2
A young girl looks up towards the sky. Her face is reflective, her eyes meditative. Her eyes are following a bird, as it wheels freely in the sky above her. As she watches, her head tilted to one side, she listens to the words of her mother (Ningali Lawford), who, with her arm around the girl’s shoulder, tells her that the spirit bird will watch over her. When the spirit bird, which has appeared to Molly in a dream, reappears near the end of the film (in a record of the events visualized in Australian director Phillip Noyce’s 2002 film, Rabbit-Proof Fence), soaring in the sky, Molly follows it home. Curious about the world, fourteen-year-old Mardu girl Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi) attentively listens to, and learns from, the stories her mother and grandmother (Myarn Lawford) tell her. She asks questions of others. She listens thoughtfully to a white man, who answers her question about the rabbit-proof fence. How far does it go? All the way to the sea in the south of Australia, and all the way to the sea in the north, she is told. Later, remembering these words, Molly transforms the rabbit-proof fence into a path that will lead her back to her home in Jigalong.
Having been forcibly removed from her family by representatives of the Australian government, who see their job as saving the ‘natives’ from themselves, and having been transported to a school for ‘half-castes’, along with Daisy and Gracie, her two ‘sister-cousins’ – as Doris Pilkington Garimara calls them – Molly leads them in their escape from the Moore River Native Settlement the day after they are abruptly deposited there.1 By following the fence, Molly is able to lead Daisy safely home, though Gracie is recaptured and returned to the Moore River school through the government’s subterfuge. Drawing on the skills she has learnt from her community, Molly uses her wit, courage and determination to navigate her way back home. Against all the odds, she evades police search parties, surviving sometimes on account of the kindness of strangers, and sometimes despite the complicity of those she encounters, who would capture her. Molly reads the landscape in order to avoid the fate of being assimilated into the white culture, the effort to breed out all traces of her native blood. She resists those who would map out her destiny, and that of her kin, as a domestic worker, as if all that she is good for is cleaning up white people’s mess.
Molly’s journey home, along the rabbit-proof fence, was accomplished over a period of nine weeks in 1931, and is recounted by her daughter Doris Garrimara-Pilkington. I suggest that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence shows the landscape of the Australian outback by effecting a new distribution of the sensible. It is not just that what is seen and what is heard is wrapped up in the social distribution of roles, but that in resisting the effort to dislocate certain bodies from the land to which they are attached, the film points towards a renewed understanding of place and time. It is a question of contesting the very notions of place, space and temporality that authorize the attempt to remove indigenous peoples from the lands they inhabit. The settlement of Australia by the British was accompanied by legitimating narratives, ostensibly corroborating their right to appropriate land on the basis of concepts of land use and property consistent with social contract theory. Bound up with the notions of labour and ownership that were supposed to underwrite the claims of British settlers to indigenous lands, were not only appeals to what allegedly constituted the defining features of humanity, but also an appeal to terra nullius, nobody’s land, or empty land – an appeal that rested on the invisibility of those who already inhabited the lands for those who appropriated it, on the unrecognizability or illegitimacy of their humanity. This amounted to the discounting of a way of life because it was not premised on the individualism of capitalist landowning rights, which was, at the same time an aesthetic and political judgement about the signification of the colour of skin of those who already inhabited the land, but who were deemed to have no right to it on the basis of their alleged primitivism. Just as the ‘natives’ were considered dispensable, and their claim to the land they inhabited negligible, their manner of inhabiting the land was not respected, not recognized as legitimate – that is, not acknowledged as fitting smoothly into white narratives about an efficient working of the land for profit. The clear implication was that the failure to entertain a relationship to the land based on property ownership amounted to a defect, a failure that the settlers set themselves the task of making good, in effect, demonstrating what they considered to be a more developed, productive and civilized relationship to the land. In question, especially in this age of global warming, is what values were enlisted in the service of this ‘civilizing’ impulse. A more respectful, and less exploitative relationship to the land and the animals inhabiting it, such as that enshrined in the Mardu way of life, appears these days not only to be increasingly wise, but also imperative to survival.
Rabbit-Proof Fence can be understood, not only to contest the political narratives about which ways of inhabiting the land constituted the properly human, rather than allegedly defective modes of inhabitation; it also challenges the philosophical concepts of spatiality and temporality that underlie and inform the ideals and values propelling capitalist, landowning myths of appropriation, driven by efficiency in the service of the accumulation of profit. The film thus addresses the mythical underpinning of narratives that fail to acknowledge the humanity of peoples on the basis of a fundamental but for the most part invisible disagreement about what it means to live meaningful lives. Not only did British settlers of aboriginal lands assume the land they conquered to be empty, but also implicitly operated on the assumption that no productive relationship to time and space had been established in this ostensibly empty land. Neither time nor space was being utilized for the production of monetary value, for profit. The land had not been cordoned off and was not being harnessed efficiently for the competitive accumulation of capital. One might say that, in effect, the British saw not only an empty land; but also an empty time and space, which they sought to fill up with capitalist notions of time and space, based upon the speed of productivity, and upon converting places into property capable of yielding capital.
