[csaa-forum] Home Improvement: Differential consciousness & colonial collaborations

[Danny Butt]

Kia ora all

Below my rather sketchy paper from the excellent Dialogues Across Cultures
conference in Melbourne (which I'll review if I get time), in the continued
vein of colonial relations and academic politics. I might develop this into
something publishable, so any feedback or suggestions would be welcomed. In
particular, any suggestions for publications that might give something like
this an appropriate home would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Danny

--------------------------

Home Improvement: Differential consciousness & colonial collaborations
http://www.dannybutt.net/home.pdf

Presentation to "Dialogues Across Cultures" conference,
Melbourne, December 14 2004.[1]
Danny Butt <db at dannybutt.net>

Homes with no heat stiffen your joints like arthritis
If this was fiction it'd be easier to write this
People try to front like they're so above you
They'd tear this motherf*cker up if they really loved you
And so would you.

 - The Coup, "Underdogs", from the LP Steal This Album (1998)

When I was 12 years old I was at a party hosted by friends of our family, on
the fringes of Queensland's Gold Coast where I grew up. I think it was
Queen's Birthday weekend and we were letting off fireworks. I remember some
disturbance later in that evening that required both my stepfather and the
man of the household, who I'll call John, leaving for quite a while, and
this meant that it was late by the time we ended up going home. It's one of
those memories that I've always been able to bring back even though I had no
real idea of what was happening. The memory is not so much of visual
"scenes" but more of a specific feeling of displacement or unsettledness, of
something not being quite right.

John passed away around five years later, and when I ended up moving to
Sydney to play in a punk rock band, I did some work for his wife who was
managing a shop. I remember a sense of distance and alienation within their
family, even more than my own, but this seemed in my mind to have something
to do with John being a professional, and there being stresses in the
lifestyle of that class that I didn't really have many reference points for.
John had particular difficulties with their daughter, who I'll call Jane,
who was an teenager of 14 on the night of the party, but had begun hanging
out with the "wrong crowd" which included older boys.

As it turns out, I've found out a couple of months ago, Jane was central to
the disturbance on that evening of that party over two decades ago. Having
gone with a friend to town, she had ended up drinking alcohol down on the
beach with members of the opposite sex, a common and popular pastime among
Gold Coast teenagers. Jane and her friend were raped by four guys who were
at or had recently left our high-school. Rather than call the police or
home, her instinct was to find other friends who were at another party, and
it was there that John and my stepdad tracked her down and brought her home,
resulting in the unrest that I remembered.

Until this year, Jane had only told one person about what really happened
that night: the counsellor at our school, who was also my baseball coach. A
subdued and somewhat ineffectual white gringo in his 40s at that time, the
counsellor did nothing. Without the school's support, and not feeling that
she could tell her parents what happened, Jane had assessed - correctly -
that there was no way she could bring this up without receiving more blame
for what had occurred, that it would be seen as her fault. Her survival
through all the effects of that experience is remarkable, but that is her
story, not mine. What I didn't know back then, being too uncool to hang out
with the beach crowd, but do now, is that this is not an uncommon way for
girls to begin their sexual experiences, and most women I know, know someone
who has a similarly violent and non-consensual first experience of sex.

What made the entire episode even sadder for me, and particularly relevant
to this paper, is that the incident came up at dinner among a group of my
parents friends, and they talked about what might happen to the school, the
counsellor, and the offenders as a result of Jane's readiness to discuss it.
All of the males made comments that are unnervingly familiar for anyone
working on issues of colonisation. "It was over twenty years ago". "There's
a lot more awareness now, you've got to remember that". "It was wrong, but
you can't change the past". In other words, the men are saying, "Prove to me
why she should exist." as Lewis Gordon has described the overarching form of
racist speech [2]. My mother, who would not describe herself as a feminist,
but who is like many women well-attuned to the politics of emotion and
repression, couldn't believe it. She said: "It made me wonder what they'd
done in the past that they wanted to cover up."

