Waiting
Waiting
Edited by Ghassan Hage
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
[email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2009 Text © Ghassan Hage, 2009 Copyright of chapters remains with the individual authors Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited 2009 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Text design by Phil Campbell Cover design by Phil Campbell Typeset by J&M Typesetting Printed by Griffin Digital, SA National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Waiting / editor, Ghassan Hage. 9780522856934 (pbk.) 9780522856927 (pdf.) Includes index. Bibliography. Waiting (Philosophy). Existentialism. Philosophical anthropology. 128.4
Preface Like many academics I know, I have always fantasised about doing a collective research project with departmental colleagues. It is no secret that the academic working day in any university department today has intensified: teaching and administrative hours have increased, preparation time has increased, course information and reading material need to be made available to students in a far more formal, and thus labour-intensive, way on university websites as well as on other sites, and one has to constantly report on one’s productivity as a teacher and administrator with an endless filling of forms. If a spectre is haunting the academy it is the spectre of the bureaucratic form finding ways to squeeze itself in the mail, through the fax machine, the phone, and last but not least by email. All form senders are very sensitive and considerate. They all start with ‘We know you are very busy’. But somehow ‘knowing that we are busy’ does not stop them. And the forms keep coming. In the midst of all this, the academic has to also maintain a research profile. But even with this creative endeavour the form manages to intrude. One has to report on one’s research productivity with an equally endless process of filling forms. As everyone now knows, reporting on research productivity can be, at times, so time consuming that it has the remarkable effect of decreasing the amount of time available to increase one’s research productivity. It is hard not to notice the individualising effect this intensification and form-alisation of academic labour has had on the workplace. Academics are often made to feel that the actual content of their creative intellectual pursuit is an individual matter of no concern to colleagues with whom they are working on a daily basis. They learn to think they can only get a sense of their work as a collective enterprise at national and international conferences. Beside the festive atmosphere linked to their very nature as ritualistic gatherings, conferences are increasingly becoming spaces of fantasy where academics feel recognised, and as such, feel they can be what they think they ought to always be: serious thinkers, debaters, manipulators and conveyors of complex thought, etc …
It is in light of the above that the idea of a collective creative research project with one’s colleagues assumes the dimension of a fantasy: a fantasy in a classical psychoanalytic sense, that is, a mode of imagining that highlights a mode of being free from the constraints of reality and emphasising what is perceived to be lacking in it. But to try to live a fantasy in a place where it is not lived creates a multiplier effect: there is the living of the fantasy, and there is the living of the fantasy of living the fantasy, so to speak. Since joining the University of Melbourne in 2008, I have found myself in a privileged position as a research professor: not only am I relatively free from the tyranny of the form, but I also have more time to pursue my research fantasies. Following a conversation with the Dean of the Faculty of Arts in which the idea of a ‘research-only week’ came up, I thought that it would be good if I proposed a research theme to my colleagues from the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry (PASI), set up some writing deadlines throughout the year until a draft is achieved, and then go on a one-week retreat in which we transform the drafts into a ready-to-go-to-the-publisher volume. I had developed an interest in the theme of ‘waiting’ while working on ‘hope’ (Hage 2003) and I had a sense of its ‘catchy’ value. And indeed, very quickly after I proposed the theme I had twenty or so people happy to work on whatever way ‘waiting’ connected with their research. From then on, people’s enthusiasm meant that the book became a genuine collective enterprise. I no longer needed to be and I was not a driving force behind it. We all became familiar with each other’s papers and were endlessly commenting on their strengths and weaknesses, formally during ‘research meetings’ and informally over drinks. From mid-2008 onward, and particularly during the retreat in early February 2009, the project carved for us an ongoing space of professionalism, collegiality, enthusiasm and fun … and endless puns on the theme of waiting. There was also a brush with the tragic fires that ended up killing more than 200 people at that time. Our chosen hotel for a retreat was in Marysville, which ended up becoming what some called ‘the ground zero’ of the fire. It burnt literally the day before we were all ready to head there. The project, and particularly the retreat, would not have been possible without the Future Generation Professorial funds generously made available to me by the University of Melbourne. I also want to
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thank Melbourne University Press for their immediate interest in the volume and the idea behind it. Finally, I have to single out the work of Gillian Tan, who, besides contributing a chapter to the volume, has been responsible for, and has ensured with remarkable efficiency, the smooth running of the project throughout its duration. Ghassan Hage Melbourne February 2009
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Contents Introduction Ghassan Hage Part I: Between Social and Existential Waiting 1. Worlds of Waiting Peter D Dwyer 2.
Waiting for Sociality: The (Re)birth, astride a Grave, of the Social John Cash
1
15
27
3.
Temporal Horizons of Modernity and Modalities of Waiting 39 John Rundell
4.
Waiting for Imam Mahdi and Development: The Case of Pakistan Nadeem Malik
54
5.
Senses of Waiting among Tibetan Nomads Gillian G Tan
66
6.
Waiting for Rain in the Goulburn Valley Rosemary Robins
76
Part II: Waiting, Agency, Politics 7. The Time Is Right: Waiting, Reciprocity and Sociality Monica Minnegal 8.
9.
Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality Ghassan Hage Out of ‘Turn’, Out of Sync: Waiting for Marriage in Macedonia Violeta Duklevska Schubert
89
97
107
10. Waiting to Return Home: Modes of Immigrant Waiting Salim Lakha
121
11. Waiting for Global Warming: Climate Politics in Australia—Perspectives from Above and Below Hans A Baer
135
12. Serbian National Resurrection: Myths of Waiting and Being Andrew Dawson
150
Part III: Waiting Affects 13. Waiting, Patience and Love Christopher Cordner
169
14. Waiting To Be Loved: The European Union’s Hope To Be the Loved Object Senka Bozic-Vrbancic
184
15. The Shame of Waiting Maree Pardy
195
16. Waiting for the Baby Emma Kowal
210
17. Waiting on Death Row Tamara Kohn
218
Select Bibliography Index
228 240
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Contents
Introduction Ghassan Hage
Waiting is such a pervasive phenomenon in social life that it can be seen, and indeed has been seen, as almost synonymous to social being. Pascal sees the very small moments in which we are waiting ‘for this or that’ as an indication that our life is worth living.1 Waiting indicates that we are engaged in, and have expectations from, life; that we are on the lookout for what life is going to throw our way. Consequently, waiting pervades social life. And because of this, its analytical value does not lie in discovering that it is part of one social process or another. For example, to examine gift exchange and note that waiting is an inherent part of the phenomenon would not be much of a revelation. This is not because of something obvious about the relation between gift exchange and waiting, but because such a statement can be made about any phenomenon in social life from sexual relations to garbage collection. However, there is a set of questions around waiting that can yield fresh, interesting and enriching analytical material. It comes from asking: what kind of waiting is exhibited in the phenomenon that one is examining? As John Rundell puts it towards the end of his essay: ‘We all wait for futures—yet not for the same ones, nor in the same way, nor at the same tempo. Modernity, because of its multiple worlds and their temporal horizons, entails that waiting for the future
has multiple, clashing and even overlapping effects, affects and modalities.’ But the differences in waiting are not just differences in individual forms of waiting, they are also differences in the way waiting is present systemically in society. Waiting, for instance, emphasises a dimension of life where the problematic of our agency is foregrounded. Is waiting an exercise of agency or a lack of it? At the most immediate and superficial level one can rush too quickly to say that waiting is a passive modality of being where people lack agency. Waiting at the airport to board a late plane, waiting for an appointment with a medical specialist or waiting on the highway for a mechanic to come and fix our car all involve a large degree of passivity: things are beyond our control, out of our hands, and we can ‘only wait’ for what we wish to happen, as opposed to actively doing something or another to make it happen. Yet, as the many essays of this book amply show, there are many cases where agency oozes out of waiting. It is not surprising therefore that the question of agency in relation to waiting is a hotbed of ambivalence. Crapanzano nicely calls waiting a ‘passive activity’2, emphasising that it is something we do, though we can also easily see it as ‘active passivity’ for a slightly different but meaningful take on what is the same mode of being in the world. The multiple and ambivalent forms in which agency takes shape in relation to waiting render it a particularly unique object of politics. There is a politics around who is to wait. There is a politics around what waiting entails. And there is a politics around how to wait and how to organise waiting into a social system. Waiting can, for example, define class and status relations in the very obvious sense of ‘who waits for whom’, which also means: who has the power to make their time appear more valuable than somebody else’s time? This relation between waiting and class has been well analysed by Bourdieu in the context of Kabyle society.3 Clearly, people’s modes of waiting are learnt socially and culturally. Queuing in Amsterdam is not the same as queuing in Caracas, and I won’t mention places like Beirut where often the very notion of queuing does not exist. Here we can note that there is a sense where knowing how to wait in a queue means knowing how to suspend competition with one’s fellow human beings. Not all people are capable of this suspension, and a degree of generalised economic
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Waiting
wellbeing, and a minimisation of a Hobbesian, wolf-against-wolf reality, is often a great help in fostering such dispositions: it is hard to make people queue before a truck with food supplies in the middle of a famine-struck region. This brings us to the fact that waiting is also intimately linked to economic factors: there is a political economy of waiting, not least because ‘time is money’ and waiting can be a waste of time. Furthermore, waiting is not only shaped by the person waiting; it is also shaped by those who are providing whatever one is waiting for. There is a supply side to waiting linked to the scarcity of resources and the capacity to offer certain services. Waiting time is often seen as a key measurement of the lack of efficiency of certain institutions such as public hospitals, airports and other government bureaucracies. Sometimes it is a measurement of the scarcity of certain professionals, such as specialised medical staff whose efficiency is not being questioned. But too long a waiting time can also be seen as proof of a dysfunctional hospital, while too short a waiting time is perceived suspiciously, at least by some, in other cases: such as the time taken for a council to approve development. Finally, it should be mentioned that socioeconomically and culturally defined modes of waiting are not just a question of the disposition of those waiting or the scarcity of what one is waiting for but a function of the technology that a society can deploy to regulate waiting. Such technologies involve the compartmentalisation of space and the provision of a space dedicated to waiting (waiting rooms, airport lounges etc). It also involves ‘waiting technologies’ such as call centres organising telephone communications, or the number-dispensing machines that allow people to avoid physically queuing, and with the help of beepers and screens work to make the process of waiting impersonal and independent of any human factors such as liking or disliking someone, and favouring or disfavouring them. The above should be enough for an appreciation of the rich plurality of the social forms that waiting takes in social life and the social and political relations that shape and flow from it. While not claiming to be exhaustive, the essays in this volume, taken together and on their own, offer the reader serious access to the complexity of waiting and its differential intensities.
Introduction
3
But there is another way of looking at waiting that raises a different set of analytical questions. These emerge when waiting is considered not so much as a phenomenon in its own right but as a perspective on a particular sociocultural practice or process. While, as I have pointed out above, noting that waiting is part of gift exchange does not add much to what we know about it, examining gift exchange from the perspective of waiting allows the analysts to start seeing dimensions of the exchange that had previously escaped them. The analytical power of waiting here derives from its capacity to highlight certain features of a social process that might have hitherto been foreshadowed by others or entirely hidden. Again, the essays in this book offer a wealth of evidence in this regard. The social phenomena examined throughout are not particularly unusual or neglected by social analysts: pregnancy, the immigrant’s desire to return home, the European Community’s struggle for legitimation, Serbian nationalism, social disintegration in Pakistan, the immigrants’ experience of assimilation in Australia, the expectations around marriage in Macedonian culture, Victorian farmers’ experience of the drought, the politics of climate change, the mobility of Tibetan nomads and the lives of Californian prisoners on death row. All are topics that have been examined by many writers. Yet, seen from the perspective of waiting, they yield new interesting perspectives on the phenomenon that help us further understand it. The essays have been organised into three parts on the basis of the general problematic that they share and the modalities of waiting that they highlight. As always with such a clustering, it is partly arbitrary and is only one of many ways of offering some semblance of coherence to the flow. This is done only to help the reader in negotiating essays that are, despite their unity around the theme of waiting, very diverse in content, degree of abstraction and style. Our waiting is big and small, grand and trivial. We wait for an ice cream and for the final judgment. The essays in Part I: Between Social and Existential Waiting aim to deal with this wide plurality in the modality of waiting, what Peter Dwyer in the opening essay terms ‘existential’ and ‘situational’ waiting. One is an attitude, a disposition with no necessary object. The other is social, relational and engaged. It is captured wonderfully by Dwyer’s inspired choice of the photography of a mountain climber, hanging out there, relationally
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Waiting
attached to other climbers and intently waiting to know what to do next. It can be said that this differentiation between existential and situational waiting marks all of the essays in the volume. The question of what it means to call a form of waiting ‘existential’ is often raised. Like everything existential, it is hard to determine with precision, but we might want to convey the fact that for us humans, the very moment of becoming conscious of our existence comes with a question mark: ‘And?’ This is in the sense of ‘So here we are. And now what’? ‘What’s next’? This sends us on an endless search for the meaning of life but it also makes us wait for the moment where waiting ends. Many religions embody an imaginary moment or space where the waiting ends, whether in the form of a coming Messiah, Armageddon or heaven and hell. The extent to which social waiting is simply a socialisation of this more fundamental waiting remains to be seen. An inkling of this problematic comes in Beckett’s ever-sorelevant play Waiting for Godot and the compelling reading that John Cash presents us with in the second essay. Here waiting is a constant articulation of the existential and the social in the form of an endless waiting for sociality and communality set in the midst of a geography of meaninglessness and purposelessness. But if this ‘mess’ is endless, so is the occasional glimpse of the possibility of meaningfulness and sociality that both highlights the mess while maintaining human optimism in the possibility of overcoming it. In a sense, Godot in Cash’s reading of it is a vision in which the social is always marked by a universal human quest and as such there is something about the social itself which is universal. Rundell’s essay, on the other hand, tempers the universality that is present in both Dwyer’s and Cash’s pieces by historicising the very nature of existential waiting itself. For him, there is an important shift in the way we relate to the future, and hence the way we wait, in the move from the cyclical, and in this sense relatively predictable, temporality that marks the religious view of the world and the open-ended sense of contingency that comes with modernity. The above problematic of the articulation of the historical with the social and the existential is nicely exemplified in Nadeem Malik’s piece on the rising reference to Imam Mahdi in Pakistan. Interestingly for us, often referred to as the Lord of Time and the Awaited Imam, Imam Mahdi is the twelfth and the last of the Shi’ahs’ founding
Introduction
5
Imams. He disappeared at the age of five in the north of Baghdad in the year 868, never to be seen again, though the Shi’ah widely believe that he will return on the day of judgement. Waiting for Imam Mahdi is thus a centerpiece of Shi’ah religious belief. But the strength of Malik’s essay is the way he shows how the waiting for Mahdi, which is existential in the first instance, gets historically articulated, first, to the more secular but endless waiting for economic development, and, more recently, to the equally secular but even more intense waiting for the end to social chaos and a return to law and order. Interestingly, the waiting for an end to social chaos is described by Malik as punctuated by moments of normality such as the pleasure of the family gathering that greeted him on the day of his arrival back home from Australia. This is highly resonant with Cash’s interpretation of Godot as an endless waiting for a respite from ‘the mess’ punctuated by a fleeting sense of the possibility of this respite. By emphasising the articulation of economic, social and existential waiting, Malik also raises the issue that has already emerged in the essays by Dwyer and Rundell concerning the different temporalities of waiting. This differential temporality is particularly developed in the essays by Gillian Tan and Rosemary Robins. But both essays further complicate the picture by showing that social temporality is also articulated to the temporality of nature. Tan’s essay is a compelling exemplification of how the waiting of Tibetan nomads is a fusion of the existential, the social and the natural experience of time. It incorporates the form of nomadic movement to add further complexity to a waiting that is now perceived as a mode of relating to both time and space. Robins emphasises the different temporality that shapes the Victorian farmers’ waiting for rain as they face prolonged periods of drought that alter their sense of nature and the natural cycle. There is a remaining belief in a cyclical time where rain is periodical even if irregular, and where a relatively secure knowledge of what to expect allows a secure form of waiting reinforced by the deployment of farming technologies that create a sense of control over time and space. This is contrasted with another form of waiting that accompanies climate change, and that Robins calls ‘biding time’, in which cyclic expectations are replaced by anxieties in the face of a changing and unpredictable nature. Both Tan and Robins highlight an inherent tension in all forms of waiting,
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Waiting
whether existential or social, and that is present in most essays. On one hand, waiting happens in time, in the sense that time and time frames pre-exist the subjects that are waiting within them. On the other hand, waiting creates time. That is, various modalities of waiting produce their own temporality that may or may not be in tune with other social and natural temporalities. The papers in Part I highlight, very explicitly in the case of some, the relation between waiting and agency. Consequently, what distinguishes the essays clustered together in Part II: Waiting, Agency, Politics is not that they deal more than others with questions of agency. Rather it is because in those papers the question of agency is articulated, more so than others, to an implicit or an explicit politics and/or a mode of organisation of waiting. In Monica Minnegal’s far-reaching paper, structured around her ethnography with the Kubo people of Papua New Guinea, the agents of waiting are seen as always linked to others in relations of ‘attention’. They relationally wait for each other and in so doing wait on each other. Minnegal shows waiting to be a mode of being attuned to the others we are related to. This attunement is what allows for a fusion of ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’. Minnegal shows that the different modalities of waiting structured around the opposition ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’ are themselves the product of social organisation linked to the division of labour. Making an innovative move reminiscent of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis4, Minnegal shows that the temporality and relationality that are behind this mode of being attentive to the other have macro-social outcomes not only in shaping the reciprocal structures of society but in shaping its temporal structure, that is, its rhythm. In my own paper, I am interested in the waiting associated with a state of ‘stuckedness’, a sense that one is moving in life. I also examine the ambiguous agency associated with an increasing celebration of ‘stuckedness’ as a form of heroism. Starting with the analysis of queues as modes of social organisation structured around the distribution of waiting time, I argue that the heroism of the stuck heralds a celebration and organisation of waiting in times of crisis. It signals a conservative governmentality that aims at de-legitimising impatience and the desire to disrupt ‘the queue’ even in the face of disaster.
Introduction
7
Violeta Schubert’s engaging ethnographic essay deals with the social disruptions created by those who fail to marry ‘on time’ in a Macedonian village. The essay is also interested in the relation between waiting and social control. Here the ‘waiters’ and agents of social control are the mothers who see the failure of their sons to marry on time as a breakdown of the fusion between biological and social trajectories instituted by society. The waiting mothers appear here as part of the governmental apparatus aimed at reproducing this fusion. In waiting for their sons to marry they are waiting to regain their own reputation, dented by the failure of their sons to follow the accepted socio-biological path, which translates as a national failure waiting to be transformed into a success. The three remaining essays in this part examine further modes of articulation of waiting politics. Salim Lakha in his analysis of the immigrants yearning for ‘back home’ offers us a case where ‘waiting’ is a form of resistance. For Lakha, the desire and the waiting to return home is never simply a passive yearning, despite the changing configuration of the meaning of homeliness in a globalising world. It is an active mode of resisting the various assimilationist social processes to which the immigrant is subjected in the country of immigration and a mode of valorising one’s own culture in the face of the host culture. Hans Baer examines the relation between waiting and politics in the movements generated by climate change. Baer shows that political attitudes to climate change can be seen as an articulation of several modes of waiting: waiting for ecological disaster, waiting for governments to acknowledge climate change and act to counter it and finally waiting for a more popular awakening to the imminent dangers constituted by climate change. At the same time Baer shows that there are differences between the various actors not just in what kind of waiting they engage in but also in the intensity with which they do their waiting. This waiting intensity, he argues, can be correlated with the degree of power that each group has within the social and political structure. Finally in Part II, Andrew Dawson provides an interesting case study of the way the myth of resurrection is experienced within Serbian nationalism. I have noted how the papers in Part I emphasise how waiting is an articulation of the existential and the social.
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Nonetheless, by moving into the domain of politics we have found ourselves drifting towards and highlighting the importance of social waiting. Dawson’s paper reminds us that this is not necessarily the case and that politics can be just as much a channelling of existential anxieties. This is particularly true of nationalism and particularly visible in the case of Serbian nationalism, as Dawson presents it. Dawson shows the way Serbian nationalism is structured around the myth of a Heavenly Serbia. On one hand, Heavenly Serbia is what every Serbian is waiting for. On the other, Heavenly Serbia represents the end of waiting. In the end one asserts the existence of a Heavenly Serbia in the very process of waiting for it. This is the politicisation of a ‘classical’ existential structure. Pascal also argues that we derive more satisfaction from waiting for things to happen than we do from the things we are waiting for actually happening. The moment of expectation is more important than the moment of fulfilment. This is very similar to the theme later developed by Heidegger around the opposition between building and dwelling5, whereby, according to a well-known formulation, we do not build in order to dwell, we dwell in the very process of building. Likewise in Dawson’s Serbia, Heavenly Serbia ‘is’ in the very process of seeking and waiting for it. Moving away from the political, but only just, the final part, Part III: Waiting Affects, assembles essays that deal with the affective and ethical dimensions of waiting, subjects we have not touched upon so far, despite their importance and despite the fact that, once again, they are already present in most of the essays. That waiting is an affective mode of being hardly needs proving. It can easily be observed in intense modes of waiting. In fact, in psychoanalytic theories of the development of the personality, waiting has always been seen as foundational in the formation of the affective self, particularly at the moment of separation from the mother or the breast. It is not far from the truth to say that in psychoanalytic theory the self takes shape the very moment it starts waiting. This is so in Freud’s famous fort da game 6, where the child aims to master the unbearable emotion of waiting for his mother. Faced with a situation where he is subjected to a process that is beyond his capacity to change, namely the disappearance of a desired object, his mother, he initiates a game which aims at a symbolic reversal of the
Introduction
9
situation. The process of appearance and disappearance of an object is made to be the subject of his will. Subjectivity and creativity are here seen as emerging through the process of waiting for the mother. Another important psychoanalytic domain for us is Melanie Klein’s observations of the difference between the babies whose attitude in the face of the absence of the breast is in the form of an unbearable waiting: ‘shock horror the breast is not here. The world is going to collapse’ and the babies who are willing to wait without an undue sense of anxiety: ‘the breast is not here but I am sure it is coming’.7 In both Freud’s and Klein’s works referred to here, and although they are each referring to a different stage in the development of the person, the person takes shape through the experience of a desire for an object that disappears. Consequently, all of these processes are one and the same, or at least part of the same, process: formation of the self, formation of the other, waiting, wanting and desiring. Already at this stage we can see how the relation between waiting and desiring, and the relation between waiting and the other, that is, the affects of waiting and the ethics of waiting, both take shape at the same time. This is certainly how the relation between love, patience and waiting on the other emerges in the first essay of this part by Christopher Cordner. Cordner depicts an ethical disposition toward the other where there is a fusion of both a waiting for and a waiting on the other. This is a kind of radical ‘waiting on’ marked by a form of love seen by Cordner as a fusion of a capacity for patience, a capacity to both be engaged in the world while knowing how to ‘let go’, and a capacity to meet the other as the other presents itself to us rather than as we want it to be. Love is also a core ‘waiting affect’ for Senka Bozic-Vrbancic in her essay on the European people’s waiting for a ‘lovable’ European Community. In a way similar to Dawson’s depiction of Heavenly Serbia above, but with an emphasis on affective politics, Bozic-Vrbancic shows how a waiting for a fulfilling Europe as both a loved and loving object fluctuate between the possible and the impossible. This waiting for love is also a waiting that aims at weaving the yet-to-be-loved object into a time in which past, present and future are themselves stitched together to create a lovable Europe. From the relation between waiting and love, Maree Pardy takes us to the relation between waiting and shame, the immigrant’s shame
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of non-belonging to an ever-promising multicultural Australia. This in a sense presents itself as the shame of an endless unfulfilled and unfulfilling promise of love. As Pardy nicely puts it: ‘The thwarted promise of multiculturalism—to belong in and through, not in spite of difference—transforms anticipatory, hopeful waiting to tedium.’ While for some immigrants the endless waiting to assimilate leads to a withdrawal from the game of assimilation and a refusal to play the waiting game, in the case of Bich, the Vietnamese woman carefully examined by Pardy, the endless waiting to belong produces shame, which in facts ends up creating a further investment in waiting. As Pardy shows, this ‘shameful waiting’ ends up being itself internalised and transformed into a disposition that is constitutive of the multicultural subject. The last two essays extend the relation between waiting and affect into an examination of its relation to creativity. In Emma Kowal’s auto-ethnographic essay of the experience of pregnancy, affect emerges in the struggle of the mother to maintain her subjectivity as it is increasingly waiting for another being to come out of her own body, a being that is increasingly given a concrete content with the help of technologies such as ultrasound. The essay begins as an analysis of the way the pregnant woman’s waiting body is positioned between the temporality of the institutions that aim at managing pregnancy and the temporality of the body. But, rather than perceive these two temporalities as different but equally linear, the essay moves, with the help of Lacan, to become a study of the processes of retroaction and anticipation through which the subjects actively introduce the past and the future into their present. But in a very creative move, Kowal uses Lacan’s mirror stage to show how the waiting for giving birth induces a reverse of the Lacanian conception of the subject as moving in time from disintegration to imagined totality. At the moment of birth, the woman’s body is experienced as fragmenting as various ‘bits’ come out of it. It regains itself as waiting ends and the imperative of ‘keeping up’ with one’s child becomes a new mode of recentering the self. In the final essay of the book, Tamara Kohn gives us an engaging look at the creativity of two men as they were waiting on death row in a Californian jail. In a way that speaks to Cordner’s notion of patience above, but in an entirely different context, Kohn manages to give us
Introduction
11
an excellent empirical sense of what it means to ‘live one’s waiting’. This, in a sense, is the opposite of the religious attitude mentioned above that has us always positing a moment where waiting ends and which consequently makes us live our lives continuously waiting for waiting to end. To live one’s waiting is to simply embrace it rather than wait for it to end. The power of Kohn’s piece is that it shows us that it is precisely in this capacity to assume one’s waiting that creativity takes place. The prisoners on death row become exemplary of the articulation of waiting as both an affect and an ethic. We hope that the essays in this collection, on their own and in their totality, will give the reader a sense of the ethnographic, philosophical and sociological richness that can be generated from the analysis of various forms of waiting, whether the latter is seen as an act, an attitude or a social process. Needless to say, the essays, despite their variety, vibrancy, depth and strength, only scratch the surface of the phenomenon. They should nonetheless demonstrate that, as anthropologists would say, waiting is good to think with.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
12
Pascal. Crapanzano. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Lefebvre. Heidegger, pp. 347–63. Freud, pp. 52–4. Klein, pp. 290–305.
Waiting
Part I Between Social and Existential Waiting
chapter 1
Worlds of Waiting1 Peter D Dwyer
I wait for the Lord, I expectantly wait, and in His word do I hope. I am looking and waiting for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, I say, more than watchmen for the morning.2 This essay explores connections between ‘waiting’ and ‘watching’ and the multiple possibilities entailed in the ‘state of being’ that may be described as ‘waiting’. I commence with ethnographic fragments from Papua New Guinea and the state of Victoria, Australia.3 I then move to depict two broad categories of waiting, comment on possible relationships between waiting and modernity and consider the place of agency with respect to waiting. In a concluding section I draw attention to a persistent dilemma of scholarship under which categories of analysis may often conceal, as they seek to reveal, the felt experiences of actors in their worlds. There must be always a sense in which each of us, as analyst, waits for later scholars to dissolve, and perhaps dispose of, the categories with which we personally engage and within which, for a time, we comfortably dwell.
Two Ethnographic Fragments From Papua New Guinea In 1998, with Monica Minnegal, I co-authored a paper titled ‘Waiting for Company’ that drew connections between ethos and environmental relations of Kubo people of the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea.4 In the first instance, we had borrowed from Knauft’s account of neighbouring Gebusi. In his ethnography Good Company and Violence, Knauft described Gebusi as ‘an exuberant, warm, and friendly people. Their pervasive spirit is one of collective good will and camaraderie, and their very word for culture (kogwayay) is also their concept of “good company”’.5 Good company, Knauft reported, concerns ‘togetherness, similarity, and friendship’ and may be expressed as, for example, ‘we’re all eating together’, ‘we’re all sitting together’ or ‘being all together is good’.6 To Gebusi, good company was about communality, relaxed talk and joking; it was about warm relations with kin, co-residents and visitors. In ‘Waiting for Company’ we wrote: Kubo undoubtedly valued good company highly. But good company did not arise de novo. It had to be nurtured … The people waited … They waited for company to come and attempted to create circumstances in which it would come, because, when it came and for as long as it lasted, tension was alleviated and they were free of anxiety. When good company prevailed life was satisfying. ‘Waiting for company’ is our modification and extension, on behalf of Kubo, of Knauft’s notion of ‘good company’ … It underlay ties between individuals and families and the warmth of relations between communities. It underlay opportunities for forging alliances in circumstances where the vicissitudes of clan demography had reduced opportunities for marriage and it ensured that individuals who became isolated through, for example, marital separation or death were at once reincorporated within a different network of sharing and support. At [the village of ] Gwaimasi in 1986– 87 people waited for their community to grow in size either through births or because others chose to join them, they
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waited for someone to arrive to teach the word of God and, quite literally, they waited for the return of the mining exploration company Esso Papua New Guinea.7 From Australia To our eyes Molly K seemed an ungainly boat. She was too narrow for her length, she rode high in the water, and the wheel house perched awkwardly above the galley. Untidy coils of cable strewn about the deck and the heavy, cast-iron dredge fitted to the stern did not enhance her image. And these days, with so many constraints on access to scallop beds, she seldom fished. She was tethered, unmoving, her paint fading. It was mid-December and, as so often, we were walking the wharves, checking boats and talking with fishermen. We spotted Niko in the wheel house of Molly K, clambered aboard and climbed the ladder to join him. He was sitting in the driving seat, slouched forward, holding the wheel, fiddling with his worry beads and staring disconsolately down the arm of water that linked the port to the ocean. He did not turn to us as we arrived. ‘Looking, looking,’ he mumbled and then fell silent. Niko was not a happy man. He was fifty-four years old. He had been a commercial fisherman since his late teens and had participated in the boom days of the Victorian and Commonwealth scallop fisheries in the 1970s and 1980s. But those days had gone. Now, to Niko and other scallop fishermen, ever-changing policies and regulations emanating from a Canberra-based centralised bureaucracy had destroyed their industry. They were not convinced that the scallop beds had been overfished, as the scientists asserted. And, for Niko, there were other considerations. He felt shamed that his status as a successful fisherman had been undercut by events over which he had no control. In the boom years he had run five boats, employed as many as twenty crew, managed a processing business that exported scallops to Europe and, so often, extended largesse to many who were disadvantaged relative to him. Now there were few opportunities when one of his boats could fish, it was difficult to find work for others or to find reliable workers, the processing and export business had been shut down, and the state of his finances had curtailed
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opportunities for charitable largesse. But, in addition, and increasingly, Niko recalled the time twenty-two years earlier when the boat he was skippering had rolled on the bar and he and two crew were trapped underneath in a small pocket of air. The upside-down boat was tossed in the waves. After what seemed a very long half-hour, Niko made his decision. He and his crew had to dive, swim clear of the boat and turn for the surface. If they did not move soon they would drown. He gave his command. One man did not survive. And, as is usual among commercial fishermen, the responsibility for that fatality was assigned to and personally felt by the skipper of the boat. When Niko sat alone in the wheel house of Molly K, seeking comfort in his worry beads and mumbling ‘looking, looking’ he was contemplating a future that had slipped beyond his control. He was ‘watching’ and ‘waiting’ for he knew not what: for the resurgence of an industry that was in the doldrums, for a re-awakening of old enthusiasms, for memories of that sad and frightening experience on the bar to fade, for being the man he imagined he once had been. But neither ‘watching’ nor ‘waiting’ offered resolution to the uncertainties that had enveloped him and which he had embodied. He had no way to move and no place to move to.
Worlds of Waiting In a discussion of boredom, Svendsen distinguished ‘situational boredom’ as a reaction to certain things or events from ‘existential boredom’ as a state of being.8 Here I extend Svendsen’s typology of boredom to the experience of waiting. Situational waiting is ‘of the world’; existential waiting is ‘embodied’. Either, however, may be understood as reaction and as state of being. Two images may reinforce my intention. The first is a photograph captioned ‘Waiting at belay’ (Figure 1). A woman, fully equipped for climbing, on a rock face high above the ground, is joined by a belay rope to a companion who cannot be seen in the photograph. The woman is waiting for her companion to complete a segment of the climb, secure himself and indicate that it is the other’s turn. To me—I was once a rock climber, a handy ‘second man’ on the rope but less confident in the lead—this image captures much about many expressions of ‘situational waiting’.
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Figure 1.1: Waiting at belay [Photograph by Steve Pollard]
There should always be at least two climbers—one climbing, the other waiting, their positions alternating—linked by a rope. Often they cannot see each other and, sometimes, cannot even hear each other but must communicate through movements of the rope. On a moderate- or high-grade climb at least half the time is spent waiting. But that waiting is embedded in relationship and, in rock climbing, is never passive. There is risk and an element of danger. There may be fear and there is a necessary sense of what will be, will be. But standing waiting, tied to a rock face, there is an end point in mind that should be nurtured. As when Kubo wait for company, whatever form that ‘company’ may take, waiting at belay is of the world: it is engaged, it is situational. The second image is a 2006 painting by Dr Hugo Heyrman that he titled Waiting (Figure 2).9 Heyrman wrote: ‘The painting shows a waiting figure … A woman protects herself from the cold. She seems to emerge from a remote distance, into our field of vision, as an unknown sign … The painting is about contemporary fragility; appearing and disappearing, becoming and vanishing’. What Heyrman did not say, but seems so striking, is that the figure in the
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Figure 1.2: Waiting [Dr Hugo Heyrman, acrylic paint on paper]
painting appears to be ‘watching’, but neither we, nor she, knows what she may be watching. The painting offers a forceful statement of existential waiting. There is a sense of abandonment, of a selfcontained world devoid of relationship, perhaps, even, devoid of engagement with all that exists beyond self. A sense of watching and waiting but with no aim in mind. Like Niko the fisherman, muttering to himself in the wheel house of his boat, the woman in the painting seems to have no way to move and no place to move to. In these contexts, waiting and watching are removed from the world. They are embodied but apart. I interpret the ethnographic fragment from Papua New Guinea as illustrative of situational waiting and the fragment from Victoria as illustrative of existential waiting. The identified difference, however, does not reflect a broader contrast between non-Western and Western
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experiences in the way that some scholars have suggested that boredom is a peculiarity of modernity or the ‘privilege’ of actors who dwell in ‘modern’ contexts.10 Rather, as Musharbash argued from the case of Warlpiri-speaking Australians living at the remote Northern Territory settlement of Yuendumu, boredom is elicited in particular kinds of contexts and its expression is both limited and shaped by peculiarities of local times and understandings.11 At Yuendumu, existential boredom came into being in circumstances where Warlpiri ‘ways of being in the world’ and Warlpiri conceptualisations of time were in conflict with Western ways and conceptualisations. Thus, Musharbash’s analysis of boredom is located within a frame of meanings and of possible disjunctions between different sets of meanings. Her analysis is helpful with respect to understanding the experience of waiting. It is unlikely, I suggest, that forms of existential experience—of boredom or of waiting—are likely to be prominent among people, such as Kubo, whose lives are grounded in a relational epistemology and whose daily practice, unlike that of Warlpiri, is only minimally exposed to, or encompassed by, the paraphernalia, impediments or desires entailed by Western ways of living and being.12 It is most certainly the case, however, that Westerners may be exposed to both categories of waiting. Indeed, when Niko waited beneath his upturned boat, wondering if people on the surface were planning a rescue, but knowing that eventually he might have to take the initiative, his experience was that of situational waiting. He waited. He worried. He was frightened. But without engagement in the particulars of the present his cause would be lost. Situational waiting is an experience fully embedded in time. Existential waiting is seemingly removed from time or, rather, from the meanings—linear and repetitive, yet endlessly consuming, consumed and irreversible—accorded to time in conventional Western settings. To Niko, at least, existential waiting was elicited when his whole being was encompassed by an uncertain future but, as a fisherman, his own sense of viable practice was committed to present circumstance framed in relation to past experience.
Always with Agency? As depicted in the foregoing, situational waiting is fully embedded in time, engaged and never passive. But that account by no means
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Figure 1.3: They are waiting [Sculpture by Nnamdi Okonkwo]
covers expressions of waiting in which those who wait are quiescent—perhaps dozing—without conveying any sense to an observer that they are waiting for anything. A third image captures my intent (Figure 3).13 The sculpture They are waiting is part of a permanent display in downtown Mesa, Arizona. Nnamdi Okonkwo, the artist, said that he was inspired by life experiences: ‘It seemed like everyone was waiting for something to happen: Waiting to graduate; Waiting to get a job; Waiting to get married. In the sculpture, I use the three women to interpret this in a more universal way, showing that in life, people wait. We’ve all gone through periods of intense waiting’. The three sculptured figures seem to be passively waiting, though, in contrast to the figure in Heyrman’s painting (Figure 2), they are comfortably in and of their surroundings. They are not apart from the world. They qualify, it seems, as an expression of situational waiting that is at a considerable remove from that revealed by either the rock climber (Figure 1) or, under my interpretation, Kubo people where, in both cases, the waiting actors participate fully in striving to bring about that for which they wait. It is not apparent from
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Okonkwo’s sculpture whether the women are waiting for anything in particular or are simply waiting for whatever it is that may be when they awake from their waiting state. To the extent that situational waiting may be expressed in either active or passive ways it becomes necessary to consider the role of agency with respect to waiting. Agency, I assert, is the capacity, within the context of existing systems of relations, to act on the world rather than merely in the world. It is, as Ratner wrote, ‘intentional causal intervention in the world’, though there is no implication here that actors will necessarily achieve intended outcomes.14 Agency, then, is a universal human capacity to choose how and when to act.15 Its expressions are variable and always context-dependent. It should not, however, be seen in quantitative terms such that some actors have lots of agency, others have little and the most unfortunate have none. Such representations of agency—and they are common in the literature—confuse available options for choice, which may be quantified, with the capacity to choose, which may not. A distinction between active and passive situational waiting should, therefore, be understood to reflect the kinds of choices that actors may make from essentially identical positions, and capacities, as agentive beings. The rock climber is alert; the women in downtown Mesa are quiescent. The contexts in which they wait, and the potential consequences of their waiting, differ. It is in the frame of those contexts and consequences that they have chosen to act in the ways that we observe. There is no difference in their capacity to act. This argument, however, is less satisfactory when we turn to existential waiting. To the extent that existential waiting may be elicited in contexts where an actor is encompassed by an uncertain future—where, in effect, an actor experiences powerful yet incomprehensible forces that derive from places where he or she does not reside—then, to that actor, it may seem that there has been a loss of agency; that he or she lacks the capacity to act. And that condition, though real to the afflicted actor, is likely to be judged by outsiders as pathological. That condition, therefore, may be appreciated as a symptom of the late modern that, on behalf of some actors, Beck has represented in terms of a feeling of ‘helplessness’ and Giddens as a sense of being ‘in the grip of forces over which we have no control’.16
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After Analysis Mauro Brunetti teaches at a school in the Italian town of Savona. Through 2005 he became frustrated and increasingly anxious. He travelled to work by train. The trains were seldom on time and available timetables were inadequate. Sometimes the train he wanted had left the station before he arrived, at other times it was late. Platform announcements of alterations were seldom correct. He was always waiting and, as a result, was often missing from the classroom when he was expected to be present. This lack of certainty in his working life, his inability to fulfil responsibilities through no fault of his own, created stress and affected his sense of self. He sometimes wondered whether his life had value or meaning.17 But Mauro Brunetti learned that there were circumstances in which individuals could sue for ‘existential damage’. Under Italian case law, a person may seek compensation for psychic damage in the event that another individual or organisation has caused him or her intense distress. It is necessary that proof of damage be established medically and that the symptoms are diagnosed clinically. Since the late 1990s, however, an Italian person may also seek compensation for existential damage in the event that another individual or organisation has caused an emotional or sentimental disturbance to his or her lifestyle or life projects.18 Mauro Brunetti considered that the stress arising from a lack of certainty in his working life—a lack caused by others and over which he had no control—entitled him to compensation from the railway company that could neither effectively manage the scheduling of trains nor provide accurate advice when its own arrangements failed. He planned to sue. Mauro Brunetti’s deeply felt experience provides a challenge to the analytical frame that has informed this essay. We have all waited for trains, buses, trams or aeroplanes. It is part of modern life. And, for most of us, most of the time, it is an irritant that we can frame within an understanding that ‘what will be, will be’. It is simply a given property of the environment within which we dwell and with which, on a daily basis, we engage. For most of us, therefore, the likelihood that we will sometimes wait for trains, buses and so forth is experienced as local and as ‘natural’ and, to this extent, qualifies as situational. Mauro Brunetti, however, no longer dwelt in the same place. He now operated with a different map and the territory of lived
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experience had been transformed. Both the guide posts and the goal posts had moved. The comfort of the familiar, of the local, had given way to a sense of bewilderment, of being encompassed by forces beyond his control. His grasp of the world as fixed, as proper, as ‘natural’ had given way to a sense of the world as indeterminate, as artefactual. For Mauro Brunetti an experience that once qualified as situational waiting had crossed a threshold into a non-place of existential waiting. The distinction between situational and existential waiting that has given shape to this essay is itself artefactual. It is an analytical devise imposed upon the real experiences of others as a means of seeking insight into those experiences. It is a tool of the scholar’s trade that, in its necessary reliance on a metalanguage, will be always at some remove from the understandings and practices of those whose lives and subjectivities are being investigated. The scholar always confronts the dilemma that the map he or she constructs to negotiate unfamiliar territory may be mistaken for that territory.19 It should be always appreciated that reified categories are themselves artefacts of intellectualisation that direct attention to boundaries of understanding that should be crossed despite—indeed, perhaps, because of—the fact that the people whose lives we seek to comprehend may operate with analogous categories. Mauro Brunetti deserves thanks for revealing that there is no fixed line that separates situational and existential waiting. There is, instead, a personally experienced, and context-dependent, threshold. But, as well, both he and Niko deserve understanding for the fact that, from their sites of ineluctable bewilderment at an Italian railway station or in the wheel house of an Australian fishing boat, they would almost certainly disagree.
Notes 1
2 3
I thank Ghassan Hage for his invitation to contribute to this volume, Monica Minnegal for discussion, Steve Pollard and Kate Howell for permission to reproduce Figure 1, Dr Hugo Heyrman for permission to reproduce Figure 2, and both Dave Wilson (Curator, Permanent Sculpture Collection, Mesa Town Center Corporation) and Nnamdi Okonkwo for permission to reproduce Figure 3. Psalm 130: 5–6. The ethnographic material reported in this paper is from joint research with Monica Minnegal. Work with Kubo people, of Papua New Guinea,
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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19
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was conducted between 1986 and 1999. Our continuing work with fishermen, in Australia, was commenced in 2000. Pseudonyms have been used to name a focal fisherman and his boat. Nor have I identified the port at which he is usually based. Dwyer and Minnegal, ‘Waiting for Company’. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 62–3. Dwyer and Minnegal, ‘Waiting for Company’, p. 27. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom. Image and text available at www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art2/ index.html. For example Conrad, ‘It’s Boring’, p. 466; Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 21. Musharbash, ‘Boredom, Time, and Modernity’. Minnegal and Dwyer, ‘Money, Meaning and Materialism’. Image and text available at www.downtownmesa.com/they_waiting.htm Ratner, ‘Agency and Culture’, p. 413. Although universal, the agentive capacity may be impaired as a consequence of, for example, neurological problems, senility, or extreme isolation through the early years of life. Beck, World Risk Society, p. 109; Giddens, Runaway World, p. 19. McMahon, ‘Delayed Italian Rail User Sues for “Existential Damage”’. Pasa, ‘Italian Case Note’. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 30–41.
