This dialogue between a Kullilli man (Brierty) and an old whitefella (Muecke) seeks to expose the magic and mischief of whitefella ways of “knowing better,” while also discovering some counter-spells gleaned from reading David Graeber and David Wengrow, Paddy Wambarranga, Michael Taussig’s The Magic of the State, Isabelle Stengers’ and Philippe Pignarre’s Capitalist Sorcery, and Lesley Green.

This conversation is the second chapter in an ongoing dialogue, the first of which was published here. Here we focus on temporality and questions of historical truth. It contrasts number-based temporalities with bio-temporalities and event-structures; transcendent versus immanent conceptions of time; disciplinary technologies and time-management; “deep” time versus “thick” time. This speculative dialogue takes place in the future, in 2060, after sovereignty was regained on Kullilli Country, as a museum tour of an exhibition dedicated to unmasking the tricks of the “magicians of reason.”

Stephen:
Hi Max. How are you going over there in Cambridge, Mass.?

Max:
Yeah, good. Everything’s mura with me.

Stephen:
Nice… So, are we “courageous” enough, “brave” enough, to have this conversation?

Max:
Yeah, they might not like it!

Stephen:
True. We are taking a couple of risks… like, yarning in the form of a dialogue is not really solid academic work…

Max:
Sure it is. What about Plato and Socrates?

Stephen:
Powerful. Like those other two men, Wati Kutjarra, travelling all over the Western Desert singing the animals, plants and features of Country, calling them into being. Plenty of magical power, these two brothers. They destroyed many dangerous evil spirits. (Fred Myers, p. 239—in case people don’t believe me).

Max:
That’s the other risk we are taking. Treating whitefella modes of reasoning as if they had magical power. It’s reciprocal. If the anthropologist Fred Myers takes the magical powers of the Wati Kutjarra seriously, we might have to take seriously the techniques whitefellas use to maintain their power.

Stephen:
…old and new tricks that are part of the continuing violence: ideological and intellectual strategies for knowledge production, including objectification, positivist factuality, translation into English, omniscient viewpoints and other concepts, tropes and technologies that maintain control of the “rules of the game.”

Max:
Are we brave enough to be speculative? Meaning, not just describing the situation as a set of facts, but daring to imagine another future that will have come about as the result of sustained Indigenous critique of whitefella forms of rationality.

Stephen:
We will travel into the future to talk about time. To your museum, Max, the one you created to interrogate whitefella mischief. Take us on a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason…

Max:
Happy to.

We are in the year 2060, at the museum we dreamt up in an old tin shed on my Kullilli Country, in the SW corner of QLD. Kullilli Country, also known as the Channel Country, a bio-region defined by its waterways. At a turnoff on a dirt track there is a wooden sign, with “MUSEUM” roughly painted in white, and an arrow. A few hundred metres down the track is an old tin shed, a shearing shed, surrounded by a few casuarinas. It looks abandoned. But when we open the door and go inside it is all perfect 2060s hi-tech interior. The living vegemesh walls are glowing faintly with bioluminescence as they regulate the temperature and humidity to suit the niches where the exhibits are nestled…

Stephen:
You want to tell them what we mean by “mischief”?

Max:
Tricks. Tricks of appearances and disappearances—sleight of hand. Magic. A conjuration makes something appear, an exorcism (or something like it) makes things go away. There’s a whole range.

Stephen:
Apotropaic language; spells to keep evil at bay.

Max:
What you fellas call “reason” has its magical tricks; a backbone to a lot of mischief.

Stephen:
At first we were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s response to Goya.

Max:
Yeah, when Goya said, “The sleep of reason engenders monsters,” D&G retorted, “it is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters but a vigilant, insomniac rationality.” (D&G, 1983, p. 112). And time must fit into that… After all, there’s a whole box of tricks associated with time, the kind of time that was a weapon the invaders brought with them to this continent: the concepts, the technologies, the academic discipline called History…

Goya, Plate 43 from “Los Caprichos”: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), 1799, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stephen:
We can’t unpack all that today, too much stuff!