I am not using this story to draw a link between the lived experience of
rape and colonisation, as these are not my experience [3]. My goal here is
to identify a brutally callous response to real human suffering, a response
that I think characterises white masculine culture, and, one that I find
deeply held throughout the two forms of white settler culture where I have
lived in Australia and New Zealand. It is a response that I find
unacceptable, and I want to understand how I came to see it as unacceptable,
seeing as I have voiced such callous responses, parrot-fashion, in my past.
And most importantly, I want to foster and promote the unacceptability of
such a response. That is the work of pedagogy, and many of us do it. Henry
Giroux (1997) has asked for the study of whiteness to go beyond being a
sector of race theory or ethnicity research, and to foster ways that white
students can productively use their experience of white ethnicity, rather
than seeing it as something bad and to be disavowed. This paper is motivated
by similar concerns. In the institution, my Maori and Pacific Island
students draw their confidence in discussions of located cultural processes.
The Pakeha students, on the other hand, go silent in these discussions
because as Sir Tipene O'Regan pointed out yesterday they lack the confidence
to engage with them and this results in fear. But the fear is the flip side
of a desire for what is lost to white culture and indigenous cultures have
by and large retained: a sense of place, a sense of holism, spiritual
context (by which I don't mean a religious form, but the practical aspect of
understanding phenomena in a much larger set of immaterial processes). My
pedagogical priority has been to indeed encourage students to understand how
to be Pakeha as something other than "not-something-else" [4].

But in the ethic of research, I would like to contribute something to our
"field" as humanities and social science researchers. My view - and it is
one that Gayatri Spivak has consistently emphasised - is that there is a
homology between the men's response in the story I related above and
entrenched masculist practices of academia. The men suppressing recognition
of injustice are engaging in what Chela Sandoval (1997, p.89) calls the
"privation of history", and she identifies it as one of the key
contributions of Roland Barthes to a theory of whiteness. The privation
works by "estranging all objects from what made them what they are,
depriving Western consciousness of responsibility for what has and will
become." I see it as a risk-management strategy in an environment where
masculine subjectivity might have to pay exorbitant damages if all claimants
were to receive justice in the court of moral reckoning. God forbid every
male having to be called to account for their past, for every act of
injustice to be recognised! Better to keep the courts busy with drug
offences and terror suspects. If you can defer the plaintiffs long enough
they might eventually give up, or failing that be painted as motivated by
mercenary revenge for things that are "in the past", and therefore a
handbrake on "progress" to be ignored.

If one of the key roles of anti-colonial and feminist theory has been to
question who is allowed to pass as a "proper subject" of political
philosophy, the response, from white male academic community has, by and
large, been one of suppression and "inoculation". This is another of
Barthes/Sandoval's strategies, whereby a limited amount of a dangerous
substance is ingested, homoeopathically, in order to avoid contracting the
full-blown virus. White male discussion of "identity politics" is so often
framed in the language of pathology, usually cast as a SARS-like import from
the United States. In the current intellectual climate, discussions of race
or gender are viewed as particularly debilitating, a divisive force that
"separates us from each other". In the light of recent election results in
the US and Australia, numerous people on academic mailing lists have called
for a "return to Enlightenment values" and a turn away from the perceived
ethical degeneracy of postmodernism.

The irony - or hypocrisy, if we're not mincing words - is that those
emphasising the gendered and racial history of the "proper human subject"
(identity politics, if you prefer inaccurate generalisations) have been
motivated by a desire for political change, to make the world a better
place, and to expand our understanding of how the political can be thought
without repeating the mistakes of the past - all basic Enlightenment values
[5]. And those resisting engagement with this work do so on the basis of its
perceived bias [6], lack of significance, marginality to the "real problems"
or perhaps similarity to the tone their spouses adopt when asking them to
take out the rubbish.  In footy they call it playing the man and not the
ball. 