Waiting
chapter 2
Waiting for Sociality: The (Re)birth, astride a Grave, of the Social John Cash
POZZO: They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act Two
In his influential first review of Waiting for Godot for the Irish Times in 1956, Vivian Mercier commented that Beckett ‘has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice’.1 In this account, waiting while nothing happens, twice, is the dominant refrain; and this is how the quote is usually reported. Yet even this pithy aphorism is qualified by the ‘glued’ attentiveness of the audience and by the subtle differences between Act One and Act Two, emblematically represented by the leafless and apparently lifeless tree in Act One having sprouted ‘four or five leaves’ by the start of Act Two. So, what is happening throughout all that waiting that is so engrossing and so subtly at variance from moment to moment? Amongst all that repetitive sameness, what is being enacted before our senses? What unfolds while ‘waiting for Godot’?
In response to such questions I will argue that the play presents us with an exquisite rendition, indeed a revelation, of something we routinely endure: a waiting for sociality. Moreover in the complexity of its repetitions and variations (its reiterations with a difference) it captures the dynamic relation between subjectivity and sociality. It reveals the ways in which subjectivity leans upon the repertoire of available cultural resources in order to cohere sufficiently to find meaning and significance in the relation to self and others. Waiting for Godot enacts the recurring and receding processes of bodies, habits and speech through which any degree of shared understanding is established—anything that operates as a social institution, as an institution in which several subjects together construct shared meanings, construct shared practices, construct shared understandings that enable them to go on. What Beckett constantly draws our attention to is the set of core processes through which this very tentative, very fragile, momentary achievement of significance and relatedness is produced—the (re)birth, astride a grave, of the social, we might say.2 We recurrently glimpse something that—for the moment—holds meaning in place, holds the gift of relation, of being related, in place, only to have it evaporate very rapidly. So these experiments in goingon-together—and the way this routine going-on comes together—this going-on-together takes a form that, for the moment, is a source of pleasure or pain, a source of meaning, a way of continuing, with care or with cruelty. Vladimir and Estragon (who call each other Didi and Gogo) cycle through both caring for and cruelling each other—and the other others who enter for the moment, Pozzo, Lucky and the boy or boy(s). Waiting for Godot is full of such recurring moments—yet another ‘little canter’3, a little run-through of a new routine—trading insults, disagreeing, making up, or whatever the little language-game happens to be. As Gogo says: ‘That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other’. Then follows an exchange of ‘Moron!’, ‘Vermin!’, ‘Abortion!’, ‘Morpion!’, ‘Sewer-rat!’, ‘Curate!’, ‘Cretin!’ that is finally capped, ‘with finality’, by Gogo’s (and, probably, Beckett’s) ultimate insult, ‘Crritic!’. As Didi ‘wilts, vanquished, and turns away’ with an ‘Oh!’, Gogo immediately begins a new caring sequence: ‘Now let’s make it up’.4 And so these canters go on, while they are ‘waiting for Godot’. These recurring language-games establish the identities (for the moment) of the individuals as related to each other through a third,
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itself on trial—the faltering, perhaps collapsing, symbolic order, the demise of symbolic efficiency. Beckett enables us to see these moments of formation and collapse—the formation of what we might term a social-institution-for-the-moment—and then in the next moment to see how this falls away. Hence, his characters, perhaps like all of us, are waiting, caught between boredom and the lure of intensity. Beckett’s characters are forever slipping in and out of the social bond. They wait, lost—indeed abandoned—in time and space. Their identity or selfhood lacks stability as psychic and emotional states flow, transferentially, from person to person. They imagine they are waiting for Godot, but even this motivation recurrently slips away and they have to remind themselves, yet again, of why they have gathered under the denuded tree in the proximity of they know not quite where. A sequence from early in Act One illustrates this well5. Looking about at the desolate scene that has just prompted a conversation about the crucifixion of Christ and the two thieves, Estragon declares ‘Charming spot. Inspiring prospects. Let’s go’. Vladimir reminds him that they can’t leave. ‘Why not?’ asks Estragon. Vladimir replies with the signature theme, ‘We’re waiting for Godot’. An exchange ensues in which they wonder whether they are waiting by the right tree. Is it a willow tree? Is it dead? Is it a bush or a shrub? They also wonder if they are waiting on the right day. What if Godot doesn’t come? Will they come back tomorrow? Were they there yesterday? Eventually Vladimir declares, angrily, ‘Nothing is certain when you’re about’. The aesthetic achievement of Waiting for Godot lies in ‘find(ing) a form that accommodates the mess’, as Beckett put it in an interview with Tom Driver.6 This mess may be characterised as the residue of Western culture after the fall into the violence and atrocities of the twentieth century, as with the mechanised slaughter of modern warfare, the explosion of the Enlightenment’s self-understanding at Hiroshima and the deep logic of instrumental reason rendered manifest at the Nazi death camps. These and like events have shredded the symbolic efficiency of Western culture, leaving in their wake an eviscerated repertoire of cultural resources as so much bric-a-brac that can no longer support the pretensions that they still harbour. This is the cultural repertoire that the characters in Waiting for Godot
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have inherited, an impoverished repertoire that no longer coheres and yet is a principal resource upon which sociality must draw. Apart from this cultural resource, all they have are the rhythms and routines of their bodies in space and time and the denuded nature that confronts them. Hence everything is uncertain; time, place and selfidentity are forever dissolving. While they wait for Godot the language games they play draw upon this mess and its impoverished resources. They negotiate ‘the mess’ as best they can. As Beckett put it in his interview with Driver: We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.7 Given this dire human condition, the language games enacted in Godot reveal the ground zero of sociality; sociality at its sparest and most bare. We need to add, however, that these moments of achieved sociality are not only minimal but also intermittent and fragmentary. The language games that institute sociality are constituted by dying words that somehow revive. As such they momentarily establish a social bond, only to have it dissipate as meaninglessness recurs. Confronted by the mess, as he puts it, Beckett presents us with a spare, minimalist enactment of the social bond as it grips, collapses, revives, grips and collapses again; a waiting that awaits intensity, meaning and significance. Beckett’s great achievement is to have found ‘a form that accommodates the mess, (as) that is the task of the artist now’.8 By finding an aesthetic form through which to enact and display the mess of Western culture and its radically debilitated capacity to support the gift of sociality, Beckett also reveals the unconscious ground upon which sociality is constructed or overlaid—the unconscious ground of desire, destructiveness and repetition that sociality both incorporates and represses, at once. What Beckett helps us to see—what he reveals to us—is a world in which the symbolic order is unable to sustain the momentarily achieved sense of time, place and identity. It constantly collapses as it opens onto meaninglessness
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and a loss of significance—only to revive momentarily before another collapse. This is how we go on. Meaninglessness and a loss of significance keep recurring—only to be staved off, for the moment, by a new canter through one of the habitual routines. As Vladimir says towards the end of Act Two, ‘But habit is a great deadener’.9 Along with the issue of significance and its loss, issues of memory and certainty also keep recurring. And these three—memory, certainty and significance—usually overlap. So, for instance, towards the end of Act Two, a boy appears, perhaps for the second time. Didi is perturbed by the fact that this boy, who looks the same as the boy in Act One, claims never to have been there before. In a desperate attempt to fold time, space and identity back into a symbolic order (an ordering) Didi furiously demands that the boy remember him next time, should he come again. Indeed Didi takes on a threatening attitude towards the boy—and frightens him away—in a repetition of how Gogo had treated the boy in Act One, when Didi acted as his protector and saviour, as it were. Of course, Didi’s desperate attempt to insist on an order fails. In an ironic turn this failure itself reveals the loss of symbolic efficiency; how thoroughly time has collapsed, space lacks location and identity lacks coherence. Locked in a transferential double act, aggressivity slides from Gogo to Didi, just as the boy moves back and forth from one to many in an ongoing mirror-play that, for Didi, shifts between care and aggressivity. Recurrence and reiteration—with slight yet telling differences—keep playing themselves out routinely. They arise as a momentary—but recurrent—relief from the pressing insistence of suspended time and the meaninglessness and uncertainty that haunts it. Their recurrent limit is that they fail to institute a symbolic ordering that survives through time and that establishes a sure sense of place where memory can survive. This symbolic inefficiency, this failure of civilisation to efficiently repress, redirect or sublimate their discontents, lays bare unconscious desire and aggressivity, as they seek and fail to find a stabilising cultural order that can securely institute sociality and achieve an ordering of time, place and identity. Faced with such a disorderly mess, Vladimir and Estragon must settle for any little routine of caring and cruelling that displaces meaninglessness and the suspended time of waiting, in an attempt to keep the depleted gift of sociality alive. Or else fall back, as Pozzo and Lucky do, into a
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master-slave relation in which meaning is reduced to a mere nostalgia for the certainties of dominance and submission, even after all the supports for such identities have collapsed. While ‘waiting for Godot’, then, Beckett’s characters await, enter, dissolve, await again, and yet again, and enter, again, and yet again, a momentarily achieved sociality that, for that moment, displaces boredom, uncertainty, meaninglessness and the suspended time of waiting with the intensity of sociality, an intensity of caring and cruelling that achieves significance and establishes meanings, before itself dissolving again. This is the waiting game they play while they imagine they are ‘waiting for Godot’. Of course, what Beckett reveals is hardly our typical mode of experiencing ourselves in relation to others; it is not as if we are normally conscious of the mess. Rather, we typically rely on a complex set of psychological defences and cultural supports to ward off any recognition of meaninglessness and the mess. Yet there is, at the same time, something uncanny about all this, something oddly disturbing yet familiar about Beckett’s strange and alienated world. Perhaps it is this uncanny recognition that ‘glue(s) audiences to their seats’, as Mercier would have it. When symbolic efficiency has failed, when psychic defences and cultural supports are stripped away, an unconscious ground zero is revealed, along with the minimalist routines through which sociality is momentarily and recurrently established. Inevitably, these minimalist routines draw not only on language, but also on what Julia Kristeva has termed the ‘semiotic chora’ that originates as a ‘“space” before the sign’ and that establishes a pattern and rhythm of interaction.10 This is a pre-linguistic spacing and placing that can generate intensity and some degree of certainty and security, as in the regularities of the mother-infant dyad. Through a mapping of time and space and of presence and absence, such a pattern and rhythm operates as a defence against insecurity and a resource for laughter and delight, for intensity and significance in the face of emptiness and abandonment. The most elaborate enactment of the mess is Lucky’s long soliloquy in Act One of Waiting for Godot—when Lucky ‘thinks’. In a valuable discussion, Jeffrey Nealon has an interesting comment on this. He regards Lucky’s think as a repudiation of ‘all the grand narratives of western metaphysics which ground themselves in discourse
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that claims’ to be ‘self-validating’, ‘ahistorical’, ‘metaphysical’, ‘teleogical and revelatory’ and ‘bulwarks against radical skepticism’.11 Nealon goes on to characterise Lucky’s think as a thoroughly postmodern language game that moves at the limit of what has been thought. He sees Lucky as an enchained revolutionary whose words open onto a new postmodern vision, in stark contrast to the modernist, grand narrative anchorings of Pozzo, Didi and Gogo. But to make this contrast is to miss the significance of what unfolds while they await Godot: the desperate attempts to establish and maintain time, place, identity, memory, meaning and significance. The mess as eviscerated resource is presented through Lucky’s dying words that modulate between signifier and mere sound. The ‘think’ runs for 79 lines, with no punctuation until its last two lines. As in the following, it presents a sequence of free association that careers through the mess: ‘… / winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin/ and succedanea in a word I resume and concurrently/ simultaneously for reasons unknown to shrink and/ dwindle in spite of the tennis I resume flying gliding …’12 The semiotic haunting of the flow of signification by an excess as sound is particularly marked as Lucky’s ‘think’ moves towards its climax and Didi and Gogo run around ever more desperately, while Pozzo crouches as though under assault. Beckett’s stage directions prescribe four phases in the reaction of Pozzo, Vladimir and Estragon to Lucky’s ‘tirade’. At first Pozzo, who has heard it before and in better times, is ‘dejected and disgusted’, while Vladimir and Estragon are ‘all attention’. Pozzo’s ‘sufferings’ continue to increase throughout the next three phases as the think moves towards its climax. Vladimir and Estragon ‘begin to protest’ in phase two, become attentive again in phase three and, finally, ‘protest violently’. When Vladimir eventually removes the hat on Pozzo’s instructions, in order to arrest Lucky’s ‘think’, Estragon shouts ‘Avenged!’ and Pozzo violently crushes the hat with his foot— returning Lucky to the status of mere slave.13 Contrary to Nealon, I would suggest that, rather than marking out a distinction between Lucky and the others, this scene highlights the similarities between them all, indeed their mutual transferential fascination and aggressivity. Lucky’s ‘think’ disturbs the others so profoundly exactly because it enacts the loss of symbolic efficiency and the collapse of the cultural resources that they—and we—must
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lean and draw upon in order to defend against profound anxiety. It returns them all to the caring and cruelling routines upon which occasional meaning and significance can be momentarily established, before it fades again into mere ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’, as Macbeth would have it.14 Hence they come to hate Lucky’s think—as it reveals their destitute condition, their reliance on a resource that can no longer sustain a vital sociality. Lucky’s ‘think’ presents an exquisite enactment of the mess that is Western civilisation, as it deconstructs and falls apart. Lucky confronts the other characters with their shared human condition—hence their hostile, sometimes fascinated, response—before stepping back into his social role, the very role that defends him against the anxiety provoked by such an exposure to the mess. Thereafter Lucky demonstrates all the traits of the colonised—as depicted by Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy and others. He has internalised his identity as slave and craves the exploitative relation on which his identity rests.15 So, in Act Two we see him lovingly place the whip back into the hand of the now blind Pozzo and place the tie around his own neck. Surely, these are some of the most chilling moments of the play—because Lucky is acting out of love, a love born from the intensity of his social relation with his owner, Pozzo. This rendition varies radically from the account of master and slave given in Hegel and disseminated in French philosophy by Kojeve. In Waiting for Godot the violence of the master and the abjection of the slave persist—no teleological dialectic rescues them and returns them to self and other via mutual recognition and the cultural achievements of work. Even any stoicism is lined with abjection. Lucky, then, can be regarded as the embodiment of Beckett’s implied response to Hegel, and, more generally, any teleology of development. The others assault Lucky because he confronts them with the fragility and incoherence of their shared cultural resources, resources that are the very detritus of enlightenment, modernity and development.
Waiting for Freedom’s Children? Beckett’s characters are forever straining, and failing, to establish certainties about time, place and identity. Theirs is a world in which the cultural supports that establish such certainties lack coherence.
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Hence they wait while playing out the little canters and routines that establish sociality for the moment. In order to explore the various facets of sociality more fully, I now turn to two accounts of contemporary social and subjective life in the work of an anthropologist and a sociologist. In his work on ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the anthropologist Allen Feldman presents an account of a conflicted society in which time, place and identity, along with memory and significance, are dreadfully certain. Feldman addresses the ways in which meaning is embedded into spaces and places and marked upon bodies. His argument is that in Northern Ireland this process was taken to an extreme, as it were: an extreme in which one specific, hegemonic set of meanings—a very reduced set of meanings—came to dominate spaces, places, bodies, identities, memories and temporalities. The friend-enemy distinction was marked onto such spaces, places, bodies, identities, memories and temporalities, we could say. Feldman posits a process in which the symbolic order, in its construction of the political, was cumulatively dominated by the insistence of one set of master signifiers—the ethno-sectarian. This chain of signifiers penetrated ever more deeply into the organisation of experience in Northern Ireland by a process in which violence— which is Feldman’s focus—disrupted the stabilised symbolic order and compelled it to reorder itself. This reordering involved a process of reduction to, and domination by, the set of ethno-sectarian master signifiers. In this way Feldman addresses the process of transformation towards the ever-deeper installation of ethno-sectarian signifiers as master signifiers that dominate political and social experience and restrict degrees of freedom.16 Feldman’s analysis helps us to see both an extreme version of how social organisation is produced, and also, by contrast, an alternative mode of social organisation in which spaces, places, bodies, identities, memories and temporalities are multiply coded. Societies such as contemporary Australia or China, for example, normally have a multiplicity of possible forms that intersect, compete, overlap and are drawn on serially, as well as simultaneously, by individuals for a multiplicity of specific reasons—from the strategic to the symbolic.17 So, in this alternative setting there is a significant degree of freedom in the way in which individuals position themselves in relation to the
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array of cultural resources and negotiate an identity. Feldman’s argument is that throughout the troubles in Northern Ireland this degree of freedom was systematically eradicated—that spaces, places, bodies, identities, memories and temporalities were overdetermined and dominated by one specific set of constructions, by a master signifier—in Northern Ireland’s case the code of the ethno-religious or the ethno-nationalist. The sociologist of the ‘world risk society’, Ulrich Beck, presents us with a good account of a contrasting social process in which degrees of freedom have been enhanced through individualisation and democratisation. So the world Beck describes and the world Feldman describes in Northern Ireland look like opposites—at least they do so until we turn to Beckett. In Waiting for Godot, as previously suggested, Beckett presents us with an enactment of the uncanny unconscious ground upon which, and in defence against which, any sociality is constructed, no matter how many or few degrees of freedom it may afford its subjects. It is for this very reason that the available cultural repertoire takes on such significance. If that resource is ‘the mess’, if it is as eviscerated as Lucky’s ‘think’ portrays it to be, then it can offer only very fragile supports against the anxieties of self-dissolution, insecurity and uncertainty. Where Beckett sees the mess and presents us with its destructive implications for sociality, Beck sees a ‘second modernity’ that contains the threat but also the promise of individualisation. Such individualisation is oppressive in that it forces us to calculate risks for ourselves and make our own choices without the support of reliable authority. But it is also liberating; it allows us, or our children, to become ‘freedom’s children’. As Beck would have it, freedom’s children ‘practise a seeking, experimenting morality that ties together things that seem mutually exclusive: egoism and altruism, selfrealisation and active compassion, self-realisation as active compassion’.18 Rather than waiting for a grand narrative and its institutional supports to deliver satisfaction in the form of a prescribed way of being and relating, freedom’s children are creatively at work within the paradox of an ‘individualising structure’ that is ‘non-linear, open-ended, ambivalent and continuous’.19 Yet Beckett’s characters, cast out and sustaining themselves through a repertoire of almost
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exhausted routines, confront us with the potential fault-lines of this paradoxical ‘individualising structure’. This contrast between Beck and Beckett highlights the dilemma of late modernity. Can the liberating destructiveness of second modernity support a sociality of intensity that is able to resist the lure of the new fundamentalisms that offer identity, certainty and intensity in return for an identification with their restricted set of master signifiers? Will ‘freedom’s children’ fare better than Didi, Gogo, Pozzo and Lucky, as they, too, await in the shadow of the world risk society’s exposure to its self-generated mega-hazards?20 Caught between the abyss of meaninglessness and the lure of a fundamentalist intensity, freedom’s children experience the fragility of the subject exposed to the trials of late modernity, as this fragility typically resolves into the denials and defences of, either, presumed autonomy or assumed community; the entrepreneurial self as against the re-traditionalised self. Can they (or we) wait this out while inventing a new or renewed sociality? Can they (or we), in defiance of Pozzo’s ultimate despair, achieve the (re)birth, astride a grave, of the social as cosmopolitan intensity? Perhaps that renewal, that ‘renovation’, to use Beckett’s word, is what we are all waiting for.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Mercier, ‘The Uneventful Event’. See Pozzo’s furious lament in Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 82. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 56. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Those readers wishing to consult the full text of Waiting for Godot will find it on-line at the following web addresses: www.samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part1.html www.samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part2.html Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, p. 505. Ibid., p. 505. My emphasis. Ibid., p. 506. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 83. See Kristeva, ‘Place Names’, especially p. 102. Nealon, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern’. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 37. Ibid., pp. 35, 38. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5. This whole speech of Macbeth resonates powerfully with Waiting for Godot. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy.
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16 Feldman, Formations of Violence. 17 In Australia, the long history of settler-indigenous relations is the principal exception. One could also point to events or moments, such as the Cronulla riots. In China, of course, such scope for multiple coding is a recent phenomenon. See Dutton, Streetlife China, for instance. 18 Beck, ‘Freedom’s Children’, p. 5. 19 Beck, ‘Individualisation’, p. 101. 20 Beck, World Risk Society.
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chapter 3
Temporal Horizons of Modernity and Modalities of Waiting John Rundell
Pre-moderns were fated to live in a world in which their existence unfolded in a steady rhythm from birth, to death and beyond. Time was predictable and inescapably infinite, saturated with ideas of singular determination and first cause. It was also circular. This circular time was often viewed as embodying a reciprocating gift passed from one generation to another in the form of obligations, debt and honour. A life lived within the circle of social or spiritual obligation was the gift which was given in time between the generations. Time was the vehicle for this circulation of the value of indebtedness and it carried this value between past, present and future, thus linking them together. This circularity was expressed, for example, in the great Axial Age religions and philosophies as well as in North American Indian gift exchanges. Waiting for the future was predetermined by these cosmological-circular times of birth, death, an afterlife, or ancestral time. In the context of circular time, we waited for fate, that is, determination, or alternatively the intercession of magic or prophesy in order to break or confirm this circle of determination. Waiting for the future was subordinated to, or subsumed by, determination.1
Once the modern conception of time was no longer reliant on these religious and cosmological points of orientation, it became linear and dynamic, pushing beyond the present into a secular and uncertain future. Time was broken up in contrast to the singular, static and often circular notions of time in which past, present and future flowed into one another. However, modern conceptions of time do not simply become this-worldly, secularised, or linear, even if they often develop in parallel with religious and civilisational modes of time. Rather, and as I will argue in two steps in this essay, the breaking of time is also accompanied by contingency and the formation of autonomous fields or worlds, the results of which are different and competing temporal horizons. Time becomes conceptualised as contingently open, relativised and uncertain. Moreover, because of this contingency and the development of autonomous worlds and temporal horizons, waiting for the future also becomes contingent rather than determined. It becomes contingent on the different modalities or worlds that constitute modernity and, therefore, on the different temporalities of modernity that these worlds signify. Different modalities of waiting emerge that become contingent and indeterminate.
From Progress to Contingency The modern notion of time and its delineation from the antique and religious has a long history in the West. The idea of a new age emerged from the Renaissance and Reformation onward in which the idea of time was no longer only cosmologically and statically conceived but conceived in terms that were oriented to a future in this world. In the centuries following the dispute between the republique des lettres two different emphases concerning time and its future-orientedness emerged. On the one hand, there was an image of respect for the ancients by the moderns, who were thus interpreters, and on the other, there was also an idea of creative rupture by which the moderns could see further by creating the very possible conditions for future-sightedness.2 This second attitude ushers in the so-called secularised versions of the philosophy of history which, for example, are found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and his less sophisticated Philosophy of History. To be sure, Hegel both lengthens and circumscribes this
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history. According to him, it reaches its nadir in the eighteenth century in the context of a history of self-consciousness beginning with the ancient Greeks. What is important about Hegel is that he assumes that he had solved the problem of waiting for the future through the idea of Progress, which to be sure he equates with freedom, rather than technical advancement. For Hegel, once this idea of progress took hold it not only anchored the search for the better life in this world, but also anchored it in a way that pushed the present state of affairs towards the future in terms of the coming self-consciousness of reason and freedom for humankind.3 Teleology came to earth. Hence, we no longer waited for the future: progress took us forward and the great road of History, which we ourselves constructed, assured us that the journey would be straight and uninterrupted, or if not so—if the road collapsed, or was blocked—someone cunning enough would rebuild or clear the road and get us started and back on track again. In Hegel’s reconstruction of world history, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte were cunning enough; they were figures who made world history by (re-)building the road and thus pushing history and the future in the direction of progress.4 In this way, History simplifies our lives and gives a particular narrative structure to it because it is viewed as a singular narrative, irrespective of whether or not it is written from the vantage point of significant or monumental figures (Nietzsche).5 However, even in Hegel’s philosophy of history waiting is still subordinated to a different determination. Nonetheless, behind this idea of determination, which is built into the grand narrative of progress, lies the idea of contingency, which is as old as modernity itself. From one perspective, contingency is History’s counter-voice; it gives rise to counter-histories, less-grand scenarios, and continuing conflicts about the direction that history purportedly takes.6 From another perspective, the idea of contingency evokes the sense that modernity is a revolutionary age in that it does not revolve in the cosmological sense, but can be built anew.7 This sense of revolutionary new arrangements also entails that social arrangements and institutions become contingent, that is, ‘they can just as well exist as not exist’.8 In other words, the arrangement of the social world is viewed as being no longer decreed by circular time, fate, tradition, or magic,
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but as one as a series of possibilities which are open towards the future, irrespective of their outcomes. If a philosophy of history narrows the relation and the gap between openness and outcome, then contingency not so much heightens but expands it. Moreover, as intimated above, the cultural self-understanding of modernity was not only one that was directed towards a contingent future, but a future that was also creatively made from within the orbit of humankind’s own resources. The notion of creativity becomes tied to contingency, expansion and an increasing reach towards a future that is less planned and more indeterminate. It is this contingency which, as we shall see below, transforms the very modality of waiting. This interpretation of modernity, which emphasises the creative formation of contingency, evokes an image of history that is a threeway conversation, or series of competing interpretations, between past, present and future. The modern understanding of time disaggregates the circular and continuous relation between past, present and future. As indicated by the remarks above, this disaggregation occurs during the Middle Ages but is only fully articulated in the nineteenth century through the development of historical hermeneutics and Darwin’s historicisation of nature. The result is what Luhmann terms the ‘historicisation of time’, or more accurately, an open-ended and contingent notion of time, through which it is also relativised.9 The historicisation and subsequent relativisation of time gives rise to a series of reflexive modalities that increasingly distinguishes the past from the present, and the future from both in increasing complexity. The present becomes pluralised and the future becomes its horizon as ‘future presents’, that is, as open-ended possibilities. As Luhmann goes on to state, ‘the historicisation of time means that in any present’s past and future horizons, presents with their own temporal horizons (that is, their own pasts and futures) arise’.10 Thus, the temporal modalities of modernity are relativised. Past and future become more distanced from the present and each becomes a possible perspective that throws the others into relief. Contingency qua time ushers in the sense that the world could be something different. This difference exists in the present and possible futures as multidimensional differences. This image of multidimensionality opens up many interpretative horizons and
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possibilities. Hence we not so much wait but interpret and create.11 Futures begin. From this perspective of the contingent disaggregation of time consciousness these creations and interpretations are not so much in front of modernity, but indicate modernity’s own push towards the future, its own temporal horizon or version of time. As Luhmann notes, what is new about modern societies is that present selections are chiefly made with an eye no longer to the past but to future selections. The present is understood as the past of future, contingent presents; its choices are seen as preliminary choices in the area of future contingency. The concern with consistency, which strengthens chains of selection, brings the present together, no longer with the past, but with the future. This is why the future becomes explicit as the horizon for making selections.12 As Luhmann also notes, modern, ‘complex societies build broader, more abstract and differentiated temporal horizons than do simpler ones’.13 Luhmann goes on to suggest that this increased temporal complexity also refers to an increasing number of narratives concerning modernity’s temporality. This increasing number of narratives and temporal horizons is also matched by an increasing number of social forms that allow for richer possibilities. This increase enables a greater range of selections in both experience and action, which, it might be added, are transposed into further increased units of future-orientated time. This complexity also entails that while past, present and future become increasingly differentiated, reflexive and perspectivistic, no single field or system becomes representative of modernity as a whole. As such no single narrative can represent modernity wholly or singularly without reducing the representation and self-understanding of its complexity. This means that contingency is not simply a matter of interpretation, of making selections of relevance, of remembering as well as forgetting, and then remembering again, of only writing counterhistories. Each world develops its own perspective of time and its own relation between the past and the present, exemplified, for
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example, in the way a nation might construct its own national history. Contingency denotes not only the differentiation of worlds but also their ability to construct their own social imaginaries.14 Temporal distancing increases the range of possibility and choice of what is selected, included and excluded. As such, temporal differentiation goes together with the different types of social differentiation specific to modernity, and as we shall see there are different modalities of waiting because of this.
Modernities of Waiting One of the standard narratives of the formation of modernity is the idea that time shifted from what has been termed ‘church time’ (the time of festival and ritual outside everyday life) to ‘merchant time’ or ‘clock time’ (the time of money, of functions, of quantifiable units). This new everyday world of monetary exchanges also lent itself to the standardisation of social exchanges in the form of work practices and thus the standardisation of units of work that pre-dated the developments of the so-called industrial revolution and steam and carbon powered machine technologies. As EP Thompson and Zygmunt Bauman have both pointed out, the development of the disciplinary techniques of modern labour involved the creation of what EP Thompson terms ‘time-work discipline’.15 For both, as well as the writers of the Annals School, and following Marx, the development of clock time and ‘commercial civilisation’ became not only symptomatic of the development of industrial capitalism, but paradigmatic for modernity more generally.16 However, as intimated above, the multidimensionalising of temporal horizons is also accompanied by the multidimensionalising of social fields or worlds. These autonomous worlds or social imaginaries (Castoriadis), with their particular temporal horizons, not only include the general and global capitalisation and moneterisation of social life, but also industrialisation, aesthetics, nation-state formation, and modern democratisation or the development of the political in its modern form. This entails that so-called clock time is only one temporal horizon of modernity. It also entails that modernity is multiworlded, that is, constituted as a series of worlds or social imaginaries and temporal horizons that are irreducible to, yet in conflict with, one another.17
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Because each of these worlds or social fields are constituted with their own temporal horizons, different existential patterns of waiting develop. Here, waiting is viewed as a boundary condition between the past, the present and the future. As such it generates the feeling of unease that people experience when they are caught or held at the boundary which they cannot cross, if only temporarily. In general terms, waiting occurs on the boundaries between the timesaturated worlds or social imaginaries and the everyday experiences of subjects. Waiting is the tension of subjects as they exist on a boundary between a present (or even a past) world that they cannot leave and a future one that they cannot automatically or immediately enter. In modernity, because there are multiple worlds, there are also multiple boundary positions, multiple forms of waiting, and hence multiple forms of unease.18 As already mentioned above, for machine-based and semioticised industrialisation, nation-state time and monetarisation time is not so much infinite but quantifiable and increasingly abstract. It is discrete, broken down and really or potentially managed. It is time for work, management and control in which the clock becomes its cultural representative not simply as an object, but more as an instituted social imaginary, to again draw on Castoriadis’ use of the term. However, each of the temporal horizons of industrialisation, the nation, and money cannot be reduced simply to quantifiable time or clock time alone. Each of these worlds has its own particular modality through which quantifiable time is expressed, its own particular counter-time, and mode of waiting. The same can be said for aesthetic time and democratic time. In the case of industrial time, time is either managed in terms of the relation between efficiency, input, output, and timetables, or it is the hurried time of technical invention. In both instances time is fast, and always in need of quickening. It includes the explosion of, and control over, very heterogeneous processes of machine-driven technological innovation, the technologisation of signs, and the development of the functional division of labour, of which paid work and function are the expression. What might be termed the technical masteries of organic and inorganic nature, labour and functions, and digitilised languages of signs belongs to technical time. Here the quickness of managed or clock time controls the temporality of
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the working day, its rhythm, and even the hours beyond it in terms of leisure, and so-called family time. Waiting is experienced as an impatience. Future-orientedness has a sense of immediacy here—for the next completed cycle of output, for the end of the shift or the beginning of the next one, for the beginning of holidays or the end of them, for the next byte and the next download. Counter-time is experienced often in the form of actions that contest this clock time, such as go-slows, strikes and protests over the length of the working day, as well as forms of social critique that contest, for example, the replacement of human labour by the machine, and its extension into all areas of human life. In this context social critique has also criticised the extension of machine techniques into areas that have hitherto been immune from industrial intervention, such as the manipulation of plants and animals including humans through gene and reproductive technologies. In this technical-industrial world with its clock time of temporal management invention or creation brings the unknowable, rather than the infinite, into knowability. This occurs under the sway of increasingly smaller or more complex units of time qua information. Here waiting, too, exists on the boundary of what is known, and what is not, that is, on the boundary of what awaits to be ‘discovered’. It is also experienced as an impatience—for the future interpreted as next ‘discovery’ or invention, the next results (notwithstanding the phenomenology and contingency of research), the next paradigm. This impatience has been incorporated into versions of progress that viewed the development of the human species in terms of technical or scientific advancement only.19 In the case of the temporality of the nation state, time is constructed in terms of innovations that transformed pre-modern states into modern ones and included the development of standing armies, inter–nation state diplomacy, and the purposive bureaucratisation of the offices of state power. It also included the state’s role and locus in the formation and consolidation of collective identities in terms of nationalist orientations which are condensed in the idea of territorial citizenship, and revolutionary transformation of society from above. All of these developments indicate a temporal horizon of the nation state that revolves around the control of control, that is, not simply the development of instruments of nation-state control—administrative
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apparatuses, territory, identity. Rather, it revolves around the control of these instruments through increasing juridification and monopolisation. Control of control entails that laws and processes are put in place to maintain order, to sanction and dispense justice, to maintain boundaries, to maintain lists of inclusion and exclusion, of insiders and outsiders, and to go to war. Control of control moves across time, into the future in order to secure it.20 Here, more than in the other ‘worlds’, waiting is experienced by social actors as the boundary position par excellence of a no-man’sland. One waits in limbo because here waiting time is controlled by the nation state. Time is deferred if one is in the queue. Waiting for a future appears as if it is a condition of anonymity. Yet, one waits to be identified so that another present can begin. Here waiting can be a cruelty, experienced as anxiety and often anger. One waits for admission to the nation state across the invisible boundary, for the identity card, passport or visa. In totalitarian and exterministic regimes one waits to be categorised as an absolute outsider, and thus to be potentially annihilated. One also waits for judgment over crimes possibly committed. For nation states time is not only management and control of control. It is also the time of remembrances—of times long past, wars fought, won or lost, and monuments erected. Here waiting and memory can be fused in forms of state-created historical reconstruction, which emphasises certain events while minimising others. It can be argued, though, that monetary time is the most complex, the most contingent and the most unstable of any of the temporal horizons of modernity. The increasing abstraction of the money form entails that its relation with the concrete, empirical reality of material life, contra Marx, becomes increasingly detached. Money lives in its own world of circulating self-referentiality where it appears almost infinite, and under which everything can be subsumed.21 The important emphasis here is ‘almost’. In the current historical context where one still requires the abstract and mediating form of money to purchase things and people (if only for a prescribed time, which places a limit on money, power and time), a social actor is signified by the ‘materiality’ of money in the form of his/her earning and purchasing power. Monetary time is instantaneous. It is also anonymous. The buying and selling of commodities and things between people who confront one another as contingent strangers is
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only mediated by money (or credit) and neither by obligation, honour, barter nor sociability. The contemporary accumulation of wealth is strategic accumulation in the form of future-oriented monetary expansion as real and symbolic power. Here power does not exist at the end of the barrel of a gun, but rather in the form of account and stock balances and lines of credit. Yet, waiting exists on the boundary line of having or not having money, that is, of waiting for money. Waiting for money can be another cruelty, a resentment, in which time is not linear, but thisworldly cyclical time—from one pay cheque, dole payment or automatic deduction to another, or one more line of credit. The exit from waiting can be the exhilaration of consumption, especially when the consumption is not deferred but becomes immediate in the blurring of the boundaries between the present and the future through forms of credit, investment and speculation. Credit especially represents the temporal conflation of present and future. It is the time of debt which cannot be deferred infinitely or indefinitely. Contingency here is individualistic, mediated only by one’s own relation with the money form. One is left alone with one’s empty wallet or lines of credit that have reached their limit. If the latter is the case one is left with a debt to the future, the only one that returns. One no longer waits for the ghosts or the ancestors. One waits in the mode of the new civility for bankruptcy and a bad credit history, simply to begin anew again and often without shame. Or one turns to the nation state or its agencies and waits with others in queues in a combination of resentment and anxiety. It is the purported unknown, though, rather than the abstracted immediacy of knowable consumption, that surprisingly connects modern ‘industrial’ invention with modern aesthetic creation. But here aesthetic time is different to industrialised clock time. To be sure, from the Renaissance to the present there has been an explosion of techniques, technical apparatuses, and genres in modern aesthetics, for example in painting, and in music, especially, which saw the invention of new musical instruments, new chordal structures and new instrumentation. However, notwithstanding the ‘materiality’ of this technical creativity, the image of what might be termed the creativity of aesthetic creation in both its modes as the beautiful and the sublime becomes the paradigm for the world of
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aesthetics, at least from Kant’s Critique of Judgment onwards. This image of the creativity of aesthetic creation, which includes intellectualisation, becomes interpreted from the vantage point of an image of an inner driving and self-constituting force, whether this force be viewed as the imagination, the unconscious, or even nature in general (as it is in Schelling’s work, for example). Modern—and here we have in mind Romantic—aesthetic temporality, which positions itself outside of time, and hence may not be viewed strictly as time at all, becomes another contingently formed ‘temporal’ horizon of modernity. Here time does not stand still, nor is it deferred. Rather, it exists on the boundary of what is not yet created, and what is created (and whether this is the form that was imagined to be created). Social actors express and experience this form of waiting not as an anxiety, or as a resentment directed to others, nor as an exhilaration of what has just been created, nor necessarily as a liberation but— and because it is a boundary condition—as a frustration. This frustration ranges between perfection and imperfection as one strives to create the perfect form, irrespective of how abstract the art form might be.22 Aesthetics also became an autonomous ‘world’ through which both the traditional aesthetics of the sacred and the other fields of modernity could be critiqued. As such, it became a counter-paradigm and point of reference for the general condition of modernity itself. This is certainly the case when Goethe’s Werther privileges infinite self-constituting innerly expressiveness against the order, boredom and prosaic rhythm of the worlds of commerce and bureaucratic management. And yet, what Werther atemporally imagines as a perfect state and creates imperfectly—Romantic love—has a frustrated and tragic dimension and end. In Werther’s case, Romantic love leads to suicide. However, Werther’s death denotes a self, which, although absolute and frustrated, is also finite.23 The same sense of atemporality cannot be said for the social imaginary of the modern political, that is, of modern politics and its own temporal horizon. This is especially the case if it is viewed not simply as the circulation and management of power between competing groups, or the limits and guarantees of freedom placed on individuals in relation to one another and the nation state (the liberal argument). To be sure, the world of modern democratisation, or the
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development of what Lefort terms the political, has its own very long and contingent history and was constituted both outside the context of European state formation in the medieval cities, and inside it as an argument against the state’s capacity to absorb society. In the context of this long history, democratisation or the political can be viewed as the time for argument. The political can be viewed as the time for the reflexivity and disagreement over the norms and values of modern everyday life and its institutional arrangements, which take their form as political arrangements. Here time is finite, with a sense of self-limitation, and thus cannot be simply truncated into the management of clock time, of the agenda.24 Politics takes its own time and its temporal horizon is qualitative rather than quantitative. Argument, as Iris Marion Young has pointed out against Habermas, is not simply a rational procedure. It is a complex modality of speaking, listening, acting, where speaking, listening, acting are not confined to the rational illocutionary intent alone. Argument is also constituted by the content and the expressive mode of expressing this content. Moreover, it is always imperfect.25 Argument, and the multiple public spheres in which it occurs as well as the genres in which it is expressed—spoken, written, performed—takes its own time in order for the reflexivity to ‘work itself out’, so to speak. Here one waits for the other. The future in this context is relationally concrete. That is, it takes time for a speaker to say what he or she means. The time of the political is reflexive narrativised time signified not by the speech act or the address as such, but by the intersection of reflexive creativity and interlocution. It is time for reflexive speaking or writing and it has no social imaginary qua time, only a social imaginary qua space. It is the space/time of the meeting that occurs between thinking, listening, acting in the forms of the immediacy of speaking or through the mediation of writing. In both forms it is an interaction between interlocuters. Each as ‘other’ requires patience as well as symmetrical reciprocity. In this context argument is the coalescence of contingency and indeterminacy where the surprises of other points of view and other topics emerge in their own time and according to their own need. To be sure, these interlocutors should be self-limiting in that the recognition of the other qua other asserts itself as a pragmatic
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norm against the self-extending self, and towards the other as a mutual partner and participant. There should be time for all to speak, to listen and to reflect. Democracy qua argumentation can be finished, yet is never completed. Speakers can speak and listen, topics can be returned to in another time—again and again. The counter-times of the political include the other worlds and their temporal horizons, which attempt to subsume argumentation to their own logics, ends or purposes. For example, the time of the modern polis is neither clock time signified by the gavel, nor aesthetic time of perfecting the imperfect, nor time that belongs to executive power. However, counter-time here includes claims and protests for participation in argumentation in the form of what might be termed recognitive conflicts or struggles for recognition. Here one does not simply wait. One demands to be included. Alternatively, there is a counter-time to the political that turns it back on politics, and includes the dictatorial and totalitarian paradigms. Here one does not wait to give up power, one clings to it. Or one waits to be categorised and potentially annihilated. We all wait for futures—yet not for the same ones, nor in the same way, nor at the same tempo. Modernity, because of its multiple worlds and their temporal horizons, entails that waiting for the future has multiple, clashing and even overlapping effects, affects and modalities. We wait for the end of the working day, for rest and leisure; we wait for a visa and a place to settle; for money and a chance to purchase. We wait to create a work of art, music or fiction, to work it somewhere between perfection and imperfection; and we wait to argue, to listen, and to argue again. Here waiting has been posited as a boundary condition which we experience as unease. Waiting in modernity is an indeterminate boundary condition in which the futures to which it gestures are also indeterminate. In the end, modern waiting, too, is finite, even if it is experienced as if it is outside of time, and there are many forms of its unease. We can wait anxiously, impatiently, resentfully, with frustration, or perhaps with patience. This indeterminacy, finitude and uneasiness is what both increases and decreases the suffering and torment, the horizons and possibilities of those who wait.
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Notes 1
2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18
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See Mauss, The Gift Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by WD Halls; foreward by Mary Douglas, London, Routledge, 1990; Hawking, A Brief History of Time; Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on Musical Modernity. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007; Elias, Time: An Essay. Translated in part from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992; Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press, 2007. See Schabert, ‘Modernity and History I’. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of History. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 31–3. See Foucault, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of a History for Life’. In his essay Nietzsche criticises types of history that is written from the vantage point of grand figures and national myths. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. Arendt, On Revolution. Heller, ‘On Being Satisfied in a Dissatisfied Society I’. Luhmann, ‘World-Time and System History’ in The Differentiation of Society; see also Hawking, A Brief History of Time, pp. 15–36; Rundell, ‘The Hermeneutic Imagination and Imaginary Creation’. Luhmann’s work can be viewed as an argument with and against Heidegger’s own ontological temporalisation of the everyday in Being and Time. Luhmann, ‘World-Time and System History’, p. 305. Rundell, ‘The Hermeneutic Imagination and Imaginary Creation’. Luhmann, ‘World-Time and System History’, p. 322. Ibid., p. 297; see also ‘The Future Cannot Begin’ in The Differentiation of Society, pp. 271–88. Ibid., p. 318. According to Luhmann, modernity is characterised by increasing functional differentiation, as against the segmental and stratified differentiations of earlier pre-modern societies. As he notes in his later work, modern functional differentiation is also accompanied by a greater series of selections between functionally differentiated social systems and their environments. See Bauman, Memories of Class; Thompson, ‘Time- Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’. Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; see also Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, Culture in the Middle Ages. I have discussed these ‘worlds’ or social imaginaries elsewhere. See Rundell, Origins of Modernity. There is an additional complexity of the relation between waiting and selfformation when the horizon of the radical imaginary of the subject is included. Here, the temporal horizon, if one can call it that, is a horizon that the subject constructs for him/herself out of its own ontological imaginings. This radical imaginary ‘temporalising’ horizon sits in tension with the social-imaginary temporalising horizons or worlds discussed here, and each is irreducible to the other. I have discussed the irreducibility of the radical and social imaginaries and the tensions that
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21 22
23 24 25
they emit in ‘Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension’. However, this aspect will not be discussed here. Rather, this essay concentrates on the tensions within the different worlds or social imaginaries of modernity and their own temporal horizons. Markus, ‘Changing Images of Science’. See, for example, Giddens, Nation, State and Violence; Hinze, ‘Military Organisation and State Organisation’; Hammer, Democracy and the Nation State. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money. See Kant, Critique of Judgment Including the First Introduction; Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); Abrahms, The Mirror and the Lamp. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther. See also Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society and Democracy and Political Theory. Young, ‘Impartiality and the Civic Public’.
