“Fractured Light”: From Globalization’s Hyper-Illumination to Culture as Symbolic Exchange

Abstract

This essay argues epistemic reduction and reification of indigenous cultures in imperial and colonial discourse underlies the fundamentally economic terms of representation of those cultures. The pursuit of cultural knowledge and forms of cultural exhibition for instrumental, including commercial, ends entails such reduction of culture to representation. Cultural self-representation changes the relations of producer and consumer in economic exchange, but does not change its essentially reductive notion of culture. With contemporary neoliberal globalization, agency, within market relations – like self-representation in a representational economy – ultimately risks assimilation to the global market in cultural difference. Two novels by Māori writers, Paula Morris's Rangatira (2011) and James George’s Ocean Roads (2006), point to contemporary commodification and consumption of indigenous cultural difference as the apotheosis of processes of cultural objectification, reification and commodification that began with imperial colonialism. While Rangatira is set largely between the 1860s and 1890s, and Ocean Roads between 1945 and 1989, both are published within the era of contemporary neoliberal globalization, and ultimately concern the critical stakes in relation to cultural decolonization. They contextualize the epistemic and genocidal violence that has been given an alibi in the valorization of (self-)representational images and performances. In refusing to objectify Māori culture – or by disarticulating such objectifications – the novels point to the potential for those un/signified spaces to evoke precisely the importance of culture as dynamic, unframeable “symbolic exchange”. I argue aspects of Baudrillard’s critical notion of “symbolic exchange” reveal both the stakes and the possibilities of (re)conceiving culture outside of market relations.

• Culture
• globalization
• māori
• objectification
• representation
• symbolic exchange

Notes

1 Te Punga Somerville (2012) explores “the intersections of Indigeneity and migration”, with a focus on the regional connections between Māori and other Pacific peoples, while cognizant of “the difficult intersection between discourses of migration … and claims to Indigeneity” (xxi). In opening with reference to Māori mobility, I do not wish to recode indigenous peoples as “migrant” peoples (cf. Te Punga Somerville 2012, xxix), but rather to challenge equally politically limiting discourses of stasis.

2 Appadurai claims “Post-1989, the world seems marked by the global victory of some version of neoliberalism” (2013, 153).

3 Contributors to Maria Bargh’s edited collection on Māori and neoliberalism variously use the terms “globalization”, “neoliberal globalization”, “New Right” and “new form of colonization” in their analyses (2007, 1).

4 I render “(self-)representation” in this way to signal the ambivalent agency of the self in relation to the processes of representation of the self.

5 Other Māori literary works have engaged disparately or ambivalently with globalization. In anticipatory mode, Hone Tuwhare’s 1964 poem “No Ordinary Sun” warns of the threat of global destruction of land and life in the development and testing of nuclear weapons. In a playful and wry historicization, Robert Sullivan’s poetry collection Star Waka (1999) traces lines and links between ancient Māori ocean voyagers and Māori as subjects of contemporary global consumerism and technological development. Fictional examples include Ihimaera’s The Uncle’s Story (2000), which celebrates pan-indigenous political/activist alliances, and The Rope of Man (2005), whose protagonist is a Māori global television news anchor based in the UK. Concerning the risks of cultural self-commodification, Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986) shows a Māori community resisting pressure to become a cultural performance troupe on their own land for a proposed tourist amenity; while in Dogside Story (2001), a community limits the terms in which they will host tourists celebrating the new millennium on their land, refusing to perform their culture for the visitors.

6 An index of success was the establishment of the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal to hear land claims, from 1985 allowing claims to date back to 1840, the year of the Treaty signing.

7 The Māori renaissance culminated in the advent of statutory biculturalism, built into state legislation across a wide range of sectors.

8 An imperial trope (notoriously reiterated in the neo-imperial nuclear age) of the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean, dotted with tiny, thinly inhabited islands, effects an epistemic erasure of indigenous presence. This perspective has been widely challenged by Pacific Island writers and critics, notably Epeli Hau’ofa’s “Our Sea of Islands” (1993).

9 It must also be noted that, like colonial indigenous “mobilities”, not all indigenous mobility in the era of contemporary globalization has been the unconstrained expression of freedom.

10 Māori filmmaker Barclay (2005) acknowledges it is the destiny of the image to circulate (13), but argues the “intellectual property right” approach to safeguarding Māori cultural tāonga (treasures) is fraught with cultural dangers for Māori (see, for example, pp. 64–65, 79, 87–88).

11 Other terms he uses in relation to this critique of generalized (economic) exchange include “impossible exchange”, “reversion” and “fatality”; he also posits “seduction” as the radical other of (economic) production which renders the object as irreversible positivity.

12 Baudrillard has gone further to point to representation itself as the “murder” of the image as singularity, whose two-dimensional form – connoting the removal of the dimension of the “real” – is betrayed by the image’s supplementation by that real to stand as reflection, testimony ([2001] 2004, 65).

13 For a very lucid explanation of Baudrillard’s account of use-, exchange-, and sign-value, see Grace (2000, esp. 6–36).

14 The notion of cultural simulacra is familiar by way of Vizenor’s (1998) work on the figure of the “Indian”.

15 Baudrillard’s use of the term le duel – meaning both “duel” and “dual” – loses its vital ambiguity in English translation. Baudrillard’s use intentionally connotes both meanings, an encounter, challenge, exchange.

16 However, Paratene reflects that when the rangatira were assembled for the voyage,

There was no talk of needing to earn money by going on show – to sing for our supper, as the English say. Perhaps there was an English version of the paper I signed, one with different words like entertainments, and shillings, and Warrior Chieftains. (116)

Here, Morris shrewdly has him allude to the two versions of the Treaty of Waitangi, one in the Māori language and one in English, and the vital differences between them.

17 As Justine Seran notes, this moment calls up Vizenor’s critique of “Indian simulations [that] have turned humans into mere objects that bear material culture in photographs” (2015, 439; citing Vizenor 1998, 160).

18 Lindauer’s painting of Paula Morris’s ancestor, Paratene Te Manu, is housed in the Auckland Art Gallery.

19 While Rebecca Styles argues “the political implications of the inaccuracies and interpretation of art are not explored in the text” (2015, 7), I suggest they are invoked precisely in displacing the focus from a central concern with representational veracity on to the processes of image production and reproduction. In this way, in contrast to Seran’s claim that the novel undermines “the status of the ethnographic image” in order to “correct erroneous representations made by non-Indigenous photographers” (2015, 437), I also argue the novel problematizes the claim for any image as “true” or “correct”.

20 Carrigan’s (2010) reading of Ocean Roads in relation to Achille Mbembe’s notions of “necropower” and “necropolitics” is also important in relation to this point.

21 In terms of this argument, it is immaterial whether it is one image, still or moving, or many images posited either as adding up to a total picture or as representing the full diversity of culture.

22 Fragmentation figures as brokenness in the novel in the form of physically or psychologically “broken” individuals, or relationships marked by various forms of distance, estrangement, alienation. We almost never see more than two characters together at any one time. On occasions, two family members in each other’s vicinity, pass by one another with at least one of them unaware of the fact. Yet the narrative scenes are structured to evoke the movements of parting and coming together again, pairs breaking apart and reforming in new combinations in different places. DeLoughrey (2009) discusses this “wave” pattern of movements in relation to her argument regarding the novel’s treatment of “radiation ecologies” and “wars of light”; I want to extend it to my own reading of the novel’s resistance to image-capture, its evocation of irreducible process, movement in time, both in relation to the characters’ relationships to one another and to place, and in the larger sense of the same irreducibility of culture to “identity” amenable to reification, capture, and framing for representation and consumption.