These sentiments are not confined, as is popularly imagined, to the fringe
elements of aging English departments that get op-ed space in the
newspapers. An example that's troubled me greatly is Lawrence Grossberg,
editor of one of my favourite books on cultural studies (Nelson & Grossberg
1988) and all-round luminary in the field, suggests in a footnote to an
essay on "globalisation and cultural studies" that:

"One can also question why ethnoscapes are given so much prominence in so
many discourses. The answer seems to have to do with the centrality of
post-colonial critics in current work, and the fact that the politics of
identity and difference is still often taken for granted within the
continuing space of poststructuralism and cultural studies." (Grossberg 1997
p.33)

But the ideas of post-colonial and anti-colonial critics are not given space
within Grossberg's essay, despite that work having contributed enormously to
our understanding of globalisation. In another footnote, Grossberg
references Tony Bennett for "the critique of the privileging of
marginality". My gut response to this was, "what the f*ck do these guys know
about marginality?" I only ask you to catalogue the environments where two
white male university professors could stand up in front of a crowd and
critique the privileging of marginality without being lynched or ignored. We
might be in similar rhetorical spaces to the ones where terms like
"Aboriginal handouts" or "feminazis" could be deployed [7]. The
condescension ingrained in the move to circumvent critique from other
subject positions - in order to forward a supposedly more important or
"inclusive" political movement - sends a very clear message to those who are
not white male university professors: "Prove to me why you should be taken
seriously." [8]

I hope the above discussion has made it clear that my aim in connecting
sexual and colonial politics is simply identifying an empirical similarity
in a white male response to issues of sexual and colonial injustice, both
within academia and "real life." It has nothing to do with competitive
"victimhood" for who is the most oppressed, but about the real processes of
how knowledge hierarchies and power relations are produced and maintained.

To give an example of how I see this taking place, I put forward the example
of Sandra Harding. A feminist theorist of science and culture, her work is
absolutely and self-consciously invested in the project of rehabilitating
the underpinnings of Enlightenment thought, and she has been published by
the most prestigious US journals and presses. Harding (1993) basically
claims that concepts such as objectivity, rationality, and good method, and
science need to be reappropriated, and reinvigorated for democracy-advancing
projects. By rights this work should be broadly accessible to white male
academia, and seen as a significant contribution to political theory - but
you wouldn't know it by browsing the dominant work in political philosophy
puit forward by the usual suspects. Harding advocates "strong objectivity" /
standpoint theory as an impetus for a new formulation of the ethics of
production, where all people who are implicated in the effects of production
should be involved in structuring its terms of reference. Surely this is a
serious basis for a discussion of democracy and truth, precisely what it is
so often claimed we need in these times. But her work remains marginal to
mainstream cultural studies' analysis of political hegemony and production
[9]. Similarly, I've written elsewhere about the need to engage with Kaupapa
Maori researchers such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith as a prerequisite to
understanding New Zealand more generally, but this almost never happens
outside of Maori studies. My only explanation is that Harding - like Spivak,
like Smith - consistently asks of us to turn our attention to those outside
cultural hegemony, and for white subjectivity this labour is somehow - in
the words of Ghassan Hage on Friday - "too hard" or, once again, marginal to
the more pressing "matters at hand".