Max:
Well, we have a few exhibits here in the museum…

Stephen:
Ah yes. Each one illustrates a spell and a counter-spell. Like Goya put his faith in reason, and D&G cast a doubt. They knew that the truths of the European Enlightenment were not piling up one by one and the rest of the world was eternally grateful for them. They knew there were other kinds of rationality in the world, including the non-human or more-than-human rationalities that made their philosophy so expansive.

Max:
Here’s our first exhibit in the brand-new Temporalities Wing: The “stages of civilisation.” This fiction of global time was invented as a justification for imperialism. The western powers were not just rampaging and pillaging. Oh no, they were bringing civilisation to poor unfortunate peoples who were “stuck” at earlier stages. Oh and what counterspell did we have for this one Stephen?

Stephen:
The view from the other side of the frontier. Graeber and Wengrow call it “indigenous critique”: “that consistent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards” (Graeber and Wengrow, 48). They put Kandiaronk’s suppressed voice front and centre.

Max:
Kandiaronk said: “I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.”

Stephen:
Arguments like his had a huge influence on the European Enlightenment. Because of what intellectuals like Kandiaronk were saying, Europeans started to think about egalitarianism and how their inherited hierarchies were not a given. Graeber and Wengrow say that the “stages of civilisation” trope was cooked up by Turgot in about 1760 precisely as a reaction to this indigenous critique!

Max:
And yet it is still widely believed that “the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth” is a stone-age one, that we were “stuck” at some hunter-gatherer “stage” until, lucky for us, modernity arrived on our shores. Look at the trouble Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu got caught up in—the usual culture wars. But Graeber and Wengrow know exactly what Pascoe was talking about. They say that the “strength of evidence” in Dark Emu is “overwhelming”: “indigenous populations were routinely working, cultivating and enhancing their territories, and had been for millennia.” (Graeber and Wengrow, p. 550; n. 38)

Stephen:
Making rational decisions about how they wanted to live. Dialoguing, discussing, negotiating towards consensus. Perhaps with a different shape to time… not time as a series of numbers like on the calendar. What an idea!

Max:
There is something about whitefella ways of dreaming that loves to break things up and divide them into components. You see that with whitefellas mistaking Country for a singular Nature, for instance, so as to divide it up into resources and boundaries.

It all must be something to do with limits, with order. After all, limits are all about mastery.

The same thing happened with time, too. Time shamans of the European Enlightenment spelled out a vision for time that was linear, progressive and moving toward a specific end—speaking about this new time as if it were a law of Nature, and as such something that could be harnessed, as if by magic. But the biggest trick of all was to trick everyone into believing it.

The more time could be split up, partitioned, the more control it allowed. Michel Foucault reminds us of this when talking about the control of activity in the making of docile subjects and adjusting the body to “temporal imperatives”: meeting targets, being in time and on time.

Time became universalised and was turned into a resource to be mined and controlled. Colonisation spelled a rupture in time and place, and life was never the same—time out of place, now that’s a funny thing.

For blackfellas, time was always connected to Country, to Dreaming. Country speaks time. So, time was always emplaced—never stripped or abstracted, but rising out of Country.

Stephen:
That makes me think of bio-temporalities. The technical term for this is phenology. Bio-temporalities are an antidote to numerical temporalities. One definition of whitefella dreaming could be naturalism with superimposed numerical metrics, what you were saying about partitioning, grid patterns in time and space. Naturalism (according to the anthropologist Philippe Descola) is the European structure of a singular Nature coupled with plural cultures. But in totemic or animist systems, (Australian cultures are supposed to be totemic) you have “naturecultures” where “everything is alive” and we are aware of different living things having their own pace. Everyone, even supposed “things,” operate on their own time.

Max:
…like a fly who lives a lifetime in a day or a stream that is older than time and not rushing anywhere. Or times corresponding to one another, even: knowing that yams are ready when the grasshoppers come out—a shared becoming and shared being.

Stephen:
Among so-called Moderns, we are most often aware of bio-temporality around talk of women’s “biological clocks,” a bio-temporality that the usual masculinist corporate schedules still find it difficult to accommodate. Reproductive bio-temporalities are of course primary, but that has not stopped machinic organizational temporalities trying to segment and flatten them. Of course, there is nothing clock-like at all about women’s reproductive temporalities. A woman might not notice a slight dip in the intensity of her monthly oestrogen cycle, but it seems to correspond to an anxiety about writing that next book to improve her tracking towards tenure.