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chapter 4
Waiting for Imam Mahdi and Development: The Case of Pakistan Nadeem Malik
During a recent visit to Pakistan, I stayed at my sister’s house in Karachi for a few days. I arrived in the evening. It was extremely pleasant to chat and gossip with my sister, her family members and some, aunts, uncles, and other relatives who joined us. Love, affection, joy and witty exchange pervaded the air. The night was reinvigorating and energising, full of harmonious colours and beauty. The next morning the scene changed. I learned that while we had celebrated my sister’s neighbour had been kidnapped for ransom. A car had followed him as he drove home from his office. When he stopped in his car port, two men kidnapped him at gunpoint. Three days later he was released after a ransom of one million rupees was paid. The warmth of my first night in Karachi had given way to chaos and insecurity. Later, when I met the man’s family, I asked why they had not reported the crime to the police. His wife said: Do you think that the pervasiveness of such criminal activities can exist without police being party to the criminal mafia? Police stations are on open sale. Officers in charge of police stations bid for police stations that offer lucrative
income. When protectors become thieves, what can ordinary citizens do? They can only pay the ransom or die. They are helpless. Only God can do something. Within a few days in Pakistan, it was clear that in addition to an increase in extreme poverty, rising prices of goods, shortages of electricity, gas and petrol, and an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, the security of life and property had become a major concern for citizens. To add to the misery, religious extremists aspiring to change the character of the state and society in accordance with medieval Islamic principles had become more active and stronger. Though in a minority, they were well organised, vocal and equipped with weapons and ammunition. Bomb blasts in major cities including the capital, Islamabad, had become frequent. Neither the writ of the state, nor any political party that might aid people to set things right was visible. In this context, most citizens seemed frustrated, helpless and fretful. They lacked political organisation and direction. Unable to solve their problems through their own actions, and unable to rely on the state, they felt dependent on possibilities offered by more distant external forces. As a rickshaw driver told me, ‘These are the signs of the coming of the day of resurrection, and we are helpless to do anything. The state does not provide security. It is high time that Imam Mahdi must arrive’. The Muslims believe that Imam Mahdi will appear along with Jesus before the coming of the Day of Resurrection (Yaum alQiyamah). He is an eschatological and messianic figure whom God will decree to appear on earth for the purpose of freeing the world of tyranny and injustice. He is twelfth Imam, after whom no-one else will be sent by God. The above anecdotes capture the sense of chaos and helplessness that pervades Pakistan today. In addition, however, they expose the myth of development in countries such as Pakistan where the dream of civility has turned into a nightmare. This essay explores the conjunction of waiting and Imam Mahdi at three levels: as a transcendental religious experience; as a phenomenon that is reinforced through modern development discourse; and as a conjunction of social and political chaos in a society that perpetually waits for the arrival of a messianic figure.
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Waiting and Imam Mahdi: A Transcendental Religious Experience When I asked the rickshaw driver why people keep waiting for Mahdi, he said, ‘Because we have belief in God and he has promised to send Mahdi to alter the world for a better human future’. To wait for Mahdi is to believe in God. It is God who leads people to live a moral life. And it is on the basis of their moral conduct on earth that God will decide how they shall experience life after death. The conjunction of God and waiting displaces people from their time and place and takes them into an imaginary space where there is no time. Waiting, they imagine, ends on the Day of Resurrection. The notion of a present time becomes an experience of fear and of waiting for the Day of Judgment. Thus, as they age, people wish that waiting for death will not end soon. Waiting provides them with relief and the opportunity to correct their moral deeds and be fit for doomsday. People wait for God’s blessings with regard to living a better moral life; they wait also for his blessings with regard to their concerns about poverty, the insecurity of jobs, property and life, and the lack of leadership and of satisfactory political and social organisation. Waiting for a messiah emerges when the state of decline of the moral, social, political and economic life of people become so acute that they find themselves stuck in a mire of helplessness. In such circumstances, an all-merciful God might send Imam Mahdi. The messiah gives meaning to God’s existence and to his powers. If he comes he can solve people’s problems, but people’s problems are endless, and can never be solved in absolute terms. If this were possible, humanity would have been already leading a perfect moral life free from any mundane difficulties. After all, God has already sent so many prophets. The perpetual waiting for a messiah thus gives meaning to the existence of God indefinitely. In Pakistan, therefore, people still wait for Imam Mahdi, despite many powerful religious figures who in the past had claimed to be Imam Mahdi.1 Imam Mahdi as a historical figure may represent the past or as a messianic figure may represent the future. He does not belong to the ‘present’ because he never comes. It is this absence of the ‘present’ that keeps him alive in the subconscious of Muslim communities and it is this ‘absence of the present’ that maintains people’s religious
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faith in the existence and power of God. Waiting, in this context, brings an indefinite hope of a better future.
Waiting for the Messiah and Development in Pakistan In 2005 in a tehsil 2 in Punjab, I asked a peasant what he thought about ‘development’. He shared a joke: Once a prince from one of the Middle Eastern states went to Europe in winter and saw people skiing. He got fascinated and said to his finance minister, ‘Wow … see, this is what we call a modern world. Can’t we have the same sports in our country too?’ The finance minister replied saying that he would get in touch with some development consultants to ask how they could have skiing in their country and become modernised. The minister did get in touch with a consultant and hired him. The consultant told them that it was not a big deal to have skiing in a Middle Eastern country. All they needed was to import a hundred thousand skis. The prince acted upon the recommendation, but when he put on the skis, he found that there was no snow. Instead, there was only sand under a scorching sun. The prince got angry and told his minister that they had been cheated: ‘How could we ski in sand?’ The minister calmed him, saying that he would contact the consultant again. The consultant said not to worry, as he was sending many hundreds of thousands of tons of snow too. The peasant’s jocular story illustrated the irrelevance of development models by allowing the understanding that all too often planned projects never run to completion; the people are kept waiting for the snow.3 The entire discourse of development, therefore, becomes a discourse of waiting for development. Since the inception of the development discourse after 1945, waiting for development has significantly defined the relationship between the first world and the underdeveloped countries. The nature of this relationship is one which equates ‘development’ with adulthood and ‘underdevelopment’ with infancy and immaturity. The temporal
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lag of postcoloniality is inscribed onto developing nations, anthropomorphised as less-then-fully-formed subjects, whose growth and maturity has to be supervised and monitored by those who have reached adulthood—that is, by the West.4 The assumption implied by this outlook was that underdeveloped countries could emulate the West by industrialisation and by following certain social, political and economic models and trajectories. In short, the development paradigm assumes that all countries, and all peoples, share a single ontological time. It does not acknowledge that different societies experience time and space in different ways. The notion of a single, pan-human ontological time is, at best, a hope that everyone may come to live in relative peace and harmony. Even in an age of globalisation with cable networks reaching into some of the remotest communities in the world, that notion is mere illusion; it is far removed from the realty. The following anecdote will illustrate my point. In 2000, while doing research on civil society and governance in Pakistan, I visited a remote village in the province of Sindh. Here I saw a television connected to a cable network that had been placed on a small tea stall to attract customers. Most of the customers were young boys who would spend the evening watching foreign channels. One day while I chatted with the boys a priest from the local mosque joined us and spoke to me: They keep watching nudity and violence on television, waste their time and do not work. They have started living in a world of strange fantasies. They are becoming immoral and no longer respect their parents and elders. They are getting spoiled. The culture of infidels has started dominating us and is affecting our social norms. It seems that doomsday is coming soon and we need Imam Mahdi to come and show the path of pious living to the new generation. The youths, by contrast, had a different view. They said that they did not watch nudity. Rather, they argued, the television informed
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them about what was happening around the world. They learned of various hairstyles, modes of dress, and foods. They could watch news that national television networks did not provide, as a result of state censorship. They agreed that Imam Mahdi should arrive, but only to provide them with what they had been seeing on the foreign television networks. The debate between the priest and the youths highlights their different aspirations and reasons for waiting for Imam Mahdi. But the fact remains that the electronic reach of global information to remote communities in developing countries produces paradoxical outcomes. On one hand, it provides knowledge, entertainment and enlightenment and, on the other, creates ideals and aspirations that can never be achieved. This results in disillusionment. An ideal of a single ontological time that weaves all humanity together is far removed from the real lives of people in developing countries. There is no recognition of the ‘present’ circumstances of people within development policy. The focus of development policy is with either the past or the future. For instance, policy makers often disparage less-developed societies for their adherence to ancient philosophies or to decadent ways of life, which they believe belong to humanity’s past.5 Such disparagement is then followed by prescriptions about ways in which these societies could improve in the future. The emphasis is on either the past or the future. Such premises were implicit in the writings of the architects of development studies—the economist Walt W Rostow, the sociologist Talcott Parsons, and the political scientist Gabriel A Almond—when in 1950s and 1960s they enunciated the modernisation project in an attempt to contain the so-called soviet socialism.6 That project promoted the idea of ‘difference’ between East and West rather than of ‘contradiction’ created by an unjust world economic system. It asserted that the difference could be overcome through technocratic and instrumental means of development. However, this could be achieved only if all people shared a single ontological time, the ultimate standard of which was provided by the West. In other words, the proponents of development stressed that if the ‘rest’ are to develop they should follow the stages of development outlined in the Western development models. Their intentions, however, have been hindered by pressures of internal evolution in several countries in the developing world. And their actions
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have sometimes brought ‘… massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression, the debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence’.7 Moreover, through the decade of the nineties, there has been a 100 per cent increase in the world’s wealth and, simultaneously, a 100 per cent increase in poverty.8 More importantly, in the case of Pakistan, the development paradigms prescribed by aid agencies and followed by the ruling elite have led the country into social and political chaos. The consequences of development based on expectation of a single ontological time are not encouraging. The dream of development has turned into a nightmare9, which belongs to the ‘present’. The ‘wretched of the earth’ are forced to live in a constant state of limbo; they live between the past and the future with no present. Such a state of affairs has considerably strengthened a belief that Imam Mahdi will come some day and renew the world. Keep waiting.
Waiting, Chaos and Imam Mahdi
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), Salvador Dali, 1976.
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The circumstances that eventually led to the Spanish civil war were the subject of Salvador Dali’s 1936 painting Premonition of Civil War. The image reveals what many texts do not. Through a metonymic association of the human body with that of a nation state, Dali shows how social and political chaos leading to civil war may destroy the very structure of a nation state. The chaos emerges when various parts of the same body start destroying each other. A conjunction of chaos and waiting can be articulated in the light of this painting. Chaos may lead to either ‘waiting for a new order’, or to further chaos. In the former case, it could be an outcome of conscious political activity; in the latter case, it could be an outcome of a spontaneous process leading to a series of further disruptions. I am not implying that the world is certain, linear and predictable. As Nietzsche2 proposed, for ‘all eternity’ it might be ‘chaos’ and it might be fruitless to search for an underlying logic, rationality and certainty that is based on modern ideologies, rather than focusing on the unexpected, the surprise and the emergent3. But, as depicted in Dali’s painting, the world has form and structure. It is not ahistorical. Thus I argue, chaos arises through dialectic of the predictable and unpredictable. Dali’s painting represents raw nature and the absence of any conscious social and political endeavour. It provided a premonition of civil war in Spain. It could equally provide a metaphor for the outcomes of irrelevant development models. It reveals that where chaos arises spontaneously and lacks direction then waiting for chaos is dreadful. The story of chaos in Pakistan may be appreciated in the light of Dali’s painting. Currently, two out of four provinces, North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, after endlessly waiting to be free of the central state’s unjust excesses, have commenced armed struggles for autonomy. Thousands of people have been killed. Uneven development, and an unjust allocation of national resources, have given birth to hatred and to a lack of trust among people of different provinces, and an uncertain law and order situation is becoming worse. The economy is in a state of constant decline. Daily newspapers are filled with reports on crimes. Social chaos has been compounded by the widespread increase in the new kinds
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of crime—especially related to illegal drugs—and criminals have substantially greater fire power. Since the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been awash with guns. Kalashnikov and other automatic weapons have become ubiquitous; many are available to rent in Karachi on an hourly basis. According to some estimates, Pakistan has approximately 7400 convicted killers awaiting execution.4 Crimes against women are at a historic high nationwide and have affected women’s mobility. During my recent visit to Pakistan my mother showed my daughter our old family album. There was a picture of my mother, aged 14 years, riding a bicycle on a main road. My daughter was surprised and shocked because, today, it is unimaginable that women of any age would ride a bicycle on the road. The nation state of Pakistan was born in a context of chaos. Hundreds and thousands of migrant Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims both in India and Pakistan were killed as a consequence of the largest human migration after Aryans. Later, the policy makers (mostly military elite) laid down the foundations of the country based on conflicting ideals. On the one hand, they followed the colonial legacy of a modern nation state while, at the same time, they tried to give it the semblance of a medieval Islamic state. The conflict gave birth to a parallel judicial system in the long run—one colonial and the other based on Islamic Shariah. The same was true of the educational system. Some children who studied in elite and other good schools were exposed to a broad, open-minded, inclusive and religiously tolerant world view; others who studied in madrassahs were encouraged to aspire to the establishment of a medieval Islamic state in Pakistan. The conflicting ideals of the state and society hindered the process of state formation. Even today Pakistan lacks a constitution agreed by all political actors in all its provinces. There is an ongoing dispute over amendments introduced by the military during its direct rule over several years in Pakistan. It seems that the state that emerged from chaos has been taken over by it. The writ of law is no longer visible. Both the poor and the rich suffer. The latter have resources, which they fear could be taken away from them. They have no solutions and feel helpless to set things right. The military has dominated the state and politics through the entire history of Pakistan. It has systematically dismantled all political and civil societal institutions that could give meaning
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to people’s lives and provide direction for the resolution of their problems. The consequence is significant social and political chaos. The paradox citizens face is that their dependence on the militarydominated state is almost complete, and yet they have no faith in the state because it has never delivered Chaos has made the ‘present’ an unliveable experience and people wait for further cycles of chaos. For those who lose hope, suicide becomes destiny; there are hundreds of such individual suicides every year. They are ubiquitous in poor neighbourhoods but occur among the rich as well. An essential condition for living in Pakistan today is, therefore, a hope in the future and the possibility of pleasure in past memories. Though future peace is considered an essential aspect of development, longing and constant waiting for it to come is intense. A comment by an educated, jobless young man illustrates the point. When asked whether he would prefer development or peace and security, he responded: I would choose peace, as I might be able to live on the minimum possible resources, but I don’t want to wait to be killed in a bomb blast, or by a petty thief snatching a meagre 100 rupees while walking on a street. Moreover, a deteriorating law and order situation takes away local as well as foreign investment. You must have observed that a lot of local industrialists and those who have wealth are investing abroad in the Middle East and elsewhere. Foreign investment is already on a decline. When asked, further, what solution he would propose and what role he thought people could play, he replied that only God might know about solutions. All strategies to solve problems have failed in Pakistan and there is no leadership that could show some light. The dis-empowered and marginalized people can only wait for Imam Mahdi. While the conjunction of waiting, development and Imam Mahdi and that of waiting, chaos and Imam Mahdi appears similar in terms of the absence of the ‘present’ and the displacement of people from time and space, the urgency of waiting for Imam Mahdi is more acute in the latter case.
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Conclusion The essay has demonstrated the conjunction of waiting and Imam Mahdi at three levels: religious, developmental and chaos. In the first case, Imam Mahdi, as messiah, represents the future: he is always absent from the ‘present’ because he never comes. Faith in a perpetual waiting for Imam Mahdi gives meaning to the existence of God indefinitely. For many people Imam Mahdi offers an ultimate sense of security in an environment of chaos and underdevelopment. Waiting for development in developing countries may further strengthen belief in a messiah for, as in the previous discourse, people are forever situated between ‘past’ and the ‘future’. The ‘present’ is absent and this absence is felt as helplessness, as an inability to set things right. People become indifferent to the ‘present’. Finally, the prevailing chaos in Pakistan as an outcome of various political and historical circumstances that cannot be managed through development not only strengthens the belief in a messianic figure but also increases the intensity of waiting for such a figure. Waiting and helplessness go together. The latter at a collective level can itself be a product of a state of displacement of people from their time and place such that they lose a sense of the ‘present’. One explanation of waiting, therefore, could be that it entails loss of the notion of the ‘present’. The people’s displacement from their time and place and the loss of a sense of the ‘present’ gives birth to the phenomenon of waiting for Imam Mahdi. Another aspect of waiting is associated with the fact that at each phase of development there is something that has yet to be developed—as absolute development does not exist. This ‘something’ exists in ‘present time’ but is ambiguous; it is, in the final analysis, nothingness. In this sense development without waiting is not conceivable. One of the tragedies of the world, I argue, is that, despite the promises of modernisation and development by the ruling elites of both the First World and developing nations, people in developing countries such as Pakistan still live in a ‘world of waiting’, a world in which they lose the sense of the ‘present’. It is this concept of waiting that underlies the chaos of present-day Pakistan and, ultimately, impacts the entire region of South Asia and reaches further to the globe.
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Notes 1
For example: Bab (founder of the religion of Babism) in 1844 and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad during the British period in India have claimed to be Imam Mahdi. 2 A tehsil is an administrative unit smaller than a district in the localgovernment system in Pakistan. 3 The joke also reflects the peasant’s (who did not have any formal education) organic intellectual ability to reflect on such a complicated phenomenon in simple words. It is important to note in this context that the Dubai government in the UAE even brought ice for skating in a small indoor recreational area; it could never introduce skiing, as the country never has snowfall. Even skating is still not part of their culture the way it is in countries that experience extreme cold. 4 Gupta, p. 11. 5 Escobar. 6 For detailed discussion on this topic see Wiarda, Non-Western Theories of Development, Harcourt Brace & Company, USA, 1999. 7 Escobar. 8 Stiglitz. 9 Escobar. 10 Nietzsche, as cited in D Milovanovic (ed), Chaos, Criminology, and Social Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)order, 1997. 11 Ibid., 1997. 12 Daily Times, ‘Death penalty and increasing crime in Pakistan.’
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chapter 5
Senses of Waiting among Tibetan Nomads Gillian G Tan
Waiting is an enchantment. I have received orders not to move. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
At one level of understanding, waiting is associated with passivity or feeling that one is unable to move or act. When we wait, we are caught in between one action and another, in between moving from one state of being to another. What is more, we are often not in control of our movements but are subject to another will. Waiting, in this sense, entails multiple suspensions—of our power to act, of action or movement itself, and of time. Recall the scene in Waiting for Godot—which one? Are they all the same because nothing happens? Nothing happens.1 Didi and Gogo have lost their power to act, they cannot remember why they are waiting, they cannot move away from the place, yet they cannot be sure that this is the right place, and they cannot recall the time—was it tomorrow or yesterday? Having lost their power to act and to locate their positions in time and place, the only thing they can do is wait. Of course, Didi and Gogo portray an extreme form of existential waiting. Nonetheless, we have all experienced modulations of this
kind of waiting and felt the host of emotions that accompany such waiting—anger at the surrender to a power outside our own, boredom at the nothingness that happens while waiting, hope and the anticipation of the end of waiting, and relief when the waiting is over. In the popular example of the queue, Mann explores how long overnight queues function as a social system, in which one’s order in turn is linked to practices of ‘time out’ and ‘serving time’.2 Paying attention to social rules brings waiting into the realm of sociality and procedures. Such moderation and ordering reverberate through the waiting lines of our society. Yet why is it that the emotions accompanying the act of queuing range from polite deference to frustration when we wait for longer than we deem acceptable and sheer rage at queue-jumpers? How is it that waiting in this context, even with moments of playfulness and conversation, is generally experienced as ‘suffering’? Sometimes, but not always, another sense of waiting weaves through these emotions, one that reminds us of the etymological root of ‘waiting’ in French. Attente, or ‘attending’ is to direct one’s energies or mind towards something, to pay attention to, to wait for. This reveals a sense of waiting that requires our five physical senses to be attentive and interactive, the way that hunters wait for prey or mountain climbers wait for belay. Waiting, in this sense, provides the framework within which I explore in my essay how the people who are waiting employ their physical senses to know the passing seasons and the changing pastures that underlie their movements. On the Tibetan plateau, nomads move from place to place according to natural rhythms and cycles of time. Hence, waiting marks the necessary pauses and breaks in the general movement of life; it is part of a symphonic whole and, because of the nomads’ constant interaction with their time and place, waiting does not engender the feeling of being ‘stuck’, even when one has stopped. This occurs even though Tibetan nomads submit to the authority of those monastic leaders and community elders who interpret the stars. Waiting encompasses a range of senses. Its complexity can be understood in relation to the contexts in which we wait. And who we are regulates how we wait.
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Waiting to Move Dora Karmo is the name of a place where a community of Tibetan nomads lives. It is located in the Minyag area of the eastern Tibetan region of Kham, and is approximately 2000 kilometres from Lhasa. The name rdo ra dkar mo literally means the circle of white rocks.3 The nomads of Dora Karmo are a community of around 300 people. As nomadic pastoralists, they rely on the production of their animals, mainly yak, for subsistence either through direct consumption of milk, butter, yogurt and meat or through exchange with farmers for other dietary staples, such as barley, wheat and potatoes. Because yak constantly graze, the search for fresh pastures regulates the movements of these nomads from one regular place to another regular place with their yak and other animals. This attachment to place exists simultaneously with a continual leave-taking from place, illustrating Ingold’s point that even though nomadism is symbolised in the pastoral animal, it is equally located in the pastures, and nomadism entails a sense of changing places in a routine pattern of movements.4 In 2006, I conducted fieldwork in Dora Karmo for my doctoral research. At the end of winter, allowing for a period of time in spring to wait for animals to regain their strength and for newborn calves to become stronger, the nomads of Dora Karmo begin to move pastures with their herds. In total, they move seven times in a year, from lower to higher elevation and then back again. The first move of the year from the winter house, a single-storey stone-and-mud structure, to the black nomad tent made of woven yak hair occurred on a grey and snowy day in late May. Rain and snow had fallen incessantly during the previous three days and, except for going out to milk or herd the animals, the five of us remained indoors, in one small room, waiting. Aku5 Kungo, my adopted father and village schoolteacher, sat on his bed while looking out the window, spinning his large prayer wheel and chanting under his breath. His lips moved continuously and his deep voice hummed a hypnotic monotone that filled the room. Dako, the elder of his two daughters, sat by the stove, about 1½ metres away, in the place that marked her control of the kitchen and of meals. Phalko, the younger daughter, paced back and forth, sometimes going to the next room—where the young animals were tied up at night—to collect more kindling and dried yak dung for the stove.
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Both women continued with their routine household chores. Tsering Panjur, Phalko’s young fiancé—the household’s son-in-law, or magpa—did not have a regular routine of chores and, therefore, was the most restless, repeatedly sitting down to converse with us and then suddenly getting up to look out the window or up towards the sky. And, as the foreign student who wanted to learn about how Tibetan nomads live, I was feeling cold, dejected and impatient to move. Over the course of those three long days, I checked and doublechecked with Aku Kungo: ‘When are we going to move?’ He replied, ‘In the fourth month, third day’. I didn’t fully believe him: ‘You said we were going to move eight days ago’. He patiently said, ‘The weather was not good’. I doggedly persisted: ‘Then you said we were supposed to move yesterday’. He replied, ‘Jhon-la Kunchok6 (the village leader) said to wait’. I continued: ‘So, now, is that the fourth month, third day?’ ‘Yes, it is’, he said. I did my approximate calculations—the third day of the fourth month of the Tibetan year of the fire-dog was 29 May 2006. Tomorrow. And so we did. Jhon-la Kunchok had conferred with monks at the local monastery about favourable dates in the Tibetan calendar for moving. Based on a complex calculation of the present year against the sighting of stars (and indications of good weather), he would then decide and tell us when to move. Until that announcement, we had waited. On the morning of the move, we all woke up early. The wet and cold weather had turned the dry earth of the enclosed area outside the house into a gooey mass of mud. Phalko and Tsering Panjur left to herd the animals out and to prepare nine of the strongest loadbearing yak for the move. In the house, the listless and unfocused energy of the past few days gave way to a burst of activity. Dako was busy organising bowls, pots and cooking ingredients, such as salt, oil, chilli and pickled vegetables. She told me to place them into plastic sacks. We also prepared the old leather sacks of barley flour, wheat flour and butter that had been stacked next to my bed all winter. When Phalko and Tsering Panjur returned with the yak, they tied them in a single line along one straight rope that was fixed to the muddy ground. Dako shot off a list of instructions about sacks that should be taken first. Finally, six yak were loaded up, their burdens
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tied to the wooden saddles by strings of strong old leather. The muddy ground was slippery, the drizzle of snow and mist made it difficult to see, and the cold weather numbed my fingers. Moving was tough work. This pattern of moving-waiting-moving repeated itself for the rest of the year until the nomads moved back to their winter houses. However, variations occurred, as on the third move from the spring to the summer pastures, when Jhon-la Kunchok ordered a small pause in our movements. Because of the large distance, nomads moved to the summer pastures over two days—on the first day, the black tent and the majority of household items; on the second day, the animals. Before the rest of my household could complete the move on the second day, however, Jhon-la Kunchok issued a decree7, forbidding animals from Dora Karmo to arrive in the summer pastures that day. If anyone disobeyed this decree, they would be fined five yuan8 per animal. Dako and Phalko waited on the top of a hill overlooking the summer pastures where I already was. I could see them in the distance on the afternoon of the second day, but they did not arrive until the following morning after the morning milking. When they did arrive, I asked them in a typical Tibetan nomad greeting, ‘A kad?’ (Are you tired?). ‘Ma kad’ (Not tired), was their—and the standard—reply. I asked them how it had been sleeping in the white canvas tent, which is used in the summer as a kind of satellite tent (I had slept in the black tent). Dako replied, ‘it was comfortable’. I brought up the issue of the decree. Tsering Panjur said that it happened regularly, particularly in the shared summer pastures where we were. The summer pastures were called Ngu-la-tang (the crying grasslands) because Aku Dretung, the uncle of eastern Tibet’s famous warrior-king Ling Gesar, had apparently got lost here amidst the dense mist, thick forests and rocky terrain. In his despair, he had cried out to the gods for help. His tears moved them to pity and they showed him the way on to the road to Lhasa. Ngu-la-tang was the summer pastures of four nomadic communities, collectively called Nalungma, of which Dora Karmo was part. Hence, the purpose of the decree was to curb disagreements and feuds among households of the various communities because male yak tend to fight with those of another herd if they get too close to each other. If yaks were to fight, male nomads would demand recompense and this would potentially
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spark off disagreements that could lead to death and revenge feuds. Hence, decrees were planned among the village elders of Nalungma and waiting, then, became a way to maintain order and coordinate moves in the shared summer pastures of Ngu-la-tang. Yet this kind of coordination differed from the kind imposed by the queue. In the very notion of a ‘queue’, the procession of order in turn was a linear and uni-dimensional progression. One waited in a line. Among Tibetan nomads, coordination did not occur in one dimension and order was not necessarily provided in turn. In the three-dimensional grasslands, groups of households—organised as encampments, or tshowa—moved together. Moving entailed an awareness of what another household was doing: if a nomad saw that a neighbour was already moving towards one place or grazing his animals on one area of pasture, then he would move in another direction. And waiting, then, complemented moving: one was always attentive to the movements of the other, and waited, or not, based on the flow of movement at that time and place.
Waiting for Death and Rebirth The complementarity of moving and waiting occurs not only in a physical sense but also metaphysically, in the progression through the life cycle and movements from death to rebirth. Tibetan Buddhists believe in the continuity of consciousness after death into future existences. Everyone is subject to this cycle of life, death and rebirth. Without enlightenment, it is impossible for the consciousness to escape from cyclic suffering; however, there are opportunities to prepare for a favourable rebirth, even to achieve liberation, and one of these opportunities is afforded at the moment of death, in the transference of consciousness from this life to the next. Hence, it is possible to wait for a new beginning by actively preparing for death. The physical rigour of work epitomises nomadic life on the Tibetan plateau. The routine chores of both female and male nomads, according to the rhythms of the seasons and the subsequent influences of these on the environment, regulate the patterns and pauses of movement and waiting. As with other cultures, when old age beckons, Tibetan nomads begin to retreat from the busy activities of the household. Older nomads leave off herding, milking, and collecting yak dung and kindling to perform sedentary tasks—work that
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requires minimal movement. Sorting through yak hair and spinning the hair into yarn for black tents and ropes are examples of such tasks. Often, older nomads do not move to the summer pastures with the rest of the family, opting to remain in the relative quiet of the winter house. They begin to stop moving. Increasingly, older nomads turn their attentions and senses to religious practices: chanting, prostrating, circumambulating around prayer wheels, spinning smaller prayer wheels, and meditating. They will congregate in monasteries, if there is one in close proximity, or other sites of religious significance, silently chanting under their breath, their lips moving to a constant rhythm as they spin their prayer wheels in a clockwise direction. They will also attend more and more teachings at their monastery in order to hear the voice of their lama, to grow more accustomed to his sound. These practices are all part of their preparations for the next life, and waiting for death and rebirth becomes a set of activities geared towards this simultaneous end and new beginning. In Dora Karmo, when a family believes that a person is about to die, they send for a highly-regarded lama to meditate and chant.9 Preferably, this lama will be one that the dying person has heard frequently in his/her life because it is important that the familiar sound of the lama’s voice functions as a beacon and guide to the dying person in his/her journey to rebirth. Depending on the individual person, the waiting period before death will vary significantly. This again requires the lama to be attentive to the particular condition and needs of the dying person. The attending lama chants passages, giving instruction to the dying on how to understand death-to-rebirth experiences, and tells the dying how to navigate through the journey of death. At the moment of death, it is important for the chants to be clear and loud because the consciousness is described as confused or bewildered. Yet the dying person will recognise the voice of his lama and follow the sound that guides him/her through death and finally to rebirth. Significantly, the chants are also directed towards the listeners, as a way for them to resolve their grief and to reinforce their own preparations for death.10 Waiting for death occurs throughout one’s life.
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For Tibetan nomads of Dora Karmo, death is viewed not as the end but as an opportunity for liberation; preparing to die, then, entails physical activities that lay the foundation for a favourable rebirth, and waiting for rebirth becomes an attentive act of listening, comprehending and following instructions, in order to proceed back to a beginning. The linearity of time is transformed into cyclical time that has no end. Nomads wait, then, just as they move—continuously through life, and back again.
Conclusion My brief ethnography of Tibetan nomads has presented a way of understanding how to live with/in multiple temporalities. As people who are constantly in movement, either through place, activity or the life cycle, nomads are able to modulate their lived time with the natural rhythms of the earth and with the cycles of life. In the cycle of life, moreover, time becomes circular and waiting has no final end. Perhaps because of this, nomads readily abide by the structures of religious authority, thus managing contingency. Furthermore, in their interdependent and attentive interactions with their environment, structures and each other, they have achieved an attitude that does not attempt to grasp or fix. Subsequently, a phenomenon, like waiting, flows with time (or times), rather than being blocked out in time. This has been placed in comparison to the contexts of waiting in other modalities. For the person waiting in those other ways, the concepts of space and time—the latter, in particular—take on certain characteristics for the waiting person. When we wait in the doctor’s clinic, for example, we surrender our time to another. This is willingly done, except when it takes too long, when we start to feel out of synchronicity with the time that we think it should take. Waiting, then, becomes a waste of time; we begin to juxtapose our inaction with the constant motion of the world we can see through the clinic window and we feel impatient with waiting because we believe we have been placed out of sync with the time of others. This brings us to the point that Bergson proposes, that within us all, there is an inner duree, or duration, of which there are two components: ‘thought’ or mathematical time and ‘lived’ or fluid time.
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Thus, waiting is always placed within the context of time calculated against either a ticking clock or other people, and within the context of actual lived time. How these different temporalities coexist within us bears on our attitudes in waiting. As an example of the tensions that may arise as a result of the coexistence of these different temporalities, Schweizer looks to the example provided by James in The Wings of the Dove of Kate Croy’s impatience during her wait for her father: ‘Kate’s pacing, we might say, enacts the waiter’s attempt to harmonise Bergson’s two temporalities: to adjust her inner rhythms to the rhythms of the clock … She can no more increase the movements of the clock than she can escape her own body. She endures both.’11. When the temporalities are discordant, waiting becomes impatient, frustrated and angry. If this dissonance continues for too long, we lose our position in time, just like Didi and Gogo, and come to an existential crisis. This leads me to a further note on the context of waiting among the nomads of Dora Karmo. Without overplaying the suggestiveness of etymology, the interplay between the enchantment mentioned in the quote by Barthes at the start of this essay and the chanting of prayers that Tibetans nomads enact warrants comment. ‘Chant’ is derived from the French chanter and the Latin cantare, meaning ‘to sing’.12 The related word ‘enchantment’ means to encircle with singing, or to bewitch/charm. Thus, when they live the fullness of movement and waiting as a whole, nomads of Dora Karmo experience ‘waiting as an enchantment’, the source of which refers to the authority that frames their chanting of prayers and meditations. Enchantment allows the moving-waiting-moving refrain of nomadic life to be experienced as a musical phrase, where waiting is the syncopation to the musical passage in movement. Chanting Buddhist prayers and meditations creates, to a significant extent, the experience of enchantment for Tibetan nomads, thus enabling them to embrace waiting as the necessary complement to moving. Moreover, enchantment does not disavow the awareness of what occurs but rather heightens the physical senses to a greater awareness of time and place. Waiting is an inescapable symptom of living in a world with others. Waiting for Godot provides us with a glimpse of the parody that occurs when enchantment disappears, when the bareness of
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existence unfolds amidst confused and discordant temporalities. On this stage, waiting takes on the form that many of us recognise: an absence of a way to fill up ‘empty’ space and time. And perhaps this emerges only in the modern condition, which may be nothing more than our inner struggle to reconcile the mental constructs we ourselves have created and hold on to.
Notes 1 2 3
I refer to this in its theatrical context. Mann. The symbolism of the name in Tibetan and from the local point of view suggests that the circle is pure (from the colour, white) and nurturing (from the feminine gender of the rocks, indicated by the suffix ‘-mo’). 4 Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature. 5 This is a Tibetan word that is sometimes used to refer to monks. It also means ‘uncle’, which is how I use it in this essay. 6 Jhon-la is the household name. Kunchok is the village leader’s name. 7 In Tibetan, khrims. 8 At the exchange rate in 2006, where US$1 = RMB 8, this was approximately US$0.70. 9 These meditations and chants are taken from an important text known as the bardo-thodol chen mo (literally, The Great Liberation by Hearing), more commonly known in English as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sections of the bardo-thodol chen mo will already be known to the dying person; in fact, part of the preparations for death throughout a nomad’s life, not only in old age, will be the constant chanting of memorised portions of the bardo-thodol chen mo. 10 Goss and Klass. 11 Schweizer, pp. 782–3. 12 Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, accessed online via Oxford Reference Online.
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chapter 6
Waiting for Rain in the Goulburn Valley Rosemary Robins
Over the past ten years in the Goulburn Valley in central Victoria, Australia, farmers have been waiting for rain. They have been waiting out a drought that, because of its timing, severity and apparent endlessness, has compelled many farmers to rethink their relationship with nature and the Australian climate. This recent drought has brought into stark relief the plight of the modern farmer who confronts a nature that has been modified over centuries by agricultural and technological innovation, and is compelled to manage its adverse effects in the form of present-day risks and uncertainties about the future. Thought of in this way, waiting for rain is part of a ‘timescape of modernity’ that shifts as technologies designed to sustain and improve rural life bring benefits and risks. The concept of ‘timescapes of modernity’ comes from Barbara Adam1 and she uses it to emphasise the increasing compression and transformation of time that comes with industrialisation and the efficiencies of our modern way of life. Adam’s concern is that the quest for efficiency is achieved at the expense of the environment as industrialisation folds within its timescape hidden and latent risks. On this latter point she takes up Ulrich Beck’s understanding of a risk society2, which emerges from the success of industrial society and with an increasing awareness and anxiety about the risks and latent hazards
that modernisation produces. A risk society is one where the distribution of wealth as the driver of modernisation wanes and is replaced by the distribution of what Beck calls modernisation risks, which are the latent and adverse consequences of earlier human decisions and actions that were taken for the benefit of humankind.3 Anthropogenic climate change is an apt example of a modernisation risk. In this short essay, I examine waiting for rain as part of an agrarian timescape that shifts uneasily between tradition and a peculiarly late-modern anxiety about the future, as told through the stories, reflections, experiences and concerns of farmers and townsfolk of the Goulburn Valley as they endure one of the worst droughts in living memory.4 This account draws on focus-group interviews with farmers and townspeople of the Goulburn Valley conducted in 2007.5 That year marked the eleventh year of continuous belowaverage rainfall in Victoria and an official record drought. The Goulburn Valley provides the setting for my account. It is known as the ‘foodbowl’ of Australia because within a very small area there are dairy, fruit, grain, meat and wine producers, which are the focal point of a bustling agrarian economy that in turn supports several regional towns and industries. It is a place where people’s activities and fortunes are closely linked with the weather. Within this rural space, waiting for the weather to change, for it to start raining or to stop raining, for it to become warmer or colder, is integral to the rhythms and cycles of agriculture and essential to the fortunes of the businesses and livelihoods of this region. In what follows, I contrast two modes of waiting: that within cyclic time, in which regular rain is expected and technologies of waiting prepare the soil, the seed, the trees, the vines, the dams, the irrigation channels, the livestock and the people, and that of biding time, in which waiting becomes suspended and expectations of cyclic albeit irregular rain are replaced by anxieties about a future altered by climate change and the prospect of the ‘end of nature’.6
Cyclic Time Cyclic time sets the rhythm for an idyllic pastoral imaginary espoused by early settlers to the Goulburn Valley. In the late eighteenth century, this valley was seen as a pastoral landscape that could be mastered using human skill, labour and know-how applied in time
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with seasonal variation to graze cattle and sheep, grow crops and harvest timber in the name of progress and the growth of a ‘pastoral empire’.7 At the centre of this empire was the Goulburn River with its various tributaries and streams—rain fed and flowing with abundance: Already in our mind’s eye we picture the time—distant though it may be—when rising townships and cultivated fields shall adorn the bank of the Goulburn.8 Over time, farmers, livestock, crops and infrastructure had to adjust to the Australian climate, as cyclic time was disrupted by extreme weather events: floods, fires and droughts. To gain control, the river’s flow was modified using dams, desnagging, and irrigation channels, designed to ‘drought proof’ the valley, to ensure production would not be impeded by drought, and that floods would fill the dams and the water would be channelled to where it was needed most and kept in reserve for use during dry times. Harnessing the river, and thereby harnessing the rain, was a crucial element in the construction of this ‘pastoral empire’ and irrigation quickly became the ‘life blood’ of production in the valley for farming and other industries. You come to the Goulburn Valley, this is drought proof country. That’s the ideology we’ve lived with … (focus group five) Wet times and dry times became part of the agrarian mindset and were thought of as periods that must be mastered and endured. Technologies that made waiting for rain less precarious helped build resilience. For instance, in 1915 construction commenced on the Eildon Dam at the source of the Goulburn River. When it opened in 1956, Eildon’s 983-metre dam wall and 80-metre-high embankment could hold up to 3,390,000 megalitres of water.9 The dam represented a practical and symbolic display of human power and control over nature that was capable of ‘drought proofing’ the valley. As rivers and land were modified by human-made technologies, waiting for rain became a less precarious and more active and industrious enterprise
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that was a preparation for the anticipated, seasonal and cyclic regularity of rain, but not dependent upon it. Cyclic time in a drought-proof valley was structured around anticipated events such as the ‘autumn break’, which traditionally begins on Anzac Day. The autumn break is a marker in the agrarian calendar that continues to condition expectations. Rain is expected from Anzac Day in April through to September, and farmers will have their fields and seed ready to sow crops and pasture grasses and will be ready to buy and sell stock commensurate with what the pasture will support. Many of the extreme events of the past have not dislodged this expectation. Goulburn Valley farmers describe past floods as ‘normal’, ‘regular’ and ‘essential’. Fire is also described in this way: They were always decent floods, they were always regular, but there’s nothing like that happening now for the last 15 years. (focus group five) It is with drought that the expectation of cyclic time begins to waver. Periods of prolonged drought, particularly this last one, are periods in which waiting is suspended and its end uncertain. Being ‘drought proof’, which is contingent upon reserves and resilience, does not hold when droughts run into one another, as the last two have, to create a prolonged period of waiting for rain that never comes or comes only briefly. If the ‘break’ doesn’t come, or there are only false breaks, waiting goes on, year after long year, and with less and less water waiting becomes extended and attenuated. I think it’s the distinction between flood and fire and drought. Drought’s prolonged and we’ve had it from 2003. It’s years. It’s a stayed stress. Whereas fire and flood and all the rest are immediate—yes, it’s a crisis, but one that we’ll recover from much more quickly. Whereas from this drought we haven’t recovered. I mean financially, emotionally, physically whatever … (focus group four) In a prolonged drought the technologies of waiting used in the past no longer apply and being prepared takes on a whole new
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meaning. Buying water, buying fodder to feed stock, selling stock prematurely, shooting stock that have grown so thin and emaciated it is the only ‘kind’ thing to do, taking ‘off-farm’ work if you can get it, and most of all biding time.