What I'd like to do in this paper - moving toward my supposed topic of
fostering intercultural collaboration in colonial environments - is to
suggest that the calls to put discussion of identity politics to rest are
misplaced until those politics are interpellated into white male academic
practices at a basic level. This could be seen as the fostering of what
Sandoval calls "differential consciousness": an ability to recognise the
limits our lived identities create to our actions, and an ability to
self-consciously transform that identity when required by the identification
of cultural power by others. From my reading of Sandoval (2000) - which
could well be incorrect - for women and ethnic minorities, differential
consciousness emerges through the dissonance between 1) senses of
possibility that can be imagined or practiced outside of public culture, and
2) the lived experience of not measuring up to the standard of "proper
subjectivity" required by those (white, male) exercising cultural power. But
although Sandoval's work emerges within the domain of what she calls US
third world feminism, "differential consciousness" could be seen as a key
competency for any cultural practice. And we now know that all practices are
cultural - that, for example, the claim for cultural self-determination
includes the right to control economic resources in culturally specific ways
[10]. Similarly, feminist theory is very deeply concerned with the value of
labour, as women constitute the bulk of the unpaid workforce [11]. So I
don't understand the popular European conception that such theories are a
distraction from economic issues, issues of space, or issues of so called
"globalisation" - obviously, they are constitutive of them.

But in casting differential consciousness as a competency - albeit one that
we must remember is developed for most against their will - I'm looking to
describe it as one I'm trying to learn from, and see as being useful for
white male academia seeking productive dialogues across cultures. I also
think it can assist with building a progressive movement against the
inequalities created through the financialisation of the globe at the hands
of transnational capital. Seeing Sandoval's differential consciousness as a
potential competency as well as a lived experience also perhaps aligns with
Marcia Langton's often stated point that the reason the White left cannot
adequately deal with the issues of Indigenous Australians is through a basic
lack of experience and engagement with indigenous people and their
aspirations. [12]

But accepting Langton's characterisation, we're left with a conundrum that
vocational educationalists know well: you can't get understanding without
experience, but how do you get that experience without understanding? White
masculinity is the ideal form of the citizen of the colonial nation-state
that creates its coherence through production of attachment to the land and
the suppression of its long history of theft. Such an attachment, as Mick
Dodson pointed out eloquently on Friday, is superficial and illegitimate to
anyone with a passing familiarity with indigenous epistemologies. What seems
paradoxical, but is in fact unavoidable, is that my own experience of
forming what I see as strong and lasting attachments to areas of land in
Aotearoa has been through accepting my relative incompetency at
understanding the land's significance. It has then also meant being prepared
to begin learning to experience land within a Maori epistemology that I have
no natural identification with, limited power within, and no authority to
change - even as I recognise that my European values still unavoidably
structure that experience.

What I think is underexplored here is that inter-cultural engagement at a
pragmatic level is not sufficient for creating differential consciousness.
If the paradigmatic relationship with the Other is, as Spivak suggested on
Friday, the heterosexual relationship, we can look at the number of men who
claim to not understand women despite spending much of their lives with
them. Or we look at the critiques of the ethnographic model where the
"answer" to some Western "question" is held by others, who will surrender it
under observation so that it can be trafficked back out into Euro-American
academia [13]. Or we can look at the failures of the "development industry."

What I'm suggesting is that engagement with feminist and indigenous
epistemology - in the way they have been asserted within the institutional
forms of Western knowledge production (the university and the mediascape),
play an important role in allowing white culture to foster a differential
consciousness, rather than incorporating everything it sees back into its
own terms of reference (rights, modernity, intellectual property, equality,
etc.). A differential consciousness allows access to new ways of
understanding ourselves and collaborating with others - it is perhaps
paradoxically, a technology of growth and development. I could say that I
see this as an issue of simple professionalism: that there are huge bodies
of work germane to our intellectual and political predicaments that are
being unfairly ignored. While that is true, I think shift needs to occur not
at the level of rational ethics, but in the imagination [14]. My claim here
is that the closing of our imagination to other subject positions is the
current "structure of feeling" of white colonial life, and that our
emotional, spiritual, and intellectual lives are shrinking through these
processes. This reduces our ability to connect with each other, to have
dialogues across cultures, to build the movement that it is claimed we
require [15]. To return to the supposed political fragmentation of the Left:
if it claims to be the party of the people it must be prepared to be held to
account and, adapting Larissa Behrendt (2003), to see our relationship with
indigenous epistemology and people as the *benchmark* for the quality of our
work [16].