The metaphysical basis underlying Kant’s understanding of how space and time function as a priori conditions for experience opens itself up to interrogation. What Kant proposed as the sine qua non of experience re-establishes itself as histor ical and contingent, rather than universal and unchanging. This might be thought along with Foucault’s historical a priori, or in terms of Quentin Meillassoux’s insistence upon contingency. It can also be thought in terms of Rancière’s conception of the transition from the representative regime to the aesthetic regime, which, in some respects, builds on a Foucauldian understanding of the historical a priori and coincides with Meillassoux’s emphasis of contingency.2 The forms of intuition, it turns out, are neither as pure nor as necessary as Kant made them out to be. Rancière is concerned with ‘the way in which the practices and forms of visibility of art … intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration, in which they distribute spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular’ (AD 25, ME 39). In maintaining the differential operation of spatiality and temporality, Rancière effectively radicalizes phenomenological claims about the horizonal operation of temporal and spatial modalities. Rather than assuming that we are oriented to the world in a way that is reducible to a calculative mode of existence, and that space and time are empty forms, constituted by measurable, identical units, philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized that we are situated within the world.3 If we understand worldhood in terms of cultural contexts, we can also see that culturally constructed worlds can clash, conflict and exist in tension with one another, when brought into some sort of relationship.
Building on claims that understanding and orientation occurs within constructed contexts, within cultural horizons, queer theorists and race theorists are among those to have developed the idea that individuals and groups can be oriented by, and can orient themselves according to, specific temporal and spatial modes.4 The levelling out of divergent temporal and spatial models according to an allegedly uniform and universal form of time is as much a function of political privilege as it is of the predominance of a scientific rationality that imposes a linear, quantitative, regulative concept of time. Heidegger displaces what he characterizes as a scientific notion of time, which assumes that time is progressive, calculative, and can be adequately encapsulated in formulae that posit an accumulation of identical units of time that can be mapped as now-points that cancel one another out to coalesce into an infinite time line. Privileging finitude, Heidegger radicalizes the transcendental approach of Kant’s Copernican revolution, thinking time on the basis of a subject who experiences time as one whose finitude is inescapable. Making the anticipation of death decisive for understanding our experience of time, Heidegger brings into question the legitimacy of construing time irrespective of mortality. Yet, his understanding of finite temporality does little to negotiate the complexities of a world in which vulnerability to death in the sense of propinquity is enhanced or inhibited in line with geopolitical and socio-economic considerations. Nor does he account for what Orlando Patterson has adumbrated as social death.5 Such considerations, for Heidegger, would be relegated to the level of the ontic, rather than the ontological; yet, the line distinguishing the ontic from the ontological is itself a regulative divide that decides in advance in favour of certain normatively constitutive features of temporal experience.6 The likelihood of early death for certain sectors of the population is left unaddressed by Heidegger’s blanket emphasis of mortality, as is the notion of social death.
Models of time that are socially and culturally inflected reflect the divergent experience of differently situated subjects. They also contest the universality of the forms of space and time that Kant maintained, suggesting that his metaphysical claims for perceptual experience are based upon an invisibly privileged masculinist and European stance, which makes a series of assumptions about an implicit ‘we’, the default subject of European philosophy, which excludes from its purchase vast swathes of humanity.7 Thinking together, the idea that such modalities of temporal and spatial experience are modulated across diverse cultures and subcultures with the suggestion that art can play a role in distributing modes of time and space in new ways, we can see how art, by confronting one culture with the temporality and spatiality of another culture, might redistribute that which Kant took to be pure forms of intuition. It is in such a project that Rancière’s work engages, in an implicit reworking of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology through insights culled from his aesthetics.8
Art can produce a contestation of cultures through proposing alternative ways of envisaging temporality and spatiality within a given culture, and between cultures. Through cultural and artistic contestations, new ways of thinking, doing and seeing, new intercultural and intra-cultural ways of perceiving in general, between and across cultures might emerge. Indeed, they are already emerging through art, if Rancière is correct, and it is up to philosophy to track and conceptualize their emergence. In the case of Rabbit-Proof Fence – not a film that Rancière himself has discussed, but one that I think illuminates his thinking on art and is illuminating for it – the reduction of the land to a resource for extracting profit contests a way of inhabiting the land that is less exploitative, and more respectful. A thoughtful curiosity about and knowledge of the land enables Molly to read intelligently the signs inscribed on its surfaces as if they were tracks or clues, following the cues of the animals and birds that reside there. This mode of inhabitation does not reduce the land to the instrumentalist end of extraction. This is a world in which humans learn from birds and animals, following, in this case literally, their lines of flight. Molly and her siblings circle around the land until they alight on the rabbit-proof fence that points them homeward, and when the fence peters out, the spirit bird guides them back to their family and community.
Rabbit-Proof Fence participates in a redistribution of the sensible, effecting a clash of worlds, a conflict. One finds oneself drawn into a world, a vision, a way of seeing, a way of understanding, a way of construing the land that brings into view the story of the ‘stolen generation’, where the perspective operates both in literal terms of the way that the land is seen – through particular camera angles – and in terms of cultural, metaphorical, aesthetic and political points of view. The landscape comes to be seen in certain moments, from the points of view of Molly and the community of which she is a part, while in other moments we see the fence and the land through the eyes of those who would capture the girls. In these latter moments, the land is surveyed from the point of view represented by A. O. Neville, the ‘chief protector of aborigines’ (Kenneth Brannagh), the tracker, Moodoo (David Gulpilil), who attempts, and fails, to do Neville’s bidding in finding Molly and her siblings, and the police officer, who accompanies Moodoo.