Biding Time The activities of ‘biding time’ are very different to those of waiting during cyclic albeit irregular time. To bide time is to remain, to wait in stillness as time passes. This is the kind of waiting that comes with a long period of drought and year after year of false breaks. Unlike cyclic time, biding time signals a loss of control as technologies of waiting relied upon in the past to prepare for rain, or to withstand short periods of no rain, begin to fail and, with this, traditional conceptualisations of a connection between natural, seasonal variation and agricultural production are permanently transformed. The rivers and dams run dry, crops wither, stock lose condition and need to be fed with a diminishing supply of trucked-in hay, and if markets also fail selling up isn’t even an option. When the interviews were being conducted, in mid-2007, Eildon Dam was slowly recovering after having been reduced to its lowest storage level on record, 5.4 per cent of its capacity, in April of that year.10 Such ‘firsts’ were frequently referred to in the focus group discussions as a mark of this drought’s severity: the first time the local creek stopped running; that native trees had died; that air conditioning in the home had become essential; that dams had emptied; that billabongs and springs had dried up; and snakes and frogs had sought refuge in the house. ‘Lasts’ also featured prominently: the last time a platypus had been sighted in the river; birds had been observed breeding; that there was enough water in the lake to ski on; that the dam had overflowed. Comments such as ‘I don’t think any of us have ever seen that’ (focus group one) and ‘That’s just history now’ (focus group four) marked this drought as unique in its capacity to rupture expectations and transform rural life and landscape. With biding time the technologies of waiting relied upon in the past to plan for the break or to endure drought when it comes no longer suffice. With this drought, more so than with others, the cause is recognised as more than simply an absence of decent rainfall; it has a human element. Focus-group participants blamed the
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expansion of pine plantations, increase in viticulture, lifestyle farming, private dams and bores as contributing to the lack of water by creating less groundwater and reduced run-off. In addition, the Victorian state government has implemented policy measures to protect the rivers and surrounding land. The White Paper on water reform proposed changes to water use, water trading and irrigation infrastructure that would see a percentage of water, normally available to farmers as part of their water entitlement, given back to the environment.11 The environment has become a player and competitor for water and natural resources have become commodities that can be priced, bought and sold. Water reform has been a dominant feature of this period as governments respond to growing evidence of environmental degradation caused by a diminishing flow of water into rivers and lakes, and onto flood plains. Irrigators must now share water with the environment to ensure there is enough flow to rejuvenate ecosystems and restore rivers to health. Changes to farming, industry and natural-resource management make the traditional family farm an increasingly rare and nostalgic way of life. The traditional farmer must adapt or get left behind. Such changes affect farmers even in good years, but in bad years of extended drought they feed a desperation that deepens as control slips further from their grasp. As they bide time during an extended drought farmers begin to lose control. This generation will never have what we had, when I say me, myself—we had a great lifestyle. I could do everything I wanted to do. I’d milk cows and still have a lifestyle. But now today, because of the high price to buy in and the uncertainty of the weather, why would you do it? (focus group three) As waiting becomes ‘suspended’ and ‘unending’, agency diminishes and control shifts further into the hands of others: governments, bureaucrats, markets, industries, scientists, and new relationships of scale and time emerge—locally and globally. These changes signal a timescape that moves against the compression of time. Drought brought on by natural and social forces slows things down and reduces active waiting to the passivity of remaining in place and
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waiting for a future that is uncertain. This is a timescape of modernity that reveals the hidden stresses and weaknesses of industrial agriculture. It is a timescape on the way to another modernity: a risk society. There’s a sense of helplessness in terms of the pace of change, whether that be water reform, climate change, environmental flows, whatever. There’s a real feeling that there’s too much lobbed onto this generation, that we’re being expected as producers to pay for the sins of the past, current woes, and predictions for the future. (focus group six) It is predictions about the future that make this drought significantly different from those in the past. The threat of anthropogenic climate change brings a difficult and perplexing additional dimension to the experience of waiting for rain. Is the drought a consequence of climate change or is it natural variation? When is the rain that does fall enough to break the drought? Will things ever be ‘normal’ again? Climate change displaces waiting for rain within timescapes of natural cyclic variation and ushers in the possibility that waiting for rain is linked to non-nature (to the end of nature) and to a human timescape: a human-induced drought. The discussions with focus-group participants about what the future held for the people of the Goulburn Valley elicited a mixture of responses: hope, fear, confidence, despair and uncertainty. Whether people were optimistic, pessimistic or unsure about the future, a sense that change would be necessary was pervasive. Some remained optimistic about the future by clinging to the past. We’re optimistic about the future and think that yeah, we are not so much in climate change. I think we’re in a cycle … just going over the history of what my family has come through, being on the farm so long. (focus group eight) I think people will change to suit the circumstances. Well, we’ve got to change. We always have. (focus group three)
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Others, perhaps more realistically, were not so optimistic and instead spoke of the future with despair, disappointment and dread. They feared for their future and their children’s future. Should I be having a family?, one asked. Will our kids ever see snow, or wet seasons? And then resignation: ‘Its just going to become a way of life for them … it will probably be all they have ever known’ (focus group two). For these Goulburn Valley residents the future represented a clear break from the past, and it is a future they do not recognise or relate to, as this brief exchange illustrates: I think we can almost accept that we don’t live in an agricultural area any more, because honestly … The food bowl of Australia, we’re supposed to be. Exactly, but it’s not, is it? … It’s not a traditional farming area any more. (focus group three)
Conclusion The people of the Goulburn Valley acknowledge that drought is more than just a matter of rainfall. The lack of water that constitutes drought is related to empty reservoirs, population growth, and to new forms of farming and new industry competing for the catchment’s water resources. Drought is as much human made as it is natural, and this has implications for assigning responsibility and deciding how to respond. Any development that redistributes water or removes it from the catchment is tantamount to sucking the ‘life blood’ out of local communities and undermining traditional farming and foodproduction industries. The people of the Goulburn Valley recognise that drought is a consequence of natural and social systems. However, the most recent drought has heightened this awareness of the human element. It has compelled some people to see their relationship with the weather and the land differently and to realise that cyclic time is not reliable. As the people of the Goulburn Valley struggle to cope with a decade of drought, anxieties about the future emerge in different ways. For some it is too much. In order to survive emotionally and
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financially in the present, they prefer not to consider the future and do not want to think about climate change. ‘OK, but what I’m saying is we are not in climate change mode yet, we are in exactly survival mode’ (focus group six). Whereas others are prepared to embrace the challenge of a climate-changed future. They realise that waiting can no longer be undertaken with the expectation that seasons will turn and rain will come eventually. Australia is a dry continent. Water is a scarce and precious resource. Traditions need to be questioned, such as using Anzac Day as a marker for deciding whether or not to sow crops. Farmers support the development of ‘new technological improvements that would help them adapt’ and ‘trying new crop varieties’ (focus group five). With this new relationship between humans and nature, waiting for rain, like other activities in a risk society, is precarious and requires a change in attitude and the development of new technologies of waiting and resilience. Some farmers expressed an awareness of increasing reliance on external expertise and economies: I think we’re very much dependent on research, particularly with environmental issues … we’re now almost beholden to a world market … so we have to do our sums: animal production, fat productions, grain production overseas, world markets. We have to fiddle with our wool until we can sell it at a good price. The systems are very global and very complex and we have to have access to all of it. (focus group three) These farmers are aware of the need to do things differently and of the flexibility and adaptability required to adjust to a new future in which cyclic time no longer holds sway and one needs to imagine a different and more global timescape where efficiencies are driven as much by environmental as by market forces, and the compression of time and technologies that maximise output need to be set in relation to external constraints, government policy and above all a new time and a different attitude to waiting for rain. So we are going to try and farm for the first time—our family have been there for 120 years—for the first time ever we
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are not going to use the water, we are going to do it differently. (focus group six)
Notes 1 2
Adam, Timescapes of Modernity. Beck developed his thesis of a risk society over several publications, but first in his book Risk Society, originally published in German in 1986, followed by the English translation in 1992. See also Beck, World Risk Society, and Beck and Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck. 3 Beck, Risk Society, p. 21. 4 Bureau of Meteorology, Special Climate Statement 9. 5 The research for this paper was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant and the contribution of our Industry Partners: City of Greater Shepparton, Shires of Campaspe, Moira and Strathbogie, Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority, Waterwatch Victoria, and the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology. Eight focusgroup interviews were conducted in Shepparton, Euroa and Cobram in the Goulburn Valley in May and June of 2007. 6 McKibben, The End of Nature. 7 Westgarth, Victoria and the Australian Gold Mines in 1857. 8 Anon., ‘Navigation of the River Goulburn’. 9 Goulburn Murray Water, ‘About Lake Eildon’: www.g-mwater.com.au/ water-resources/storages/goulburn/lakeeildon 10 Victorian state government monitoring in April 2007 estimated the storage levels at Lake Eildon to be 5.4% of its total capacity, the lowest on record. www.ourwater.vic.gov.au/monitoring/monthly/archive/monthly_ water_report15/storage_levels2/table_of_storage_levels 11 Victorian State Government, Securing Our Water Future Together.
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Part II Waiting, Agency, Politics
chapter 7
The Time Is Right: Waiting, Reciprocity and Sociality1 Monica Minnegal
For Kubo people of the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea, the best time to hunt pigs is hamedibi a (tree-leaf time), when trees drop not only many of their leaves but also the acorns on which pigs gorge and grow fat. Pigs can be hunted at other times, of course, and often are; they are rarely difficult to find. But if you want fat with your meat it is best to wait for hamedibi a. Trees, however, are always dropping leaves. And the acorns may be few in some years. There is no way to know in advance when, or even if, hamedibi a will arrive, no sign that unambiguously declares it is here. So Kubo wait, and watch, attending to the signs in the forest and to the activities of their fellows. As the leaves begin to pile up on the forest floor, men get restless. Is it time yet? Eventually, one will stop waiting; he gathers his bow and arrows, calls his dogs, and heads out into the forest. Others watch, glance at each other to gauge reactions, perhaps raise eyebrows and shrug before returning to what they were doing. A few days later another heads out, and
this time the reaction is less sanguine. The next day another goes, then another. Hamedibi a has come … for some, at least. Waiting, if you believe much of what is written about it, is ‘wasted’ time—‘time out’ from productive activity, spent kicking your heels and staring at the wall while you ‘wait’ for someone else, or the world as a whole, to get its act together, do what is needed so that you can get back to doing your own thing.2 ‘Waiting’, it is implied, indicates an inability to act, a lack of agency; we wait only when made to do so by others. But sometimes we actively choose to wait, to ‘hold off’ on doing something because it suits us to do so. At these times, ‘waiting’ is an explicit expression of agency. This, then, is the starting point of my essay. I will explore ‘waiting’ as social action, focussing on how patterns of reciprocal waiting shape conversations and other collective performances. Conversations take form as people exchange both words and silences, waiting to hear—attending to—what others have to say before responding. It is in attending to those other words, speaking in turn, that the potential lies to build something larger, something new—a performance that can be enjoyed for more than just the ideas that are exchanged. By strategic waiting, as much as by strategically making others wait, I argue, we give rhythm to social life. But who and what we choose to wait on also entails recognising the agency of others, and so shapes the world of social actors with whom we engage. The distinction that frames my argument is not between active and passive waiting, between waiting patiently and impatiently, well and badly. Rather, I draw on a distinction that others have made between ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’.3 The classic example is that of interactions in a restaurant—of the consumer who ‘waits’ and the ‘waiter’ who attends. The former can do no more than anticipate the arrival of service. The latter must choose how long to wait before serving. Much of the waiting that we do is for something to happen, perhaps something specific that we anticipate or fear because of what it will enable or oblige us to do, or perhaps some vague change that we cannot put a name to but feel is coming and must then be dealt with. Such waiting—the customer waiting for his meal—is always oriented to an imagined future. But not all waiting takes this
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form. We may wait not just for something that requires or enables us to act, but for the appropriate moment to act. And in such cases—the attendant waiting on the customer—the waiting entails an intense engagement with, and attention to, the present. While we may wait for objects to appear (our meal to be delivered, our friend to arrive, or our turn to speak), we wait on other subjects. There is always an interlocutor in such waiting, whether this be a person with whom one is speaking, or the environs in which one dwells.4 And the performance that results from this engagement is crucially shaped by the way that waiting—as reciprocal attention—is exchanged.
The Act of Waiting Let me illustrate with reference, first, not to restaurants but to patterns of seasonality and seasonal activity in Papua New Guinean communities. For some, seasons are understood to arrive in a fixed sequence, a fixed schedule, and one ‘waits for’ the day that is known to mark the boundary between one season and the next. For others, like Kubo, there are known and named seasons—tree-leaf time, rainfalling time, okari-nut time—but while these recur they do not do so in any necessary sequence. Seasons, for Kubo, are both ‘time when’ and ‘time for’. But no one event signals the ‘right’ time to act. Rather, what one is waiting for is the optimal moment to act, in a continually shifting set of circumstances. Seasons are defined by the coming together of conditions and potentials, and Kubo know what season it is by attending to those conditions, and to what others are doing in relation to them. Rather than living in a world of predefined boundaries, what they are doing is, to use Wilden’s phrase, ‘digitalising the analogue’5; in waiting, and then acting, they create boundaries where none are given and thus give coherence and shape to their world. What matters, in such situations, are the relationships within which the actor is suspended, not particular events. Those relationships are not experienced as givens, necessary attributes of social and environmental structures, but are continually renegotiated as Kubo wait on others. Kubo conceptualise the world in relational terms, rather than in terms of pre-existing categories. In their relational epistemology6, the identity of people, and of things, as one kind or another emerges only in and through engagement
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with them, and it is the relationships that are classified rather than the entities themselves. It is by observing what things do, how they respond to the actions of others and how they act toward others that Kubo come to know the nature of things; the material attributes of those things are far less informative. Hamedibi a is not defined by the thickness of leaves on the ground or the presence of acorns, but by the falling of leaves, the rummaging of pigs and, crucially, the hunting and eating of those pigs by people. In waiting on those interactions Kubo emphasise that relational dimension. Just as things can be known only through how they respond to your actions so, too, in this relational perspective you can know yourself only by the outcomes of your interactions with the world. Where seasons follow a precise and predetermined schedule—summer, in Australia, begins on the first day of December, and the teaching semester in the first week of March—their arrival is not subject to our recognition, and reveals nothing of who we are. Similarly, back in that restaurant, someone who waits a precise ten minutes before demanding the customers’ order, tops up glasses every five minutes regardless of how full they are, and whisks away plates at the end of an hour whether or not the diner has finished eating is not really attending the table. He is not a ‘waiter’ but an automaton, and the customer is not really there for him. Crucially, in waiting on ‘others’ one confers on them agency and subjectivity equivalent to one’s own, recognising the need to wait for them to reveal themselves rather than presuming to know what they are. As Corcoran notes, ‘we wait with each other, for each other’7, and in doing so we both emerge from the common mass of like beings and through our relationship become, momentarily at least, ‘unique in all the world’.8
Emergent Patterns: The Rhythm of Performance The waiter in that restaurant, through his attention, confers on the patron recognition of his existence at the centre of attention; this, as much as the food, is what is being paid for. But the restaurant patron, waiting for his meal to be served, may well not notice the waiter hovering in the background. There is no reciprocity of attention in this encounter, it seems. Only when the service is not attentive enough
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does the waiter emerge into focus for the patron, as a subject in his own right. The waiter, however, does not act alone. The performance the patron observes is a collective one, and the shape of that performance emerges from the attention that staff in the restaurant pay to each other as well as to the patron. Where multiple actors make their own decisions as to when to wait and when to act, the potential arises for a cacophony of ‘voices’ to emerge. Though each may be attending to the same ‘other’—human or non-human, material or immaterial— relationships with that other are negotiated as individuals. There may be rhythm in the individual performances, but social life requires some collective coherence. That coherence may come from synchronising performances so that each reinforces the other, or by offsetting them so that the performances complement each other. Again, let me illustrate by reference to patterns of seasonal activity in Papua New Guinea. Among Etolo, all people engage in similar activities, in similar places, at similar times9; they wait together, and act together. Among Kubo, too, people engage in similar activities, but they do so in different places and at different times; one waits while others act, and acts while others wait. In neither place is the pattern imposed by the environment. Indeed, in both cases, there is an inherent potential for coherence to be lost as people separately attend to opportunities the environment reveals to each of them. Among Kubo, each man judges the arrival of hamedibi a for himself, but the exchanges of meat and associated sociality that it facilitates depend on both some concordance of judgment and ensuring that not too much meat appears in the village on any day. Among Etolo, in contrast, where different kinds of activities require movement to different altitudes, sociality depends on those movements occurring at the same time. The rhythm of social life in both Kubo and Etolo communities is maintained, then, only through close attention to the activities of others, as people wait to see what those others are doing. This does not mean that all ‘wait for’ someone to initiate activity. If that were the case, nothing would be done. Rather, there is a reciprocal recognition that all have something to ‘say’, something to
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contribute to the conversation. What matters is that one’s own contribution be made at the appropriate time relative to others. Just as people like Kubo give shape to the natural environment through their interactions with it, so, too, they may subtly coerce other people to initiate, synchronise or offset activities. The first man who calls to his dogs and sets off to hunt does so in the knowledge that others are paying attention, and in doing so also draws their attention to what he has seen in the forest. Those others may choose to continue waiting, thus calling into question his interpretation. In that case, he, too, will probably delay further excursions, even if that first hunt is successful. But by bringing in a pig, giving meat to the village, that man will have altered the dynamics of social life and heightened attention both to himself and to the environment. The waiter, hovering near the table with his notebook ready, draws the attention of patrons to the menu. And in overtly attending to another in a group, even silently, we elicit their attention in return and prompt them to speak. Such ‘active anticipation’, as Corcoran terms it, is itself active participation; it may imply ‘deference, unequal status, and differential power, but also some degree of mutually acknowledged obligation, attendance, care and interest’.10
Disembedding: From ‘Waiting On’ to ‘Waiting For’ While coherent performance depends on attending to—‘waiting on’—others, it is possible that some are better attuned to the relevant activities of those others. Or perhaps only some are considered to have access to those others. Here, then, there is the potential for a shift from ‘waiting on’ others to ‘waiting for’ others to declare that the time has come to act. A ‘division of labour’ may emerge in relation to waiting. For example, in Papua New Guinea, spirit mediums, with their ability to visit dimensions beyond those of daily life, have access to information about the ‘others’ who animate the environment, information that is not available to everyone, and thus they may be accorded authority to dictate the time and place of action.11 The spirit medium, here, is the epitome of an ‘expert’ with access to knowledge and understanding not available to novices. Arguably, of course, the spirit medium is more like the conductor of an orchestra, standing outside the world of performance and thus able to attend to, and
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direct, all the players; only in this way may a truly coherent performance be orchestrated. But the medium, more than the conductor, is complicit with the expressed desires of the players to whom he attends, waiting for their responses and refining his own statements in turn. And, of course, the audience attends to the medium, even as he attends to them. Questioning his pronouncements remains possible, as is deciding how to act in response to them. Contemporary life, several scholars have suggested, is characterised by a particular mode of ‘waiting’.12 It is a view that resonates strongly with the arguments of authors such as Beck and Giddens on the emergence of what has been variously termed late modernity, reflexive modernity, or even post-modernity.13 The events that matter, so the argument goes, are increasingly recognised as beyond sensory experience, occurring on a global rather than local stage. Modernity saw a growing reliance on ‘experts’ to access those events and diagnose the world—to tell us when and how it was time to act. But, as our trust in those experts has declined, in this post-modern world we are left impotent, just waiting. Waiting for … we know not what. A shift has occurred, the argument implies, from ‘waiting on’ to ‘waiting for’—a shift predicated on a more fundamental shift, from a world of past/present/future to a world of before/after in which the ‘present’ has disappeared from view. Previously, our experience of the present was embedded in intersubjective relations, relations that were grounded in past engagements and that, perhaps renegotiated in the present, would frame future interactions. Now, it seems to proponents of this view, the boundary between past and future is absolute; the future will comprise a new world order, and the past no longer provides any guidance as to what form that order will take. The present is merely a ‘waiting room’, disembedded from what may have brought us to this place and what will take us out of this place. There, we merely wait for the waiting to end. The objects that the waiter perceives in the present ‘have been plucked out of their quotidian context that would have given them purpose’14; they are indeed, like the waiter himself, objects rather than subjects. But this postulation of a temporal trajectory, from pre-modern to modern to post-modern, is not satisfactory. Rather, I suggest that ‘waiting for’ emerges in any context where a division of labour exists within production sequences. Consumers—those at the end of the
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production chain—have no choice but to wait for others to play their part. Those intermediate in the sequence both wait for (the food to be ready to serve) and wait on (the one who will consume it). But those in a position to initiate production need merely to wait on. It is the autonomy of action that characterises Kubo life, an autonomy they value and valorise15, that underlies their relational epistemology. The decision to go hunting, make a garden or build a house is for each individual to make. They need wait for no one else to initiate that action, merely wait on the world in which they dwell to reveal when the time is right to do so themselves. In as much as people are engaged in multiple productive activities, however, they may sometimes wait on others, sometimes wait for others, and commonly do both at the same time—being simultaneously subject and object, both subjectifying and objectifying their world.
Notes 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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My thanks to Kubo people for teaching me the value of waiting on others to reveal themselves, a skill crucial to all anthropology, to Peter Dwyer for sharing the living and learning during the nearly two years we spent with Kubo between 1986 and 1999 and for enabling me to know myself a little better through our own mutual engagement, and to Ghassan Hage for stimulating me to reflect on what it all might mean. See, for example, Schwartz; Schweizer. See, for example, Schwartz, p. 858. Heidegger; Ingold, ‘Building, Dwelling, Living’. Wilden. Minnegal and Dwyer, ‘Re-reading Relationships’; see also Bird-David; LiPuma. Corcoran, p. 518. Ibid., p. 528. Dwyer, The Pigs that Ate the Garden. Corcoran, p. 517. See, for example, Kelly, pp. 61–4 See, for example, Corcoran; Schweizer. Beck, World Risk Society; Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity. Schweizer, p. 783. Minnegal and Dwyer, ‘Re-reading Relationships’.
Waiting
chapter 8
Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality Ghassan Hage
That a viable life presupposes a form of imaginary mobility, a sense that one is ‘going somewhere’—what I have called existential mobility—is something that has strongly emerged in both my research on transnational Lebanese migration as well as my work on white racists in the West. In a sense both the migrants and the racists seek existential mobility and aim to avoid its opposite, a sense of existential immobility or what I will be referring to here as ‘stuckedness’. Although one can find evidence of people experiencing various forms of stuckedness at all times and in all places, I will argue below that the social and historical conditions of permanent crisis we live in have led to a proliferation and intensification of this sense of stuckedness. What’s more, there is an increasing sense that stuckedness has been normalised. Rather than being perceived as something one needs to get out of at any cost, it is now also experienced, ambivalently, as an inevitable pathological state which has to be endured. In this essay, I am looking at this process whereby ‘stuckedness in crisis’ is transformed into an endurance test. As I will argue, such a mode of confronting the crisis by a celebration of one’s capacity to stick it out rather than calling for change, contains a specific experience of waiting that is referred to in common language as
‘waiting it out’. As such, it is this waiting out of the crisis that I am examining. In my work on migration, I have taken seriously the equation of well-being with a sense of mobility that is present in common everyday statements such as ‘How are you going?’ This equation is present in many other languages. In Lebanese dialect one asks ‘Keef el haal?’ which literally means: ‘How is the state of your being?’. And the common reply is ‘Mehsheh’l haal’ which literally means: ‘The state of my being is walking’.1 I have tried to work with an understanding that such language of movement is not simply metaphoric but conveys a sense in which when a person feels well, they actually imagine and feel that they are moving well. Existential mobility is this type of imagined/felt movement. As far as migration is concerned, I have shown that people engage in the physical form of mobility that we call migration because they are after existential mobility. This differs from the physical movement of tourists, for instance, whose physical mobility (travel) is part of their accumulation of existential mobility. In a sense, we can say that people migrate because they are looking for a space that constitutes a suitable launching pad for their social and existential self. They are looking for a space and a life where they feel they are going somewhere as opposed to nowhere, or at least, a space where the quality of their ‘going-ness’ is better than what it is in the space they are leaving behind. More often than not, what is referred to as ‘voluntary’ migration then is either an inability or an unwillingness to endure and ‘wait out’ a crisis of existential mobility. As I have pointed out above, this kind of comparative existential mobility has also come out as an issue in my work on certain specific forms of white racism that are marked by resentment and envy towards immigrants as well as ethnic and racial minorities.2 While analysing this form of racism it became clear that it was shaped far more by a comparative sense of mobility than by simple class location. For instance, there is a common belief, especially among cosmopolitan small-l liberals, that the racism of the followers of Pauline Hanson in Australia, like that of the followers of Le Pen in France towards immigrants, is a ‘working-class’ form of racism. This is not the case. Hansonite and Le Pennist racism is primarily derived from a sense of ‘mobility envy’ by people from all classes who felt
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they weren’t moving ‘well enough’. This was sometimes voiced explicitly in terms of social-mobility envy: such as white Australians resenting the presence of so many Indian-background doctors in their hospitals. But ultimately, it was existential mobility that was at issue. Thus, in interviews I conducted, some white racists exhibited racial resentment towards minorities even when they themselves were located in a ‘higher’ socioeconomic group than those minorities they were racialising. Mobility envy followed a pattern similar to the following paradigmatic story: The story begins with the ‘established/white’ person owning a nice car and the immigrant ‘outsider’ who has just moved to the neighbourhood buying themselves a motorbike. Some time after settling, however, the immigrant neighbour buys a car while the established person still owns the same car. One begins to notice that racial resentment starts kicking into the discourse of the white/established person even if the car they own is much better than the car just bought by the immigrant. What the racists become envious of, then, is not the ownership of the car itself (since they already own a better one) but the mobility implied in the move from a motorbike to a car at a time when they feel that they have remained stuck where they are. It is in this sense that I am arguing that just as there is an imaginary existential mobility, there is an imagined existential stuckedness. This form of stuckedness is existential in that it does not necessarily coincide with lack of social mobility. One can be in a job and climbing the social ladder within that job yet still feel stuck in it. This highlights the fact that social and existential mobility are not the same thing, even though they tend to coincide in a number of social situations. It is on the basis of observing patterns of behaviour similar to the above that I have argued that, in Australia, there was a link between the racism towards Indigenous people and immigrants exhibited by the white racist Hansonites and the latter’s sense of stuckedness generated by neo-liberal globalisation and, particularly by the insecurity in job tenure that has increased the sense of ‘being stuck in one’s job’ everywhere around the world.3 The precariousness of their tenure made them feel constantly worried about losing their jobs and they felt as if someone were constantly watching them and
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waiting for them to make a mistake so they could have a reason to sack them. This made their working culture increasingly claustrophobic. Interestingly for me, my research on Hansonism at the time of its emergence also coincided with what became known in Australia as the Thredbo disaster, a landslide at Australia’s most famed ski resort in which a number of people were killed, buried under earth, rubble and snow. One person, Stuart Diver, survived under the rubble, in freezing temperatures, stuck under a slab of cement. All of Australia celebrated his endurance and survival. But what attracted my attention was the particular resonance this story of survival had in the white cultural milieus I was researching. To me, it seemed clear that this resonance was the product of a form of imagined affinity between the sense of being both socially and existentially stuck that was expressed by many Hansonites, and the stuckedness of Stuart Diver under the landslide. The celebration of his survival was a celebration of a ‘heroism of the stuck’. With this form of heroism, it is not what you actively or creatively achieve that makes you a hero but your capacity to stick it out and ‘get stuck well’, so to speak. To be a hero under such circumstances is to be resilient enough to endure stuckedness, or, to put it in a way relevant to us here, it is to be able to wait out your stuckedness. It is also to be able to wait for deliverance so as to come out as a survivor and start ‘moving’ again. This heroic endurance spoke to many Hansonites who, in the absence of social alternatives, celebrated the heroism of ordinary people who simply endured a life where a sense of stuckedness prevailed as their social world was crumbling around them under the effect of globalisation, the rising precariousness of their hold over their jobs and the intensified migration that changed the shape of the cultural world they inhabit. This sat ambivalently with a continued desire to see themselves move existentially. It is important to note carefully what it is about stuckedness that allows heroism. At first glance, being stuck presumes a lack of agency. Indeed it is lack of agency that defines stuckedness whether physically or existentially understood. As such, stuckedness is by definition a situation where a person suffers from both the absence of choices or alternatives to the situation they are in and an inability to grab such alternatives even if they present themselves. So, how can one be a hero when by definition one is in a situation where one does not do
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much? I think the heroism of stuckedness lies in this ability to snatch agency in the very midst of its lack. This is what the notion of endurance implies: asserting some agency over the very fact that one has no agency by not succumbing and becoming a mere victim and an object in circumstances that are conspiring to make a total agentless victim and object out of you. In this way, a certain nobility of spirit and an assertion of one’s ‘freedom as a human’ oozes out of the very notion of ‘endurance’, which comes to negate the dehumanisation implied by a situation of ‘stuckedness’. More than a decade has passed since the Thredbo disaster, but it is notable how this ‘heroism of the stuck’ has become a pervasive generalised cultural form not just in Australia but all over the world. With every earthquake, flood and other natural or war-induced disaster involving the crumbling of buildings and the burying of people alive comes a celebration of survival: an almost competitive account of finding people who have survived being buried alive, stuck, for two, three, four and five days under the rubble etc. One can note a shift of sensibility that accompanies this redefinition of heroism in people’s reactions towards a well-reported incident that occurred in the Himalayas. A climber who was successfully achieving his ascent of the mountain met with another climber who had encountered difficulties and was basically ‘stuck’ midway through his climb. It was an encounter between the hero as ‘a climber’ and an ‘achiever’ and the hero as ‘stuck’. That people’s sympathy went overwhelmingly toward the person who was stuck reflected more than a common sympathy with ‘victims’ and the ‘underdog’. It reflected a transformation in what Raymond Williams would call the structure of feeling built around collective notions of heroism.4 But this also means that there is a sense of community among those who ‘wait out’ the crisis. In the paradigmatic example of white racist resentment that I gave above I argued that the established/white person experiences a form of mobility envy in the face of the immigrant who has purchased a car. But there is another, more communal sense in which resentment is experienced: the migrant who is achieving mobility is like any ‘petty bourgeois’ achiever. S/he is standing out as different from the ‘community’. S/he is exhibiting an unwillingness to be part of the community of the stuck. The ethnic difference of the immigrant becomes coupled with a social/cultural
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difference based precisely on their perceived unwillingness to wait out the crisis ‘like the rest of us’. The fascination with stuckedness is increasingly permeating popular culture. It is striking, for instance, how, of all the possible angles from which one can approach the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s twin towers, Oliver Stone’s film based on the event was in large part about the heroism of the people stuck in the tower’s rubble waiting for deliverance. There is clearly something timeless and universal about this celebration of the human spirit to endure. This universality exists even when each celebration also takes a cultural form specific to where it is occurring. In this paper, however, I am neither interested in the universal nor the culturally specific aspect of this heroism of the stuck. Rather I want to examine the historical specificity of its significance today, particularly as it becomes articulated to a celebration of a form of waiting, or more specifically, a ‘waiting out’ or weathering of a crisis situation where the self is experiencing existential immobility. ‘Waiting out’ is a specific form of waiting where one is not waiting for something but rather waiting for something undesirable that has come, like a spell of cold weather or a disliked guest, to end or to go. Unlike waiting that can be passive or active, ‘waiting out’ is always passive, yet its passivity is, as I have pointed out, an ambivalent one. It involves both a subjection to the elements or to certain social conditions and at the same time a braving of these conditions. It is this ambivalence that allows it to take the heroic forms discussed above. It is also this ambivalence that, as I want to now argue, makes it a governmental tool that encourages a mode of restraint, self-control and self-government in times of crisis. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre famously aims for an ‘existential’ reconceptualisation of the Marxist notion of the revolutionary class or masses. He rethinks Marx’s well-known differentiation between class-in-itself and class-for-itself in terms of what he calls the difference between the ‘serie’ and the ‘fused group’. The serie is a collective that appears together only from the outside. In fact, it is what Sartre terms ‘a plurality of isolations’. Interestingly for us, the example that Sartre gives of a serie is that of people queuing for a bus at a bus stop.5 The serie unites and separates at the same time. The degree of isolation of the people waiting
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(together nonetheless) reflects what Sartre wonderfully calls their ‘degree of massification’. Sartre argues that this is the law that governs most social organisations at work. We can see in this a hint of the self-disciplining in what Foucault will later call governmentality in so far as it is a technique of individualisation and the internalisation of a mode of governing the self. The queue where one governs oneself into waiting in an orderly fashion is one form of such ‘serial governmentality’. What interested Sartre, however, is not so much this analysis of the alienation that is inherent to this serial governmentality—in this he was reconceptualising an old problematic that was already notably dealt with by Rousseau and Hegel among many others. Rather Sartre wanted above all to examine and detail the process that led people to move from this individualised passive state to become active agents of history: how the ‘serie’ is transformed into ‘fused group’. Interestingly for us, Alain Badiou, commenting on this piece, portrays this coming together of the fused group as a disruption of orderly waiting in the queue.6 Suppose the bus does not come? he invites us to think. People start to feel agitated. People start talking to each other not about the banal things they usually do to fill up time while waiting but about the unbearability and inhumanity of being subjected to such conditions external to themselves. And suddenly our communication with the other is made on the basis that they, like us, find waiting unbearable. From the formula ‘Everyone is the same as the other in so far as they are other to themselves’, we move to the formula ‘The other is the same as I since I am no longer my other’. As Badiou puts it, ‘in the serie the Other is everywhere. In the fused group the same is everywhere.’7 For Badiou (and for Sartre), as for many sociologists who have worked on queuing, the queue symbolises social order. But Sartre reminds us that the queue encourages self-government in so far as it is moving, in so far as it is working as a mode of regulating access to resources etc … Once it stops working Badiou sees both a social crisis and a crisis of governmentality. Let us examine the Sartrian/ Badiouian example from our perspective. Queuing for the bus involves at one level an orderly form of mobility. In so far as the buses keep coming the queue moves and people feel they are moving,
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physically and existentially. When the bus does not come this initiates a ‘crisis’. This is not only a social crisis that perturbs the flow of buses and the flow of people queuing but also a crisis felt by each individual queuing in the sense that, when the queue stalls, the people queuing experience a sense of immobility—they are no longer going somewhere, they are now ‘stuck’ in the queue. In this sense, to reinterpret Sartre and Badiou from our perspective, it is this state of stuckedness that triggers the questioning of the existing social arrangement and leads to the social upheaval that transforms the serie into a fused group. We see here the revolutionary optimism in formulation. It is an optimism characteristic of Sartre’s time and still shared by Badiou: crisis is an unusual state of affairs that brings about upheaval, a rethinking of the social order (that is, the modality of waiting) and the formation of a revolutionary force (no more waiting!). One can recall here the way Herbert Marcuse addressed the students in the early seventies: ‘We should not wait. We cannot wait and what’s more we do not have to wait’. I want to argue that the reflections on stuckedness I have developed in this essay emphasise that the perspective of our time on crisis and order is different from the way crisis and order are perceived in the Sartrian-Badiouian arguments above. Crisis today is no longer felt as an unusual state of affairs that invites the citizen to question the given order. Rather, it is perceived more as a normalcy, or to use what is becoming perhaps an over-used concept, crisis is a kind of permanent state of exception. In this sense, enduring the crisis becomes the normal mode of being a good citizen and the more one is capable of enduring a crisis the more of a good citizen one is. As usual this takes on a racial, civilisational and class dimension: the ones who do not know how to wait are the ‘lower classes’, the uncivilised and racialised others. The civilised, approximating the image of the hero, are those who get stuck in a classy way. They know how to endure. It is here that the heroism of the stuck seems to me to signal a deeper form of governmentality, a governmentality that is reproduced even in times of crisis. Even when the bus does not come, even when people are feeling stuck in a queue that is not moving, they heroically keep on queuing. And this is self-reproducing: the more one waits and invests in waiting, the more reluctant one is to stop waiting.
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What we have therefore is a new form of governmentality that invites and indeed valorises self-control in times of crisis. Today, I go on the plane and I am told that there is always a possibility of a ‘crisis’ and I need to be prepared, know about oxygen masks, exits etc … so that if a crisis comes I am prepared to self-govern myself even in such demanding times. Even when possibly facing death I should learn to act in an orderly fashion. Here, queuing, even in the midst of disaster, is understood as something one has to do. And far from being perceived as cowardly to remain ‘inactive’ and non-revolutionary in the face of crisis, to ‘wait out’ the crisis is perceived as something that one is proud to do. It is a mark of a deepening of the civilisation process. It is civilised to know how to endure a crisis and act in an orderly, self-governed, restrained fashion. It is the uncivilised ‘third world–looking masses’ that are imagined to be running amok in the face of crisis. One can see the two faces of this racialised civilisational gap during the Katrina disaster. One can also see it in Australia in the latter-day vilification of refugees as ‘queue jumpers’: people unable to wait for their turn. Likewise, the Parisian boys who revolt in the suburbs are not seen as ushering in a revolution. They are seen as ‘trash’, as they were famously referred to by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy when he was interior minister. They are so partly because, within this racialised civilisational discourse, they, and not their social situation, are perceived to be the problem. Indeed they are not seen by many of their detractors as living in especially difficult conditions. Everyone is living in especially difficult conditions in the eyes of such people. For the latter, what marks such boys is not the social condition of crisis but the fact that they do not know how to wait out and endure the crisis ‘like everyone else’. Perhaps this is one of the more important problematics that the radical imaginary of the past has to face, as the desire for existential mobility sits ambivalently with this celebration of heroic stasis. How can one reimagine ‘being revolutionary’ at a time when to be revolutionary in the old Marxist or Sartrian sense is to be ‘vulgar’, ‘impatient’, uncivilised and unable to ‘wait properly’.
Notes 1
See Hage, ‘A Not So Multi-sited Ethnography of a Not So Imagined Community’.
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2 3 4 5 6 7
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See Hage, White Nation. See the whole issue ‘L’insecurite comme condition de travail’. Williams, Marxism and Literature. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 256–7. Badiou, Petit Pantheon Portatif. Ibid.
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chapter 9
Out of ‘Turn’, Out of Sync: Waiting for Marriage in Macedonia Violeta Duklevska Schubert
Accustomed to political upheavals, and the need to constantly realign their civic or national identities, Macedonians are, in their own words, ‘resourceful’ (snaodlivi) and ‘resilient’ (istrplivi) people. Typical perhaps of historically powerless and much invaded peoples, their survival strategies have to a great extent been based on a kind of performative complementarity: the ready adoption of new civic identities, a lack of self-consciousness about these identities and an unshakeable belief that at the heart of things, who they ‘really’ are remains impenetrable. The ultimate modernity crisis of Macedonia is thus not about whether society can meet the shifting and conflicting criteria set by external or supranational entities such as the EU (or NATO); adoption of a new supranational identity would be but a civic label. Rather, the modernity crisis faced by many of the ‘youths’ (mladi1) of Macedonia is whether they can adjust to, and renegotiate a place in, a changing ‘order’ that threatens the very foundations of what is taken for granted—that the individual ultimately ‘belongs’ to the family and, further, that personhood and individuality are byproducts of meeting one’s social (familial) responsibilities, the primary of which is getting married.
Indeed, for Macedonians, and as an important step in the socalled natural rhythm of life, marriage is presumed to occur ‘in order’: you are born, are christened, grow up, get married and, once married, have children who one day will make you a grandmother or grandfather.2 In other words, the foundations for marriage are presumed to ‘naturally’ exist—one grows up and is thus ready for marriage—and are based on a fusion of the natural with the conservative conception of the social cycle. Women as female heads of a household (domakinka) are part of the social apparatus that ensures there is a fusion. For this reason, mothers of ageing bachelors are particularly concerned when their sons are not married by the socially appropriate age because it is a failure of their job, so to speak, to keep the natural and social together. Marriage, it is presumed, should occur while one is a ‘youth’ because ‘All that is young is beautiful’. The burden of life (and thus time), however, is like a river, it ‘runs’ out (‘Životta si teˇci’ ). There is thus a sense of a race against time to marry while a ‘youth’, before one is old (stari) and, automatically, lacks physical appeal. Moreover, to avoid being cheated by time or of full participation in each major sequence in life, youths should start proceeding through the journey of life together, with their esnaf (those who are in their age set); like should search for like, bachelors should seek never-married women (not widows or divorcees), and an ‘old dog’ (‘star pes’) should not act like a youth, stealing the latter’s spotlight when his turn has clearly passed! There is even a perceived cut-off time by which marriage should occur in order to avoid the potential problem of becoming ‘too old’. As Macedonians often say: ‘After the age of twenty-five not even God could find them a wife’. So embedded is the importance of marriage in the order of life that it is presumed that only the insane will never marry: ‘Adults who have never been married are rare’.3 For all intents and purposes Macedonians, until recently, not only married but did so at an earlier age than is typical across Europe.4 But changing social and economic circumstances promoted migration of women, especially to cities, without changing the need for men to stay in rural communities to ensure their lifetime security and commitment to reproduction of the household. As a result, there is a high imbalance in sex ratios in rural areas, often as great as one unmarried woman to nine unmarried men. At the time of my research in Macedonia in the mid-1990s, the
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‘problem’ of ageing bachelors waiting for marriage was experienced as acute, particularly by mothers.5 It is this experience of cataclysmic disorder that has seriously disturbed the presumed (unchanging) natural order of life for individuals, both mothers and sons, which is the focus of this paper. Hence, if meaning and purpose in the ideal comes from taking one’s ‘turn’ in the order of life, being ‘out of turn’ compels renegotiation of the place of self in relation to others and reconfigures relationships both within families (especially between mothers and sons), and between individuals and society. Though waiting of some kind or another is a universal human condition, modalities and experiences of waiting undoubtedly find unique expressions within the contexts of different cultures. In the Macedonian case, waiting is unbearable when you have to do it alone, when all others appear to have moved to waiting for something else that corresponds to the proper waiting and have achieved their ‘turn’ in the supposedly natural order of life. Hence getting married is of central importance and is connected to notions of ‘time’ and ‘order’ in which social synchronisation is critical. The proper order of things is captured in the phrase ‘po red’ (literally, ‘in order’ or ‘as is proper’). Red presupposes ‘being’ in time and place in that the time in which certain life events occur is viewed as part of the order or ‘turn’ available to every human being. Older informants would often refer to this as ‘as it is written’. Importantly, the manner in which people execute red, or satisfy custom, is by following others and not deviating from the patterns and standards set by the collectivity. In every sense, therefore, people’s behaviour pivots around that of others in their community. This is especially the case in villages. There is no reward for individualism, and even if an individual’s ideas are taken on board there is no value attached to originality or authorship. Once out there, ideas are for copying and copying has no negative social connotation. Indeed, standing apart from others can be a matter of stram (shame) unless it is your red to do so (such as on the day of your wedding). The reward for being good, hardworking and attentive to the order of things, as perceived by Macedonians, is in the turn itself rather than in praise for innovation, which is dangerously close to showing off (falenje). ‘Order’ and ‘time’ are simultaneously lineal and relational. Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer time, which ‘is entirely relative to
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the social structure’6, is akin to Macedonian time. It is an idealisation of the right time to do things because, it is assumed, everybody else also executes or plans events in the same way. Timing is everything and synchronising one’s movements and actions relative to others means there is an anticipation that if others ‘wait’ then it is acceptable to do so oneself. Socially synchronised waiting is to be expected and is unproblematic. Thus, though there is an abstract notion of ‘time’ (vreme), it is essentially social timing—being in accord with others—that makes waiting in ‘turn’, in time, of central importance to Macedonians. A relation to the collective is all-encompassing. It is even a topic of self-mockery: ‘We Makedonci are like sheep. We follow’. The safest social and moral course of action is to copy how others do things: ‘Everyone does it like that’ or ‘As others, we too’. If babies are conventionally christened when they are six weeks old then parents would be deeply ashamed if they waited much longer. Further, it is not only following others that one must consider; it is even more important not to lag behind. Social status and the reputation of a household can be made or unmade through timing. In this sense, ‘rushing’ with premature and, thus, ill-timed action that is out of order or sync with others is just as problematic as prolonged waiting. Waiting for others to act, taking your cue from others, is a quintessential Macedonian way of conducting oneself in the public sphere of life. But, the unbearableness of waiting is that others may not be waiting—may have moved to waiting for something else—either because their ‘turn’ has come or they ‘did’ something different. To ‘do’ something is of paramount concern to mothers of ageing bachelors. If waiting too long is to be regarded as something other than evidence of laziness, tardiness, inertia or indecisiveness then being seen to be doing something is critical. Thus, feeling that they stand out socially, especially in relation to other women who have married sons of the same esnaf as their own son, mothers of ageing bachelors find it is unbearable to be ‘in wait’ at a time at which others appear to have moved to the next stage along the natural (and social) order of life. During my research in Macedonia such mothers would take me into their confidence, confess frustrations that would be socially dangerous to voice for fear of
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arousing gossip. Often they would burst into tears, as did one who asked, ‘What is lacking in him? Nothing. It is such a pity. Here he is, a beautiful boy, tall, from a good family, yet he is not married’. What seemed to infuriate this woman even more was that ‘These neighbours’ son, he is nothing in comparison to my boy. Yet here, he is married’. Though for an outsider such as myself such an outburst appeared somewhat comical, by the end of my first month in the village the sense of despondency and ‘sickness’ that the problem of ageing bachelors was inflicting on the women was clear. Virtually all mothers with unmarried (ageing) sons sought to alleviate their stress with Valium. All claimed to be ‘sick’7 and in their own minds, it was they who were the real victims of ‘unmarried sons’. One woman went so far as to describe her life as her own worst enemy (‘Dušman mi je životta’) and even, as a death (‘Smrt mi je’)! For mothers of ageing bachelors ‘life is an enemy’ as they wait for their sons to find a bride and rejuvenate their house, to adorn a bride with all the jewellery and finery that they have collected over so many years of careful budgeting and investment, and to accept social engagements without fear of being censured or ridiculed by the more successful women who parade their brides, or worse, their grandchildren! Getting married is a means of status upgrading that supersedes all standard criteria such as economic self-sufficiency. Marrying, and having children, enables a low-status man from the most economically insignificant household to rise above men who would otherwise be considered his social superiors. Therefore, when one’s own son is unmarried, it is unbearable to encounter another woman with a son of similar age who is already married, perhaps even with children. Maintaining the social status of her household is important for a domakinka and enables her social interaction and engagement with other women of the village. Being out of sync with other woman is a matter of shame that can lead to a reticence to socialise. As it is, engagement in the social or public sphere is fraught with dangers for mothers: it leaves them open to public teasing, to feelings of being unjustly dealt with by the hand of fate and for them in turn to feel resentful that they have been lacking in luck. That is, sociality becomes ‘torturous’ when a neighbour whom one considers to be less of a domakinka to ‘show off’ the marriage of her ‘nothing’ son.
