Menu PERFORMING A STATE Studying Politics and Performing Critique, Part 2 (conversation with Endre Dányi and Marlene Schäfers) By: Nida Alahmad Februari 2017 My conversation with Endre Dányi in the last post, in which he talks about his current research project, triggered a new conversation that I am extremely thrilled to have the chance to share on this website. My colleague Marlene Schäfers was in conversation, via email, with Endre on a number of issues that he raised in the original post. Their engagement is intellectually generous and brings to the forth many interesting questions and observations on performing critique and doing research. They were also both very generous in allowing me to share this exchange on the blog. Among other things, they touch on the possibilities and problematics of relaying that Australian aboriginal people “have a complex political system that has not changed much in tens of thousands of years”— what do claims to stasis do? What do claims to progress do? They also touch on the ways these notions appear in nationalist politics, colonial, and orientalist imaginations. The performativity of claims to stasis and the possibilities that such performativity may bring along. (NA) MS You mention that the political system of the Aboriginal people you are working with in Australia has not changed much over the last ten thousand years. Would you not think such a claim comes dangerously close to Orientalist notions of the unchanging and static nature of "primitive" societies? At the same time this makes me wonder whether and if so, how, it might be possible to claim stasis beyond the tropes of Orientalism, to recuperate it for a different kind of politics. More broadly, in relation to this, could you elaborate on the role of temporality in the melancholy politics you outline? What kinds of force do claims to permanence and stasis exert within the ruins of liberal politics you mention, particularly in light of the fact that liberalism is closely associated with a temporality of constant transformation and progress? ED Yes, you’re right, the claim about unchanging Yolngu law does come across as suspicious. I also wondered about this and it seems to me that the claim is often used to contrast aboriginal law with western law, which keep changing all the time (a sign of weakness/inconsistency in my Yolngu respondents’ eyes). So perhaps it makes sense to investigate this in two steps: 1) what does the claim of change/statis do? 2) What does the 'tens of thousands of years' claim do? The latter, at least for me, is a way of putting European history in context: with references to ancient Greece, Rome, Jesus, Charlemagne, and so on, we keep making continuities that are still 'recent past' by Yolngu standards. I find this humbling, although I see how it may also come across as problematic. As for the second set of questions, I should probably have another look at Benjamin's theses on history before I come up with a proper answer, but I think the trope of the ruin is there to problematise a modernist notion of progress, which is so present in the grand narrative of liberal democracy. (Fight against absolutist monarchy => struggle against fascism and communism => 1989 as the end of history.) How else could the past 200-250 years be narrated – and inscribed into material/architectural form? The renovated Reichstag building houses a series of interesting attempts to answer this question – I particularly like Hans Haacke’s intervention that juxtaposes the notions of 'people' and 'population' MS Thanks for your answers! If I may add a few thoughts: I agree that what is of interest here is to examine what the claim to stasis does, how it is discursively employed but then also how it is practically lived, embodied, and performed. In many ways claims to stasis of the kind 'x many thousand years' are of course very central to the claims to rootedness that seek to legitimise many a nation-state, and which we can clearly see in the deployment of for example archaeological knowledge to claim connection to a "national homeland," trace a presumed national unity over time, and so on. And on the other hand there is the Orientalist attribution of stasis to the colonial other, effectively a "denial of coevalness" as described and analysed so aptly by Johannes Fabian. Both these claims to or attributions of stasis emerge from modernist conceptions of temporality of course, and in that sense may work alongside or even reinforce each other. Now the claim to stasis put forward by the Yolngu, I suspect, might be of a somewhat different kind. On the one hand, quite clearly, there is an attempt here to use the 'x many thousand years' claim as a means to claim rootedness and autochthony, and in this way resist colonial appropriation of aboriginal land, culture, and history. In that sense we may say it is a claim that plays into the hands of, precisely, the modernist imagination of time in which the nation-state is embedded. But, on the other hand, I also wonder whether the kind of stasis the Yolngu imagine is not also something else than simply a rehashing of the modernist claims to rootedness made in the name of nationalist ideologies. In that sense, I would be interested to know more about Yolngu notions of temporality, and how these may have changed, become adapted or fragmented in the encounter with settler colonialism. This brings me to my more conceptual thought, then, which is the question of how we might recuperate claims to stasis from the modernist temporality of the nation-state. How to make a claim of the kind 'x many thousand years' without playing into exclusionary logics of primary presence or civilisational progress? I don't really have an answer of course, but I feel that there might be something in the Yolngu claim that could open up some new perspectives on the question of stasis within our (post)modern world. Ruins, then, might indeed be a place to start thinking here, as material objects that signal both stasis - a kind of stubborn remaining - and change, yet change not necessarily of the progressive kind but one where decay opens up new potentialities. ED Many thanks – this is both helpful and fun! I don't really feel qualified to comment on Yolngu notions of temporality, but what might be important to emphasize is the notion of performativity: stasis is something that needs to be done over and over again. It's interesting to contrast a performative understanding of time with the 19th century version of national history, which uses modern science (including archaeology) to produce ‘true representations’ of the past. My PhD research was about the Hungarian parliament building: there it's very easy to see how the neo-gothic palace in the centre of Budapest was envisioned as a monument of a medieval past that had almost disappeared without a trace. That monument was obviously constructed, in more than one sense of the word, but the constructedness of it had to be denied in order to fulfill its function. (It's bizarre how the original design of the parliament building was fetishised during a recent renovation process, as if the task after the 20th century was to return to the 19th - but that's a different story.) I really like what you write about ruins, and it resonates strongly with my interest in melancholia as a way of seeing / engaging with the world. However, there's a problem when it comes to indigenous politics in Australia: I don't know if the Yolngu or other communities see places as ruins at all. The performance of the past makes it present again, which is precisely what ruins don't do. Something I need to think about during the next round of fieldwork. PERFORMING A STATE © 2017 Ghent University ! nida.alahmad@ugent.be