Developing such consciousness is not without risks. In the wisdom of Katie
King (2000):

"To pay attention to and use such theory and methodology coming-into-focus
requires a high tolerance for conflict and for beginning again, tasks with
emotional, intellectual and political costs. Misunderstandings and mistakes
and unrecognised privilege are the paradoxical "common ground" upon which
such methodology is made, and they all have their own consequences,
sometimes separate from the coming-into-being of such methodology, and not
at all necessarily mended by it."

Gayatri Spivak asked yesterday, "Can theory hold itself to the same
standards as manual labour? To me, that means developing a sense of craft,
professionalism, and accountability to people outside our own comfort zones
for our results. If we are not prepared to undertake the labour of
familiarising ourselves with feminist and indigenous scholars that will
allow us to develop the tolerance and real engagement that King calls for,
and to see in that labour a better future for both ourselves and the world,
then I don't think we have a political movement worth working for.


NOTES

1 This presentation was somewhat different than the one I had intended, and
one person was disappointed that the "case studies" I mentioned in my
abstract had not eventuated. This was for two reasons, firstly that the
projects I had thought I would talk about are not yet so developed or
interesting; but more importantly, as Spivak describes her teaching in India
in her excellent interview in Signs, "if I talk about these places, first of
all, I think I would get the kind of approval from your readership which I
would much rather earn because of my theoretical work. You know, there is a
certain kind of benevolent approval which I really resist. I'm being as
honest as I can be." (2003 p. 623). Thinking through these ethics of
"trading in the politics of virtue" (Mindry) in light of Spivak's remarks
has prompted this paper.

I also showed two videos in the presentation - one, an excerpt Mooney on
Movies from the Dave Chappelle Show (Chappelle is the greatest cultural
theorist on TV by a mile!); and the second, images from James Allen's
collection of lynching photo-postcards Without Sanctuary, that included a
voiceover from Allen where he discusses the role of these images in
developing his "suspicion of white".

2 Gordon made remark made at the "Thinking Race and Identity" conference,
UNSW, Sydney, July 31 2004. My report on this conference archived at:
<http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipermail/place-place.net.nz/2004q3/000045.
html>

3  However, see for example Rev. Sequoyah Ade's recent post to Legacy of
Colonialism - < 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LegacyofColonialism/message/1300>, which does
make this claim, though I am not sure how helpful that is.

4 Michael King's commonly cited Being Pakeha is not particularly useful,
being invested in the project of shoring up Kiwi nationalism, which is the
major barrier to such an understanding. The priority for me is provoking an
explicit discussion of the similarity between white cultures, a relationship
(i.e. the colonial fact) that structures the cultural processes I discuss in
this paper, but at the level of the unconscious.

5 See Mark Davis, a question of postmodernism -
<http://www.renewal.org.au/markdavis/question.html>. Donna Haraway has also
consistently made this point.

6 Hirini Moko Mead, in a recent presentation at Nga Pae o Te Maramatanga,
asked "Why is the work of Maori historians seen as biased?" in Treaty of
Waitangi hearings. Dipesh Chakrabarty usefully suggested why in his
presentation at Dialogues Across Cultures, but I'm not sure if/where this is
published.

7 Lorraine Code (1995) has shaped my thinking here, and the term "rhetorical
spaces" comes from her book of the same name.

8  To be fair, Grossberg is far from the worst offender and has engaged with
postcolonial criticism more fully in other articles, but to self-consciously
exclude this perspective in a textbook chapter on globalisation and cultural
studies is, from my point of view, shocking, and more to the point radically
circumscribes its ability to adequately describe "the global".

9 Note that I am not defending Harding's work, she has done this more than
ably herself. I don't find the way she frames her project particularly
well-connected to my own interests, but I think it could be for many others.