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How can a woman maintain the status of her household and family— be an enviable and respected domakinka—if others with sons of the same age are already grandmothers? Deciding to take matters into their own hands, the mothers of ageing bachelors are a hive of activity: scurrying through the village and beyond, following up rumours of potential ‘older girls’ who are themselves waiting to be found, clandestinely meeting with soothsayers, gypsy potion makers or even, in one case, a psychologist in the city who was said to be ‘helpful’ in soothing frail nerves that have been brought on by having a lazy ‘donkey’ of a son. In short, the tension between the waiting for that which should come and the potential fruitlessness of continuing to leave matters in the hands of others (their sons) compels a monumental shift in strategising the realisation of their desired social authoritative self. They take time into their hands. For such mothers, being ‘in wait’ for their sons to act dramatically alters their own actions. Overseeing the physical upgrades of the kukja (house), economic self-sufficiency and maintaining their social reputation for being a hardworking ‘familija’ of good character, amongst many other markers of social status, preoccupy the time of waiting while a son is growing up and is to be expected as part of the proper order. Such efforts are expected to be rewarded when their red comes, as at the wedding of a son. This is the only occasion about which everyone is in agreement that it is ‘their’ red, and they will mobilise the full extent of their household’s social network to receive guests and stand in the social spotlight. In short, the success of a mother’s life culminates in the wedding celebration. The absence of the wedding denotes a life half lived. If for the mothers modernity is disorder, and marriage a means to restore order, for the men, their sons, it is not that simple. Ageing bachelors are also concerned about prolonged waiting but, unlike their mothers, it is not so much that they fear that their red may not come as that they wonder what it would take to fashion a place for themselves as meaningful social subjects in a different order, one in which individualism, pursuit of self-fulfilment and exploration might become the order of things. The frustration and disruptions brought on by prolonged waiting challenges the notion that there is a power and order that comes with getting married that will dissipate or negate the haus (chaos) that they see as permeating Macedonian
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society today. For the men, disorder abounds and thus the normal standards and expectations must likewise be suspended. Of course, the mothers also have a sense that haus abounds but, for them, it is a chaos that must be overcome. Thus, the quality to the mothers’ waiting is quite different to that of their sons—they attempt to reposition themselves into both time and red and the further actions that enduring prolonged waiting compels them to do are more intense once their sons have remained unmarried well past the appropriate social age. But the fundamental purpose of even their intense actions remains—to implore, cajole or even morally blackmail their sons into marriage. In short, how the sons are positioned in the family is voiced almost entirely through interactions with their mothers and these interactions are fraught with tensions. To give an example, while visiting ‘for coffee’ at one woman’s house I witnessed a confrontation between her and one of her two ageing bachelor sons: When are you going to get married? When it comes. When is it going to come? When I want it. I can’t talk to you. You don’t listen at all. I’m going to burst [ke puknam]. You’re eating me alive [me jadiš]. Burst then. Don’t you care? You have made me sick. I am going to die. Die then. At least I will be relieved of the nagging. I can’t stand it. I am going to kill myself. Kill yourself then! With this final response to his mother the son stormed out of the house and did not return for three days. His mother quietly enquired after him amongst his friends so as not to arouse gossip. One week after his sullen return (because there is virtually no alternative for an unmarried man except to live with his family in Macedonia) I visited the mother again. She candidly explained that during his absence the son had gone on a drinking binge, got into a brawl and then smashed the car. Two police officers had come from the city to their house just that morning. With some negotiation
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between the family (father) and the police the charges against the son were dismissed. I did not ask why she and her husband intervened because it was apparent to all, including me, that though they often criticised their son for being an old, self-indulgent bachelor, he was ‘family’—and family comes before all else. The son’s reckless action in this particular case, as with his inaction in relation to searching for a bride, was experienced collectively; it affected them all as a family and imposed upon them a reaction. While waiting for their sons’ turn for marriage to come, parents, especially mothers, move from activities that ensure they have set the necessary foundations for receiving a bride into their household toward assuming greater responsibility for searching out candidate brides and keeping the topic of marriage before their sons at all times. Waiting time for mothers of ageing bachelors is never quiet and though they dread confrontations such as the one above it does not stop them from pursuing their singular goal to get them married. And yet, the mothers, in the end, cannot make their sons go along with the plans. That is, as frustrating and disruptive as prolonged waiting is for the mothers, it is the realisation that even with the intensification of their efforts they cannot directly effect change that will reinstate order—they continue to merely wait for their sons to act, to assume agency. Where, for youths, living in the moment and becoming heightened sensual beings of the present is a form of rejection of the idea that re-establishing order is possible, for their mothers frustrating and prolonged waiting produces an intensive awareness of an acting or assertive self that is limited and powerless to affect others. In this sense, enduring and prolonged waiting for marriage is challenging the premise of ‘being’ and compels individuals (both mothers and sons in this case) to reconsider what it is that makes them a person beyond marriage, family and kinship. But the Macedonian linguistic repertoire does not easily accommodate such shifts in thinking. The word for ‘man’ (maš), for example, is synonymous with ‘married man’ and thus one continues to be a ‘youth’ well past the age of adulthood. But, even the word ‘youth’ is preferable to the pejorative ‘star bekjar’ (old bachelor) or being described as ‘Still not married’ (‘Ušte ne je ženet’). Being ‘still not married’ defines the men as neither ‘man’ nor ‘youth’. Further, along with the label of ‘star
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bekjar’, being ‘still’ not married automatically situates them as being out of place and time. As alluded to above, however, being out of time and place is something that is viewed by families, as well as the broader society, as being entirely a matter for the men themselves to resolve. For their mothers, realignment to time and place is simply a matter of getting their sons married. If the sons cannot find a bride, if he needs help in his search, then mothers can mobilise the full extent of their social network into the quest. Without getting their son to agree, however, any attempts to search for a bride behind their son’s back only leads to further conflict and confrontation between them. But, getting ageing bachelors to do something different when they have become accustomed to the condition of waiting is easier said than done because, contrary to the beliefs of their families, they often do not feel that they have agency. It is perhaps not the condition of prolonged waiting that produces a state of mind or consciousness for ‘youths’ (that is, the unmarried) whereby the focus is almost entirely on sensuality and sensuousness, but it certainly heightens it. That is, there is an objectification of that which is ‘external’ (beyond one’s control) and a heightening of one’s own sensory perceptions—being attuned to one’s own needs, wants and desires and indulgence of the body as the only fields within the bounds of individual agency. Though a few have reoriented themselves towards gratification of different kinds—buying more stock and immersing themselves in village work—most ageing bachelors attempt to prolong the sense of freedom of youth through reckless self-indulgence. The indulgence or self-focus of children and youths is generally left unchecked by families because it is taken for granted that such behaviour will cease with marriage. In contrast, the indulgence of an ageing bachelor is to be pitied and ridiculed as the excuse of the weak and powerless. Though the ongoing indulgence of ageing bachelors is irksome to their families, they are for the men themselves a form of reward for endurance rather than a reward for being good, hardworking or attentive to the order of things. For the ageing bachelors, the experience of prolonged waiting or endurance becomes a vehicle for creativity to emerge in how one indulges self and body. In short, in coming to the realisation that there might well be no ‘end’ in sight to waiting, individuals feel that they have no choice but to consider life
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without end—without rhyme or reason—without ‘order’ or purpose. Life, for all intents and purposes, is simply sensual and insular; they would often say to me, ‘No-one understands what I am going through’. Indulgence in this sense is both a tool for killing time, transforming boredom and yearning to pleasure, and enables boredom, shame and depression to be experienced or ‘covered over’ with pleasure. Being out of sync with others, as well as oneself, is particularly intolerable in a society that continues to be primarily focused on kinship and family roles and identities as the essence of being a ‘person’. Given that the ‘job’ of ‘youths’ (the non-married) is presumed to be finding a bride to rejuvenate their kukja (house) and familija (family), and further, the importance of marriage in constructing the social adult8, the inherent danger for ageing bachelors is, therefore, in becoming a non-person. With no inherent end in sight, waiting becomes the norm and moves beyond an experience of interruption or punctuation between (anticipated) actions. But, waiting for self-realisation, a new order in which they are acknowledged as productive, afamilial, social subjects is a constant state of endurance for men. It is a condition akin to nothingness: ‘Nothing to be done.’ Dialogue has no function. Macedonia as non-subject of action, from neither the inside nor the outside: the story of Macedonia neither creates nor resolves conflict, does not develop either ethical or political programs of reform, and it does not offer meaning for its human existence. Every interpretation is null. There is no direction and no aim.9 Though it may be that people feel there is ‘nothing to be done’ given that each endeavour to refashion themselves is denied or rejected, the process of waiting for the desired objects (be it marriage or, as in the case above, full realisation and development of the state of Macedonia) is not passive. The tension between the denial of access to the object of desire and the continual projection or hope that it will eventuate compels a refashioning of the present as well as of oneself and others. That is, reconciled to the fact that their ‘perfect’ marriage partner has not been found, political activism and
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engagement in Macedonia’s EU-membership project, amongst many others, have been alternative spaces within which many individuals have concentrated their efforts and imaginary. As the process of becoming ‘modern’ is to a large extent a matter of disengagement with, and reorientation away from, family and kinship, however, lack of progress in the spheres of civic or political activism has only reinforced the problems encountered on the family or kinship front. Fuelling the overall sense of despondency of ageing bachelors who continue to be referred to as ‘youths’ is the fact that, concomitant with daily confrontations with family and community, there is the sense that there is a lack of realisation and recognition of the Macedonia state-building project with which many have been extensively involved. For many ageing bachelors involvement in the broader state-building project preceded waiting for marriage. The majority are of the generation that consider themselves ‘veterans’ of the struggle for independence, being in their late teens to early twenties during the critical time of the formation of the new state between 1989 and 1991. This generation did not prioritise political or civic activism over family so much as have that priority thrust upon them. That is, cessation from Yugoslavia, and all the subsequent struggles and conflicts, have defined the generation that is now labelled stari bekjari (literally, ‘old bachelors’). As they were ‘youths’, šetanje (roaming, freedom to move) was expected and little if any pressure was placed on them by their families to cease or reduce any form of indulgence, including political activism. It was taken for granted that marriage would ‘fix’ all manner of ‘worthlessness’: indiscriminate drinking, sporadic and unexplained absences from home, excessive wasting of family resources (money), political activism, social uncouthness, stuttering etc. As with other forms of indulgence, however, the socio-political context too is proving to be thankless. For family, and indeed for the society as a whole, what they do as ‘youths’ while they are supposed to be searching for a bride is superfluous, including political activism, and thus seeking to prepare the grounds for good social, economic or political conditions before marrying are nonsensical. Moreover, the intensification of awareness of self—of making waiting time more meaningful—is for many ageing bachelors not only a matter of reorienting themselves away from family but also now from any further engagement in civic or political
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activities. This leaves only self-indulgence and ‘living in the moment’—indiscriminate sex, drinking and following the ‘mood’ (‘kef’) of the body. To give but one example, on my last visit to Macedonia in 2008 I caught up with one of the ageing bachelors, ‘Krste’, who has since married and now has two children: I didn’t get home till late last night. I was waiting at the (taxi) ramp and some ‘boys’ saw me. They kept pushing me to join them at a bar. I don’t know. I can’t say no to friends. When I find myself in a društvo, the music is good, the drinks are coming. I get in the mood. We started shouting [drinks] one by one, I didn’t have the heart to say no. Fuck life, it’s so depressing, but last night was good. There was this waitress, big boobs, short skirt, she kept giving me the look. It set my mood even more. The things that he did to pass the time while waiting to marry were hard to stop after marriage. In this sense, the previous night’s reckless carousing was for him far more than self-indulgence because in letting the mood take over he was able to escape, at least for a brief time, both the order instilled in him by his parents and the chaos that continues to surround him: In the morning my little girl woke me up. The old man [Krste’s father] started abusing me, telling me to stop drinking, stop looking for društvo [comradeship], you have a family now … But fuck him, all my life he is cursing me. Well, I got married, didn’t I? I’ve got kids. I work. What else do they want? What, I’m supposed to stop living? In short, the intensification of an awareness of the need to make waiting time more meaningful makes it a critical period betwixt meaningful and meaningless action. Waiting time ‘out of turn’ and out of sync, so to speak, inspires strategic and creative use of what is often taken for granted as non-time. As such, obsessively focused on seeking pleasure in the ‘now’—suspended from both past and future—the men create a new space of time in which both ‘nothing’
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and ‘something’ is done. But, at least in the eyes of their mothers, nothingness prevails. As both a fledgling and a vulnerable state, Macedonia is as yet uncomfortable about the nature of its ties with each of its subjects/ citizens and generally omits any direct interference with family or kinship matters. The perceived scale of the problem of ageing bachelors, however, is compelling a response by both the state and the church. For example, in a recent attempt to ‘solve’ the problem of ageing bachelors a bill was proposed to tax working unmarried individuals past a certain age10, which, interestingly, coincides roughly with the socially accepted cut-off age of 25 years for marriage. Though somewhat different, the response by the Macedonian Orthodox Church is no less dramatic. I was recently invited to meet with the archbishop of the Australian and New Zealand diocese of the Church, for instance, and soon realised that my having focused research on kinship and ageing bachelors in Macedonia was of interest. The archbishop first bombarded me with questions: What is the problem? Why don’t they marry? What would it take to make these men marry? And then he proposed a solution: the Church would volunteer to act as a go-between, a strojnik. Proposing an institutional spin on a traditional role, His Eminence noted that recent ageing bachelors had found brides in Albania, Ukraine and Romania, amongst other ‘poorer’ places, and that this should be fostered because the women from there were obviously happy to marry an ageing bachelor in Macedonia. Given the resistance by ageing bachelors to having their mothers seek out potential brides, however, it was difficult to see the archbishop’s ambitions realised. Though Macedonian society has undergone fundamental changes and challenges that have reshaped many people’s perspectives, by and large it is still taken for granted that you have but one chance or turn at each major life event and that if you have passed the moment you should allow the next in line to proceed. In short, having an exorbitant number of stari bekjari who are well past the social age of marriage threatens the premise that there is, indeed, a ‘natural’ order of things in which each will get their ‘turn’. Time for marriage, in terms of both actual age and social timing, is finite— as waiting for it should be. However, the serious disruptions to this
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perceived order, amidst ongoing conflicts and struggles to negotiate new identities, forms of expression and types of relationships with oneself and others, means that for many individuals, especially mothers and sons, prolonged waiting for marriage is not, as Corcoran11 might suggest, akin to hope. Rather, as Schweizer notes, the experience of waiting for marriage in Macedonia unleashes ‘the repressed rhythms of duration’ and cuts to the core of ‘deeper dimensions of our being’ and estrangement from the world.12 Ironically, the men are viewed as possessing agency but as lacking the will or determination to act upon it. But, if men lack the will, whether it be because they have become accustomed to the condition of being ‘in wait’ or because they are testing, challenging or rejecting ‘order’, their families, and now the state and church, continue to define them in terms of whether or not they are married.
Notes 1. The word ‘mladi’ has a slightly different connotation to ‘youth’ or ‘adolescent’ and is best described as referring to those of a marriageable category. 2. See Campbell on the ‘three stages of life’ among the Sarakatsani, pp. 278–91. 3. New World Encyclopedia, www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/ Macedonia, accessed 29/1/2009. 4. The distinctive late marriage age of Europe has been well noted by social historians and anthropologists, including Hajnal; Ott; Goody; and Bourdieu, ‘Marriage strategies as strategies of social reproduction’, amongst many others. 5. It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into a comparison between the Macedonian case of ageing bachelorhood and that of other societies, or indeed to do full justice to the broader societal or historical context in which the problem emerged even within Macedonia. 6. Evans-Pritchard, pp. 105–6. 7. Scheper-Hughes in Death Without Weeping and Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics discusses notions of social sickness, particularly in the latter work, which focuses on the problem of ageing bachelors in rural Ireland. 8. The word for adult male, ‘maš’, is equivalent to ‘married man’; without marriage they continue to be referred to as ‘youths’, even at 40 years of age! 9. Thiessen, p. 14. 10. Jovanovska. 11. Corcoran, p. 508. 12. Schweitzer, p. 778.
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chapter 10
Waiting to Return Home: Modes of Immigrant Waiting Salim Lakha
This paper focuses upon the predicament of migrants who are waiting to return home, a phenomenon that is widely experienced amongst migrants of many different national backgrounds. Waiting to return home is a phenomenon that has been addressed by scholars from a wide variety of perspectives.1 What I am interested in are two questions: 1. In our globalising world, marked by an intensification of time and space, how stable and meaningful is the category ‘home’? 2. Does ‘waiting to return home’ represent a form of resistance? What are the markers and discourses of this resistance? I will explore these two questions with reference to the ethnographies of South Asian migrants and biographical and autobiographical materials. For those who entertain a return home, waiting is not a passive condition, that is, resignation or ‘submissive inaction’.2 Corcoran’s understanding of waiting, for example, implies ‘strong and purposive
action’ that can be equated with characteristics of hunting such as being observant, following a ‘prey’ and taking ‘by surprise’.3 The association of these active traits with waiting, according to Corcoran, has lost its prominence as societies have become more distanced from pursuits like ‘hunting and combat’.4 I find Corcoran’s approach more useful for this paper, in contrast to that of Crapanzano, who views waiting as ‘a passive activity’.5 For Crapanzano waiting is akin to a ‘holding action’ or ‘a lingering’ and can even precipitate a state of ‘paralysis’ when it assumes an ‘extreme’ state.6 Further, he claims waiting gives rise to ‘feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and vulnerability’.7 Though such sentiments may arise in specific groups or individuals under exceptional circumstances, it is not the case with migrants in my study who are waiting to return home. Their waiting is not marked by ‘paralysis’ or resigned acceptance of their existing condition, but on the contrary involves engaging actively with their present circumstances while they are waiting to return home, as will be explained below. It is the objective of this paper to examine how those waiting to return home are in different ways engaging with the present in modes that could be said to represent resistance. These include, for example, the desire to retain citizenship of their homeland, opposition to going down to the pub as well as consuming specific foods, and rejection of the idea of settling permanently in the adopted homeland. These issues are explored later. The discussion will begin with the different ways in which home is conceived, especially in the context of globalisation, which is characterised by a highly interconnected world in which there are accelerating and deepening flows of finance, people, technology, images and ideas.8 A key feature of this process is time-space compression as a result of the transformation of communication and transport technologies9 that has intensified human contact (amongst other links) and created immediacy and intimacy across space that was previously impossible. The second section will discuss the markers and discourses of waiting, which in some instances represent resistance to expectations of the adopted homeland. There are two primary discourses. First, there is one that concentrates on national character. This discourse criticises the British for being cold and distant. These attributes are explained as reasons for wanting to
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return home. Second, there is the discourse that rejects the values and social practices of mainstream society, such as the importance of alcohol when socialising. I will discuss these in greater detail further on.
Conceptions of Home In the social sciences it is commonly acknowledged that home is more than just a physical construct as represented by a dwelling.10 It constitutes a social space and conveys a sense of belonging. 11 Different writers emphasise somewhat different aspects of home, though it is evident that they share certain common understandings of what represents home. For Hage there is a strong affective element to home since home building is predicated upon feelings connected with ‘security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility’.12 While all these elements are important in promoting a sense of belonging, at certain stages in the life cycle one of these elements may predominate. Thus ‘a sense of possibility’, which is associated with opportunity and social mobility, could be the driving force during the early years of settlement and career when securing a stable livelihood is an imperative. In the context of globalisation, ‘a sense of possibility’ is not spatially limited for those who are able to exploit the opportunities offered by the global labour market (this is discussed more fully below). In Duarte’s study, home is not a singular place, because her Brazilian respondents in Australia expressed an attachment to both their homeland and their country of adoption.13 Their situation is marked by ‘intense feelings of liminality’ which, following Victor Turner, involve being ‘neither here nor there … betwixt and between’.14 Such a divided sense of belonging, marked as it is by both ambiguity and tension15, is not unusual among first-generation migrants whose experience and memory of the homeland continue to cast a shadow over the present. However, the intensity of feelings evoked by the previous homeland is amplified under contemporary conditions of globalisation where communication technologies offer frequent and regular links with the homeland. These technologies through instant and frequent contact create and perpetuate an intimacy with kin and community in the previous homeland that was not possible during earlier phases of global migration. Thus intimacy is sought not only
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through certain acts like consumption of familiar foods and partaking in various cultural activities but also through regular communication across nations and continents. The changing context of home under contemporary globalisation is also acknowledged by Anh Hua, who emphasises a need for diasporic Asian feminism.16 For Hua, the politics of home are not confined to space, identity and power but include mobility associated with ‘transnational global movements’.17 Such mobility gives rise to a multiplicity of homes across nations. In similar vein, Rapport and Dawson argue that under ‘contemporary’ conditions of movement what is necessary is a ‘mobile conception of home’ that is ‘plurilocal’.18 What is striking, though, in Hua’s account is the claim that transnationalisation of homes creates what is referred to as a ‘psychic state of perpetual homelessness’ or in some instances even a rejection of ‘any fixed dwelling’.19 Such a state of homelessness or rejection of ‘fixed dwelling’ may, however, be as much a function of class as mobility. For example, the need for attachment to kin and community, and what Hage refers to above as a ‘sense of possibility’ or opportunities are not class neutral. Professional, middle-class migrants may enjoy greater opportunities of employment across the globe compared to their working-class compatriots, and they may choose to adopt a globally more strategic approach to migration and settlement. Their cultural capital20 and economic resources may also allow them to negotiate their lives in different parts of the world more effectively and freely than may working-class migrants. The international mobility of Indian information technology (IT) professionals and other similar professionals is a case in point. Evidence certainly suggests, as stated below, that professional migrants adopt very calculative strategies of migration and, therefore, in making home. Similarly, other writers looking at contemporary migration view movements of people with reference to what they call transnational social spaces21 where national and social boundaries do not correspond to each other.22 Transnational social spaces have ‘a multipolar geographic orientation’.23 They argue that an understanding of transnational social spaces offers more useful insights into the functioning of kinship networks, ethnic connections and diasporic communities.24 There is increasing recognition that contemporary globalisation
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has intensified transnational links, thereby creating networks and opportunities that are transnational and global in scope. For example, the employment trajectories of Indian IT professionals reveal that international migration can be a strategy for enhancing economic opportunities. These involve a willingness to move to multiple locations rather than settling in one country.25 According to an Indian informant, resident in California, an Indian IT acquaintance of his chose to emigrate from the USA to Europe because he reasoned the euro was a stronger currency than the dollar! Such calculative movement points to shifting and unstable notions of home. In spite of the unstable and ambivalent ideas of home and belonging as demonstrated in the study by Duarte, it would be hazardous to disassociate one’s analysis of movement from the notion of home. For many, the idea of home, however imagined, has a meaningful existence in their lives. But these days home may be conceived not as a permanent site but as a few sites, or even a large number of places. According to an Indian IT professional whom I interviewed at length, and who was sent by her company in India to work in Melbourne on short-term assignments, Melbourne for her had become a second home, as she affectionately referred to it. Through her various visits to Melbourne she came to enjoy the multicultural lifestyle of the city and the greater freedom, compared to her hometown in India, that it offered her as a single woman. While globalisation and transnational movement complicate the idea of home, they do not detract from the affective elements of home. Waiting to return home foregrounds these affective elements, as discussed in the next section.
Waiting for Home: Modes of Resistance The following discussion draws on the literature and experiences of South Asian migrants and diasporic subjects who represent my field of research. As a member of the Indian Gujarati diaspora that is globally dispersed, I also draw upon my observations of the Gujarati diaspora. In addition, I make extended reference to Dhooleka S Raj’s study of South Asians in Britain26 because it provides a pertinent analysis of contemporary migration and is a rich source of evidence on waiting to return home, albeit evidence that has been reinterpreted in the context of this paper.
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There are ample studies that refer to migrants waiting to return home, with varied interpretations of what such waiting represents (see Raj above). For some writers the migrants’ intentions to return home simply turned out to be a ‘myth’ because their desire to return was not fulfilled.27 Raj in her study of middle-class South Asian migrants in the United Kingdom, however, offers a somewhat different interpretation of the so-called ‘myth of return’. She argues that the ‘myth of return’ is not purely a myth because in more recent years the desire to return has been re-invoked in terms of going back home (to India) to retire. It has therefore re-emerged as what she refers to as a ‘neomyth’.28 Her study is pertinent for several reasons. To begin with, Raj does not adopt an essentialised, priomordial definition of home. As she explains, her study focuses on how transnationalism shapes the lives of Hindu Punjabis of Indian origin by interrogating the ways in which ‘the homeland has been framed and created by these migrants and the Indian nation’.29 The homeland is therefore not a fixed entity but one that has been re-imagined by Indian migrants and redefined by various other factors, including changes in the attitudes and policies of the Indian government towards people in the Indian diaspora or people of Indian origin (PIO) in official nomenclature.30 These policies are now more accommodative and inclusive of those in the diaspora, to the extent that they facilitate extended visas and even allow for dual citizenship,31 though not dual passports. Raj goes as far as to argue that the decisions by her subjects to return to India ‘is not a return home’ but is an outcome ‘of the reconstructing and refashioning of home’ as a consequence of various Indian government policies.32 This argument may be somewhat overstated considering the sentiments of her subjects, which are articulated below. Second, Raj’s study is most relevant to this discussion because it acknowledges the significance of transnational links and ‘global relations’, whereby migration is not viewed merely as involving a single, permanent move from one point to another.33 Instead, those envisaging a return home to retire articulate what Raj refers to as the ‘six months mantra’, that is, spending six months in India and six months in Britain.34 Third, Raj draws our attention to the contrary attitudes and perceptions of her subjects who are waiting to return home. It is evident from these contrary views that home is not a single place.
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The discussion below draws on the markers and discourses of resistance of Raj’s subjects as well as South Asian informants in Australia and beyond who are known to the author. A key marker of resistance in the process of waiting to return home is the refusal of some Indians to relinquish their Indian passports and citizenship. In part, the refusal to relinquish their Indian citizenship was a response to the fact that until recently (that is, 2003) the Indian government did not recognise dual citizenship. However, even after the Indian government’s recognition of dual citizenship some continue to resist obtaining citizenship of the country of their adoption, namely, Australia. According to one Indian-born informant who has resided in Australia for many years and at one time would have preferred to spend an extended period in India, the refusal to relinquish Indian citizenship is explained in terms of ‘nationalism’ or nationalist attachment to India. This person witnessed the nationalist movement in India and cherishes the outcomes of the nationalist struggle represented by the country’s economic and political modernisation. Compromising his national identity by obtaining dual citizenship is not an acceptable alternative to him, even though he will in all likelihood now not return to India for a variety of personal reasons. Nevertheless, he takes pride in the fact that his son, who was born here, undertook his postgraduate education (funded by the imformant) in India. The son has also established enduring personal (through marriage) and professional ties with the country. Though the informant’s expectation of returning to India permanently or semi-permanently did not materialise, in the course of waiting to return he helped cultivate and encourage his son’s interest and links with India. Waiting, to that extent, cannot be regarded as a passive act. The above case is not an isolated instance of resistance to what is perceived as loss of national identity and of actively pursuing links with India in the course of waiting to return. Another Indian-born informant who has lived in Australia for a couple of decades still retains his Indian citizenship and entertains the idea of returning to India. In his case an important underlying reason for holding on to Indian citizenship was the reluctance to relinquish Indian national identity. He was unable to explain why he had not used the facility offered for dual citizenship by the Indian government. Instead, the
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informant referred to the pre-2003 situation when dual citizenship was not an alternative for Indian citizens and when obtaining a visa to return to India was a necessary requirement for Indians who were foreign citizens and foreign passport holders. According to him the thought of obtaining a visa to return to India, his homeland, was unbearable. Needless to say, the act of obtaining a visa to return home to India would have automatically categorised him as an alien. It was thus the resistance to being identified as an alien that was a major motivating factor in his retention of an Indian passport and citizenship. The above informant, like Raj’s subjects, has also invested in a residential property in India so that when the opportune moment to return arrives it is possible to reside in his city of origin, where property prices are escalating at a rapid pace.Whether the informant eventually returns to India on a permanent basis is a moot point, but more pertinent to the argument of this discussion is that waiting involves forward planning for return to the homeland and actively engaging with the homeland by, for example, securing a place to live there in the event of return. Active engagement with the homeland is also demonstrated by the informant’s regular visits to India, which are facilitated by the availability of cheap fares and fast air travel between India and Australia. This informant spends most of his time when visiting India with his siblings and his parents, with whom he normally stays. By all accounts of his visits that I have heard, he regards India as his second home. Evidently, the space within which his waiting occurs is marked by both an active engagement with the homeland and resistance, which involves not forfeiting the citizenship of his homeland. A significant marker of resistance observed by Raj in her study is the refusal to settle permanently in the country of adoption. This refusal may not necessarily involve completely abandoning one’s country of adoption but, as Raj explains above, it involves in some cases dividing equally one’s time between the homeland and the country of adoption or the so-called ‘six-months mantra’. In other cases members of the diaspora (both Indian-born and those born outside India, such as the East African Indians) only visit infrequently their country of adoption but nevertheless hold property there and have their children reside there too. The reasons behind refusal to live
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permanently in the country of adoption are often complex, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to thoroughly delve into such factors. Pertinent to this discussion are the discourses of those intending to return home. For example, some of Raj’s subjects articulate their intentions with considerable force and poignancy. Thus one of Raj’s respondents explained her intention to return to India by stating:35 My attraction is that it’s so much fun there—my brothers are there; it’s a holiday. Here you’re limited in choice with who your friends are. It’s so superficial and people always say, ‘This is what we do’ [referring to money and jobs]. They are so superficial and nouveau riche. The Brits are cold like the climate; the weather here is awful. I can’t stand the weather. I have lived up and down this country and you never get to know them. I mean really inside. And do we go to the pub? The above statement I find has considerable resonance since it articulates feelings that were often expressed by overseas students, especially of South Asian origin (Indians and Pakistanis), when I was an undergraduate at a university in northeast England, where the winters were long and harsh and the sense of isolation ran deep since the university was located in a somewhat isolated part of England. Naturalising the character of the British by comparing it with the cold climate was a common refrain among these students. What was evident is that those who expressed this view felt socially isolated from the mainstream of British society and were unable to replicate the intimacy, security and social warmth of their families and friends at home. In my opinion the utterances of Raj’s respondent, especially the discourse on British character and her referring to the habit of going to the pub, reflect two phenomena. First, as stated above, the utterances express the loss of closeness or intimacy which is held to be characteristic of South Asian kinship relations. She also defines citizens of the adopted country as ‘superficial’ and only interested in ‘money and jobs’. Second, they also represent resistance to expectations of what one may characterise as the Anglo-Celtic, British way of life that is symbolised in the popular imagination of some South
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Asians by pubs and the consumption of alcohol. To those South Asians, who are socially conservative, the pub symbolises the excesses of a Western life style and aspects of Western values that are antithetical to their own cultural norms. I found it revealing when a young, middle-class, professional South Asian woman in Melbourne who was brought up in Australia, and whom I have known since her childhood, confessed to me her discomfort when socialising with her workmates because it was always accompanied by the consumption of alcohol and involved an expectation that she would partake in it. She, of course, found this social ritual of the workplace unappealing. In fact, going to the pub is a primary social ritual of commensality in Australia and Britain. This is an instance where we can see the migrant resisting co-membership and closeness with the citizens of mainstream society. It points to the fact that resistance is a day-today battle against succumbing to the dominant social expectations for migrants waiting to return home. This also underlines how discourses create a distance between certain migrants and the adopted country, thereby giving space to the homeland. In fact there is the impossibility of establishing genuine intimacy: ‘I have lived up and down this country and you never get to know them. I mean really inside’. Like alcohol, food is another source of concern and resistance. In particular for those Hindus from South Asia who follow a purely vegetarian diet, it is a struggle to find food outlets that offer vegetarian dishes that are prepared according to their taste and not mixed with meat or meat-derived ingredients. I have often heard vegetarian Indian acquaintances complain of the lack of choice in food when they are travelling around Australia. Though the proliferation of South Asian restaurants in major cities in recent years has to some extent ameliorated this problem, it nevertheless poses a challenge for vegetarians who resist the dietary practices of a largely meat-consuming society. Similarly, for South Asian Muslims consumption of pork is taboo. It is common to hear them refer to the pig as an unclean animal and consumption of pig meat as haraam or prohibited in the Koran. The anxiety about consuming food from shops and restaurants where pork may have been mixed with other ingredients is a matter of considerable concern that leads to shunning such places. While alcohol and food are two important areas of
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consumption over which resistance frequently occurs, many other aspects of mainstream lifestyle and social behaviour are also contended with and resisted, as Roger Ballard explains in his discussion of South Asians in Britain.36 Needless to say, resistance to the way of life of the adopted homeland and the expectations associated with it is not universal, as some of Raj’s respondents very clearly articulated. I recall a conversation I had in 2004 with a Gujarati Indian from East Africa who had settled in California. To my casual enquiry about how he found living in California, he responded immediately, ‘This is the American dream’! The yearning to return home to India or elsewhere from where the diasporic Indians originated is not equally felt. Nevertheless, it is also the case that for many migrants and diasporic people, such as those from South Asia, whether they have attained the ‘American dream’ or not, there is an anxiety about losing the ‘culture’ of their homeland or being swamped by ‘Western culture’. This loss is often a matter of real concern. For the first generation of South Asian migrants and diaspora in the West, such concern is substantially amplified where the cultural predicament of their children is involved. Consequently, strategies such as promotion of vernacular language learning, religious education, endogamy, perpetuation of musical traditions and culinary habits, and returning home to India or other parts of South Asia (or elsewhere, as the case may be) permanently or periodically are all modes of resistance. In our research on Indians in Melbourne we found, for example, that many families participated in a wide variety of cultural activities demonstrating a vibrant cultural existence37. Pursuit of Indian music and various dance forms was common. Also, the growing popularity and spread of modern and hybrid genres of Indian music through Bollywood films and other channels has particularly enhanced the interest of young Indian-Australians in the popular culture of India. Returning home of course is the ultimate mode of resistance.
Conclusion Under contemporary conditions of globalisation, where time-space compression is progressing at a rapid pace through faster modes of transport and communication, it is possible to return home without completely abandoning the adopted homeland. Consequently, as
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many contemporary scholars, including those researching the movements of East Asians, have observed, home is not constituted by a single site but by multiple sites.38 The ‘six-months mantra’ referred to by Raj in her study clearly demonstrates this phenomenon where South Asian migrants in Britain are concerned. My own knowledge and observations of South Asians (Indians and Pakistanis) in Australia, Canada and the USA confirms that for at least the first generation of migrants the notion of home has not entirely stabilised and movement between the homeland and adopted home is a common feature, though not necessarily in the mode articulated above by Raj. Waiting for home or returning home under contemporary globalisation does not necessarily entail a permanent departure for the homeland. Though the notion of home is not stable, because people’s attachments and lives are not permanently rooted in one place, home is still a meaningful category. How people imagine home in terms of what is culturally and socially meaningful shapes the way they define their identities. Needless to say, economic circumstances may also have a bearing on where they call home, but it is evident from the discourses of many South Asian migrants that economic conditions do not solely define what is considered a meaningful existence. The lament of Raj’s informant about the superficiality of social relations in Britain, the lack of social warmth, and the inability to identify with ‘pub culture’ are all evidence of a lack of consonance between the adopted home and what is perceived as a socially and culturally meaningful existence. Similarly for my informants in Australia, identity of the homeland has greater meaning and takes precedence over citizenship of their adopted land. In the case of both my informants mentioned above, waiting to return home involves retaining the citizenship of their homeland, and resistance to expectations of many in their adopted homeland who believe that migrants should consider themselves fortunate to be here and become citizens of the so-called lucky country that is Australia. It could also be argued that such resistance affords more options to migrants because they are able to enjoy the material benefits of living in their adopted country and at the same time obtain emotional satisfaction from continuing ties with their homeland. For some, therefore, retaining the citizenship of their homeland means they are not locked into a single situation.
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I find Corcoran’s metaphor of waiting as stalking a ‘prey’ together with its ‘connotations’ of ‘preparedness’ and ‘taking advantage’39 very apt for this paper dealing with migrants who are waiting to return home. It is evident from the above discussion that, in the course of waiting to return home, my informant and the subjects of Raj’s study are making preparations for returning home and are following opportunities that emerge in the homeland like a hunter who stalks a ‘prey’. As Raj states, policy changes of the Indian government that allowed dual citizenship drew great interest from some diasporic Indians who were following government policy on Indians resident abroad. The space within which waiting to return home occurs is a source of considerable activity rather than passivity. This activity represents both resistance and creativity that involves building ties with the homeland and vigorously promoting cultural pursuits associated with the homeland.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
See Raj, pp. 170–1, for reference to some key perspectives. Corcoran, p. 517–18. Ibid., p. 517. Ibid., p. 517. Crapanzano, p. 44. Ibid. Ibid. Appadurai, p. 328. See also Held & McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton, ‘Global Transformations. Politics, Economics and Culture’. Harvey, p. 240. Rapport and Dawson, pp. 4–11. Castles and Davidson, p. 130. Hage, ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West’, p. 102. Duarte. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid., p. 320. Hua. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Rapport and Dawson, p. 7. Hua, pp. 3–4. Following Bourdieu (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, pp. 12–13, 114–15), cultural capital refers here especially to educational qualifications, but in the context of this discussion it can also include markers like fluency in English, which is the international language for conducting business, and certain middle-class attributes and tastes that are valued in cosmopolitan social circles.
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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
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Pries, p. 6. Flecker and Simsa, p. 164. Pries, p. 6. Willis, Yeoh and Fakhri, pp. 2–3. Biao, pp. 164–5; Voigt-Graf and Khoo, pp. 146–7. Raj. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 166. Koshy, p. 17. Raj, pp. 179–80. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 174. Ballard, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of Desh Pradesh’, pp. 13–14. Lakha and Stevenson, pp. 250–2, 258–9. See, for example, Ong, pp. 120–8. Corcoran, p. 517.
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chapter 11
Waiting for Global Warming: Climate Politics in Australia—Perspectives from Above and Below Hans A Baer
Introduction A few years into the beginning of the twenty-first century, a tipping point was reached in which many politicians and ordinary people came to believe that global warming was real and potentially threatening. The gravity of global warming and associated climatic changes began appearing as a regular feature in the global mass media, and it showed up on government policy agendas in numerous countries. These dramatic changes even finally forced US President George W Bush and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, both of whom vigorously opposed the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by their respective countries, to admit that global warming, or what they preferred to term ‘climate change’, was a reality. There appear to have been three driving engines behind these remarkable developments: 1. a rapidly mounting body of scientific evidence from diverse disciplines (climatology, geology, virology, glaciology etc) all pointing to the same conclusion: that global
warming was not only happening but also doing so at a rapid pace and with growing effects; 2. the image evidence, such as pictures of how much glaciers had retreated, and direct experience of the increasing number of severe storms and serious heat waves that began impacting people’s lives; and 3. the emergence of increasing numbers of prominent spokespersons, scientists, environmental activists, and science-aware politicians, which brought global warming to the attention of the mass media. Other factors, including the efforts of some social scientists, also contributed to the growing awareness that global warming constitutes a serious threat to the environment and, as a result, to humanity as well. While a growing number of climate scientists and many environmentalists have been saying for some time that humanity no longer has time to wait on definitive scientific proof that global warming indeed is occurring and that in large part it is an anthropogenic phenomenon, various social actors insist on playing a variety of waiting games in terms of mitigating global warming. Thus, despite a heightened consciousness about the seriousness of global warming, we are still living in an era of continued denial by ultra-conservatives and business interests who profit enormously from the status quo, as well as public resistance to radical lifestyle changes requiring personal sacrifices on the part of the affluent. Drawing upon Barry Schwartz’s article ‘Waiting, Exchange, and Power: The Distribution of Time in Social Systems’, this essay examines the ways in which Australians from different social strata await the impact of global warming on their society.1 He argues that ‘waiting is patterned by the distribution of power in a social system’.2 While Schwartz’s assertion applies primarily to people waiting upon various social services, it can be applied to potentially cataclysmic events, which includes global warming. In terms of global warming or climate change, one can identify several forms of waiting: (1) waiting on the global warming to unravel as part and parcel of a larger ecological crisis that includes the depletion of resources (such as oil, water, forests) and numerous forms of pollution; (2) waiting on governments and global governance bodies, such as the UN, the European
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Union, the World Economic Forum, and the G8, to take action on global warming; and (3) waiting not only on these bodies to implement social change but also for ordinary people to be part of the process of implementing social change in the form of a grass-roots climate movement that is linked with other movements, including the environmental, anti-corporation globalisation, labour, ecosocialist, and eco-anarchist ones. Furthermore, historically one may speak of the ‘long wait’ on global warming that has swung between two poles—scepticism and impatience. The sceptical or contrarian view of global warming constitutes the extreme variant of the ‘wait-and-see’ approach to global warming. The summer of 1988 witnessed a series of record-breaking heat waves and droughts in many US regions. In response, congressional hearings on planetary weather were held in Washington, DC, at which renowned climate scientist James E Hansen, along with other scientists, testified that a century-long trend of global warming had resumed after a levelling off during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, largely due to global dimming resulting from highly polluting industrial activities. Ironically, partial reduction of industrial pollution permitted the greenhouse effect to become more pronounced. These developments prompted the environmental movement, not only in the United States but also elsewhere, including in Australia, to take closer notice and ultimately to stop waiting upon global warming but to act upon it. In 1988 the World Meteorological Organisation and other UN environmental agencies established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Conversely, various other conservative parties were not awaiting global warming, or even adopting a waitand-see attitude. Instead, they denied it or claimed that it was part of a natural cycle that would eventually pass away. Such organisations included the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, Global Climate Information, and, in the case of Australia, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Lavoisier Group. How people go about waiting for the impact of global warming and associated climatic changes or denying or downplaying these realities or processes of adaptation and mitigation may be structured by their relative power and socioeconomic status in both national and global social systems. In supporting this hypothesis, this paper examines how the Australian Government under the leadership of
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Kevin Rudd, despite its ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, has continued state linkages with various corporate interests in keeping the Australian public waiting on the creation of a viable global warming mitigation program. However, as Crapanzano observes, waiting is ‘marked by contingency—perhaps—and all the anxiety that comes with the experience of contingency’.3 It is a ‘passive activity’, and thus ‘produces in us feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and vulnerability’.4 In their impatience with waiting, some Australians along with some people in other parts of the world have adopted a proactive approach to global warming, albeit in numerous different ways. I myself have become a proponent of the critical anthropology of global warming because, in my own small way, I wish to empower not only myself but others.5 With this thought in mind, in this essay I examine the impatience of the Australian climate movement, which has gained support from the Green Party, in waiting upon the implementation of stronger governmental policies.