Max:
She might have an attitude towards a potential partner, like: “Oh, what the hell, they will do.” On a first date, this potential partner is not consciously aware of her pheromones, but they think she is actually interested in what they have to say about Dungeons & Dragons… So would you say bio-temporalities are heterogeneous assemblages of things like lunar cycles, growth and chemoreception?

Stephen:
Yes, great definition! Plus I think it is in tune with a temporal philosophy of immanence. Immanent vs. transcendent time. Who could possibly think that a concept as slippery as time could be pinned down with numerical apparatuses like calendars and clocks? If we accept that certain bio-temporalities can erupt, exerting their living but haphazard forces, precisely the kind of time that the relentless march of numbers is trying to keep at bay, then are we not in the realm of immanent time? Temporalities that throb beneath the surface, or slowly bulge like white mushrooms pushing aside pine needles, or flicker with silvery flashes like perch in the Bulloo river. Or a pregnant cow whose belly grows with vegetable slowness for nine lunar months. All these pulsating lives at their own pace.

But time on a transcendent track is telling us to wait for a flip to a higher level, when we have left actual life behind, and have become nothing less than pure disembodied spirit. The transcendent as profit. The transcendent god, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, is “the God who sows and reaps, as opposed to the [immanent] God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds). Transcendence: a specifically European disease.” (D&G, 1987, p. 18).

Speaking of dungeons…

People are always captivated by the idea of cicadas spending seven years as ‘nymphs’ in a kind of suspended animation in the dark, underground, only to suddenly emerge into the sunlight. This is literally transcendence, is it not?

Max:
Yes! They metamorphose into different creatures.

Stephen:
They must think they are in heaven. They fly around on the breezes, in the rain and the sunshine. They sing, at dusk, with that continuous screaming noise, then they have sex. When I was a kid, the varieties used to have names like cherry nose, brown baker, red eye, greengrocer, yellow Monday, whisky drinker, double drummer and black prince.

Max:
You mythologized them.

Stephen:
Of course: that’s a way of saying we exchanged power with them.

Max:
And they soon die, within a couple of months.

Stephen:
You know how you said: “The time of one thing corresponds to another: yams are ready when the grasshopper comes out”? I’ve heard similar things: “When the black kites are flying over the dunes, the salmon are running.” These temporalities are linked up in reckonings that only humans can make, right?

Max:
I think so.

Stephen:
As opposed to the abstract numerical accounting of things (for quantification and marketing), bio-temporalities are singularities, and in the case of “human reckonings” of them, they can collide or intersect to produce meanings and courses of action. Deborah Bird Rose (in her posthumous book, Shimmer) tells us that eucalypts don’t flower just for themselves, as it were, but “produce their pollen nectar at night,” in visible light-coloured flowers “so that their peak of desirability coincides with the night-time flyout of their main pollinators [flying foxes], leaving the leftovers for the bees and birds to consume during the day.” (Rose, p. 30).

There is something indivisible and unique about both kinds of singularities, say, flying fox and eucalypt blossom. “They are events”, says Tom Conley in The Deleuze Dictionary, “that make it both unique and common, both an entity of its own perceptual data and a ground for the relation that the monad holds with its environs.” So we would like to talk of composed and multiple singularities when it comes to bio-temporalities (if the philosophers will allow it). I think I like it that singularities are “events” creating “environs” in “place[s] where perception is felt in movement.” (The Deleuze Dictionary, p. 255).

[pause]

What do we have to say about History, Max? Do you have any exhibits on History?

Max:
Yes, over here, this comet one.

Halley’s Comet, 6 June, 1910, photograph by Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, Wisconsin

An old man in the Kimberley, on being asked when that cattle station was set up: “same time as that comet fell down,” referring to Halley’s comet in 1910. (Benterrak, Reading the Country, p. 252).

Max:
This is accurate, reliable, “historical” knowledge—but notice: without numbers.

Stephen:
The singularities are expressed by the demonstrative pronouns: that comet… that cattle station.

Max:
But this exhibit over here is a story that is close to home for me. Many of my relatives were brought up or lived on Cherbourg Mission. For a time many were sent to Palm Island, too, after an old grandfather was accused of starting a race riot between the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg and the white community at Murgon.