The fence comes to function as a map, as Molly follows its path, having listened to a white man’s account of how it is the ‘longest fence in the world’ – words that take on a new meaning as the girls, hungry and exhausted, trek on foot 1,200 miles of the 1,500 miles to which one of the three rabbit-proof fences erected across Australia extends. Molly has been brought up on her mother’s stories, and the fact that she knows how to listen, her attentiveness, pays dividends. By following the fence, she is able to return home. She transforms the lessons she has learnt, her observations of the location of the sun in the sky, her ability to track animals, her understanding of how to provide shelter for herself and her siblings, and her ability to cover their tracks, into a means of survival. The ‘poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning’ (ES 10, SE 16), says Rancière. Molly translates the words of a white man, and recomposes them into a lifeline, as she follows the fence back to her family and community. The fence shows her the route back to the world from which she has been stolen, a sign that points her homewards, even as it embodies the effort of white, British settlers in Australia to separate the wild from the tame, a separation that comes to stand metaphorically for aboriginal ways of life and the life of white Australians, who see themselves as saving primitives. The fence symbolizes the effort of the Australian government to tame the wildness of aborigines, ‘for their own good’, by taking their children from the land and life they know, and assimilating them into white culture.
The cinematography of the landscape is evocative of songlines, of dreamlines, as the fence that has been erected to protect agricultural land (cultivation/civilization) from the ravages of the rabbits (untamed wildness) is read in a different way and for different purposes by Molly. We might say that Molly transforms the fence into a songline, singing into existence another world, a world she rejoins because she knows how to cover her tracks, escaping with Daisy and Gracie from the school just before rain wipes out their footprints, and crossing the Moore River so that Moodo, who is dispatched with his tracker dog to find them, loses the scent. Moodo is compelled to acknowledge Molly’s intelligence: she is, he is forced to concede with a grudging admiration, ‘clever’ – she is not the ignorant, uneducated black child that the white Australian government imagines her to be, in its quest to eliminate the traces of black blood in ‘half-castes’ and to offer them what is imagined as salvation.
Two worlds clash, and their difference is epitomized in how the materiality of the fence manifests itself – its function to prevent damage to crops by rabbits (a mandate that, in fact, it failed) – and the role it takes on in the marking out of a path that returns the girls to their home. The fence comes to constitute the difference between starvation and exposure for the girls on the one hand, and their returning home, on the other hand. Whether they follow it or not, becomes a matter of life and death for Molly and her siblings, while for those who erected it, at issue is economic survival premised upon keeping the rabbits from the crops.
When Molly and Daisy finally reach their home in Jigalong and rejoin their family, their faces are blackened in an effort to prevent their reappropriation; the government’s efforts focused on children whose lighter skins were taken to signify that they could more easily and quickly be assimilated into white communities and ways of life. The lighter their skin, the more effectively the traces of black blood could be bred out of their family lines, so the thinking went.
Rabbit-Proof Fence opens with a long, unbroken aerial shot, which moves above, over and along what turns out to be a landscape, but which presents itself at first as indeterminable. The referentiality of the shot is uncertain. ‘We’ are not sure of what we are seeing immediately. ‘We’ do not know what we are looking at. Slowly, the pattern of shadows, hollows or dots – are they bushes, or the tops of trees? – that merge into one another takes on the discernible topography of desert land. After moving across the land, the long take reveals the sky above the land, and then dips down again to the land. This opening aerial shot evokes aboriginal dot painting, a technique in which Western perspectival assumptions are inoperative; that a Eurocentric perspective does not operate, is suggested in more than one way in the film, as the desert is presented to us from a bird’s-eye view, evoking the spirit bird that guides Molly home.9 What we see when we see the rabbit-proof fence, what we see when we see the land it cuts across, whether we see a barren inhospitable land, or whether we see a homeland, is precisely what is affectively, politically and philosophically at stake. And this very indeterminacy is at the heart of the film.
In an account that resonates strongly with scenes from Rabbit-Proof Fence, Fiona, one of the contributors to a 1997 report Bringing them Home, a report published by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, recalls: ‘We had been playing altogether, just a happy community and the air was filled with screams because the police came and mothers tried to hide their children and blacken their children’s faces and tried to hide them in caves.’10 Quoting this passage and commenting on how she is moved by Fiona’s testimony, Sara Ahmed resists articulating the way she is moved in terms of empathy, and distances herself from the ideal of reconciliation, the limits of which she points to. She invokes a politics based rather ‘on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one’ (CPE 39). Ahmed insists that she does not know, has not lived that which moves her in Fiona’s testimony. She ‘cannot know’, and yet she is moved by what ‘does not belong’ to her (CPE 31), and being so moved, still she must act. As she says, ‘non-indigenous readers’ need to take ‘personally’ the testimony in Bringing them Home, ‘but in such a way that the testimony is not taken away from others, as if it were about our feelings, or our ability to feel the feelings of others’ (CPE 35). Ahmed points out that the violence inflicted in forcibly removing Fiona from her home ‘was not simply inflicted upon the body of the individual who was taken away, but also on the body of the indigenous community, which was “torn apart”’ (CPE 34). As Ahmed puts it, the ‘skin’ of the community that mourns the children that were removed from its midst helps to shape both that community itself, wounding that community, and the children of the ‘stolen generation’. In order to move away from the hurt thereby caused, she suggests, agreeing with Wendy Brown, that it is necessary to avoid fetishizing wounds, insisting that it is equally necessary for the hurt to be made political, for it to be brought into the public realm, for it to be witnessed, for it to be heard. And not just for it to be heard, but for it to be heard justly – for it to be heard in a way that calls for action, in a way that renders it capable of entering into the realm of the political. To enter the public realm is also to challenge the contours of what counts as public. In this case, such a challenge involves interrogating the self-evidence of standards and assumptions that seem to flow unproblematically from white authority, until such time as this authority is rendered critically conscious of itself, made to account for itself and the vision that sustains it, called to justice. Until such time as an apology is elicited.11 Until such time as to be white does not accord the right to determine how and where those who are not white should live, how they should be educated, and what should be their way of life.