Australian Public Concern about Global Warming: In the Past and Since 2006 For some time, certain segments of Australian society, ranging from politicians, such as former prime minister Bob Hawke and leading members of the Green Party, to grass-roots environmental groups and prominent climate scientists, including ones employed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), have expressed concern about the impact of global warming on the environment and human societies. 6 In 1995, the Labor Government threatened industry with a carbon tax, which promoted the latter to accept the Greenhouse Challenge Program, a voluntary program accepted by John Howard, who became the Coalition prime minister in 1996. During much of Howard’s tenure, he kept Australians waiting for a concerted effort to address global warming by allowing a small ‘cabal’ of lobbyists, self-described as the ‘greenhouse mafia’ and consisting of executives from the coal, electricity, oil, cement, and aluminium industries, a pivotal role in formulating the government’s climate change policies.7 Guy Pearse, a Liberal Party member and former lobbyist and Howard government advisor, asserted that the prime minister allowed his climate policy to be shaped by the country’s biggest polluters and lobbyists in Canberra.8
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The year 2006 proved to be pivotal in public consciousness about global warming or climate change for two reasons: (1) the release of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and also a book by the same title and (2) the publication of The Stern Review by Nicholas Stern, a former Chief Economist of the World Bank and the Advisor to the UK Government on Economics and Development reporting to the prime minister, in which he presents a neo-liberal analysis of global warming and efforts to mitigate it.9, 10 As in other parts of the world, the topic of ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ has been on the mind of numerous Australians for a least several years. Both the Age, a liberal Melbourne-based newspaper, and the Australian, a nation-wide, Rupert Murdoch–owned, conservative newspaper, regularly publish articles about global warming. The former tends to be more accepting of the contention of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global warming or climate change is largely anthropogenic, and the Australian tends to carry mixed messages about it, but with a certain contrarian orientation with respect to the climate science consensus on global warming. With an ongoing drought impacting much of Australia, particularly the southeast, and cyclones and heavy storms impacting other regions, particularly the northeast, many Australians have ‘waited’ to see what would happen next. Many Australians accepted the Howard Government’s ongoing insistence that the climate science of global warming was still indefinite both in terms of the seriousness of the problem and whether the sources were primarily natural or anthropogenic. A growing number of Australians, however, were unwilling to adopt this ‘wait-and-see’ attitude. Within this group were the majority of climate scientists working in universities and for the CSIRO, environmentalists, and others who were concerned about the drought that had been impacting particularly south-eastern Australia for nearly a decade, ravaging bushfires in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory during summer 2003, and the ongoing bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Around 2003, a growing number of Australians began to form and join local grass-roots climate action groups (CAGs). Many of these groups are linked in complex ways with various environmental organisations and even minor political parties, particularly the Greens and the Socialist Alliance. Many of them have also become affiliated with various regional climate action
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networks and more recently an effort to create a national climate action network. Due to widespread pressures to take the threat of global warming more seriously, Howard commissioned a task force, which recommended that Australia adopt an emissions trading scheme (ETS), one that should be implemented in 2011 and would set a low greenhouse gas emissions price (a somewhat arbitrarily determined cost allowing companies to emit greenhouse gas emissions by paying the government a fee) with deeper emissions cuts being required later.11
The Rudd Government’s Position on Global Warming Mitigation and the Reluctance of Some Australians to Take a ‘Wait-and-See’ Attitude toward the New Climate Politics from Above In his campaign for the prime ministership, Kevin Rudd, the then leader of the Labor opposition, promised Australians that they would not have to wait much longer for concerted action on global warming because he would ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and fast-forward the development of an ETS to 2010 and implement various other mitigation strategies. Political pundits repeatedly argued that the impatience of many Australians with waiting for government proactive policies on global warming mitigation helped Rudd to be elected prime minister. Shortly after assuming office in November 2007, Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and created a Ministry of Climate Change, with Penny Wong as its head. Even before Rudd’s election as prime minister, his federal opposition and the Labor-controlled state governments commissioned a study on mitigation and adaptation strategies headed by neo-liberal economist Ross Garnaut. The Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, which includes BP Australia, Insurance Australia Group, Westpac Bank, Origin Energy and Visy Industries, admits that there is a need for an ETS, but not one that threatens the Australian economy. While many Australians are taking a ‘wait-and-see’ approach as to how governmental and business leaders will choose to address global warming, other Australians have become impatient in ‘waiting’ for the powers-that-be who quibble about carbon trading, carbon off-setting, and ‘clean coal’ schemes and have quickly organised
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themselves into a climate movement that has declared a ‘climate emergency’.12 In essence, the diversity of actors in the emerging climate movement uniformly contend that taking action constitutes a more viable mitigation strategy than waiting for the findings of various governmental studies. On 9 February 2008 the Climate Emergency Network was established at the Climate Movement Convergence in Melbourne. This effort resulted in a climate emergency rally in Melbourne on 5 July 2008 at which Greens Senator Bob Brown spoke. Various climate activists around Australia also organised a Camp for Climate Action Australia that occurred from 10 to 15 July 2008 in Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port, which had been designated to undergo expansion. In the words of the organisers, what is needed is a ‘just transition from coal to clean—not an expansion of the coal industry’. Conversely, the Australian Coal Association has asked Australians to await the development of improved power station efficiency and carbon sequestration. Unwilling to wait and see whether such long-term techno-fixes would succeed, climate activists organised Walks Against Warming in various Australian cities on 15 November 2008. The Australian climate movement is still in its infancy and still very much a disparate phenomenon in terms of participants, aims and strategies. A green social democratic wing urges lobbying politicians and persuading business people to embrace a regulated green capitalism that would result in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Social democratic climate groups include Friends of the Earth Australia, the Australian Conservation Foundation, Climate Action Network Australia, Greenpeace Australia, Carbon Equity, the Victoriabased Climate Emergency Network, Beyond Zero, Rising Tide, Zero Emissions Now, and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. Virtually all of the green social democratic groups support a strong shift to the use of renewable energy sources, particularly solar, wind, thermal, and wave power. Most of the green social democratic groups are open to a stringent ETS scheme of one sort or another. A much smaller democratic eco-socialist wing maintains that mitigation of global warming ultimately requires the transcendence of capitalism. Actors in this wing include members of the Socialist Alliance, Solidarity, the Socialist Alternative, the Socialist Party Australia, and the Freedom Socialist Party, probably eco-socialists
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within the Green Party, and an assortment of independent socialists. Eco-socialists, however, recognise that the mitigation process cannot await the collapse of global capitalism, although some point to the recent global financial crisis as a possible sign of the unravelling of this system. In the interim period, rather than simply awaiting the ‘revolution’, the eco-socialists call for various transitional reforms, such as public ownership of utilities, the expansion of public mass transportation, minimisation of car use, renewable energy sources, and redistributive mechanisms. During the 2007 election, the Socialist Alliance delineated a 10-Point Climate Action Plan, which called for a 60 per cent overall emissions reduction by 2020 and a 90 per cent overall emissions reduction by 2030; a shift to public ownership and democratic control of all power industries and the auto industry; the construction of wind farms in suitable areas; the eradication of industrial farming based on fossil-fuel fertilisers, pesticides and fuels; the cessation of the logging of old-growth forests; an urban program of reforestation; and the provision of free urban and regional public transport.
Waiting and Responding to Government-Inspired Reports on Mitigation Strategies The year 2008 was a one in which some, if not many, Australians awaited a series of reports from both Ross Garnaut and the Rudd Government. Preliminary Garnaut Reviews were released in February and June.13, 14 The long-awaited final Garnaut Review was released on 30 September 2008.15 It proposed two sets of targets: (1) one that seeks to be part of a global strategy to limit greenhouse gases at 450 CO2 equivalent ppm in which Australia commits itself to a 25 per cent reduction of 2000 levels by 2020 and 90 per cent by 2050 and (2) one that accepts a limit of 550 CO2 equivalent ppm as ‘more realistic in terms of what other countries are likely to do’, thereby having Australia aim for a 10 per cent reduction of 2000 levels by 2020 and a 80 per cent reduction by 2050. The final Garnaut Review calls for an ETS and the development of ‘clean coal’ technology but is quite weak in its call for development of wind and solar energy resources and a shift from reliance on cars to mass transportation. Furthermore, it accepts the notion that the Australian economy requires ongoing
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growth and does not address the impact that such growth may have in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. In July 2008 the Rudd government released a Green Paper delineating its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. 16 The Treasury Department released its Climate Mitigation Policy Modelling in late October 2008.17 On 15 December 2008 the government released its long-awaited White Paper, in which it delineated in great detail the specifics of its carbon pollution reduction scheme.18 In this document, the government admits the seriousness of the impact of global warming on Australia by noting: As a hot and dry country, we have more to lose than any other developed nation if the world fails to reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change … In the past twelve years, we have experienced eleven of the hottest years since records began and temperatures are projected to continue to rise over the next century. In Australia, temperatures are expected to rise by around five degrees by the end of the century.19 Despite the government’s recognition of the seriousness of global warming for both the world and Australia and its ongoing commitment to ‘reduce our carbon pollution by 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050’, for the short term it has committed itself to a cautious mitigation strategy, one inspired in part by the Garnaut Review and that accommodates various corporate interests. Rather than taking the high moral road, the Australian Government has committed itself by 2020 to ‘reduce Australia’s carbon pollution by up to 15 per cent below 2000 levels in the context of a global agreement where major economies agree to substantially restrain carbon pollution and advanced economies take on reductions comparable to Australia’ and an ‘unconditional 5 per cent reduction in carbon pollution below 2000 levels by 2020’.20 While the government recognises that its targets are more modest than those that the European Union has proposed for 2020, it asserts that its target range translates into a ‘34-41 per cent reduction in the per capita emissions of every Australian’ given that the country’s
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population is ‘projected to grow by around 45 per cent over the period 1990-2020’, whereas the EU’s ‘target range translates into 24 to 34 per cent in reductions for each European’ given that its population is ‘projected to be relatively stable’ during this period.21 While an ETS forms the backbone of the government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, it also calls for a modest ‘investment in renewables and carbon capture and storage and action on energy efficiency’.22 Like other green capitalist schemes, the government asserts that Australia can ‘reduce carbon pollution while continuing to grow our economy and jobs’.23 While the Rudd Government has adopted a cautious mitigation strategy, the Coalition Opposition, led initially by Brendan Nelson and more recently by Malcolm Turnbull, has sought to keep Australians waiting until 2011 rather than 2010 for the implementation of an ETS. In contrast, the Green Party has criticised the government’s modest targets. Some 60 environmental, climate action and social justice organisations quickly lodged protests against the government’s mitigation strategy. These included protests at Rudd’s electoral office in Queensland, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s office in Adelaide, and Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s office. Damien Dawson, a Friends of the Earth representative from Melbourne, stated that the protests constitute an ‘expression of the community’s disgust with the cringing climate policy Kevin Rudd announced yesterday [15 December 2008]. If Kevin Rudd doesn’t have the brains or the ticker to choose the Reef, the wetlands and the people over coal and other polluting industries, then he should get out of the way’.24 Even prior to the release of the government’s White Paper, various organisations, including Friends of the Earth Melbourne and Sydney, Greenpeace, the Australian Student Environment Network, and Clean Energy for Eternity, had been planning a Climate Action Summit in Canberra for the period 31 January to 2 February 2009 before the first day of the 2009 federal parliament. In its rationale for the forthcoming summit, the organisers stated: Last year, Kevin Rudd was elected to government in the world’s first climate change election. One year on, we are still waiting [emphasis mine] for the urgent action needed
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to peak our greenhouse gas emissions and begin this urgent transition to renewable energy. In December 2009, Kevin Rudd will meet with world leaders in Copenhagen to set the framework and benchmarks for future global action on climate change. We need to ensure the Australian government goes to Copenhagen with the strongest commitment to reducing greenhouse pollution and averting runaway climate change.23 I attended the Climate Action Summit at the Australian National University—a grass-roots conference of over 500 attendees representing some 280 climate action groups (CAGs), Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, the Socialist Alliance, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative, and various eco-anarchist groups. The Climate Summit passed a resolution demanding that the Australian Government participate in an international effort to reduce global levels of CO2 to 300 ppm no later than 2050, that Australia’s CO2 emissions should be reduced by at least 60 per cent by 2020 and by 90 per cent by 2030 (from 1990 levels); and that the government enact a policy of 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020 and establish a moratorium on all new coal and gas-fired power plants immediately, revolutionise energy efficiency, promote mass transportation, foster agricultural biological resilience, and create a moratorium on native forest logging. While the Green Party was not one of the sponsors of the summit, Christine Milne, a Greens Senator from Tasmania, spoke at the summit and supported the actions of its participants. Furthermore, Bob Brown, also a Greens Senator, addressed the Climate Action Summit’s rally at Parliament House on 3 February. While the summit’s organisers claimed some 2500 attendees at the rally, the Canberra Times reported on 4 February the presence of 1250 attendees. I suspect the actual attendance was somewhere midway between these two figures. Some climate activists have become so tired of waiting on the government to even adopt moderate to radical global warming mitigation strategies that they have decided to embark upon a series of direct actions challenging the government’s go-slow approaches on global warming mitigation policies. For example, the climate action group Rising Tide plans to
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engage in a direct action on 21 March 2009 in what it terms a ‘fun, effective and non-violent protest against the tripling of coal exports from Newcastle Harbour’.26 While by the beginning of 2009 climate scepticism clearly had fallen into disfavour, the Rudd Government, despite its assertions that it has moved beyond a business-as-usual approach and its acceptance of the climate science regarding the seriousness of global warming, including for Australia, in reality adopted a rather conservative approach on mitigation strategies. Clive Hamilton admits that initially he was optimistic about the role that the Rudd Government might adopt on global warming mitigation, but about a year later he recognised that the greenhouse mafia had reorganised itself in lobbying the new government. The climate emergency has turned into a crisis of democracy. The government is meant to protect the interests of the people, but it has protected the interests of the big polluters. The Government is in the thrall of a powerful group of energy companies and it is apparent even to the most dim-witted observer that these corporations are, as Thoreau wrote, ‘more interested in commerce than humanity’.27 While many Australians may be willing to still take a wait-andsee approach with the Rudd Government’s policies on global warming mitigation, clearly climate activists of various stripes have become increasingly impatient with waiting and continue to mobilise on how to engage in climate actions.
Conclusion While the Rudd Government asserts that it eschews a ‘wait-and-see approach [that] leaves the economy exposed to far more serious future adjustment costs that could leave assets stranded, workers unemployed, and households exposed to rising costs’, it has been playing a waiting game with the Australian public on the specifics of its global warming mitigation strategy.28 Following Schwartz, elites, whether they are situated in the governmental sector or the corporate sector, are in a much stronger position to dictate the parameters
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of the waiting process. Conversely, while it is difficult to say how many Australians continue to wait upon a more explicit mitigation strategy from above, a small, but vocal, minority have quickly responded to the waiting game by refusing to wait indefinitely and acting upon their political convictions. Both prior to and following the Climate Action Summit in Canberra, back-to-back heat waves struck south-eastern Australia. On the morning of 27 January 2009, the Melbourne-based tabloid Herald Sun ran an article titled ‘VIC facing worst heat wave in the city’. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology had predicted the following temperatures: 38 for Tuesday 27 January, 41 for Wednesday 28 January, 40 for Thursday 29 January, 40 for Friday 30 January, 41 for Saturday 31 January, and 31 for Sunday 1 February. Reportedly, Melbourne had not endured four straight days of 40 since 1908. The weather bureau also predicted that Swan Hill on the Murray River would experience five days over 42. In actual fact, the temperatures for Melbourne were 43 on Wednesday, 44 on Thursday, 45 on Friday and 37 on Saturday. Although Melburnians and Victorians experienced somewhat cooler days over the next few days, the weather bureau predicted a one-day spike to 44 for Saturday 7 February. In actual fact, the temperature hit 46.4, an all-time high for Melbourne, and surrounding areas reportedly hit even higher temperatures. The hot weather and dry conditions sparked the most devastating bushfires that Victoria has experienced in recorded history, resulting in the deaths of numerous people and the destruction of homes and even communities, including the small mountain resort town of Marysville in the Yarra Ranges east of Melbourne. (Ironically, some of the contributors to this book had planned to have a writing retreat between 9 and 13 February at the Cumberland Lodge in Marysville, but this accommodation burnt down in the bushfire.) On ABC’s Nightline program on 9 February, David Karoly, a renowned climate scientist based at the University of Melbourne, noted that while no single climate event can be conclusively linked to global climate change or global warming, there is a strong possibility that Australians can expect, not merely await, such events in the near future. So only time will tell if the record temperature highs and devastating bushfires in various parts of south-eastern Australia will
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move the Rudd Government and much of the general public from a ‘wait-and-see’ modus operandi to one that is clearly tired of waiting by adopting the concerns of the climate activists. Despite the disparate nature of the Australian climate movement, it has quickly emerged as an important component of a worldwide movement that prefers responding to anthropogenic global warming rather than waiting on it to fry the planet and its inhabitants. Critics of the climate movement often assert that it constitutes a new form of millenarianism. Megan Jennaway, however, rejects this contention: Adherents of GWT [Global Warming Theory] differ from the members of millenarian and/or prophetic cults in a number of significant ways … In particular, their lack of faith that divine intervention is on hand to lead humanity out of the deepening climate quagmire, and the associated absence of conviction that we are heading into a New Age or a better future for all, decisively differentiate them from most if not all millenarian movements.30 As for myself, I believe that market mechanisms and technofixes are insufficient to mitigate global warming. The world that I am awaiting and struggling for is one that transcends the capitalist world system and moves toward a long-term process of mitigation based upon public ownership, social equity, democratic processes, and environmental sustainability.31 Conversely, I do not have some naïve suspicion that this will occur any time soon, if ever. Rather than adopting the wait-and-see approach of ‘business as usual’ or merely implementing minor mitigation efforts, I am committed to the creation of an alternative world system. Instead of merely waiting upon global warming I have chosen to assume a proactive stance by being a partisan observer of the climate movement.
Notes 1 2 3 4
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Schwartz. Ibid, p. 843. Crapanzano, p. 44. Ibid., p. 44.
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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Baer, ‘Global Warming as a By-Product of the Capitalist Treadmill of Production and Consumption’. Falk and Brownlow. Hamilton, Scorcher. Pearse. Gore. Stern. Murphy, p. 1. Spratt and Sutton. Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review: Interim Report. Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review: Draft Report. Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review, Final Report. Australian Government, Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper, 2008a. Australian Government: The Treasury. Australian Government, Carbon Reduction Scheme: Australia’s Low Pollution Future. Ibid., p. iii. Ibid., p. iv. Ibid., pp. xix–xx. Ibid., p. xxiii. Ibid., p. iv. Friends of the Earth, www.foe.org.au, accessed 22/12/2008. Climate Summit, www.climatesummit.org.au, accessed 22/12/2008. Rising Tide, www.risingtide.org.au. Hamilton, ‘Climate Emergency or an Emergency of Democracy?’, p. 2. Australian Government, Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme: Australia’s Low Pollution Future, p. xxi. Schwartz. Jennaway, p. 73. Baer and Singer.
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chapter 12
Serbian National Resurrection: Myths of Waiting and Being1 Andrew Dawson
Introduction Occupied2, lacking a single state and divided3 for most of its existence, Serbia has only fleetingly seen its national ambitions realised. The late twentieth century was one such moment. Between 1992 and 1995, following declarations of independence by Slovenia, Croatia and then Bosnia and Herzegovina and irredentist moves by Albanian Kosovar separatists (the ‘break-up of Yugoslavia’), Serbia undertook a military campaign that resulted in control of no less than 25 per cent of Croatia, 70 per cent of Bosnia and Herzegovina and 100 per cent of Vojvodina and Kosovo, former Serbian ‘Autonomous Provinces’ with very significant non-Serb populations. The resulting unity of Serbs in a contiguous geographical and political space constituted a realisation of the ‘Greater Serbian’ ideal. From 1995 to 2000, however, the bulk of Serbia’s territorial gains were lost, leading to the displacement of Serbs from Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (especially Sarajevo) and, above all, Croatia; the collapse of the autonomous ‘Republic of Serbian Krajina’ in Croatia in 1995 led in a matter of days to the exodus of 170,000 people, almost the entire Serbian population of the region, and the largest population exodus in post–World War II
Europe. Many such people were relocated, usually to rural areas that had been ‘ethnically cleansed’ of their erstwhile Croatian, Muslim and Yugoslav populations. Principal among these was Republika Srpska, the beleaguered Serbian ‘entity’ within the independent and Muslim-dominated nation state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the exception of the discredited ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ thesis articulated by some journalists and politicians, the emergence and persistence of Serbian nationalism in former Yugoslavia through periods of national victory and defeat has, by and large, been explained in terms of the agency of political actors who, through populism and, especially, tight control of media4, managed to mobilise nationalist mass movements.5 However, few systematic attempts have been developed that consider the articulation of such populist ideological projects and media with everyday life. An exception to this is, however, treatments of the ubiquitous national myth of ‘Heavenly Serbia’.6 Through biblical analogy and, in particular, ideas of treachery, sacrifice, sanctification and heavenliness, Heavenly Serbia provides a means of conceptualising national defeat. For example, alluding to a discourse of Judas-like treachery, Judah points out that, as in almost all wars engaged in by Serbia, ‘throughout the war(s) of 1991–95 no Serb ever ascribed a defeat to losing a battle fair and square. With monotonous regularity losses were always put down to secret deals’.7 Conversely, however, Heavenly Serbia also identifies Serbia with the central raison d’etre of Christianity: resurrection. Interpretations of Heavenly Serbia differ markedly, particularly on the relationship between earthliness and heavenliness. On one hand, Judah, for example, represents it as presenting a Serbia of the heavens as a paradise to be achieved at death, and its earthly resurrection a hoped-for future.8 Contrastingly, Anzulovic argues that according to the myth ‘earthly Serbia is holy Serbia’ per se, an assertion based on the observation that ‘the difference between Byzantium and Serbia … is that the Byzantines regarded the emperor and his court as heavenly, whereas the Serbs conferred heavenly status on the nation as a whole’.9 Nonetheless, what all such accounts share is the idea that Heavenly Serbia’s emphasis on resurrection renders it an idiom of future national expansion. In other words, Serbia is presented as a nation in waiting.
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Having said this, for the many ordinary Serbs who draw upon Heavenly Serbia as a framework for conceptualising the nation’s experiences and their own experiences as its subjects, this emphasis on waiting does not appear to sit easily. For many of them the death, displacement and poverty that resulted from the pursuit of the Greater Serbian ideal is often regarded as a price that was, is and will be too great to pay. And this gives on to much less ambitious views for the nation, such as, for example, the old Titoist policy for interethnic cooperation of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, in which the nation is conceptualised as a people (a ‘narod’) that shares a space and polity with and tolerance for others. This diminished Serbian ambition is captured nicely in a statement that appeared both during and in the aftermath of war in territories lost. An apparently defiant statement when emblazoned on Bosnian government offices and NATO installations, ‘This is Serbia’ conveyed less ambition in its everyday utterances—Serbia persists, albeit in these contexts of geographical and political division from other Serbs, in these contexts of minority status, in these contexts where the people lack political autonomy10, in these contexts of (even) occupation, but, importantly, that’s OK. Such compliant pragmatism gives on to a very different view of futurity. Rather than a nation in waiting, Serbia simply is. This raises the question what sense does Heavenly Serbia, a ubiquitous myth that emphasises resurrection and nationalist expansion, have in the context of their apparent everyday disavowal. I argue that a possible answer may be found from within the anthropology of religion and, in particular, in Maurice Bloch’s theory of ‘rebounding violence’. In a series of books and articles, beginning with From Blessing to Violence11 through to Prey Into Hunter12, Bloch argues that religious ritual and myth is characterised by a core that is both universal and unchanging. This is so because that core relates to matters not reducible to specific circumstances. It is concerned with the reality of biological life and death and the need to represent human life as occurring in permanent frameworks that transcend them— descent groups, nations and the like. He describes this core as involving a process of rebounding violence, for the subjects of such ritual and myth are represented as engaging in a process of symbolically departing from and then returning to conquer and transform the realm of everyday ‘earthly’ life. In the first part of this essay I
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consider the origins and historical development of the myth of Heavenly Serbia, and then proceed to explore the contrasting ways in which it is deployed in conceptualising significant events in recent Serbian experience. In the second part of the essay I interpret the myth of Heavenly Serbia through the lens of Bloch’s rebounding violence thesis. Through this, I argue, Heavenly Serbia furnishes a myth of territorial expansion, but also a means of conceptualising the nation and the national subject as simply ongoing in these times of frustrated national ambition and, ultimately, the threat of discontinuity rendered by defeat. Heavenly Serbia is, then, as much a statement of a nation in being as it is a nation in waiting.
Heavenly Serbia: Origins, Development and Contemporary Manifestations King God, what shall I do, how shall I do it? What is the empire of my choice? Is it the empire of the earth? And if I shall choose the empire of the earth, The empire of the earth is brief, Heaven is everlasting. And the emperor chose the empire of heaven Above the empire of the earth. From Vuk Karadžic, ` ‘The Downfall of the Serbian Empire’
Serbian national ambition is grounded principally in two historical referents. The first is the Kingdom of the Nemanjas from the midtwelfth to the mid-fourteenth century that moulded the beginnings of a nation from hitherto disparate tribes. The second is the Battle of Kosovo fought in 1389. Indeterminate in terms of military outcome, the Battle of Kosovo is commonly distinguished as the point marking Serbia’s subjugation as a vassal state within the Ottoman Empire, but also as the birth date of the ‘Legend of Kosovo’ and, more specifically, the myth of ‘Heavenly Serbia’. According to the legend, Lazar, the Emperor of the Serbs, chose death in battle, thereby rejecting either living dishonourably as a vassal in an alien empire or the fleeting temptations of earthly empire. The legend, initiated by the widow of Lazar to consolidate
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power in the hands of Lazar’s clan, has been preserved through six centuries and elaborated at key historical junctures13 by a range of institutions. However, alongside Serbian epic poetry (of which Karadžic’s Downfall of the Serbian Empire is a most famous example), the Serbian Orthodox Church played the central role in these respects. Consequently, Heavenly Serbia’s elaboration is characterised above all by a melding of history and Christian mythology. The legend has it that Lazar attended an eve-of-battle ‘last supper’, present at which were his closest aides, but also a Judas figure, Vuk Brankovic, Lazar’s son-in-law and a rival to the throne. In an act of supreme treachery, Brankovic went on to hand over the battle plans, and victory to the ‘Turks’. Within 200 years of his heroic self-sacrifice, and in an effort to identify Nemanjic Serbia and Lazar’s Serbia as a single entity, Lazar was incorporated by the church, with whom the Lazarevici were always closely associated, into the ‘saintly-born’ dynasty of the Nemanjici through his own canonisation. Consequently, Serbia itself becomes, according to the legend, a heavenly kingdom ruled over by the Nemanjic saints and, of course, by the Christ-like figure of St Lazar himself. The central role played by the church in the development of Heavenly Serbia is not surprising since it is almost certainly the only distinctively Serbian institution to have survived occupation.14 However, and especially following Communism, the rate of nonbelief in former Yugoslavia, especially amongst Serbs, is high, and unfamiliarity with even the most basic aspects of Christian liturgy amongst believers is higher.15 Consequently, in eras such as that of post-Communism, when nationalism has been hegemonic, this contradiction between the salience of organised religion and the relative absence of a common culture of organised religiosity means that Heavenly Serbia is simultaneously ubiquitous and remarkably polysemic. I describe two divergent manifestations of Heavenly Serbia, of ideas of the relationship between treachery, sacrifice, saintliness, heavenliness and national resurrection, as they unfolded through significant events that took place in former Yugoslavia between 2000 and 2002, the period of my occasional fieldwork in Republika Srpska: the loss of Kosovo, the investigation of Serbs for war crimes, the ousting of Slobodan Miloševic (President of Serbia from 1989 to 1997
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and President of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000), and his subsequent incarceration and trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The manifestations of Heavenly Serbia described are those of Serbia’s and Republika Srpska’s private and state-sponsored television, and of Zlatko, my some-of-the-time Serbian landlord in Republika Srpska, with whom I spent lots of time watching and talking about television. Such television, especially Serbia’s main channel, Radio Television Serbia (RTS) and its flagship news program Dnevnik (Daily News), was, in the decade following Yugoslavia’s break-up, little more than a mouthpiece for government. Zlatko, a 53-year-old Krajina Serb had been displaced from the majority Croatian village of his ancestors when the Republic of Serbian Krajina collapsed. He moved on to Republika Srpska with his wife and child, where they lived in greatly reduced circumstances. He had been allocated accommodation by local authorities in the partly destroyed village house of ethnically cleansed Muslims. A university graduate who had been employed as the manager of a power-generating plant near to Knin, Zlatko and his family now lived largely off the meagre income his wife made from waitressing.
Treachery The year 1999 had been a nadir in Serbia’s nationalist ambitions. International talks were held at Rambouillet in an attempt to halt the repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo and escalating violence between Albanian guerrillas and Serbian military forces. However, Miloševic refused to sign up to a peace agreement that would have reestablished Kosovo’s autonomy. In turn, NATO intervened militarily, bombing Serbian military installations in Kosovo itself and, importantly, bombing Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Serbia capitulated, withdrawing its forces from Kosovo, and the great majority of the Kosovan Serb population followed them. With Kosovo now effectively rendered foreign territory, Serbia had lost its symbolic heartland. Much of 2000 was taken up, by media and ordinary people, with conceptualising defeat. According to television the NATO intervention in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina were acts of treachery by the ‘West’ against a former ally in the struggles against both Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism, and that the irredentism of Croatia, Bosnia
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and Kosovo’s Albanians were merely contemporary manifestations of it. In contrast, for Zlatko, it had been the Serbian state that had acted treacherously. It had covertly armed Serbs in places like Krajina and given them a clear directive to build a Greater Serbia through the framework of autonomous Serbian republics. Krajina was lost through a Croatian military offensive that could, he argued, have easily been thwarted had the full might of the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army) been brought to bear. Instead, Krajina had been betrayed by Miloševic in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions and following a covert deal between Miloševic and Franjo Tudjman16, the president of Croatia, that had smoothed the way for peaceful partition of Bosnian territory between the two nations.
Sacrifice Miloševic’s intransigence at Rambouillet was regarded with considerable ambivalence by many Serbs that I spoke to. For, while Kosovo is widely regarded as Serbia’s heartland, it is also regarded as the quintessential locus of Balkan orientalism17 and rural backwardness.18 As Zlatko put it, ‘why the fuck give everything up for Rwanda’. Nonetheless, television celebrated the intransigence of the Serbian state, seeing it as tantamount to a form of noble sacrifice that had typified the nation from the Battle of Kosovo onwards. Rerun documentaries of World War II brought home the point. Within two days of their giving in to threats from Hitler and signing up to the Axis Tripartite Pact, the government and the regency of Prince Paul were overthrown in a military coup. In his broadcast to the nation Patriarch Gavrilo, the then head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, declared, ‘Before our nation in these days the question of our fate again presents itself. This morning at dawn the question received its answer. We chose the heavenly kingdom—the kingdom of truth, justice, national strength, and freedom’.19 Predictably, in due course, Hitler initiated Operation Punishment, Serbia was dismembered, hundreds of thousands lost their lives and many more were forced to flee. Concurrently, the Kosovo exodus, and other recent instances of its type, particularly from Krajina and Sarajevo, were celebrated as defining Serbian experiences. Notably, RTS reran a dramatised documentary of Petrovic’s Agonie et Resurrection20 that describes the remarkable actions of Serbs during the Great War when, facing
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occupation by the combined forces of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria, King Peter, Prince Regent Alexander, the entire Serbian government, the army and thousands of civilians undertook a horrendous retreat through Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania and Corfu, where they were to regroup and prepare for return and national resurrection. For Zlatko, however, while these experiences resonated with those of the Krajina Serbs, their exodus was anything but selfinitiated. Despite atrocities committed against his own family in World War II, in the spirit of Brotherhood and Unity he had lived peacefully, if somewhat cautiously, with his Croatian neighbours, even during wartime. On the outer fringes of the Republic of Serbian Krajina and near to the military frontline, he had even been able to make use of his good relations, supplementing his dwindling income from the power plant by exploiting interethnic disparities in supply and demand amongst the various groups that he came across in his movements between the village and Knin. All the time taking a considerable cut, he explained, he took food from Croatian peasants in exchange for cigarettes from Serbian soldiers and, on several occasions, took arms from cash-strapped Serbian soldiers to cashed-up Croatian militia. The end of the Serbian Republic of Krajina came almost without warning. On one of his economic forays he had been warned by Serbian military that a Croatian military offensive was imminent, that the JNA would not resist and that, as a minority Serb in a Croatian-dominated village, his family was in danger. The Serbian military offered them safe passage that night. However, in exchange he was instructed to assist a ‘friend’ in planting land mines on his neighbours’ farms. He did as he was told, all the time, however, recording on a map the mines’ locations. A vehicle was sent to pick him up with his family, but before being allowed to leave he was stripped of the map. On the resumption of peaceful relations between Croatia and Serbia, Zlatko returned to reclaim his property. He visited his old neighbours to let them know of his intention to return. They told him that they would have been willing to protect him in the event of the arrival of Croatian militia. However, he had lost their loyalty and was now no longer welcome. They had learnt that he had been in cahoots with the JNA and that, in an act that they regarded as mindless cruelty typical of his people, he had planted the mines. His
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stories about his efforts to arm Croatian militia, about the pressure he was put under and about the map that he had planned for use in demining fell on deaf ears. How could they possibly believe him? They had learned the story of his treachery from his very own people, Republic of Serbian Krajina officials. The villagers made their feelings about Zlatko’s imminent return clear. When he returned to Republika Srpska to collect his family they burnt his house down. So, what he had initially seen as an, albeit forced, sojourn in Republika Srpska had now become exile. And his exile was not simply a matter of ethnic cleansing. As a member of a minority in Krajina, now sovereign territory of Croatia, he had zero utility for the Serbian state. In contrast, as a member of a majority in Republika Srpska, a quasi-independent entity within a Muslim-majority nation state over which Serbia was desperate to exercise control, principally by ensuring that it maintained a majority, he had considerable such utility. For Zlatko exile was not an act of Serbian self-sacrifice. Rather, reflecting a policy of ethno-demographic consolidation21, it was part of a more general sacrifice of Serbs by Serbia.
Heavenliness Through 2000 the work of the ICTY intensified. Searching for evidence with which to build cases against suspected war criminals, it uncovered more and more mass graves in the territories from which Serbian military had withdrawn. Though often contested as part of a ‘Western’ conspiracy against Serbia, such evidence of the ‘cleansing’ of Serbia’s ethnic others was becoming increasingly hard to refute. In this context, the response of television was complex. Since Miloševic had been indicted by the ICTY to stand trial for war crimes, Serbian state television was anxious to distance him from blame. Rather, it laid responsibility at the door of Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, such as those in the Republic of Serbian Krajina, who, apparently, had acted independently of the Serbian state. Nonetheless, in many respects even their actions were justified. A line of moral equivalence was often developed, in which evidence of mass graves of Serbian victims was shown. Additionally, ethnic cleansing was justified as a bulwark against the historic processes of assimilation, emigration and genocide of the Serbs, dating from the Battle of Kosovo through to the present day. Television engaged, in this respect, in a process of
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selective remembering that has been well documented elsewhere22, the centrepiece of which was broadcasting of the disinterment of the hidden tombs of victims of Ustasha genocide committed by both Catholics and Muslims during World War II. The graves had, in the spirit of preserving Brotherhood and Unity, been strategically forgotten under Tito’s communist regime.23 The broadcasts communicated the message that recent ethnic cleansing had been a legitimate pre-emptive response in the context of the ethnic cleansing of Serbs that would otherwise have resulted from the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosova. Having said this, the broadcasts contained another message. Victims were often represented as the citizenry of Heavenly Serbia. For example, several programs reran the famous speech of Bishop Jovan of Šabac-Valjevo, who stated: Since Prince Lazar and Kosovo the Serbs, above all, have been creating Heavenly Serbia, which today must certainly have grown to become the largest state in heaven. If we only think of those innocent victims of the last war, millions and millions of Serbian men, women and children killed or tortured in the most terrible way or thrown into pits by Ustasha criminals, then we can understand that today’s Serbian empire is in the heavens.24 For Zlatko Heavenly Serbia was not simply a preserve of the dead. Above all, the Krajina Serbs, both dead and alive, are ‘truly God’s chosen children’. As ethnic-minority warrior frontiersmen, initially of Christendom25 and latterly of Greater Serbia, they had suffered disproportionately. Most, Zlatko pointed out, were in touch with living memories of the Ustasha policy on the Serbian question of ‘convert a third, remove a third, kill a third’, in which burning alive was a preferred method. Their recent exodus, though engineered by the Serbian state, was one further example of the persecution of the Krajina Serbs. In this context, he argued, the ethnic cleansing that had been integral to the building of the ‘Republic of Serbian Krajina’ had a particular significance. Not merely pre-emptively legitimate, it was an action integral to the very being of his warrior class of people. Zlatko liked to recite the work of Njegoš—Bishop Petar Petrovic II,
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arguably Serbia’s preeminent national epic poet. In The Mountain Wreath (1857) Njegoš glorifies the slaughter of Slavic Muslims and celebrates the somewhat un-Orthodox act of the granting of holy communion to the slayers without prior confession. This makes clear the proposition that the extermination of ethnic others is inherently sanctifying and purifying. For Zlatko, the killing that his people had engaged in was a basis of their heavenliness.
Saintliness Through 2000 the domestic political legitimacy of Miloševic was eroded by a range of factors—the loss of territory, the Belgrade bombings, corruption and embezzlement scandals and, finally, an unconstitutional attempt to hold on to the presidency following elections. Following mass protests he was forced to resign the presidency. Shortly afterwards he was given over to the ICTY. Despite an accompanying regime change at RTS, these events precipitated a spate of television retrospectives in which Miloševic was unambiguously presented as having inherited Lazar’s saintly mantle. This was evidenced in a range of events, from his very public political conversion from communist to nationalist in Kosovo itself26, to his descent from the skies by helicopter to lead, in the presence of Lazar’s remains and an audience of two million, fully one tenth of the Serbian population on the 600th-anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Kosovo27 through to his intransigence in failing to sign up to Rambouillet. According to television narrative, his intransigence was grounded in the certainty that, while Serbia would lose to NATO, his status as the new Lazar, who fought for a righteous but doomed cause, was guaranteed.28 Zlatko could only look upon such reportage with disbelief. Miloševic was, indeed, a celestial being of sorts. However, referring to a commonplace imagery from rural Serbia, this being was, for Zlatko, more of the vampire variety.29 Through war and corruption he had ‘sucked the life blood out of ordinary Serbs’.
Resurrection Much of late 2000 and beyond was taken up with events at the ICTY. Upon arriving at The Hague Miloševic stated his refusal to recognise the legality of the court’s jurisdiction, and insisted on conducting his own defence. Simultaneously, he experienced a worsening of his
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heart and blood-pressure conditions. Debate raged over the cause of this, especially after a foreign substance was found in his blood stream that weakened the effects of his medication. For some this must have been self-administered in an attempt to obtain the cardiological treatment he was seeking in Russia, and for others it was a covert attempt by the ICTY to assassinate him in order to save face— the case against him was, it was argued, collapsing. Television presented Miloševic’s treatment by the ICTY as tantamount to persecution like that of Christ. And, reflecting another facet of the melding of the national and the biblical, his response was presented as quintessentially Serbian, a manifestation of its small nation in a context of great powers, David in the face of Goliath, character.30 Nonetheless, the imminence of his death was presented as a near certainty. In this context, and with an eye to potential martyrdom, feverish concern was expressed about what would happen to his remains. Would they be released from Brussels? Would they be cremated? Would they be conveniently lost? Viewers were reminded of the importance of the remains of Serbia’s slain heroes, its leaders of the citizenry of Heavenly Serbia. The dramatisation of Petrovic’s Agonie et Resurrection reminded the audience of how the retreating Serbian army regrouped in Corfu and then returned to fight alongside the Allied forces in Salonika, and how the Serbian government in exile laid the foundations of the post-war Yugoslav state. With the Allied victory the new ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ was established. Ethnonationally equal in name only, it became, in fact, a Serbo-Slavic centralised state and constitutional monarchy presided over by the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty. Resurrection! For Zlatko, for whom the historic experience of the Serbs is akin to that of the Israelites31, Petrovic’s tale of retreat and resurrection resonated. While Zlatko’s ambition was simply to rebuild the lives and livelihood of his family, he had no doubt that Greater Serbia would indeed be built once more, and its heartland would be in places such as Republika Srpska, where displaced and newly radicalised Serbs from Krajina, Bosnia and elsewhere had found only a temporary home. However, a typical Yugoslav secularist, he had no time for some of the resurrectionist ‘mumbo-jumbo’ that church authorities and television had brought to the celebration of nationalism. An important aspect of the events described in the dramatisation of Agonie et Resurrection was the
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decision to take into exile the casketed remains of Stefan Prvoven ani, the ‘First Crowned’ Nemanji monarch, who had died some 700 years previously, and later return them to Serbia where they would play a key role in rituals surrounding the inception of the new kingdom. Likewise, television reran footage of events preceding the recent Yugoslav Wars where Lazar’s formerly exiled remains were, in an act designed to mark the sacred space of the nation, ritually transported through areas that would in the following years become Greater Serbia. Nonetheless, by the time of Miloševic’s death in 2006 a more critical and even ribald tone was permitted. Much, for example, was made of the actions of Miroslav Miloševic (no relation to the former president), a leading member of an anti-Miloševic group, who was arrested after leading a gang who claimed to have driven a wooden stake through the heart of the late president. The gang had had to prevent him returning from the dead.
Rebounding Violence: Heavenly Serbia as a Mythic Structure of Belonging Thus far, I have described the use of Heavenly Serbia in contrasting conceptualisations of Serbian experience. Serbs are represented as having been betrayed either by the ‘West’ or by the Serbian state. Serbia as a totality is represented as having engaged in national selfsacrifice, or Serbia’s peripheries are presented as having been sacrificed on behalf of Serbia as a totality by the nation state. Heavenliness is presented as a preserve of the nation’s leaders, or as a preserve of the citizenry of its periphery. The saintliness that, on one hand, is presented as a preserve of the nation’s leaders is, contrastingly, ironicised as malign celestiality. And, finally, national resurrection is represented as intimately connected to leadership, or as a capacity of the citizenry of the periphery. The contrast is not unlike those recorded in other ethnographic accounts of competing visions of the nation between cores and peripheries in other parts of southern Europe.32 Nonetheless, across these manifestations of Heavenly Serbia its core elements of treachery, sacrifice, heavenliness, saintliness and resurrection are shared and constant. Thus, it might be argued, Heavenly Serbia might be considered as a representative example of the kind of religious myth that, according to Bloch, is characterised by a core that is both universal and timeless.
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Indeed, there are marked correspondences between this core as Bloch describes it and Heavenly Serbia.33 First, Bloch argues, religious ritual and myth invariably involve, through actions such as symbolic killing, a departure from the earthly. This is, I would argue, commensurate with the centrality of sacrifice in representations of Serbian experience, from the choice of death rather than subjugation through to retreat rather than vassaldom and exodus rather than minority status within alien nation states. Second, Bloch argues, having departed this life the subjects of ritual and myth are presented as joining the realm of the transcendental. In some instances in the Serbian case, such as Patriarch Gavrilo’s portrayal of sacrificial submission to Nazi genocide, this is presented as a literal entry into a transcendental realm. This is echoed in statements about the citizenry of Heavenly Serbia, particularly by other clerics, such as Šabac-Valjevo. Bloch then goes on to point out that presentation of the subject of ritual or myth as part of a transcendental realm has, however, minimal politico-social value in itself, since, distinct from the realm of the earthly, it has no impact upon the earthly. Thus, such ritual invariably offers a representation of return. However, unlike Van Gennep34 and Turner35, for example, who present this merely as a reintegration into the earthly (society), for Bloch it is a return in which the transcendental remains attached to the subject of ritual or myth. The conjoining of transcendental and earthly, particularly through ideas of heavenliness and saintliness, is replete within representations of Serbian national experience, whether through a literal conjoining of the earthly and the transcendental by disinterment and the presence of the dead in the everyday, through the presentation of leaders as saintly emissaries or through the representation of present-day Serbs as members of lineages whose defining experiences are suffering and death. In an important addendum to his thesis Bloch argues that the subject in religious ritual and myth is invariably represented, following her/his symbolic killing, as regaining vitality on return. However, it is not the earthly vitality of the realm from and to which the subject has symbolically departed and returned, but rather a conquered vitality obtained from ‘outside’ beings—plants, animals, women and other peoples, for example. The killing of others is clearly central to ideas of Serbian nationhood, especially in the Njegošian
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association of ethnic cleansing and heavenliness. In religious ritual and myth, Bloch demonstrates, this conquering of others is also symbolically enacted at the level of selfhood. Identity is conceptualised as dualistic, and ritual involves the defeat of the aspect of selfhood (such as the feminine in the Merina case) associated with earthliness, and the victory of the aspect of selfhood associated with the transcendental (the masculine in the Merina case). Likewise, ethnic cleansing is for many Serbs conceptualised as the conquering of an earthly self that persists within the other. Commonly, ethnic others are represented as Serbs who have been induced to lapse by the earthly temptations of empire, by, for example, the privileges granted by Ottomans in exchange for Islamic conversion. Importantly, it is this idea of conquered vitality that, above all, for Bloch, places religious myth and ritual in a position in which it tends to furnish ‘idioms of expansionist violence to people’, idioms ‘which under certain circumstances become legitimation for actual violence’.36 Through its representation of cycles of treachery, sacrifice, saintliness, heavenliness and, of course, resurrection, Heavenly Serbia does indeed furnish an idiom of expansionist violence. Moreover, as Anzulovic demonstrates so copiously in an account that does no less than present every instance of Serbian military aggression as rationalised by the myth37, this often gives on to actual violence. However, most importantly, for Bloch, the conjoining of the earthly and the transcendental presages a conquering and transformation of the earthly per se such that it becomes transcendental in itself. In these times of national defeat and (a fear all too replete in Serbian interpretations of history) threatened ethno-national annihilation38, Heavenly Serbia has a particular significance—less than an expression of a nation in waiting, it is, rather, simply a statement of a nation in being.