An Uncle tells me that a policeman drew his pistol on our grandfather, but in the end he wrestled the pistol away and shot it in the air—stopping the fight.

Anyway, both places were set up during the early twentieth century with the idea of forcing Aboriginal people into a way of living that started to mirror European ways of living. They called it “Protection” in those early days.

On paper, these institutions were meant to act like a cicada—buried or kept away from the world, locked away in another world, so as to be transformed day-by-day, generation-by-generation towards a supposedly “civilised” condition.

Stephen:
The mischief of the transcendent is right there, hey, spelled out in the language of Progress.

Max:
For sure. Protectors spoke of Aboriginal people as incapable of change without supervision and restraint—and all wrapped up in the pastoral logics of salvation.

For ages, lots of whitefellas were saying that it was a law of Nature that Aboriginal people would disappear to make way for whitefella civilization, for progress.

By the time Protection rolled around, they started saying things like transforming Aboriginal people into so-called civilised subjects would mean “suspending the laws of Nature.”

Stephen:
So that was their idea of turning Aboriginal people into subjects and objects of History: where History means progress, and progress is as much about destruction as it is about transformation.

Max:
And with that they tried to do this by controlling almost every aspect of Aboriginal peoples lives. And time was at the centre of everything.

For much of Cherbourg and Palm Island’s history during the Protection-times, they would ring a bell throughout the day.

A bell telling people when to wake up, when to gather for roll calls, when to go to work, when to take a break, when the day was over, curfew and on and on.

Stephen:
The bell must have been such a strange metallic sound on an ancient continent, like axes chopping down trees, gunshots, or the clinking of chains… reverberating out over Country and claiming mastery over it.

Max:
Absolutely, we have this poem up here by Cecil Fisher to remind us:

• We who lived on reserves or missions
• The stories we all could tell
• Of the rules and regulations
• And the fear of the Mission Bell.
• It rang morning, noon and also at night
• This bell which was the Protector’s tool
• The bell tolled to start and finish work
• It forced upon us the white man’s rule…
• —Cecil Fisher, from Memories of Cherbourg Mission Bell.
•  

Max:
Fisher goes on to say, “The bell rang eleven times between 6.00 am and 9.00 pm each weekday, replaced by a siren in later years.” That siren, Fisher called, “the screaming noise from hell.”

Speaking of. When my family were out on Palm Island, they were placed under the authority of a superintendent named Curry. He loved the bell. It was all part of trying to turn the whole island into a prison—even his backyard had jail cells in it.

He would beat the bell day and night, trying to control everything. It was enough to drive people womba (mad).

But in the end, he was the one who went mad. First, people called him Uncle Boss, but after a while people knew him as “Mad dog.” He was an insomniac—sleepless, agitated, paranoid, thought he was god-like with his bell.

One day the bell-ringing tyrant sent a telegram to the government promising to “clean up Palm Island for good,” and that night he went on a rampage—killing a doctor and his wife for undermining his rule, blowing up his house and walking down the main street shooting at houses.

The police took too long to arrive from the mainland and an Aboriginal man, Peter Pryor, ended up having to shoot Curry in self-defence…

Stephen:
That reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Goya: that it is not the “slumber of reason that engenders monsters but a vigilant, insomniac rationality.”. This time tyrant “mad dog” sounds like one such monster.

Max:
I reckon. Eventually they put up clock towers in places like Palm and Cherbourg. It’s funny, whitefella time—that abstract and un-emplaced time—was literally being installed on Country, into the landscape.

As well as spying over people all day—keeping them in time and on time—the one at Cherbourg looks like an obelisk—as if clock-time had always was and always would be.

[pause]

Another observation might be the absence of wrist watches, and the common evocation of “Broome time” as a reason for not expecting anyone to turn up on time for a meeting. Working with old Paddy Roe, who never had a wrist watch, I noticed he had another gesture for talking about time, a tumbling hands gesture as he said the words “generation after generation” to talk of his peoples’ way of living on Country, from the past to the future. It is a gesture reproducing cyclical kinship: in Aboriginal English your “granny” is both your grandparent and your grandchild. The traditional “skin” names are also cyclical: if your skin name is Banaga your children will be Garimba, like your mother. Human beings, Paddy Roe would also say, act to energise the life of the Country, which is destined to grow, generation after generation. Time as engendering, not counting. You remember we were both reading Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope about the Crow in North America?