Since legitimating narratives circumscribe in advance the appearance – and thus, in so many of the ways that count, the very existence, the very public character – of anything at all, the conflicts of values that underlie legitimating narratives need to be given. To adapt a phrase from Hannah Arendt – a ‘space for appearance’, is necessary in order for new legitimating narratives to appear. The struggle to allow such conflicts to appear is a political struggle. Allowing the emergence of discord between Molly’s vision of the world and Neville’s, between how the fence figures for her, and how it figures for others, is a way of opening such a space of appearance. As such, we might see Rabbit-Proof Fence as composing, in Rancière’s words, a ‘proposition on what it is that is given to see to us’ and as an interrogation of the ‘power of representation’ (DPA 149). Legitimating narratives circumscribe in advance the possibilities of not just recognizing individuals as equal, but also transforming the standards according to which equality is judged. They limit available interpretations of the very narrative works of art that can shape affect in such a way as to be transformative, and the frames of visibility that dictate interpretive schema. Legitimating narratives themselves are subject to transformation.
In another context, discussing Chantal Akerman’s 2002 film De l’autre côté (From the Other Side), a film concerning the US-Mexican border about which I will say more towards the end of this chapter, where I will also comment briefly upon a few other works, Rancière says that Akerman’s film is about the ‘raw materiality’ of the border, and that it transposes a ‘geo-political’ issue into an aesthetic one (DPA 150). One could say the same about Rabbit-Proof Fence, where how one views the fence and the land it cuts across is embedded in conflicting ways of life. The proximity between these two films resides in the fact that they both compose a proposition on what ‘is given to us to see’, they both constitute artistic propositions that, as Rancière says, ‘focus on matters of space, territories, borders, wastelands and other transient places, matters that are crucial to today’s issues of power and community’ (DPA 149).
When art redistributes the sensible in ways that remain interesting politically, while at the same time remaining art in the sense that Rancière understands it under the aesthetic regime, it avoids merely telling its audie nce what to think. It remains art, and does not become politics. Political art, as Rancière understands it in terms of the aesthetic regime, remains content to open up a space in which a conflict of worlds might produce a shift in narratives, a shift in vision. Yet equally, the conflict exposed in and through such art might yield no political change. And this is precisely as it should be. For, once art can predict its effect on an audience, it stops being art and coalesces with politics. The wider question at stake here is the relationship between art, philosophy and politics, the integrity and autonomy of each realm, and how to think these realms without assuming that one is answerable to the other. It seems to me that Rancière is able to juxtapose these realms to one another, in a way that resists subordinating one to the other, at the same time as it resists imagining that these realms work entirely independently of one another. The line between them remains indeterminate, subject to constant reworking, just as the line between the private and the public domain is constantly redrawn, and with this redrawing the borders of individual subjects also shift. That the line distinguishing the private from the public, or art from politics, is subject to incessant revision does not mean that there is no difference between these realms. Rather, the difference is politically negotiated, and the work of affect, especially its capacity or incapacity to be signified, is part of this political negotiation. Affective investments have a propensity to shape the very lines that divide individuals from society, consciousness from the unconscious, subjects from objects, what we see and what we fail to see, what we understand and do not understand, and thus what we take to exist and that of which we remain ignorant.
How far Rabbit-Proof Fence devolves into a political manifesto I leave others to judge, but I would say that in its most interesting moments it resists doing so.
Rabbit-Proof Fence takes up the collective trauma suffered by aboriginal families under the heading of what has come to be called the ‘stolen generation’, the forcible removal of children from their natural kin. At issue is the compounding of a racial identity marked as inferior by a white culture. The reason that ‘half-castes’ were removed from their homes was because they were already construed as half-white, and therefore were considered appropriate vehicles for the further dilution of aboriginal identity and culture. The term suggests that indigenous children who were born from mixed-race sexual unions fell short of proper (white) formation, that they were cast in the image of whiteness only halfway. The forcible removal of ‘half-caste’ indigenous children from their communities was undertaken with the express intention of assimilating these offspring into a white community, in order to breed out the blackness of their skin. As the architect of this racial reconfiguration of indigenous communities, the Australian government imagined for itself the role of benefactor. It also imagined itself to be responsible for the reshaping of humans, whose material bodies and racial configuration it imagined could be moulded in keeping with the white ideals it espoused. Passive black bodies, it imagined, could have their blackness effectively erased, according to a white form, in terms of which they were imagined to fall short.
Although the film Rabbit-Proof Fence might be said to serve to document a story, and thus functions in one sense as revelatory – it reveals the hidden truth of the ‘stolen generation’, and incites ‘our’ indignation – visually, it also functions in a way that disrupts the very narrative it tells, providing another way of looking at the landscape than the dominant, instrumentalist view of those who steal away children from their families and communities and from the land that supports them and their way of life. It counters that narrative with another narrative, a narrative in which a young girl sees the land in a way that constitutes a form of knowledge and intelligence discounted by that dominant view.