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I thank Ghassan Hage for his invitation to contribute to this volume, Senka Božic-Vrbancic, John Cash, Chris Cordner, Tamara Kohn, Maree Pardy, Vicky Schubert and Mary Patterson for their commentaries on the text, Stef Jansen, my research collaborator in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Toyota Foundation and Leverhulme Trust who funded the research. Notably, by the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians and Nazi Germany.
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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Currently, for example, the former-Yugoslav space consists of seven nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. See, for example, Thompson, M. In general, the space for nationalism’s emergence in former Yugoslavia has been conceptualised in terms of structural factors—economic crisis, globalisation and, above all, decentralisation of political power such that constituent nations of the federation were set on a path of inexorable resource competition. It is only the emergence of nationalism itself that has, by and large, been explained in terms of the agency of political actors who, through populism and, especially, tight control of media, managed to mobilise nationalist mass movements. The appeal of nationalism for such political actors (ex-communists) has been conceptualised as, most commonly, lying in its ability to offer a new post-communist discourse of state legitimation, or, more innovatively, as a means of ‘demobilising’ civilians who in a period of post-communist unrest would otherwise have clamoured for democratic change (see, for example, Gagnon). Other exceptions to this are the large bodies of niche literature on memory (see, for example, Hoepken) and discourses of gender (see, for example, Zardov) and sexuality (see, for example, Mostov). Judah, p. 36. Ibid. Anzulovic. Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina have, effectively, a one-third say, principally through the mechanism of the rotating presidency, in national affairs. However, ultimate authority rests with the protectorate organisation, ‘The Organisation of the High Representative’. Bloch, From Blessing to Violence. Bloch, Prey Into Hunter. Especially during the birth of nationalism in the nineteenth century, at moments of anti-colonial rebellion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during the 1912–13 Balkan wars and through the re-emergence of nationalism in the late twentieth century. Sells. Alcock, p. 366. This is a misrepresentation of the talks held between Miloševic and Tudjman in Karadjordjevo in 1991 in which a partition of Bosnia was agreed. See, for example, Todorova. See, for example, Ramet. Cited in Emmert, p. 160. Petrovic. See also Duijzings. See, for example, Jansen. See, for example, Bax. Cited in Judah, p. 47.
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25 The Krajina Serbs were initially installed in the region by the Habsburgs after displacement from Serbia by the Ottomans. In exchange for land they were to provide a military frontier against Ottoman expansion. 26 Silber and Little, pp. 37–47 27 Sells, p. 181. 28 See also Judah. 29 Barber, pp. 15–21. 30 See also Van der Port. 31 See also Lowenthal. 32 See, for example, Herzfeld, pp. 1–46. 33 For a summary of the core, see Bloch, Prey Into Hunter, pp. 4–7. 34 Van Gennep. 35 Turner. 36 Bloch, Prey Into Hunter, p. 6. 37 Anzulovic. 38 For example, ethno-national annihilation is the defining theme of the famous Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, the leaked document that came to be regarded as the main precursor of and intellectual justification for Serbian expansionism in the 1990s.
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Part III Waiting Affects
chapter 13
Waiting, Patience and Love Christopher Cordner
In ‘The Idea of Perfection’ Iris Murdoch speaks of loving ‘attention’ as a mode of acknowledging the reality of another.1 Murdoch takes her idea of attention from Simone Weil2, originally from Weil’s ‘attente de Dieu’. Literally ‘waiting for God’, Weil’s phrase is commonly translated ‘waiting on God’.3 Both modes of waiting are linked with attention. If I am really to attend to what you say, or just to you, I must wait for what will come from you, not pre-empt it by thinking I already know what it will be, assimilating it to expectations or categories I bring to the occasion. But then I must also wait on it when it comes, be present and open to it, letting it work upon me. Real attention to another is thus what allows their otherness to shape our response to them, rather than our assimilating the other to the patterns of meaning we impose. The important idea of attention has found various partial expressions in Western philosophy. The best known is Kant’s ‘achtung’—literally translated ‘attention’, and perhaps carrying something of the parade-ground connotation of austere, formal respect.4 For Kant such attention is effected by a subject’s reason or rationality. Such attention is also responsive to reason or rationality in another; and the affective attitude carried by such attention is respect. For both Simone Weil and Murdoch, by contrast, love is integral to real
attention to another; and such loving attention is also not an orientation to the other merely ‘as rational’ but rather as a whole human being. Moreover, love involves a receptiveness that reason does not. What is not assimilable by reason is excluded by it, banished as merely senseless. Love, by contrast, as we are reminded in the famous ‘negative’ descriptions of 1 Corinthians 13, ‘beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things’. (This needs some qualifying later.) As those verbs ‘beareth, endureth’ testify, love is patient, accepting of what is loved. Loving attention thus extends beyond ‘contemplation’ or ‘appreciation’5 in the direction not of agency—appropriating or controlling or changing or moulding or manipulating—but of receptiveness, acceptance and, as we will see, affirmation. Murdochian attention, while simple, is not straightforwardly given in any empirical terms. That is why I spoke in the first paragraph about what is involved in ‘real’ attention. Attention is, to use a term currently favoured by philosophers, a normative concept. One can fail in no duties to another, in one sense ‘attending’ to all her needs, without rising to what is needed for Murdochian attention. The above passage from Corinthians goes on to say something strikingly similar: ‘though I understand all mysteries, and all knowledge … though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing’. (I am not a Christian, and my argument depends on no Christian assumptions or doctrine, but Christian thought affords striking versions of many of the points I wish to make.) A generation after Kant, John Keats described the poetic mode as one of ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.6 The ‘chameleon poet’7 waits for otherness to come upon her, receptive to taking on its colour and pattern. This receptiveness to the world is literally a form of patience—that term’s etymology linking it to suffering or undergoing—and thus akin to passivity. But Keats’s delicate and crucial point is that creative activity is at work through this mode of responsiveness. He would thus have agreed with Coleridge that poetry ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’.8 The receptiveness of such waiting is then far from mere
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passivity or ‘negativity’; it is, after all, negative capability. As we shall see, Keats’s point about poetry has a much wider application. Kant himself in fact prefigures an aspect of these shared concerns of Keats and Coleridge, with his idea of ‘reflective judgment’. Kant distinguishes two modes of judging: we can judge ‘determinantly’ or ‘reflectively’.9 In determinant judgment ‘a ‘concept is given and the individual is subsumed under it’.10 Modifying Francis Bacon’s image—that we scientists stretch nature on the rack and extort her secrets from her—Kantian determinant judgment has us forcing ‘nature’, or the world, onto the conceptual frame or rack that provides our understanding of it. Here is a familiar model of ‘objective’ knowledge, as mediated by an attitude of detachment, independent of feeling, and aiming at systematic or theoretical completeness. Historically, engagement in one branch or another of the physical sciences has been taken as best exemplifying this mode of knowing. In reflective judgment, by contrast, ‘the individual is given and a concept must be found for it’.11 There is a kind of swivelling of the soul, making for a receptiveness to ‘the individual’, in which we seek a way of realising it in its individuality. ‘Judgment’ risks being a misleading term here, since it implies a one-directional activity—of judger on object. But in reflective judgment the judger is placed or modified by the object as much as she judges it. In Keats’s apt term, we are ‘chameleons’, being shaped and coloured by what we encounter, rather than forcing the world into the frame we impose upon it. ‘Getting to know someone’ can unfold this way, where the task involves you emotionally, indeed summons the whole of you in response; where your sense of yourself is at stake in a developing relationship with the other; where the task is both contextual and endless, and the very idea of systematic or theoretical completeness has no application. (Empathy is a form of reflective judgment.) These modes of judgment are diametrically opposed. But this does not mean that they operate independently of one another, any more than the diametrically opposed physical forces of attraction and repulsion do. Kant is I think mistakenly inclined to speak as if his two modes of judgment do operate independently of one another, encouraged in this error by his separating out of ‘aesthetics’ as reflective judgment’s distinctive domain of operation. In fact each mode depends on the other, and there is continuous and often
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fruitful oscillation between the two modes (even if there can also be serious tension). This Kantian contrast between modes of judging, and its echo in subsequent Romantic thought, is one key way in which the importance of waiting on what is other to us has found philosophical articulation. There is a reason for speaking of waiting-on rather than waiting-for here. So far as ‘the individual is given’, otherness has, so to speak, already emerged, and one then waits on how it will shape one’s realising of it. Keats’s negative capability can be read as including the receptiveness necessary even for emergence of the individual, and thus as holding within it waiting-for as well as waiting-on. Another way of putting this is to say that negative capability is engaged before judgment, even when judgment is reflective. Negative capability includes a prior receptiveness that is a condition even of reflective judgment. As noted, Kant himself relegated reflective judgment to aesthetics, outside the domains of knowledge and practice. But his idea can be extended, to bring out how what is involved in waiting-on can inform our deepest engagements with the world and one another. One direction of my argument is suggested by Iris Murdoch’s transforming of Romanticism from within, by feminising its historically masculine bent.12 The Kantian sublime, for example, involves our being returned, in the experience of the sublime—in the characteristic Romantic form of mighty cataracts, towering mountains, raging storms—to an exhilarating sense of our own rational transcendence of what otherwise would be experienced as simply beyond our power either of imagination or of physical resistance, and in either case as overwhelming. We are able to face these things with a sense of our own distinctive power of rising above their threat to our physical or our imaginative capacities.13 In the experience of the sublime we imaginatively realise the strength of our own independent, transcendent, rational will—those traditional traits of the masculine. While acknowledging the sublime as encounter with what cannot be mastered, Murdoch has a different emphasis. ‘The pages of Shakespeare abound in free and eccentric personalities whose reality Shakespeare has apprehended and displayed as something quite separate from himself’.14 According to Murdoch it is the great merit of the novel as an art form to allow space to the ‘contingent, messy,
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boundless, infinitely particular’ individual other.15 The reality of the other then cannot be known by Kantian determinant judgment, since the excess of the individual over whatever determinant judgment might deliver marks precisely the reality of the human being. Its reality therefore lies beyond the scope of such judgment, and can indeed only be answered to by a responsiveness that waits upon that always-undetermined excess. In this responsiveness, however, there is not the self-sufficiency of the independent transcendent rational will, but the open-ended, open-hearted, humble receptiveness that Murdoch calls love. Since ‘waiting’ can be a one-word answer to the question ‘What is she doing?’, waiting can be described as an action, something done. (It shares, it is true, something of the unusual character of activities like sleeping, sitting, lying down, resting, in that one can, in the very doing of the thing, be almost entirely passive and inert.) Like any activity, waiting can be ‘done’ in a variety of ways. Among many other ways, people can wait nervously, expectantly, joyously, fearfully, reluctantly, and patiently or impatiently. My concern is with Murdochian attention, and the waiting-for and waiting-on that it involves; and I now want to explore whether such waiting can be adequately characterised as patient waiting. (My answer will be that it can, but only when patience takes an especially pure form.) One who waits impatiently finds himself prevented from realising his will—and chafes at the prevention. One might wait thus impatiently for rain, for her to say yes, for one’s next pay cheque. The impatient waiter finds his being in time an obstacle. He would stride over time if he could, to get what he is waiting for. He cannot ‘let things be’, cannot ‘give himself over’ to temporality. The patient waiter, by contrast, does give herself over to the passing of time. But strangely, she thereby in a sense transcends it. As Kierkegaard puts it: ‘by his patience the prisoner effects his freedom, though not in the sense that need make the jailer anxious or fearful’.16 By her wholehearted acceptance of temporality, it is as if the truly patient person realises herself beyond the effects of time, even though her waiting takes place within time. The word ‘realise’ can be a rough synonym for ‘recognise’—‘re-cognising’ what is there already or anyway. But it can also carry the more active or creative sense of ‘make real’. So one can ‘realise’ one’s assets, transforming them into ‘real’ capital; or one
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might realise one’s dream, transforming it from dream into reality; or poetry can realise something by making it imaginatively present, as TS Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’ perhaps realises for us a sense of cultural exhaustion. In the present context ‘realises’ carries this generative sense. But let me now try to clarify this difficult idea of patience. Patience can vary in depth. Of course some people have very little patience, if any, and among those who show patience, some show it more often than others. But this difference is not necessarily a difference in what I’m calling depth of patience. Two women may wait for marriage, say, equally keenly and with apparently equal patience. Suppose marriage comes to neither, and one of them is devastated by that outcome, but the other, somehow, avoids being so. Then the first one’s patience depended on the conviction that the actual outcome would indeed fall as she wanted it. This conviction sustained in her an ‘empirical’ or conditional patience, dependent on a belief about how things as a matter of fact are or will be. Such patience will crumble as that belief is contradicted by events. The different response of the other woman—who equally keenly hoped for marriage but was able to accept the situation when marriage did not come—might merit a historical explanation. Perhaps the world has often enough rewarded her patience in the past. Then her present response may belong to an economy of satisfaction in which she has a favourable balance to draw on to sustain her through this disappointment. It may be so. But there is also the possibility of a patient response that resists explanation in such terms: a patience that is not conditional in that way on the world’s rewards. I should call this a deeper, or purer, patience. Indeed it may be no less than saintly, and too much to expect of anyone. (I am not talking of the capacity to hide one’s devastation by putting on a good face to the world, admirable though that may sometimes be.) Wittgenstein wrote: ‘The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.’17 Note that the first sentence says that the happy life is one that ‘can renounce’, not ‘… does renounce’, the amenities of the world. Wittgenstein is not urging a stoic or Eastern detachment from enjoyment of the world’s ‘amenities’. They can indeed be enjoyed whole-heartedly, but they can be part of a happy life only so far as one is not dependent on
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one’s enjoyment of them. They can ‘grace’ the happy life, but one must be able to let them go. (Why so, according to Wittgenstein? Because since we ‘cannot ward off the misery of this world’, readiness to renounce its amenities is necessary if one is to be happy ‘in spite of the misery of the world’.18) When the ‘amenities’ in question are, for example, one’s reputation or the people one most loves—or perhaps the expectation of marriage in at least some cultural contexts—it is a serious question whether this combination of attitudes is even psychologically possible for anyone. Detachment from the world is one response to this state of affairs. But if you think, as I do, that such detachment dehumanises people, what then? Must it simply be conceded that the patience I described is a false ideal, that it cannot seriously be affirmed? Not so. There can of course be dangers in trying to live in the light of psychologically unrealisable ideals, since a sense of inadequacy for one’s failure can sometimes be simply debilitating. But it need not be so, and in the present case I believe it is not so. Perhaps a certain crudeness in modern moral philosophy masks appreciation of this possibility. A parent can acknowledge that his love for his children should be unconditional (I’ll come back to this), while fearing, perhaps even knowing, that if circumstances become bad enough his love will fail to be so. But the ‘ideal’ of such love may still be a light by which he can not only reflect on his limitations as a parent but also be moved to be a better one. More generally, it may be that the conditions of being fully humanly alive in, and to, the world inevitably expose us to the risk, and perhaps even the certainty, of failing to live by the light of ideals that inescapably haunt us. What I called deep patience has been in many cultural contexts such an ideal. (It has often taken a distinctively religious form in cultures shaped by the great monotheistic religions: that whatever happens is the will of God and to be accepted wholeheartedly as such.) If what has to be accepted thus patiently is, for example, the death of a child, it may be that noone can actually do it. But, to repeat, that is not necessarily a good reason for saying that one should either relinquish the ideal, or otherwise to some extent try to limit one’s love for one’s children. As noted earlier, patience is literally ‘suffering’, undergoing rather than doing. It comes from the Latin pati, meaning to suffer, submit to, allow. Recall Jesus’s injunction: ‘Suffer the little children to
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come unto me’, simply meaning ‘Let them come’. But if waiting is, even so, something we can do, so is waiting patiently. Even deep patience can co-exist with ‘agency’, activity, exercise of the will. It is an attitude or manner or orientation—of something like acceptance—that can show itself in or through the exercise of the will. The adverbial phrase—doing whatever ‘patiently’—captures this. As Wittgenstein puts it: ‘Here everything seems to turn on how one wants’;19 and the mode or manner of wanting that is compatible with what he means by ‘renouncing the amenities of the world’ is, precisely, wanting ‘patiently’. When that is ‘how’ one wants, one can try as hard as possible, provided only one accepts wholeheartedly the outcome, whether success or failure. Recall Kierkegaard’s prisoner: it is an important point, not made by Kierkegaard, that the prisoner’s patience is compatible with his longing to be free. Indeed, it is even compatible with his trying to escape.20 What matters is the spirit in which, the attitude with which, he does these things. A religious version of this attitude makes it clear: the patient person can want as strongly, and try as hard, as possible, provides she can also say, ‘Yet let not my will but thine be done’. The problem, of course—the deep human difficulty—is that saying this, even saying it sincerely, is one thing; meaning it with one’s whole heart is another. As I said before, there may be circumstances in which it is not psychologically possible for human beings to do this. But even when that is so, not only does it remain possible to make sense of this concurrence—of deep patience with vigorous exercise of the will—but our cultural tradition shows that many have found nourishment in envisioning it. For me a beautiful image of this combination of attitudes was the marvellous grace of the tennis player Evonne Goolagong-Cawley. When she missed a volley, even on a crucial point, she would turn and go back for the next point as if with a wholehearted acceptance of what had happened, not because she was not caught up in the game, but as if even so she could treat its pleasures and outcome as so many ‘graces of fate’. There was a kind of surplus in her orientation, as if she stood outside the world of time and change in which she was also absorbed by this activity. We might feel tempted to say: so far as her orientation has this surplus or reserve, she could not be as fully involved in the activity—could not want as strongly—as one whose orientation lacked that surplus. But I see no reason to accept
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this. Compare: ‘someone who would not commit murder to save her child’s life cannot love her child as much as one who would do that’. Not so: the difference between them may be simply that one acknowledges limits on what she can do to protect her child that the other does not acknowledge. Similarly, the Goolagong-Cawley surplus or reserve does not mean that she must want less strongly, only that she also has an orientation beyond the wanting. Another example: someone deeply psychologically disturbed may show a grace in the way he lives even his psychological disintegration—a patience in, an acceptance of, even this terrible contingency. Neil, one of the people in the Seven Up television series, was like this. The example suggests the possibility of deep patience informing a person’s whole mode of being-in-the-world. It is then an acceptance of the world as a whole, an acceptance that is not contingent on how things in fact are or turn out. (But there is an ambiguity in that sentence. To say the acceptance is ‘not contingent on how things in fact are or turn out’ is to point to the content of the acceptance, the kind of acceptance it is, and not to the likelihood of its continuance. Recall the psychological limitations I mentioned earlier: no human being can know that she will remain able thus patiently to accept whatever happens. She can only hope that she will do so.) We can here appreciate the force of Murdoch’s feminising of the Romantic sublime. Goolagong-Cawley’s grace is an example of it, in minor key. Her acceptance of what happens is precisely a matter of answering to what she cannot master. But the masculinist Kantian sublime has us thereby exulting in our own power of rational transcendence of the contingent world. Goolagong-Cawley’s grace, like that of the person managing to live his psychological disintegration with a deep patience, by contrast realises a spirit of humble, loving acceptance. But patience, and Goolagong-Cawley’s grace, is more than acceptance; it involves an affirmation of the world, in a way the experience of the sublime (at least as understood within Romanticism) does not. The latter attunes us to our own rational transcendence of the world, and thereby leaves the world behind. I said before that it is as if in her patience the patient person realises herself ‘beyond the effects of time’, but she does so in a way that necessarily also relates
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her to, indeed embeds her in, the world. The kind of being-beyondtime realised by such patience is what it is only as an affirmation of the world ‘as a whole’. The ‘masculine’ attitude identifies us as, so to speak, transcendence ‘in itself’, non-relationally: it removes us to an ‘outside the world’ that is, or at least sets itself to be, independent of the world that is transcended. (This transcendence realised in the experience of the sublime parallels the detached mastery of determinant judgment.) The ‘feminine’ attitude, by contrast, realises an outside that is necessarily the outside of an inside. It makes sense only relationally—as an affirmation of the world. At the same time, though, this affirmation is not dependent on ‘how things are’ in the world. This is the reason for calling it an affirmation of the world ‘as a whole’, but that in turn has to be understood in a way that makes room for this affirmation to be expressed in and through gestures, deeds, movements, engagements with the actual ‘how things are’ of the world—in and through how you play tennis, for example, if you are Goolagong-Cawley. (This difference between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ transcendence is mirrored in traditional disputes in Christian theology about whether God is immanent as well as transcendent.) I want to link this difference—between what I am calling, roughly, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ transcendence, the latter a transcendence realised only in a certain mode of immanence—with a difference in modes of love. Erich Fromm contrasted what he called mother’s love with father’s love. Mother’s love he described as unconditional, meaning that neither its bestowal nor its continuance is contingent on its being earned by any merits, deeds or qualities of the one loved. Father’s love, by contrast, has to be earned and can therefore be lost, according to contingencies of deed or character of the one on whom the love is bestowed.21 Fromm did not mean that all mothers show unconditional love, or that only mothers can or should show it, while fathers cannot and should not. Nor did he mean that father’s love is shown by all or only fathers. A father can love ‘like a mother’, and vice versa. Despite Fromm’s occasional tendency to essentialise these loves in gender terms, his key point is the distinction between two kinds of love. It might have been better to label them maternal and paternal love, to avoid any suggestion of such essentialism, but since Fromm’s terms are ‘mother’s love’ and ‘father’s
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love’, I’ll continue to use them. It is also important that, although Fromm discusses them in relation to infants and small children, expressions of these two kinds of love are far from confined to that context. Fromm said that the infant experiences mother’s love as his or her being loved simply ‘because I am’22; and the suggestion is that the infant finds this to be an absolute or unconditional affirmation of who she is, because it is an affirmation not conditional on her efforts or qualities or achievements or deeds.23 In the light, or perhaps the warmth, of this love the infant is then moved to affirm herself as not fixed or defined by any number of specific qualities or traits, precisely because she experiences the love as ‘of her’ regardless of what she specifically is or does. So the affirmation involved in unconditional love is initially an affirmation by the one who loves, but it can engender a like self-affirmation by the one loved. This self-affirmation is quite different from self-esteem, which is based (as the etymology of the word suggests) on an ‘estimation’ of oneself, which is to alter with any alteration in what the estimation is based on, and is therefore conditional. It is not simply self-respect either, precisely because it is a form of self-love ! But when self-respect is thought of as unconditional—as an attitude to oneself that is to be sustained whatever one is or becomes or does—then it is certainly much closer than self-esteem is to the self-love I’m speaking of. But in the Kantian tradition that has done most to articulate the character of unconditional respect, such respect is anchored in rationality, and tied tightly to dignity; and the self-love in question here reaches beyond affirmation of oneself in those terms. The difference between Fromm’s paternal and maternal love recalls a difference between reason and (a certain kind of ) love that I touched on at the outset. Mother’s love excludes nothing, is unconditionally accepting of its object. Just as reason divides and excludes—what does not submit to its categories is excluded as senseless—so father’s love is given only as its object submits to the demands of paternal reason: ‘you are worthy of my love so far as you are or do this, but not that’. Such love includes the other only alongside its readiness to exclude. Hence there remains an anxiety in the receipt of such love, just because it is alienable by contingencies of what one is and does: it does not affirm a sense of who one is that
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reaches beyond contingency, as Fromm’s mother’s love does. Father’s love is thus predicated on what Kant called determinant judgment of the other: ‘if I can clearly ascertain that you are or do this or that, then you will be loved’. Mother’s love, by contrast, is an expression of reflective judgment. The love is itself a distinctive mode of receptiveness to, or acceptance of, its object. It answers to the individual ‘as a whole’, in a way that cannot be justified by reference to any determinable qualities or deeds of the other. One could say: with so-called father’s love, the other is loved because s/he is known to be a certain way; whereas with so-called mother’s love, the other is known to be absolutely or unconditionally valuable because s/he is loved.24 From the perspective of this mode of ‘judging’, the reality of the other is given only to a certain kind of love.25 (This brings out one reason why it is a mistake to restrict reflective judgment to the domain of the aesthetic, as Kant restricts it, as if it is always concerned only with aesthetic appearances, and never with how things really are.) But this difference between mother’s and father’s love exactly parallels the difference between deep patience’s unconditional affirmation of the world and a valuing of the world according to how it answers one’s needs and fulfils one’s expectations. In realising Murdochian attention, mother’s love involves a patient waiting on this other person, that may also obtain in relation to any situation a person is in, and can indeed inform a whole orientation to the world. I have spoken of deep patience, then, as both a possible ideal relation to the world, and also as illuminating Murdochian attention as a kind of waiting-on the other. But suppose I were asked: ‘why should anyone be moved to respond, or more generally to live, in a way that is expressive of what you call deep patience?’ Well, I do not think there is any ‘should’ about it. But as we saw, this orientation, expressed as unconditional love of the other, invites being understood by the one loved as an unconditional affirmation of ‘who she is’, an affirmation of who she is as beyond the reach of time and contingency, which can kindle just such a self-affirmation in her. Then what I have called deep patience is, in its unconditional affirming of the world, a kind of reflection of such a self-affirmation, indeed a lived expression of it. Two final comments. First, we need to appreciate the significance of calling deep patience a ‘possible ideal relation to the world’.
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In Fromm’s terms, next to mother’s love stands father’s love (as well as many other cultural demands), by which we are summoned to various contingent ‘senses’ of who we are that can make us vulnerable and anxious, precisely because they are subject to time—that is, subject to change. As creatures in time we necessarily have, and are answerable to, such ‘contingent identities’26, such senses of who we are. But this means that we cannot understand ourselves only under the aegis of the unconditional affirmation of mother’s love, even when we are lucky enough to have been nourished by it, any more than a person’s relation to the world can consist only in negative capability. For the same reason, the ‘ideal’ relation to the world expressed in deep patience cannot be for anyone the single actual element of his or her living. It can and does enter our experience here and there, and there can even be the hope of its informing all of one’s responses and engagements. But this can be a hope only, precisely because we are not gods but human beings vulnerable to contingency. This is of course not itself a regrettable fact about us—even if it very often finds regrettable expressions—but simply integral to who we are. Secondly, some might call the orientation I have described a religious one. That is fine, but it is very important that it does not rely, and indeed never did or could rely, on independent commitment to religious belief, nor on any other ‘grand metaphysical narratives’ of Western culture. To suppose otherwise is—putting the point in terms I used earlier—to assume that the feminised sublime must be grounded in the truth of a determinant judgment about religious matters. But it cannot be so grounded. I have tried to show how the ideas of waiting and patience can be pressed to recover for us the possibility of a certain sense of ‘self’ that has been a recurrent theme of Western culture. Historically, it may have found its richest expressions in distinctively religious language and practice. One motive for my activity of recuperation in this paper is to indicate how else the possibility of that sense of self may be kept alive for us.
Notes 1 2 3
Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, p. 313. Ibid., p. 327. Attente de Dieu is in fact the title of a book by Simone Weil, published in English translation as Waiting on God.
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4 5
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Kant, The Metaphysic of Morals, pp. 186, 198–9. David Velleman characterises love as a mode of appreciation, in ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, pp. 99–104. Sabina Lovibond hints that love has a receptivity that contemplation, at least in a common understanding of it tracing to Aristotle, lacks. See ‘In Spite of the Misery of the World: Ethics, Contemplation and the Source of Value’, p. 315. Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December, 1817, p. 53. Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October, 1818, p. 172. Coleridge, p. 269. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 18. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 18. See Laverty, p. 7. Kant, Critique of Judgment, especially pp. 90–117. In my brief summary I have combined what Kant there distinguishes as the mathematical sublime and the dynamically sublime. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, p. 275. Ibid., p. 274. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, p. 173. Peter Winch cites and discusses the passage from which this sentence comes, in ‘Can a Good Man Be Harmed?’, pp. 205–7. Wittgenstein, p. 81. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 78 ‘But Kierkegaard says that the freedom the prisoner’s patience effects need not make the jailer anxious, and surely the jailer might well have reason to be anxious about the prisoner who is trying to escape?’ Yes he would, but then it is not the prisoner’s patience itself that is making the jailer anxious but only the attempt to escape that is doing so. Making such an attempt is not necessary to his patience, but it may be compatible with it. Fromm, pp. 33–6. If Fromm is right that there are (at least) these two different kinds of love, then the passage from Corinthians I quoted earlier is not true of everything rightly called ‘love’. Also: the passage I quote below from the Epistle to the Romans interestingly complicates Fromm’s contrast, since God’s love is there given the unconditional character of Fromm’s ‘mother’s love’. Ibid., p. 34. There are some interesting questions here: Might the infant mistakenly take mother’s love to be unconditional when it is not? How, on the basis of merely finite experience of mother’s love is the infant able to experience it as unconditional at all? Compare Henry James saying of Balzac that he did not love his characters because he knew them, he knew them because he loved them. Cited in Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, p. 285. Under Kant’s influence the category of the aesthetic comes to be a kind of rag-bag for what cannot be accommodated within extant categories of
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theoretical and practical reason. But the real task is to overcome the restrictiveness of those categories. 26 The phrase is adapted from Christine Korsgaard, who speaks of our ‘contingent practical identities’ (pp. 239–50). The contrast she draws with a human or moral identity that is necessary for human beings is highly suggestive, though developed in rationalistic terms I do not share (pp. 120–30, 237–8).
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chapter 14
Waiting To Be Loved: The European Union’s Hope To Be the Loved Object Senka Bozic-Vrbancic
On 26 September 2008, the European cultural project Esplanada das Culturas gathered together several immigrant associations in Lisbon, Portugal, to discuss the importance of intercultural dialogue for forging a European common identity. At the same time, Russian pupils and teachers in Volgograd discussed the relationship between different cultures in their city. Simultaneously, the public of Marseilles, France, was invited to join the painting of ‘Une mosaïque pour la Paix’. These events were just three of around 400 actions that took place all over Europe on this one day. Within the framework of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue this day was declared the ‘Intercultural Dialogue Day’. School workshops, public movie screenings, concerts, and panel discussions on European culture were organised simultaneously in 21 countries. All these events culminated under the slogan ‘unity in diversity’.1 Esplanada das Culturas is part of the big network of projects established by European public policy makers that strive to produce ‘European culture’ and ‘European identity’. Alongside many other projects supported by the European Union (EU) institutions (for example, ‘The Spring Day for Europe’, ‘Iyouwe share the world’, ‘Meeting the Other’, ‘Stranger festival’, ‘Strong European emotions’),
it is designed to create mutual understanding and respect for different cultures and a strong sense of emotional belonging to Europe (in addition to a strong sense of a regional and national belonging). As early as 1985, Jacques Delors, the European Commission’s president, proclaimed that, ‘You don’t fall in love with a common market; you need something else’2. Since then, the role of European cultural projects (new festivals and awards or celebration of heritage sites) has been to make Europeans ‘fall in love with Europe’, to create Europeanness as a ‘new category of subjectivity’. As Christine Albanel, French Minister for Culture and Communication, recently said: ‘A lot still has to be done to breathe life into Europe, to deepen the European cultural identity. And for that, we need concrete cultural projects.’3 In this essay, inspired by Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotions and construction of collective identities4, I analyse these attempts to make Europe ‘alive’ and to encourage ‘Europeans to love Europe’ as a form of waiting. As Ahmed claims, love is crucial for the formation of group identities, and it comes into being as a form of reciprocity; ‘the lover wants to be loved back’. In the case of national love, the nation functions as the loved one, and lovers (national subjects) expect the nation to ‘give back’ the love (for example, to offer a good and harmonious life despite any deprivation and disturbances). Ahmed states that despite the fact that the nation fails to return this love, the subject ‘stays with the nation … as leaving would mean recognising that the investment of national love over a lifetime has brought no value’.5 In the case of the EU I argue that European institutions such as the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and so on play the role of the lover that desperately wants to be loved back by European citizens. To date, it appears that European citizens have failed to sufficiently return the love, given the fact that the evidence in some countries of the union suggests widespread scepticism towards the EU and its cultural programs.6 This failure has worked to increase European institutional investment in the creation of ‘European people’ by financing various cultural projects. And, in the same way as Ahmed claims that national love is a form of waiting, I argue that in the case of the EU the institutional love that results with the investments in the European people becomes a form of waiting. As Ahmed states: ‘To wait is to extend one’s investment and the longer one waits the more one is invested,
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that is, the more time, labour and energy has been expended. The failure of return extends one’s investment’. 7 By focusing on the European institutional investment in the European people as a form of waiting I ask, how does waiting for European citizens to ‘fall in love with Europe’ reflect on issues of identification? What kind of jouissance (enjoyment) is created through the process of waiting?8
The Promise of Waiting: A Jouissance of ‘Unity in Diversity’ Psychoanalysis has long shown us the importance of love for social bonding. Freud in his Group Psychology asserts that ‘love’ is a nucleus of social bonding, it links individuals to one another, it puts limits to narcissism (self-love), it shapes groups as a uniform entity, where members tolerate each other. The earliest expression of love with another person comes through identification. According to Freud there are three forms of identification: (1) with the father, (2) with the object-choice of love and (3) with a common quality shared with some other persons.9 The identification with father is the identification with the image we would like to be. Love for the object involves investment, which means that self-love overflows on to the object, it idealises the object. It posits the object of love in the place of the ego ideal, the place from which the subject observes him/herself in a lovable way. When a common quality is put in the place of the object of love then the magic of collective identification appears in its strongest form. For Lacan, there is a something more that is involved in the mechanisms of love. Through the process of identification the subject seeks the fullness of her or his identity in the symbolic (the world of words), but this fullness which the subject seeks is impossible since with an entering into the symbolic the subject sacrifices something, she or he sacrifices an immediate access to the real (unity, wholeness). The subject thus becomes alienated and this ‘alienation constitutes the subject as such’.10 In Lacan, this lack of the real is the lack of a pre-symbolic, real enjoyment, a lack of jouissance. The sacrifice of jouissance causes desire for it, and in that context it becomes posited as an external object, which remains desirable but still impossible. So, what makes something (or someone) the object of love is the very jouissance that keeps our desire in motion. Love in this context is how the subject deals with his or her own lack, and with the
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lack in the loved one.11 Investment in the object of love means an investment in the process where the part assumes the role of fullness and becomes a source of enjoyment. Waiting here is a synonym for the investment; it is an effect produced by the symbolic structure in which the subject has been embedded. In the case of the EU this process of waiting for a new collective supranational identity, the process of investment in the object of love, started in the 1980s, when European politicians realised that economic integration did not create social and cultural integration. In 1985, Jacques Delors stressed that Europe had to be more than simply an economic association. His claim that ‘An organism without a soul is dead. A united Europe needs a soul’ marked the moment when the first attempts to create passionate attachments were established. These attempts included the creation of new symbols of Europeanness (the flag, the anthem, a common design for passports) and a few cultural and educational projects that promoted cooperation between different national states, stressing at the same time that all of them on one side are unique but on the other side have something in common—‘shared European heritage’. The stress on the common heritage that coexists with cultural differences culminated with the concept ‘unity in diversity’, which was formalised in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty: The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore.12 This connection between diversity on the one side and commonality on the other is nothing new. Ahmed 13 argues that in multicultural societies (such as Australia and the UK) the ‘cultural difference’ (different styles of music, dress and food) is celebrated as the main characteristic of the nation and therefore marks the diversity of the national ‘we’. However, there is always something in multicultural national narratives that underlines all differences as the same—that is, the notion that all of them are assimilable into the body of the nation, they do not threaten the ‘we’ of the national being. In a similar way, the narrative about the EU presupposes that
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national (and regional) differences do not threaten European supranational identity; on the contrary, the sum of these differences creates something new, an added value that enriches each particular culture. 14 As José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, in his speech ‘Europe and Culture’ at the Berliner Konferenz für europäische Kulturpolitik in 2004, said: When we think of Europe’s shared heritage, we can of course take pride in a glorious intellectual past as far back as ancient Greece and Rome. We can think of medieval Christianity, which was by its nature European, united around the same faith … We can think of the ‘Republic of Letters’, from Erasmus to Montesquieu, who stated that ‘Europe is just one nation made up of many’. Or of Victor Hugo who underlined at several occasions that the unification of European peoples will never deny national identities. We can think of our common values: freedom, democracy, equality, justice, solidarity, which are the result of this intellectual past … a result on which we can build … The questions of what Europe can do for culture, and what culture can do for Europe are not new … The organisers of this conference have chosen the motto ‘A soul for Europe’. I agree that we will master the challenges ahead only if we do some ‘soul-searching’. We need common ground, and common reflection about what the EU can be, and what it will be; it cannot succeed without a proper look at Europe’s cultural dimension … Our citizens must have the opportunity to experience their European identity in their everyday lives; an identity that does not subtract from but adds to those already in place.15 What is interesting here is that the phantasmic sameness that is put in the place of the ego ideal is dual. On the one hand, the European sameness is put on the supranational level by subsuming different national cultures under the same ‘common heritage’ (going as far back as ancient Greece and Rome). On the other hand, it is imagined as an added value, a sum of different cultures, a total which enriches each individual culture, be it regional or national (European
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added value). The first presupposes a fantasy of culture that is rooted in the past, culture that is assumed to be static and fixed, something that can be displayed in the present.16 The second offers a fantasy of the supranation as a process, where the emphasis is not on what European common heritage is, but on the fact that it is in the process of the making (added European value ‘that does not subtract from but adds to those [cultures] already in place’, ‘soul-searching’). This duality on the one side, through the process of selectiveness, displaces European cultural memory, given the fact that, as Hage argues, ‘with the process of selection comes another necessary process: repression’17, the process that purifies the past in a way that excludes all traumatic elements from it. The memory that is repressed from official European narratives is the memory of the European colonial past, power relations between different member states as well as power relations between different groups within member states. In other words, the European narrative about ‘common heritage’ rooted in the past is formed in order to obtain certainty, to create the narrative that offers a perception of wholeness and continuity.18 On the other side, this duality creates a possibility for ‘new heritage’ or ‘heritage-in-making’, which emerges through the very intersection of this past with the present and the intersection of different national and regional cultures. These intersections are seen as European added value, ‘a sum of the total which in turn enriches each culture’. In this sense, we can say that the duality of phantasmic sameness in narratives about European culture suggests the productivity of desire; rather than fullness, it suggests a sense of emptiness, a gap in a signified Europe. This brings us to the role of waiting for an ideal Europe, to the process which I see as an investment into emerging European identity, the investment that will bring results in the future. Waiting here reflects all ambiguities involved in the process itself.
The Promise of Future Since the Maastricht Treaty, cultural investment has been stressed in a variety of official documents, declarations, reports and politicians’ speeches. Initial pilot cultural programs such as ‘Kaleidoscope’ (1996– 99), ‘Ariane’ (1997–99) and ‘Raphael’ (1997–99) focused on the encouraging of cultural co-operation and ‘cultural creation with a European dimension’, mostly in the fields of literature, translation
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and heritage. ‘Culture 2000’ (2000–06) for the first time in EU history initiated and supported projects in all cultural fields. These projects were supplemented with parallel projects in the field of media and education (for example, the Erasmus program—an exchange program for students).19 One of the most interesting projects for analysis is ‘Enlargement of Minds’, launched in 2004 when ten new member states (Eastern European states) entered the EU. The goal of the project was to create in Europe a sense of belonging to an open and diverse community and to achieve ‘an enlargement of minds which will not only counteract the kind of preconceptions which lead to prejudice, but which will build on the emergence of a renewed European civic society’. Wim Wenders, a famous German artist, talking about the ‘enlarged Europe’ in 2004, said: All these countries yearning for Europe, including all the new and future member countries from Eastern Europe, could on one hand have the opportunity to introduce themselves, tell us about themselves, win us over, and on the other hand be welcomed and embraced by the European CAUSE and the European SOUL …20 Here the ideal is imagined through the discourse of hospitality and tolerance; however, the issue of power relations and ‘who is tolerating whom’ is clear. Ghassan Hage argues that the discourse of tolerance in societies that celebrate diversity is not completely opposed to the discourse of exclusion and intolerance, as it may seem at first glance. According to Hage, both tolerant and intolerant discourses presuppose that the dominant group ‘practises the same imaginary position of power within a [community] imagined as ‘theirs’’.21 In other words, in the discourse of tolerance, the dominant majority is structurally placed in a position of power inasmuch as it is granted the active power to tolerate. In the case of the EU, the Maastricht states (Western European states) were put in position to extend their love to others (Eastern European states), to embrace them. The new member states were expected to return the love that was offered to them, to offer some cultural forms which are unique in their concrete specificity but still acceptable by the European
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standard. With other cultural differences, through the institutional encouragement of cooperation, these purified cultural forms should contribute to the creation of sameness, ‘the added European value’. Sameness here does not attempt to eliminate difference; on the contrary, it establishes itself as the ground on which difference continues to operate. So, the ‘European added value’ is an empty signifier that can stand for anything; it is constantly (re)filled by the continuous process of the idealisation of Europe. It is represented as a sum of ideally connected elements of different cultures, an embodiment of values that should function as the lovable object in the Lacanian sense, the ego ideal for various European people, a libidinal bond for the European community. Difference, perceived in this particular way that excludes all traumatic elements and power relations, is imagined as something that could offer a sublimated form of the enjoyment, as the master signifier that should contaminate all other fields of the social (political, economical and so on), in order to create the harmonious community. Those who are critical of this model or remain sceptical about the imagined European ideal are seen as a threat. For example, the EU project that was rejected by France and the Netherlands with their ‘no’ to the European Constitution in 2005 was interpreted by the majority of European officials as the reaction of ‘old Europe’, a racist rejection of openness and tolerance, a fear of the new internal immigrants, a fear of the emerging new society. As Slavoj Žižek argues, ‘In their reaction to the ‘no’, [the European political elite] treated the people as retarded pupils who had not learnt the lesson of the experts: their self-criticism was one of a teacher who admits that he failed to educate his students properly’.22 This failure ‘to love Europe’ worked to increase European institutional investment in the celebration of difference (new festivals …), and especially in the education of ‘young Europeans’. In that context the new cultural program (2007– 13) puts a special focus on promoting intercultural dialogue (in internal and EU external relations). The celebration of Intercultural Dialogue Day, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, is just one example of how interculturalism has been promoted. Its special focus on ‘young Europeans’ is not incidental. As Ahmed23 argues, the return of the investment in the community is often imagined in the form of the future generation, who will acquire the features of the ideal
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subject. The ideal future European is often imagined as somebody who will be educated through the Erasmus program, who speaks three or more European languages, who is mobile and ready to travel all around Europe. The young generation here shapes the fantasy that one day the waiting will result in a return of love for Europe.