Max:
Yes, you ended up calling Paddy Roe a “poet of radical hope” (Mueke and Roe, p. 40) because he and his other elders had to create a new kind of future…

Stephen:
…because he was worried about the future generations…

Max:
Far from being “stuck” in some pre-history he was as inventive as any modernist.

Stephen:
What made time palpable for him, as opposed to empty and meaningless—which was what was threatened by cultural genocide and assimilation—was the Dreaming, Bugarrigarra, or the Law, and boys ready and willing to go through the Law.

Max:
I get it, what thickens time is culture: not just ceremony, but all the mundane everyday stuff that goes with its maintenance.

Stephen:
Exactly! I don’t like the “deep time” metaphor much. It just extends linearity. Thickness is all about lovely complexities and entanglements.

Max:
Anna Clark is a bit suspect of this “deep time” in her review of that new book Everywhen: “I couldn’t help but wonder, does the history discipline’s reach into Indigenous deep time threaten to colonise a space which has so far eluded Western epistemology?”

And she refers to the “curly questions”: “That’s not to say all the curly questions are answered, or reconciled. Clearly, there is a question as to how Australian Indigenous texts— drawn in sand, sung, painted, etched and walked on Country—can be rendered into scholarly historical discourse.”

Stephen:
Yes, these “Australian Indigenous texts” are multimodal, i.e.: thick. Not just a thin line of prose in an academic discipline which has forgotten how to make an event of what they want to achieve…

Max:
This is what happened to Captain Cook in Penny McDonald’s 1989 film Too Many Captain Cooks. It features Rembarrnga man Paddy Wambarranga telling us with great authority that this was not the historical Captain Cook “from 200 years ago,” but “Captain Cook from a million years ago” who brought to the Rembarrnga in Arnhem Land “axes, steel knives. They all come from Captain Cook. It’s his song, his story, his painting” (Paddy Wambarranga is telling us as he is recreating the song, the story and the painting in the film before our eyes). This is the power of the real, the multiply real, Captain Cook, now with dreaming status because he is multi-dimensional and immortal. Not at all like the “new Captain Cooks” who “started shooting people down in Sydney. We respect only one Captain Cook. Nobody can change our culture because we have ceremony from Captain Cook.”

Stephen:
But I agree with Anna Clark that it would be worse for History not to try at all. If the current reconciliation push—Voice/Treaty/Truth—ever gets as far as truth, then presumably versions of historical truth will be much in demand. But what other kinds of truth might be important in the Indigenous/invader negotiation? How do you deal with the apparent absurdity of the Yolngu Cook being from a million years ago?

Max:
It is a way of saying not everything has to pivot around 1770, that moment called “sovereignty” or the “dawn of modern Australia” or the pivot from “pre-history” to “history”—as if everything suddenly changed at that point. That is a trivial kind of apprehension of time. Paddy Wambarranga has appropriated Cook and thickened him up in his own terms, with a song, a story, a painting and a dance. He made him real.

Stephen:
So, when the Yolngu put on impressive performances for visiting dignitaries, the latter are duly impressed, but possibly for the wrong reasons. They think it is culture in the narrow sense (as if real life is happening in some other domain).

[pause]

Stephen:
Well, that was a good little trot.

Max:
Yeah. [pause] What will we do now?

Stephen:
Have we run out of time?

Max:
Run out? Like sand in that old technology of the hourglass?

Stephen:
Seek closure?

Max:
Recap what we have said?

Stephen:
The critique of the Whitefella “gods of reason.”

Max:
…those monsters of an “insomniac rationality.”

Stephen:
Of course, there’s the well-known “stages of civilisation,” one of the major pieces of whitefella mischief.

Max:
Worth repeating until it sinks in.

[pause]

Max:
Hell’s bells and other disciplinary technologies.

Stephen:
Deepness is just another obsession with origins. What thickens time is culture.

Max:
The transcendent is more whitefella mischief; we prefer immanence.

Stephen:
Bio-temporalities and totemic relations as inter-species partnerships.

[pause]

Max:
Are we there yet?