Rabbit-Proof Fence demonstrates how deeply kinship regulations are infused with racial connotations, that they are implicated in ethnic injunctions. In this sense, it brings to the forefront the question of who is allowed to count as kin, which is heavily implicated in what Patterson calls ‘social death’.12 There is an official injunction to marry outside a group defined by its racial parameters and distinguished by its allegedly primitive mode of life. Kinship practices are engineered by cordoning off a whole group of people, and their way of life, on the basis of the colour of their skin, designating them as inappropriate marriage partners, while sanctioning others. Taken from their families and from the land they know, the ‘stolen generation’ of aboriginal children were deposited in schools to learn, in the words of Doris Pilkington Garimara, ‘how to live like the white man’.13 The intention was to raise them in an environment that would enable them to marry into white communities, in order to breed out the traces of their black blood, so that their offspring would no longer share the colour of their own skin. The traces of blackness would be bred into non-existence, eradicated.
Rabbit-Proof Fence illustrates how a white colonizing nation conceptualizes itself according to racialized assumptions that are woven into the fabric of society, in a way that might be thought of in terms of an aesthetic unconscious. In looking to Rabbit-Proof Fence, I am looking to art as bringing into question the borders defining subjects as distinct from objects, individuals as distinct from communities. By reading this film alongside Ahmed’s understanding of affects as not belonging to discrete subjects, but circulating between subjects in such a way that this transmission helps to constitute who counts as a subject and who does not, we can understand that affects help to delineate subjects as belonging, or not belonging, to specific communities. In Rabbit-Proof Fence at issue is a cultural mode of seeing that is specific to a communal way of life valued by indigenous communities, but not valued – and to all intents and purposes not even visible to – those who set themselves up as their ‘protectors’. Making visible that which is rendered invisible through cultural hegemony, where the latter is understood as a systematic inability to see, or what also might be elaborated as a failure of affective investment, is at issue here.
In proposing that the Rabbit-Proof Fence illustrates what Rancière calls the redistribution of the sensible, I suggest that it provides an example of how visibility itself is orchestrated in advance by the sanctioned narratives that circulate and come to be recognized as synonymous with the realm of appearances itself, and how seeing things through the eyes of others differently affectively positioned from ourselves can open up the possibility of challenging those narratives.14 This does not mean, as Ahmed emphasizes, that we feel what others feel, it means rather, that art can move us through identification, a process that respects the separation of subjects. Neither does it mean that being moved will necessarily cause any personal or political transformation; it means that change is possible. It means that different ways of seeing are possible, different ways of hearing and understanding are possible, that shifts in sight and vision, in hearing and listening, in sensing and perceiving are possible. Sometimes, but not always, such shifts can transform themselves into political transformation. Legitimating different narratives is a way of transfiguring the public domain of that which passes for common sense, or is taken as self-evidently true within a given community. Artistic redistributions of the sensible are one of the ways in which the transposition of such narratives might begin.
Rabbit-Proof Fence offers a way of thinking through how something like an aesthetic unconscious can inhabit the best of intentions, and how such intentions can be structured through radical blind spots, structured, in this case, through the assumption of white privilege which takes on genocidal overtones. The aesthetic unconscious allows us to approach fundamental failures of vision that structure what passes for knowledge, failures of vision that allow those affected to dismiss a way of life as invalid because it does not conform to oligarchic, Western lifestyles and styles of government. Neville believes that the genocidal acts in which he engages in relation to aboriginal peoples is ‘for their own good’.
The removal of Molly and her sisters from one community to another illustrates how porous are the concepts dividing an individual from a community, for what happens in the assimilation of the ‘stolen generation’ is precisely a refiguration of individuals, and at the same time a redrawing of the boundaries of communities. Ahmed indicates how loss, a loss that is registered affectively as pain, was suffered by the indigenous communities from which children such as Molly were removed. A collective memory of that loss, bereavement, trauma and suffering recomposes those communities.
The claim that Rancière makes in focusing on the redistribution of the sensible is that art can change the way we see, or more generally, perceive the world. It can cause perceptions, or more specifically, the perceptual field, the perceptual horizon (which will be culturally and politically inflected for us all in different ways) to shift. So things previously invisible can become visible, or things that were visible in particular configurations can become visible differently. This means that if we are moved, perhaps on an unconscious level, the world can change the way it looks to us. New ways of understanding the world become possible. It is crucial that new ways of grasping or understanding the world do not necessarily follow from new ways of seeing or perceiving the world. The unpredictability of this causal relationship is the key for Rancière.15 Whether a new conceptual grasp of the world ensues will depend upon, among other factors, a great deal of work being done by the one who perceives the world in a new way. Habitual, well-worn, culturally validated assumptions will need to be dislodged, and this might take concerted effort, communal help, and a good long while, a lifetime or more – perhaps a lifetime will not be enough. Perhaps we will run out of time.
There is no strict causal correlation between the work that art can do in opening up new worlds, horizons or perceptual fields and the way in which familiar objects and things can settle into new configurations or relationships. Positivist attitudes might be discontent with this lack of any strictly causal correlation; but this lack of determination might also reflect the way things are, the way the world is, the way change happens – or doesn’t. That art can open up the possibility of political change remains crucial. Equally, it remains crucial that it does not mandate or necessitate political change, since if it did, art would coalesce with, or collapse into, politics, and that, as we know, would spell trouble.