Conclusion ‘Waiting for something’ always implies a temporal dimension where present and future are strung together on the thread of the wish that runs through them (‘I believe that my waiting will result with the fulfilment of my wishes’). ‘Waiting for Europe’ is enveloped in narratives on ‘unity in diversity’ where the temporal dimension is much more complicated—unity rooted in the past, imagined in the present for the future, which will bring ‘real’ results. What we have here is a double gaze, the past and the future constantly intermingled in the present, characterised by a constant investment, an investment that has a double purpose—to look back and create ‘common heritage’ and to look forward and create ‘added value’, both striving to produce Europeanness as a new category of subjectivity. This double process is far from neutral. As I have shown in this essay, through the official selection of ‘common heritage’, European politicians and administrators are reconfiguring European history in a way that ignores unpleasant intrusions of the past, yet pretends to correspond with the past in a way that gives a new vision of European society. It even projects an ‘imagined future’ onto the past by focusing on events that could signify a ‘united Europe’ in order to offer the pleasure of identifying with the supranation in making. This double gaze that is involved in the process of ‘waiting for Europe’ is well illustrated by Prime Minister of Luxembourg Jean Claude Juncker’s words: ‘[In order to have Europe] we must go back to teach Europeans to love Europe’24. The importance of love as the social bond is crucial here. A host of metaphors manufactured by European politicians and policy makers invoke the idea that without love Europe is a ‘dead body’, ‘an organism without soul’ and show that ‘soul-searching’, to borrow Barroso’s term, presupposes that the body is known, displayed, or at least its ‘skeleton’ is imbedded with rational ideas of economy and human rights and is waiting for a soul. And this skeleton (a very Deleuzian ‘body without organs’) can be enlivened only through the
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strongest passionate attachment—love. In order to present itself as a lovable object, the EU bureaucratic machinery invests money and time in cultural projects that concurrently promote the symbols of diversity (uniqueness of particular cultures) and sameness (European added value such as tolerance and open-mindness). Here we are moving from a metaphoric to a metonymic sliding that opens up an endless circulation of desire because there is always the possibility to add something new. And it is exactly this infinite possibility of adding that illustrates the impossibility of the ‘real thing’, the impossibility of ending a process of waiting, so obvious in any narrative about identity making, in this case European supranational identity making.
Notes 1
2 3
4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14
Projects organised within the framework of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue can be seen on the following site: www.intercultura ldialogue2008.eu/406.0.html?&redirect_url=my-startpage-eyid.html. Last accessed on 2 December 2008. Stavrakakis, p. 83. Press conference for the launch of the European cultural season in Paris, June 2008. Available on the following site: http://europa.eu/rapid/ pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/08/482. Last accessed on 24 December 2008. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Ibid., p. 131. See Eurobarometer statistical data at http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/ Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 131. In order to answer these questions I primarily focus on analysis of various texts that circulate in the public domain (documents, speeches, proposals, reports, newspaper articles, and descriptions of various cultural projects, their aims and objectives). These texts serve as an example, a window that could be a key to understanding how the process of building European identity works. It is important to say that I do not see these texts as moments of progress in the European story; on the contrary, they take shape through the relational complex with other elements in the social— in other words, they are discursively articulated. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 126; Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 54. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 170. Salecel, (Per)versions of Love and Hate, p. 18. The Treaty on the EU, Art. 151.1., http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/ dat/11992M/htm/11992M.html Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 105. This concept of European added value was established in 1990: ‘The European “cultural model” is not all exclusive, still less a “melting pot”, but
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15
16
17 18
19
20 21 22 23 24
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rather a multivarious, multi-ethnical plurality of culture, the sum total of which enriches each individual culture’ (EP 1990, pp. 28–9) Barnett, Culture, policy, and subsidiarity in the European Union, p. 410. The speech is available at www.ifa.de/en/info/dossiers/auswaertigekulturpolitik-in-europa/culture-report-progress-europe/ Last accessed on 9 January 2008. For example, recently, in order to display Europe’s cultural heritage, the digital library ‘EUROPEANA: a shop window on Europe’s cultural heritage’ was launched. See www.europeana.eu/portal/. Last accessed on 4 January 2009. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 113. Several authors have argued that concealed within the narrative of ‘common heritage’ is the essentialisation of European culture that leads to Eurocentrism, marginalisation of non-European immigrants and exclusionary policies (Said; Modood; Delanty). For example, Delanty (p. 154) argues that due to this view about ‘common heritage’ new forms of racism are growing—racism based not on the idea of ‘race’ but on ‘culture’, and as such excludes non-European immigrants and helps to strengthen the process known as Fortress Europe. The information on education and media programs is available on the following sites: http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/ and http:// ec.europa.eu/information_society/media/. Last accessed on 24 December 2008. This speech is available at www.ifa.de/en/info/dossiers/auswaertigekulturpolitik-in-europa/. Last accessed on 9 January 2008. Hage, White Nation, p. 85. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 269. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 129. El Pais, 6 February 2004. This quote is available at www.teameurope.info/ node/19, accessed on 5 May 2009.
Waiting
chapter 15
The Shame of Waiting Maree Pardy
The field of emotions is less a body of knowledge than a jungle of unexamined assumptions, observations and theories.1 Multiculturalism is a cluster of promises.2 It promises a new life, the good life, and a space for being other than this. It is utopian insofar as it offers a frame for belonging. It is this promise of belonging—a shared sense of being in the right place, at the right time and among the right people that entices some Australian immigrants to invest in the space of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is also a waiting room, in which the entanglement of waiting and wanting to belong is unavoidable. Yet, time in this waiting room is sometimes experienced as unduly prolonged. When ‘waiting is assigned to the poor and the powerless so as to ritualistically reinforce political and social demarcations’ the promise of belonging generates torment rather than hope.3 In this essay I suggest that the prolonged or chronic waiting associated with belonging through multiculturalism produces shame (a powerful and sometimes distressing social emotion) in those who do the waiting and that this shame, in turn, generates a disposition of waiting. This is a disposition of apparent disinterest and inertia that involves an
over-reliance on time to make things right and a simultaneous gloom about the eventuation of this possibility. It is the psychic and corporeal recursivity of waiting and shame, or a shame-waiting loop that emerges from multicultural waiting when it is experienced as an incessant waiting to belong. This loop of waiting-shame-waiting is demonstrated here through an instance of multicultural waiting that reveals the yearning and recurring disappointment attached to migrant strivings for belonging. Psychoanalyst Helen Lewis suggests that ‘the central context for shame’ is negative evaluation.4 It relies on us our imagining how others see us (negatively), how they feel and what they think when they see us, and then on our returning that gaze, those thoughts and feelings back onto ourselves. This kind of shame, then, is an emotion of belonging par excellence or, as Thomas Scheff has it, an emotion that at its heart is about generating and maintaining social bonds, and it emerges at moments when the social bond is threatened.5 Scheff proposes that if fear arises from danger, anger from frustration and grief from loss, shame emerges from our need for the right degree of connectedness with others. ‘Shame is the emotion that occurs when we feel too close or too far from others. When too close, we feel exposed or violated; when too far, we feel invisible or rejected’.6 Shame is like waiting, in the sense that it is about the feeling of not being in the right place or right relation to time and others. It is linked to and experienced in terms of an ideal other (someone whom I am not). Waiting, like shame, is about not-belonging or not being ‘in-time’ with others; being out of step. It is a failure to blend in, or as Bergson proposes, a disjuncture between thought and life.7 ‘The person who waits is out of sync with time, that is, outside of the moral and economic community of those whose time is synchronised’.8 This type of waiting and this type of shame, therefore, are both about wanting to be other and elsewhere. In what follows, I suggest that such disjuncture is not uncommon for immigrants in Australia. In particular, I report here on the vexed waiting of some VietnameseAustralians. I then attend to the entanglements of waiting, shame and multiculturalism, depicting the emotions, feelings, behaviours and temperaments produced through this predicament, showing how a waiting-shame-waiting loop works to both enable and
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sabotage a sense of belonging among some immigrants. It is not my contention that all or even most Vietnamese-Australians and other immigrants are suspended in a state of perpetual waiting or deep shame. Nor am I suggesting that multiculturalism causes the complex of waiting and shame described. I am suggesting rather that the social individual comes into being through the social world, that the The promise of multiculturalism thus produces Vietnamese– Australian bodies in particular ways. Shame and waiting also attach to other categories, such as class, sexuality, disability, childlessness, to name a few. My aim here is to highlight how historical contexts and social policies produce such categories and the experiences of shame and waiting that emerge through them.
Yellow Never Seems Right (White) In July 2002 a 19-year-old Vietnamese-Australian young man was hacked to death with a machete, near the Yarra River in inner Melbourne. His cousins, two young men aged 25 and 21, jumped into the river in an attempt to escape their sword-wielding Vietnamese attackers, and both cousins drowned. This event made great media— a nightclub brawl, gangs of young Asian men wielding swords and knives, a terrifying chase that ended in ghastliness. The body of one of the young men was soon recovered from the river, but it took three days of searching to locate the other. On the morning following this event people throughout Australia woke to the news of this tragedy. As a national radio report had it, ‘the three Vietnamese men were the victims of a gang attack. Up to 15 Asian men wielding knives, machetes and swords chased them from a nightclub in South Yarra after a dispute’.9 Speculation ensued about whether this was a random attack by Asian gangs, or whether it was drug and crime related. Nobody was sure, but much of the gossip played with stereotypes of Asian males as both predatory and effeminate. The participants in the fight were criticised for their unmanly need to fight with knives—the ‘weapons of wimps’— rather than fists.10 Such claims served the dual purpose of denigrating Asian men as hyper masculine but less than manly, while also creating the ground for making comparative claims to a superior masculine respectability—one more fittingly Australian.
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In an outer suburban flat in Melbourne, Bich, a young Vietnamese-Australian woman in her twenties, stirred to the news of the tragedy from her bedside radio. ‘Fuck!’ she groaned, pushing her head back under the covers, ‘How embarrassing!’ In retelling this moment, several months after the event, she remained shocked and slightly disconcerted by her initial response, although she did not recoil from it. She recalled how she felt as the radio news bulletins and appalled commentary bombarded her. She felt no sadness for the boys or their families; she felt only anger and humiliation. ‘I felt it in my body,’ she said as she conveyed her fury at the action of these ‘idiot Viet boys’. She recollected only one fully formed thought ‘those stupid bloody idiots!’ As Bich began preparing for her work day, she became increasingly preoccupied and agitated as she imagined her encounters with people who would recognise her as Vietnamese. There was, she lamented, no escape from her Vietnamese-ness. On this day in particular, it was galling to her that she would be visible to the world around her only as Vietnamese. In 2002, when the Salt Nightclub murders occurred, Vietnamese refugees had been in Australia for 27 years. For Bich and other Vietnamese-Australians the murder event marked a re-emergence of what they had begun to feel might finally be fading—their visibility. It was this that had kept them in wait, for in a sense they were waiting for their visibility to abate. This opposition between being visible and having a sense of belonging was however leading to a cul de sac. Both symbolically and materially they cancelled each other out, for a person could only have one (belonging) if they lost the other (visibility). To many Vietnamese, ‘Salt’—the name created to describe the event—both reignited and intensified a fading yet familiar condition. Although unnamed, the sense of shame at being seen as Vietnamese was palpable, and it was this that promised to extend their waiting to belong. What is it, then, about being seen as Vietnamese that so powerfully obstructs a sense of belonging? How does it suspend people in a frustrated space of waiting? To be sure, waiting is universal to the refugee and migrant experience, though each wave experiences its own particular cycles of waiting, escape and arrival. For Bich, and others like her, the waiting this time was not the active waiting associated with the slow yet
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anxious sojourn in refugee camps, or the anticipatory and hopeful waiting of passage to a safe haven. The Vietnamese in Australia had waited more than two decades for a waning of the abuse that accompanied their arrival in rickety boats to Australia’s shores. It is sometimes difficult, amidst the celebratory forgetfulness of Australian multiculturalism, to recall that the Vietnamese arrived unexpectedly and in large numbers. Through a seven-year period, from 1975 to 1982, almost 58,000 Vietnamese refugees entered Australia. Only about 2000 of these arrived by boat, and yet it is those arrivals that have provided an enduring image. Vietnamese refugees, no matter how they came, were lambasted as ‘boat people’, whose arrival triggered panic about an ‘Asian invasion’ and who subsequently were represented as ‘drug-taking, gambling gangsters’. They had already waited, sometimes patiently sometimes not, to learn English and to engage with the world and the local spaces they moved through. They had waited to blend in, so to speak; to become part of the landscape of multicultural Australia. More than twenty years after their vexed arrival, some had begun to feel they were disappearing from this critical public gaze and assuming a greater sense of everyday comfort and homeliness. The day after ‘Salt’ marked a renewed intensity of waiting. Bich’s waiting became acute (as she braced for attack). Yet the acuteness of her waiting is underscored by waiting as a chronic condition of her being. Acute waiting is that which relates to an event or an object close at hand—a train, an appointment, a shopping queue, a diagnosis, or an imagined or planned encounter. Chronic waiting is that where considerable or prolonged time has elapsed between the original desire for something and its failed attainment. A significant interaction of duration and emotional intensity animates this acutechronic schema. The short duration of acute waiting arouses intense or sharp emotion, while the prolonged duree of chronic waiting produces dullness, or a deadening of vitality. As Bich acutely anticipated the stares and whispers of customers, colleagues and passersby at the fashion retail outlet where she worked, she became increasing agitated. She was waiting to be attacked. She knew her body would betray her, and that she would be reduced from individual to group member. She felt that today the public’s gaze upon her would render her a member of a machete-wielding, unruly mob of gangsters.
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And though this recognition would not necessarily implicate her in these acts, or cast a shadow over her citizenship as such, it would intensify her visibility. Today her public presence would feel not quite right. She imagined that she would not pass as white today. She would in her mind be recognised unquestionably as not only yellow but Vietnamese. The acute waiting experienced by Bich on that day is, I suggest, symptomatic of a rather more chronic predicament. Thinking through biomedical frames of acute and chronic conditions suggests a similar interplay of time, intensity and effect. An acute condition has immediate bodily impact, can be life threatening and demands immediate response. It is often, though not always reversible. Chronic conditions are not immediately life threatening and usually find a way to settle into or onto the body such that one’s bodily orientation to the world becomes newly created through the condition. Chronic conditions may ‘flare’ from time to time, becoming lived in those moments as ‘acute’ symptoms triggered by a chronic condition. Chronic conditions sometimes shorten life, but they almost always reduce well-being and are often irreversible. While acute waiting is anxious, anticipatory and sometimes hopeful, these symptoms may also occur in combination with other feelings such as flatness, resignation, defeat and hopelessness. These latter are the symptoms of chronic waiting: I have waited so long; the object of my desire continues to elude me; the wait and the desire are hopeless. The thwarted promise of multiculturalism to belong in and through, not in spite of difference—transforms anticipatory, hopeful waiting to tedium. It is through this sort of emotional flatness that chronic waiting settles into the body of the one who waits. Waiting thus becomes an orientation to the world. The heightened alertness associated with acute waiting orients one to be on guard, watching and waiting for the arrival of the thing, whether it be a person, an event, the moment to act or the time to retreat. In chronic waiting, where the longed-for object is constantly deferred or postponed, waiting itself begins to settle on the body, thus transforming (or making) that body-self. Chronic waiting creates chronic waiters, who orient themselves to the world through prolonged suspension. They may exhibit a corporeal lethargy, as they delay, procrastinate and hesitate, or they might lack any clear intention to act on the world. Yet, while the chronic
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waiter seems apathetic and indifferent, s/he is still very much on guard. It becomes a matter of ‘stop, look, listen, do not proceed, make no move, at present there is nothing to be done; wait’.11 This may entail enormous frenzy, busyness, or moving in many directions while not moving anywhere, and yet ‘through it all the waiting can be discerned’.12 This is waiting not so much as action or inaction, but as orientation to the world, which seems to display a certain disregard for time. There may be an apparent nonchalance, expressed as some day, one day, perhaps tomorrow, an oscillation between despair and hope. A lingering over, and excessive investment in, imagined possibilities, but a refusal to act or move towards them; a perpetual waiting for them to arrive. Altman elaborates such waiting as both fantasy and defense. That is, the immigrant may cling to the fantasy of belonging while also defending against, even repressing, her own hostile responses to the crumbling of this fantasy. The constant thwarting of desire and sense of defeat associated with unmet longing can also engender mistrust and paranoia. Passive or chronic waiting is thus not experienced as a volitional act but as an aggressive rejection by an other. This invokes multiculturalism as a promise that ‘keeps while it gives’. It offers the promise of belonging, even the right to belong, but, by continuing to distinguish between those who have multiculturalism (the Anglo-Celtic nationals) and those who are multicultural (immigrants), multiculturalism is structured to perpetually differentiate between ‘Australians and others’.13 The continual rejections entailed in the wait for multicultural belonging may overwhelm, to the extent that all one can do is wait and hope, to ‘wish for magical control over destiny’.14 But reliance on magic, or rather on time, is also an attenuation of hope. It entails a disbelief in one’s capacity to alter the rejecting gestures of those from whom recognition and belonging are sought. For Bich, both modalities of waiting—acute and chronic—are like the waiting of prey, restlessly anticipating the method and the moment of the predator’s attack (rejection), the predator’s mission being to repetitively prove that the Vietnamese could never really belong in Australia. The acute waiting of Bich and others induced by ‘Salt’ involved anger, anxiety, defensiveness, humiliation and despair. These are emotional expressions of the chronic condition—waiting-shame.
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Sara Ahmed has argued that emotions are best examined not by exploring what they are, but by asking what they do.15 While everyday understandings of emotions tend to explain them as moving from the inside to the outside—as internal subjective states that are expressed outwardly—social scientists tend to posit emotions as cultural and social practices that become internalised; the movement here is predominantly from the outside in. Ahmed problematises this distinction between the internal and the external, suggesting instead that emotions create the inside/outside relation. Emotions, for her, are spatial; they circulate between bodies, they ‘stick’ to some bodies in particular ways; thus in a sense they create bodies. This movement and stickiness may also create a subjective and embodied sense of being stuck, of fixing bodies and selves, preventing them from moving or being moved. The stickiness of emotions and, in particular, what sticks, to whom it sticks and how we become stuck in this ‘circulation’ of emotions that produces ‘affective economies’ fabricate bodies in particular ways.16 What, then, are the emotions that circulate within the affective economy of multiculturalism? What are the emotions that ‘stick’ to the bodies of Vietnamese-Australians that create them as outsiders? Do they become attached, in a resigned and coerced rather than empowered way, to the emotions fixed upon them? In what ways are they caught in an affective economy of insiders and outsiders? And in what ways might they be energised only by their attachment to their outsider-ness? In addressing these questions I move off from Ahmed to explore how this incessant unsated yearning to belong materialises as acute and chronic modalities of shameful waiting.
Waiting to Belong: An Affective Economy of Multiculturalism Ahmed says that we have no feelings for an object; feelings emerge in the encounter with the object. If the bodies and selves of Bich and others are produced through their encounters with ‘belonging through multiculturalism’, what is actually happening in this encounter with the promises of multiculturalism and how is this influenced by how Australia encounters the Vietnamese-Australian? Encounter here is a force-field, generating and circulating emotions through which multicultural belonging materialises as a relationship
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between bodies. While some bodies unquestionably belong to the nation, others are created to belong to (or through) the multicultural nation. Multiculturalism is thus a restricted and contained space delineated by those who ‘have’ multiculturalism for those who ‘are’ multicultural, and even when immigrant groups are valued as an important part of Australia they are valued for enriching the lives of those who simply exist here, rather than for those who arrive here. ‘While the dominant White culture merely exists, migrant cultures exist for the latter’.17 In the case of Vietnamese immigrants and refugees, however, the emotional field of encounter has for a prolonged period been volatile and often hostile. In the Australian imaginary one of the most searing and enduring images of Vietnamese refugees is the image of their unruly arrival—on boats and en masse. In addition, Vietnamese men in particular were, for several years after their arrival, prominent in media reports of street-gang activity, drug use, drug selling, and ‘dodgy’ business transactions. Vietnamese people became known to themselves and others through the emotional registers of hostility, fear, suspicion and anger. Emotion produces these bodies, travels between them, sticks to them, and over time those bodies sometimes become stuck to the very emotion that produced them. These ‘figures of speech’ that construct and legitimise claims about the Vietnamese failure to embody the ideals of the acceptable national subject, produce rather than describe Vietnamese-Australians. It is both her encounter with and her investment in the ideal national subject that are crucial for Bich. By being marked out as failing to meet the requirements of the ideal, she and others like her are made in relation to those who are deemed to embody those standards. Emotions are tied up with investments in social norms, or in the promises made by the achievements or embodiment of those norms. She is both shamed through and invested in the norms of the ideal national subject. This is the power of shame’s endurance. Some may argue that the shamed or denigrated migrant should disregard this racial stereotyping—rise above it, so to speak, and accept it for what it is: mistaken identity or false representation. But even when one is able to do just that, to feel unashamed at being Vietnamese, the spectre of shame resides in the ongoing vulnerability to judgments about whether or not one should qualify for social acceptance
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or national entitlement. Shame thus induces a strong attachment to the rejecting other, that very attachment that made the person vulnerable for feeling shame in the first place. This is part of what Lewis terms the spiral of shame and that of which Ahmed speaks when she suggests that emotion is an investment in social norms.18, 19 When she spoke about that day, the word ‘embarrassment’ was thick in the thread of Bich’s narrative. ‘I still feel embarrassment, you know, when people ask “What nationality are you?” You know, we still get judged about it.’ She talked about Vietnamese people being the subject of much gossip and opinion. She explained that, whenever something involving Vietnamese people happens, people will ask her who they are, whether she knows them and what she can reveal about them. ‘I say, “Excuse me! Why do you think I know them?” Then they say, “You’re Viet; wouldn’t you know them?”’ Bich spoke about this as though she had habituated herself to questioning, judgment and racial association as banal, though irritating components of her encounters with the world she lived in. For her, multiculturalism promises the space of belonging with several trappings, being subjected to constant judgment being the most salient. The way she orients herself to the world through this judging summoned her to be on guard, such that her waiting was acute. From where would the first attack come? Here is part of what she told me: This girl at work, how stupid! She was brought up in Camberwell or somewhere—little miss princess—I’m probably envious—her dad’s a manager, CEO of some company, her mother’s a housewife, and she’s just a little miss perfect. She turned to me and said, ‘Did you hear about Salt?’, and I said, ‘Yeah’, and she said to me, ‘Why? Why? How come Asians go around in gangs? Why do they have knives? Why? It must be drug related.’ Bich’s response was weary but furious: I could have smacked her out. I really could’ve! When she said it I was fuming. I thought, ‘You’re so naïve. You haven’t grown up with anything around you. You’re so shut off, not brought up with the suburban boy world. Never been on
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the streets. And because it was her—half Scottish and half Irish—because it was her. That’s why I got shitty. And the entanglements of shame (as an attack on the self ) and the yearning to belong (where one can be a self ) thicken in her response: But if it was Anh (another worker at the shop who is also Vietnamese) who said it, I would’ve said, ‘Yeah, fuck! God, they’re fucking idiots. It’s so embarrassing, isn’t it?’ While Bich speaks of embarrassment rather than shame, there exists a dynamic and temporal relation between the two. She is embarrassed by her public exposure (her nakedness) as Vietnamese, yet this acute moment of embarrassment will pass. Thus, as with modes of waiting, embarrassment is acute, shame is chronic. Such shame, however, suggests her acceptance of the Vietnamese stereotype. Within the affective economy of Australian multiculturalism that promises so much while fixing particular emotions to particular bodies, it is not that Bich endorses or is determined by the stereotype but that she can never be entirely free of its regulating force. The etymology of embarrassment suggests being encumbered, a burdened mental state, being baffled or disturbed. It is about experiencing unwelcome but short-lived public recognition. Shame, however, is about the withholding of full social recognition; it is about being in a constantly anxious state of feeling on the edge of social disqualification and exclusion. ‘Whereas the subject of embarrassment feels that he (sic) has egg on his face, the subject of shame feels a loss of face’.20 Shame as the state that always threatens social exclusion locates immigrants in a perpetual state of outsiderness. Multiculturalism promises entitlement to national belonging while operating through an emotionally charged racialised hierarchy that rules out the promise. In their prolonged waiting to belong, the subjects of a racially stratified multiculturalism are successfully shamed without being ashamed of anything in particular. In this sense Bich felt on parade to the world as Vietnamese (the shameful stereotype), and this very exhibition deepened her shame regardless of what she had done or not done. She was, as she said, enraged by her public display
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as the stereotype. If you are Vietnamese and striving to belong through Australian multiculturalism, shame emerges and creates you anew at the ‘juncture of you and the stereotype that represents you’21 or through the feelings that emerge when you encounter the object you invest in and wait for—belonging.
Waiting to Be Seen Differently Because she is seen and sees herself and others like her as failing to meet normative standards, it is not surprising that Bich’s investment in these social norms is intense, an intensity that produces an emotional field inside her and between her and the public world of which she is a part. The failure to embody the norms of the ideal national subject is experienced as shame, an experience that many Vietnamese raise in relation to their experience of belonging. This is not, however, a failure in objective terms; it is a failure in the eyes of those with whom they exist in bodily relation. They become visible through that which sticks to them (as mud sticks), and this is their shame. This visibility ensures a repetitious encounter with their sense of shame. They are stuck by their inability to escape the visibility of their bodies and the spaces and emotions that produce them as visible. Shame works by demanding or necessitating either a replacement of the self or a transformation of the world that produces the body-self. If shame, like other emotions, sticks to the bodies that it fixes upon, is there a way or time for it to become unstuck? Waiting, like shame (and even waiting for the shame to pass), is about time insofar as it involves being trapped in a state one wishes to transcend. Its present involves the capacity to imagine being elsewhere and/or other. One imagines that belonging would mark the end of shame (for who one is), and the end of shame would indicate that belonging has arrived. But how do immigrants endure this predicament of waiting? The experience of waiting is about the duration of time for sure, but it is equally about the subject (en)during this time—duration (time) and enduring (subject). Waiting, according to Bergson, is not simply time, or duration, for waiting has ‘two temporalities’— time thought and time lived. For those who don’t wait, time thought and time lived co-exist harmoniously. Those who wait are out of step with time, ‘outside of the moral and economic community of those
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whose time is synchronised and who act predictably and in unison’.22 The one who waits does so arhythmically and just as the ‘two temporalities grate and jar’23 so does the misrecognition involved in the fractious moment when you are recognised only through the stereotype that represents you. This embodied endurance of time sometimes feels like waiting for life to begin, a waiting to be seen differently. Experienced as a ‘dwelling that is longer than is right’24, those who wait might search for ways to bring an end to the waiting, or to distract themselves from its pain. They fill in the time of waiting. Pacing or fidgeting is not always meaningless activity, but a means of comfort and relief. For Bich and many others even though they wait, they engage meaningfully in social and productive life. Working, acquiring a house, creating a home, engaging with friends, neighbours and community —work, love and civic life—are creative gestures towards belonging. Yet even when these investments counterbalance the pain of waiting, there remains no way to escape the body that is created by that which has become stuck to it. At its most extreme, the present sometimes becomes sheer endurance, as the inner life is oriented to the future or the past. The present is lived as purgatory or predation, as ongoing suffering or perpetual vulnerability to attack. In purgatory one is waiting in shame for heavenly release, and all one can do is wait. One might become enraged by this constant waiting in shame. Moreover it feels legitimate for one to be enraged when the nation constantly constrains one’s attempts to belong. Yet when the intensity of the rage quells, one begins to feel shame for one’s lack of entitlement to such expressions or feelings of anger. This shamerage-shame is what Helen Lewis refers to as the feeling trap. Thus the immigrant may not only become ensnared in a loop of shamewaiting-shame but also in a spiral of shame-rage-shame. It is now possible to grasp how and why waiting becomes dispositional. Waiting as exclusion induces shame. This shame circulates through an affective economy of multiculturalism that Vietnamese bodies are marked by and attached to. Shame sticks to their bodies, repressing their movement and fixing them in place. They wait because they are stuck. And while they endure this time of waiting,
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they sometimes wait in rage. In this sense, waiting changes its direction and becomes a strategy to contain one’s fury. One begins to find ways to contain or avoid the aggression one feels, fearful of the consequences of unleashing it. Waiting as disposition is in such cases extremely functional; it is almost catatonic, ‘preventing any untoward or destructive impulse’.25 This waiting is the shame-rage spiral. So is there nothing to the promise of multicultural belonging? Perhaps attachment to multicultural belonging is ‘cruel optimism’.26 Cruel, Berlant proposes, because it entails attachment to an object (belonging) that will never arrive, attachment in advance of its loss.27 The possibilities for belonging through a racialised hierarchical multicultural space, based on hierarchies of race in which the ideal subject remains white, not yellow or black, are already compromised. Migrants in Australia, ranked according to a hierarchy of racialised entitlement, become socially visible through their ‘difference’, thus generating a desire among some to become invisible. When they speak about their desire to be invisible, they are making a plea to be seen differently rather than being seen as different. For the visibly different to be differently visible the gaze of multiculturalism must be transformed. As suggested here, when shame sticks and fixes bodies in place, it works by demanding either a replacement of the self or a transformation of the world that produces the shamed body. Arguably September 11 ushered in such a transformation, but not one hoped for or predicted. The declaration of a ‘war on terror’ ruptured the existing affective economy of multiculturalism, adjusting the rungs of its racial hierarchy, and altering the circulation of emotions that stick to and create bodies. The newly fabricated bodies ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ and ‘Muslims’ have for now obscured the visibility of the Vietnamese, absurdly providing a possible default space for a less encumbered sense of belonging.
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Scheff, Bloody Revenge, p. 41. I borrow this concept of a ‘cluster of promises’ from Berlant’s work on the objects of optimism. Such promises, she suggests, are embedded in all objects of desire, whether a person, a thing, a set of ideas or an institution. All attachments are thus optimistic. She goes on to name ‘cruel optimism’ as a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility: ‘Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss’, ‘Cruel Optimism’, p. 21.
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Schweizer, p. 779. Lewis. Scheff, Microsociology, p. 71. Scheff, Bloody Revenge, p. 40. Bergson in Schweizer, p. 780. Ibid., p. 779. PM archive. White, ‘Weapons Are for Wimps’. Altman, p. 508. Ibid. See Hage, White Nation. Altman, p. 514. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pp. 9–12. Hage, White Nation, p. 121. Lewis. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Velleman, ‘The Genesis of Shame’, p. 66. Berlant, ‘The Subject of True Feeling’, p. 3. Schweizer, p. 779. Ibid., p. 781. Bergson, in Schweizer, Ibid. Altman, p. 515. Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism’. Ibid.
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chapter 16
Waiting for the Baby1 Emma Kowal
There are many kinds of waiting in store for women who want to have a baby. In my case, I first had to wait until I was ‘ready’ to have a baby. I had to finish my education, achieve something in my career, find the right man, and have my fill of overseas travel. I had to wait until I stopped thinking of pregnancy as something to avoid at all costs. None of this seemed like waiting; it seemed like living. The sense of waiting only surfaced at the increasingly frequent times when someone would ask me, ‘Are you going to have a baby?’, and I replied, ‘Not yet’. At some point, not long before I reached thirty, I asked myself, ‘What am I waiting for?’, and found no good answer. Then the waiting really began. First I had to wait to get pregnant. I thought that once I took a deep breath and stopped trying to not get pregnant, I would immediately conceive. But I found that one, two months passed and nothing had happened. I researched conception on the internet. Each month was henceforth divided into two parts: one half, waiting for the day of ovulation, the best chance at conception; and the other half, waiting to see if I was pregnant. Each month, I would wait as long as I could stand it before doing the pregnancy test, as the longer you leave it, the more certain the result.
Finally, the test was positive. I was four or five weeks pregnant. I had to wait until twelve or thirteen weeks before the risk of miscarriage was so low that it was socially acceptable to tell people. I had to keep this tremendous, irrevocably life-changing miracle under my hat for endless weeks. At six weeks or so, I started to feel sick. I waited for it to pass, at first hopefully, and later desperately. Would I feel better tomorrow? Next week? Or would the whole pregnancy be like this, nausea and exhaustion like a thick film on the world? The waiting of pregnancy is a U-shaped curve. For the first half or more, the waiting is intense. Every day I would wake up and remember that I was pregnant. Every day there was someone else to tell my exciting news. But for all the excitement, I had little to show for it. Even by the time I was seeing my baby, small but perfectly formed, on the ultrasound screen at twenty weeks, I did not look obviously pregnant. It was many weeks more before the sight of my belly invoked smiles from strangers. Meanwhile, I celebrated each week that passed, measuring my stomach or reading another chapter of my pregnancy book. I would spend hours on the internet, researching the best prams, cots and baby names, but, still, barely any time passed at all. Then, at some point, time shifted and began to pass quickly. That ritual of surveillance, the antenatal visit, became a more frequent occurrence. I began to fret about the work still to be done before the baby arrived. I felt the weight of my belly, the restriction of the lungs, the strain in the pelvic ligaments, the sharp pains as little elbows and feet poked at my insides. At the end, once I stopped work, time slowed again. I moved slowly and carefully through the day. I woke frequently at night with hip pains and heartburn. I waited for it to end. Most of the time, women in their first pregnancy will go over their due date. The day marked ‘Baby due!!’ in your diary will come and go, and you will still be waiting. As the days go on some women will plead with their obstetricians to end the waiting and induce them. Others will resist intervention, waiting until the baby is good and ready to be born and not a moment before. Still others will go in and out of labour for days, finding that even the onset of labour is not the end of the waiting. Then, finally, the baby finds her way into the world—she is there, in your arms. ****
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Pregnancy is experienced differently by every woman, but to all it is a time of waiting. How women choose or are compelled to spend their time while waiting will also differ from woman to woman. Drawing on reflections on my own pregnancies as well as pregnancy scholarship and literature, this chapter will consider the experiences of white, middle-class women in Australia who experience a wanted pregnancy in the early twenty-first century. I review the ways that scholars have written about the temporality of pregnancy, and argue that Lacan’s concepts of anticipation and retroaction offer an alternative avenue to understand how some women wait for their babies. Feminist scholarship on the temporality of pregnancy generally draws an opposition between two kinds of time: institutional or industrial time; and biological, natural or lived time.2 In the usual formulation, institutional or industrial time is imposed on women by the medical system. Drawing on classic studies of time and discipline 3, these scholars argue that time is used by obstetrics to discipline the pregnant woman, measuring every aspect of her pregnancy and determining how long it should be. Just as labouring women used to be bound by leather straps to the hospital bed in the early decades of the twentieth century, they are now ‘bound by the clock’4, compelled to produce their babies in a timely fashion or be subject to intervention. Even temporal practices that seem innocuous to most women, such as counting gestation in weeks, are relatively recent impositions on the time of pregnancy, designed to facilitate greater medical control. Institutional time is contrasted with natural or biological time. This mode of time is often described in terms of its opposition—it is not linear, not Western, not rational, and not time in the way we usually conceive of it. Fox, for instance, describes a ‘truly timeless present, a present free from fearful distinctions, the relative time, of reason’.5 Martin compares women’s experience of time to that of Native Americans, describing it as ‘another kind of time that is often incompatible’ with the time of industrial society.6 The oppositional nature of these descriptions reflects their political context. Feminist scholars since the 1970s have fought to resist medical control of pregnancy and birth7, and their efforts have meant that women today can choose less medicalised forms of health care. However, in the name of expanding women’s options, feminist
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accounts oversimplify women’s experiences of time.8 The binary is stark: women can embrace their non-Western biological rhythms or be tied to the oppressive schedules of medical knowledge. There are two problems with this dichotomy. First, there is little room for women’s agency in taking up medical notions of time. Most women in Australia have thoroughly internalised the ‘capitalist, technocratic, bureaucratic and psychologically individualist’ obstetric clock9, and yet they still creatively engage with their pregnancies, drawing on available technologies such as ultrasound to give meaning to their experiences as the pregnancy progresses.10 In addition to this, defining women’s experiences of time in opposition to Western, linear time often leaves this ideal mode of time under-theorised. We know what it is not, but not what it is. One strand of scholarship that can assist in conceptualising women’s experiences of time are accounts of pregnant embodiment. These works reflect on the experience of inhabiting the pregnant body. The classic essay in this genre is Iris Marion Young’s ‘Pregnant Embodiment’.11 She argues that pregnancy is an instance of the split or double subject, a subject split in her experience of selfhood (as herself and not herself ), in her bodily location (the trunk and the head), but also split across time. The time of pregnancy is not ‘uneventful waiting’ but a ‘unique temporality of process and growth in which a woman can experience herself as a split between past and future’.12 How can we understand this ‘unique temporality’ of pregnancy, especially a first pregnancy, where the woman is stranded between her life as an independent woman and a lifetime of service to her baby? Two areas of Lacan’s work—his conceptions of subjectivity and of subjective time—offer insights into this strange temporal experience of waiting for the baby. For Lacan, subjectivity begins in the ‘mirror stage’ when infants first see their reflection in the mirror and recognise it as themselves. Through the process of identification with the child’s own image, the ego is formed. This is also inevitably a process of alienation that leaves the subject permanently ‘split’. In contrast with the embodied conception of the split subject that Young employs above, Lacan’s use of the term refers to the three ‘orders’ that make up human existence: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The subject will ever be split between the ego of the imaginary order
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(the order of representations and associations) and the subject of the symbolic order (the order of culture and language, and also the unconscious). In many ways, life is a struggle to resolve this split. The second aspect of Lacan’s work that is important here is his concept of subjective time. The subject does not experience time in a linear fashion but through the two mechanisms of anticipation and retroaction. Anticipation is where one’s experience of the present is structured by an anticipated future. We speak and act as if we already knew what will happen. Retroaction refers to the way that the past is reinterpreted through the present. The way we recall past events is changed by what we know and feel at the time we recall them. These simple concepts are crucial to the mirror stage. The infant is ‘jubilant’ in anticipation of the mature subject they will become in the future. At the same time, the infant’s image retroactively brings forth the ‘fragmentation’ of the body (corps morcelé ) that preceded this stage.13 In the moment of recognition in the mirror, three things are set in train: the subject’s past, now experienced as fragmentation; the imagined future wholeness of the subject; and, through these mechanisms, the subject itself. The time of the subject is ever darting between anticipation and retroaction. As Bowie describes it, the desiring subject ‘comes into being at the point of intersection between an irrecoverable past and an unattainable future; its structure is that of a ceaseless crossstitching, in language, between what-is-no-longer-the-case and what-is-not-yet-the-case’.14 A woman waiting for her baby is more aware than most of her contingent place in the present. Once she has seen her offspring flickering on the ultrasound screen, retroaction begins its work reinterpreting the life led ‘before’ motherhood, while the present is saturated with the jubilation and anxiety of the imagined future. For women raised in the time of second-wave feminism, the retroaction spurred by pregnancy can be painful. As Wolf puts it, while pregnant she, ‘along with other ambitious women of my generation, felt myself gradually becoming one of those women with whom I had always refused to identify. My self-sufficiency and independence, two qualities I admired most in others, shut down in me like the lights of a business that had lost its clientele’.15 Waiting for the baby is waiting for one’s former life to end.
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The workings of anticipation are generally more pleasurable for the pregnant woman. As her body transforms, she might immerse herself in pregnancy books and internet chat rooms, seeking the perfect pram and the perfect name, forging the language of her imminent life. Hundreds of internet sites, forums and blogs offer advice on all aspects of pregnancy, from make-up tips to driving pregnant to sex after birth. Consumption features heavily, with long shopping lists of essential pregnancy and baby items and prominent links to internet baby stores. Many sites offer to send weekly emails, tailored to the developmental stage of your foetus, complete with diagrams and ultrasound images. As the woman searches, reads and consumes information and products, both her child and her own identity as a mother are gradually coming into being.16 For the moment, she inhabits a liminal space of waiting, a space structured by both what is emerging and what is being left behind. The ultrasound is a particularly powerful technology of anticipation. Scholars examining the effects of ultrasound technology on women’s experiences of pregnancy argue that it has created the notion of ‘foetal personhood’.17 This is the fantasy that the foetus is an autonomous entity able to survive independently. Ultrasounds often provoke future parents and ultrasound technicians alike to suggest that ‘foetuses are “waving”, “giggling”, “smiling” or “sleeping”’18, granting foetuses physical and social abilities they do not possess. As most women today have their first ultrasound by the time they are twelve weeks pregnant, the foetus is personified well before biological birth occurs. Some women will even seek additional ‘nondiagnostic’ ultrasounds, where relatives and friends can gather in a theatrette to experience the baby well before it is born. For these families, waiting for the baby is punctuated with technologically mediated sensory experiences that anticipate the child that is to be. Marketing for one high-quality ‘3-D’ ultrasound machine features an image of a foetus ‘smiling’, with the slogan ‘First words: 17 months. First steps: 11 months. First smile: 3 months. Memories now start earlier’.19 Ultrasound images thus illustrate the unique temporality of pregnancy: hurtling between past, present and future, the woman ‘remembers’ her child before it is born. Feminist scholarship on the ultrasound argues that foetal personhood is another attempt to eclipse the pregnant woman, whose
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body is indivisible from the foetus, and a convenient fantasy for the right-to-life movement.20 Interpreting this phenomenon through Lacan’s work, it is not the indivisibility of the mother from the foetus but the ambiguous split between them that is crucial. The moment that the woman sees her baby on the ultrasound screen is startling. Nash explains that for the white, middle-class women she interviewed, seeing the foetus on the ultrasound screen makes the pregnancy feel ‘real’ for the first time.21 This moment of recognition mimics the mirror stage of infancy. In this case, the jubilation felt by the infant at the anticipation of future wholeness promised in its own image is instead the jubilation of the mother. The mother, seeing the image of her infant, feels jubilation at the anticipation of its future wholeness. In a further twist of mimicry, in the image of her future child the mother-to-be anticipates her own future wholeness. This is best expressed in the future-perfect tense—the tense of Lacanian temporality.22 The ultrasound screen promises that ‘I will have been pregnant’, and ‘My waiting will have been over’. For the woman, waiting for her baby is also waiting for herself. Gallop argues that the mirror stage is like a second birth (Lacan refers to the time before the mirror stage as ‘pregnancy’).23 While our mothers deliver us into nature, the birth of the subject delivers us into history. Reading this point the other way, the mother’s way, as it were, we can think of birth as a re-enactment of the mirror stage. The experience of pregnancy and birth recalls the fragmentation that precedes the founding of the subject. The physical symptoms of pregnancy and the disruption they cause (to work, to leisure, to movement) induce a sense of bodily and existential fragmentation, an effect heightened by a ‘3-D’ experience of the ‘waving’, ‘giggling’, and ‘smiling’ foetus within. This fragmentation is managed through the discourses of proto-motherhood—the magazine lists of essential baby items, the sharing of birth stories, and the internet forums on baby names. While the pregnant woman waits, these discourses anticipate the two nascent subjects that will soon emerge. The ‘split’ subjectivity of pregnancy then reaches its climax in the process of birth, as the body is fragmented into baby, placenta, blood and fluid. The bodily reconstitution that begins at the moment of birth is the beginning of the infant’s life but also the birth of a
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new subjectivity for the woman. Her waiting for motherhood is finally over. After the birth, the mother finally grasps what she meant when fashioning her child through her words and actions. The pregnancy is complete and can begin retroactively to have meaning. The limbs that tickled her ribs, the bottom that thrust against the surface of her belly demanding to be stroked, now make sense. They were her child. Novelist Anne Enright writes of her newborn daughter, ‘I had let something slip into the stream of time’.24 Newly mothering and newly mothered, woman and child begin their lives as interdependent but separate beings. The new mother is no longer waiting but keeping up, following, guarding and nourishing her child, launched upon the stream of time.
Notes 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Thanks to Ghassan Hage for encouraging me to write about waiting for my baby, and to John Cash, Senka Bozic-Vrbancic and Rosemary Robins for their constructive comments on this chapter. Earle and Letherby; Fox; Pizzini; Simonds. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic; Zerubavel. Simonds, p. 568. Fox, p. 133. Martin, p. 198. Katz Rothman; Martin; Oakley. Felski. Simonds, p. 569. Nash, p. 15. Young, IM, ‘Pregnant Embodiment’. