Ben Labreche is working with the conflict between individual self-making and the constraints of inheritance in his research. Patrick Redding noted that in general anthropology is more oriented towards comparative cultures in present time than towards history. Gabriele Hayden concurred and noted the allusion to Fabian's work on time and anthropology in Povinelli's South Atlantic Quarterly article.

A second thread of discussion concentrated on Povinelli's politics. GH and BL had reservations about her queer politics. Povinelli's discussion of the Radical Fairies came up, but CG has been focusing on her treatment of the Belyuen community. BL wondered: what is she calling for? CG: thicker social representations. BL: Is this just better liberalism?

Finally, PR asked about CG's notion that the purpose of Using Theory is to be disturbed. Is this a contrast with Susannah Hollister's approach to the Marxist theorists she is using? Would CG take on board Povinelli's methodological and political positions? CG: yes, these do matter. Theory isn't just something picked out of the anthology to support what you were already going to do.