In an early sequence of Rabbit-Proof Fence, a maternal arm is cast around Molly, as she listens to the words of her ancestors, who pass down to her a way of life and learning, a writing not taught in classrooms, but by which traces are inscribed on the land and in the air. I opened this chapter by referring to the scene in which Molly looks up to the sky to emphasize the ancestral heritage that binds her to her community. In understanding affects not as belonging to discrete subjects, but as circulating between subjects in such a way that this transmission helps to constitute who counts as a subject and who does not, we can acknowledge the instability and porosity of the borders separating subjects from their communities. Affects can bring into question the borders defining subjects as distinct from objects, individuals as distinct from communities. Affects help to delineate subjects as belonging, or not belonging, to specific communities. A community previously relegated to anonymity by a white way of seeing finds a voice, finds, at least, a vision, locating itself in a landscape, in Rabbit-Proof Fence. At issue is a cultural mode of seeing that is specific to a communal way of life valued by indigenous communities, but not valued – and to all intents and purposes not even visible to – those who set themselves up as their ‘protectors’. Seeing the fence through Molly’s eyes makes visible that which is rendered invisible through cultural assumption, manifested both as a systematic inability to see, and as a failure of affective investment.
In the preceding discussion, I have highlighted how art can contest the view that the forms of space and time are empty, abstract and uniform, and that the units of a linearly conceived time are identical. As such, I have elaborated what Rancière means when he says that art is political ‘because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space’ (AD 23, ME 37). By challenging the ways in which we see and hear things, the ways in which we perceive the world, the ways in which the world is framed, art can expose the frameworks, which we might have taken as neutral and universal, as in fact embedded in very specific assumptions about what kind of spaces are allowed to exist, and what relationships to time are granted legitimacy. In Rabbit-Proof Fence, highly specific narratives about capitalist productivity and efficiency infuse the racialized impulse to move bodies from one place to another, in order to school them according to the cultural and economi c assumptions of the dominant culture.
Rancière favours art that opens up new ways of seeing, new ways of distributing the sensible, while acknowledging its outcome, its effect, to be incalculable. He is interested in the conflict of narratives that Akerman’s film De l’autre côté presents about the US-Mexican border, because the film ‘turns an economic and geopolitical issue into an aesthetic matter’, and because it produces ‘a confrontation between two sides, and a series of conflicting narratives around the raw materiality of the fence’ (DPA 150). Akerman ‘has the camera move along the fence, making us feel its inhuman strangeness’, and in doing so, she resists focusing merely on the ‘drama involved in crossing the border’ or on the ‘contradictions that exist between the realities of the US economy and the injustices and prejudices of US nationalism’ (ibid.).16 She presents the experiences of Mexicans, families who have lost their sons, loved ones who have risked, and lost, their lives in trying to cross to the other side, in their attempt to make their lives more liveable, in the effort to earn a living wage. Akerman presents the omnipresence of the wall, the intrusiveness of searchlights, the pain and the suffering of those who are left behind. She shows how precarious, how risky, it is to cross the border, and in doing so she demonstrates how little those who are willing to risk their lives have to lose. And then she presents the fear and righteousness of Americans on the other side, who see Mexican border crossers as invaders of their land, who assume they have the right to shoot those who trespass on their land. She brings these two divergent worlds together, demonstrating their incompatibility, their divergent logics. The film focuses on the conflicting narratives that the border produces. It does not tell us what to think. It simply presents the widely divergent narratives, of those who have lost their loved ones to the attempt to cross over to the other side in search of a better life, and those who assume that they have the right to kill them for trespassing on their land in their aspiration for a better way of life. And it leaves us to draw our own conclusions. These conclusions might involve reflecting on the irony that some feel themselves entitled to seek to better themselves, but would deprive others of such entitlement, because they come from the wrong side of a geopolitical border that puts them at a systematic disadvantage in the economic order of the world.
Towards the end of the film, we hear a voice-over of Akerman on the soundtrack, while we see an American highway, at night, from the perspective of a driver. The voice tells the story of an illegal Mexican immigrant, who worked as a housemaid, and then disappeared. The story is told from the perspective of the woman who employed her. We never see either woman. We do not discover if the woman who disappeared attempted to cross the border, if she was returned safely to Mexico, or whether she was killed in trying to do so. We are left, suspended, between these possibilities, in a state of uncertainty, like many relatives of would-be Mexican immigrants to the United States. We do not see illegal immigrants being killed or subjected to violence – the film concerns those who are left behind – but this film is haunted by the death and loss of those who do not come home.
In a similar way, Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of the West Bank resist showing the wall itself, and instead shows ‘a pile of stones … harmoniously integrated into an idyllic landscape of hills covered with olive trees’ (ES 103, SE 113-14). In this way, she shows us ‘an Israeli roadblock on a Palestinian road’ (ES 104, SE 114), but does so in a way that refuses to anticipate the effect on the viewer. Rancière says, ‘She has photographed not the emblem of the war, but the wounds and scars it imprints on a territory’, and thus elicits not the ‘exhausted affect of indignation’ but ‘an affect of indeterminate effect – curiosity, the desire to see closer up’ (ES 104, SE 114). The effects are thus uncertain, ‘where the eye does not know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should make of it’ (ES 105, SE 114). Again, the conclusion is in suspension. One either sees, or does not see, the pile of stones; one sees them either as a harmonious and insignificant part of the landscape, or as a roadblock that interferes with the daily life of Palestinians.