10 Mason Durie (1998) would be one example out of a vast literature on this
topic.

11 Again, while it is not my place to assess the most significant of this
large body of work, Shulamith Firestone (1970) and Gayatri Spivak (1988)
have been the most influential on my understanding of this.

12 For an example, I think of the bafflement expressed on the Australian
Left at the rise of the Family First party in Australia (which has an
aboriginal woman as a leader), when it is obvious that an aboriginal woman
leading the Labor party is a practical impossibility as currently
constituted. Langton's presentation with Zane MaRhea at Dialogues Across
Cultures discussed some extremely innovative educational programmes in
remote schools, where she noted "we are not expecting any support from the
unions on this". 

13 Almost every indigenous group must have a well-known academic making this
critique - e.g. Vine Deloria, Linda Tuhiwai Smith. This discussion is going
in some very interesting directions within Pacific Studies since the
publication of Haunani Kay Trask's "Natives and Anthropologists" in the
journal The Contemporary Pacific in 1991. David Welchman Gegeo and Teresia
Teaiwa are two Pacific scholars addressing the contemporary debate with
insight. I am just beginning some work investigating the responses of
non-Native academia to this Pacific emergence.

14 For myself, I can trace a small and beautiful book of women's
experimental writing, edited by Anna Couani and Sneja Gunew (1988), as one
beginning point to recognising the importance of feminist work for a
"general" understanding cultural and political processes that might be
relevant to my own life.

15 There is probably some work to do here linking this to the work on
affect. For two excellent examples, Melissa Gregg's unpublished PhD Thesis,
"Scholarly Affect" 
<http://www.cccs.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=16507&pid=16194>; and in relation
to settler culture and historical trauma, Probyn (2004)

16 Behrendt states "The way to measure the effectiveness and fairness of our
laws is to test them against the way in which they work for the poor, the
marginalised and the culturally distinct." While Theory is not Law, I think
nevertheless think that it's worthwhile being able to consider having a
story for how politically-motivated research might be perceived by these
groups.



REFERENCES

Behrendt, Larissa. From the Periphery to the Centre: A New Role for
Indigenous Rights. 2003. Law and Justice Foundation of New South Whales.
Available: http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/justice_awards/2003address.html.
November 14 2004.

Code, Lorraine. Rhetorical Spaces : Essays on Gendered Locations. New York:
Routledge, 1995.

Durie, Mason. Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga : The Politics of Maori
Self-Determination. Auckland, [N.Z.]: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex; the Case for Feminist
Revolution. New York,: Morrow, 1970.

Giroux, Henry. "White Squall: Resistance and the Pedagogy of Whiteness."
Cultural Studies 11.3, (1997): 376-89.

Grossberg, Lawrence. "Cultural Studies, Modern Logics, and Theories of
Globalization." Back to Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies. Ed.
Angela McRobbie. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. 7-35.

Gunew, Sneja, and Anna Couani. Telling Ways : Australian Women's
Experimental Writing. Adelaide: Australian Feminist Studies Publications,
1988.

Harding, Sandra G. The "Racial" Economy of Science : Toward a Democratic
Future. Race, Gender, and Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993.

King, Katie. What Do Today's Globalization Processes Have to Do with
Feminism and Writing Technologies? 2000. Available:
http://www.mith.umd.edu/fellows/king/differ.html. November 8 2004.

Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds). Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Probyn, Elspeth. "Everyday Shame." Cultural Studies 18.2/3 (2004): 328-49.

Sandoval, Chela. "Theorizing White Consciousness for a Post-Empire World:
Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love." In Frankenberg, Ruth (ed).
Displacing Whiteness : Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Durham,
N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Theory out of Bounds ; V. 18.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of
Value." In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. 1985. New York:
Routledge, 1987. 154-75.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Jenny Sharpe. "A Conversation with Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination." Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society 28.2 (2003): 609-24. Also available from
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/SIGNS/journal/issues/v28n2/280208/280208.we
b.pdf


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