If, according to Rancière, ‘some of the most interesting artworks today engage with matters of territories and borders’, in what ways is the art of certain contemporary artists effecting a transformation in the distribution of the sensible such that racialized, female bodies become terrains through which, upon which, and with which, artists compose propositions?17 In addressing this question, I turn to Shades of Skin, a photographic installation by the Kenyan-born artist, now a resident of Germany, who goes by the name Ingrid Mwangi/Robert Hutter, having fused her artistic identity with that of her white husband. In Shades of Skin the artist/subject chooses not to return the gaze of the camera, but her choice does not figure as a withdrawal from confrontation.18 On the contrary. She does not sensationalize or eroticize her body, but she stands (or hangs) firm, even if her body is cut into segments, even if her back has been mutilated by a whip, even as it recalls the way in which women’s bodies, raced bodies, are constantly subjected to measurements, compared (and found wanting) to ideal measurements, made to approximate to norms. She partially covers her face with her hands. She reveals her body in parts, but the parts resist the fetishization of the white male gaze.
What happens in Mwangi-Hutter’s photographic installation, in four, larger-than-life images, Shades of Skin, which cuts her body into segments, mimicking, yet distancing herself from, the commodification and fetishization of female body parts that are eroticized in masculinist imaginaries? What happens as these photographs both expose the black, female body of the artist as vulnerable, and refuse to capitulate to the narratives of lynching and middle passage to which they nevertheless attest? How do we read the photograph of two dark-skinned feet, dangling, suspended, above the darker earth, in conjunction with the lighter skinned back, scarred with marks that could have been left by a whip, or in conjunction with a face that closes itself off from viewers, eyes closed, hands protecting it, obscuring our view of the face? What histories do we see in these images, and what remains invisible to us? Who is the we, the us, I invoke here? Who will read this, and what will you make of it, and how much does what you make of it depend upon your sex, your, class, the colour of your skin, your history, the thinking you have done about feminism, oppression, colonialism, racism or slavery, on how you have been affected by discrimination, or whether you ha ve been subject to it?
With each photograph, the shades of skin darken, until, with the last one, where Mwangi-Hutter’s feet, dangling just above the black earth, are almost as dark as the earth itself. The images evoke lynchings, recalling Billie Holliday’s haunting rendition of ‘Strange Fruit’, just as Mwangi’s scarred back evokes beatings, and the middle passage. Against a background of colonial history in which women’s bodies have become eroticized metaphors for the conquered lands of colonial conquest in which the lighter a dark body is, the more it is found to approximate to white, hegemonic standards of beauty and civilization, the stark confrontation of this body in parts resists any easy reading.19 The body of Ingrid Mwangi/Robert Hutter – her fused artistic identity no doubt part of her ongoing interrogation of hyphenated identity, having been born in Nairobi, Kenya and having migrated to Germany at the age of fifteen – becomes a terrain on which the histories of oppression and exploitation are mapped out. At the same time the power, strength and resilience of black bodies comes to the fore. In the duality of this strength and vulnerability, and perhaps in their inseparability, the images of Mwangi-Hutter’s body, dissected into segments, cut up into sections, nonetheless conveys imperturbability.
Artists can create new forms of perception of the given and new plots of temporality. Thus, Mwangi-Hutter’s Shades of Skin calls up a history of slavery, at the same time as resisting it. She appeals to a textural, mythical background such as Fanon describes, only to defiantly rework it, just as her photographs both refer to and reconfigure the fetishization of the female body. In multiplying the temporal and spatial perspectives in terms of which we construe a body or a landscape, art works can contest the narrative of an active form shaping passive matter. In calling up affects of curiosity rather than indignation, art is political in a way that cannot be determined in advance, but precisely insists on remaining indeterminate.
In the context of the history of appealing to the sexualized metaphors of women’s bodies to describe the landscape, in her work Static Drift (2001) Mwangi-Hutter inverts that operation, inscribing rather the maps of Germany and Africa onto a black woman’s body, indicating how that body is marked by territorial boundaries, inscribed by geopolitical histories, read and seen through colonizing impulses.20 Mwangi-Hutter uses her body, the only thing she owns, to contest the narratives inscribed on it, and to produce new narratives with it. In doing so she messes up, and redeploys the form/matter dichotomies that have operated in colonial contexts, and transforms the ways in which they have been played out on the dark bodies of women. The skin of her body becomes a site of transformation, a surface on which the sun tattoos maps of Germany and Africa, which contest the settled orthodoxies of the world, creatively rewriting them in ways that call for new visions, new worlds.
Let me bring this chapter to a close by turning finally to a work discussed by Rancière, Alfredo Jaar’s image, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita.21 In his discussion of Jarr’s piece, Rancière remarks on the eyes of a woman who has seen her family murdered in the Rwandan massacre. Focusing on what he calls a ‘politics of metonymy’, where the effect is given for the cause (the eyes that have seen the murders are shown, not the massacre itself), and the part is given for the whole: ‘two eyes for a million massacred bodies’ (ES 97, SE 108), Rancière comments on the choice of whether to hide or show feelings, the choice of whether to speak or remain silent (see ES 98, SE 108), a choice which Gutete Emerita retains, but of which those who are murdered have been deprived. We do not see the spectacle of horror, but the ‘woman’s eyes’, eyes that have seen this horror, a metonymy that ‘disrupts the counting of the individual and the multiple’ (ES 98, SE 108). Spectators are asked to read a placard that tells the history that these eyes have seen, ‘the history of this woman and her family’ before we see Gutete Emerita’s eyes. Since politics is, as Rancière puts it, ‘in the first instance … the changing of places and the counting of bodies’ (ES 97, SE 108), the photograph functions to disrupt any easy count, just as it refuses to engender debates about the ethics of whether the horror of massacres should be depicted, or made into a spectacle. It indicates the horror not by showing it as spectacle, but as it is reflected in a woman’s gaze.
Rancière understands politics in terms of challenging the miscount, where bodies move into different places, and where the total number of bodies is counted differently, where bodies that were previously invisible according to dominant regimes of thought, can be seen and can begin to count. He understands art as effecting new ways of seeing, new manners of partitioning the sensible, new ways of dividing up what there is to see, hear and perceive, such that different ways of counting become possible. That which was relegated to private, invisible spaces, now becomes public, and as such can turn into a matter of political debate. When bodies begin to count in different ways, and when the sounds they make begin to count as legitimate and meaningful speech, so too the discourses in which they intervene can change, so that the very terms of what counts as legitimate speech are transformed.
Notes
1 Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of Molly Craig, describes the relationship between the girls as sister-cousins in her account, as retold in Jennifer Bassett’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (Oxford University Press, 2008). The story forms the basis of Phillip Noyce’s film of the same title. This edition is intended for young readers. I have been unable so far to procure another version. The term ‘half-caste’, as if aboriginal children who have mixed parentage are inadequately cast, as if they fall short of an ideal of whiteness, as if they are inadequate copies of an idealized whiteness that is imagined to be pure, invokes images central to the history of aesthetics, pervaded with assumptions about the shaping of matter by form in accordance with a presumed ideal of truth.
2 Rancière suggests that ‘aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. … My approach … retains the principle from the Kantian transcendental that replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility. At the same time these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression. I differ from Foucault insofar as his archeology seems to me to follow a schema of historical necessity according to which, beyond a certain chasm, something is no longer thinkable, can no longer be formulated. … I thus try at one and the same [sic] to historicize the transcendental and to de-historicize these systems of conditions of possibility’ (PA 13-50). See also Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
3 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).
4 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also, Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (London: Duke University Press, 2006).
5 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
6 For a more detailed discussion of this point see my essay ‘The Problematic Normative Assumptions of Heidegger’s Ontology’ in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, edited by Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 73–108.
7 I adapt here a phrase I borrow from Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007).
8 Levinas understands art as harbouring the capacity to freeze time, to effect a stoppage of time, such that art is understood as a frozen moment, interrupting the inevitable passage of time. There is, then, a precedent for the suggestion that art can effect a changed relationship to time. For Rancière, art is capable of orchestrating multiple new relationships to time, that is, artworks can displace us from the temporal assumptions in which we are embedded and cause our experience of time to operate differently.
9 I am grateful to Mary Moodon for her discussion of this point.
10 Quoted by Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 36. Hereafter cited in the text as CPE. Bringing them Home is a report published by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997.
11 In 2008, an official apology was issued to aboriginal peoples by the Australian government. While it is unclear exactly what the causal link might or might not be between the appearance and consumption of Rabbit-Proof Fence, and the issuing of this apology, it is certainly possible that its circulation contributed to a mood in which the issuing of this apology became possible. To be clear, there is an important difference between rendering political the hurt caused for the ‘stolen generation’, and the sentiments generated by Rabbit-Proof Fence. Yet, the redistribution of time and space, the redistribution of the sensible that a film such as Rabbit-Proof Fence effects, helps to facilitate shifts such as that a world in which an official apology becomes possible. Precisely the lack of any clear causal link between the distribution of a film such as Rabbit-Proof Fence and the issuing of an official apology is consonant with Rancière’s view that for art to be political, for it to effect dissensus, is not for it to dictate a particular intervention, but rather for it to make us think differently, perhaps to perceive the world differently. Action consistent with such transformations might or might not follow, and this is how it should be, since once art instructs us on how to act politically, it ceases to be art and becomes simply politics.
12 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
13 Bassett, Rabbit-Proof Fence, p. 5.
14 There are ties that bind Molly to the land from which she comes and to which she belongs, and which she knows and loves, t ies that are insignificant to those who seek to wrest her from that land. These ties of belonging are at the same time communal ties, ties to a shared way of life, which includes a vision of the land that is inaccessible to the police, whose search fails to find her.
15 While not maintaining the complete autonomy of art and politics from one another, Rancière distinguishes the orbit of art from that of politics; he resists the idea that political art should lead directly to political, collective action, conceiving of the art of the aesthetic regime, rather, in terms of its capacity to intervene in the field of possible visibility, that is, its potentiality to disrupt that which presents itself as self-evident, in accordance with what he regards as the police distribution of the sensible. Rancière discusses this in terms of the ‘aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151).
16 See Rancière’s discussion of how the uncanny, which ‘resists signification’, relates to the ‘readability of political signification’ (PA 63).
17 Rancière, ‘Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics’, in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, Willian Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth MCcormick (London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 49.
18 https://nmwa.org/works/shades-skin
19 H. Rider Haggard in his novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) has Alan Quatermain provide the following description of the African landscape: ‘I attempt to describe that extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language fails me. I am impotent even at its memory. Before us rose two enormous mountains. … These mountains … are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and on top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast’, quoted in Lola Young, ‘Imperial Culture’, Theories of Race and Racism, edited by Les Back and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 273.
20 http://exhibitions.globalfundforwomen.org/exhibitions/women-power-and-politics/biology/body-as-art
21 https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/66608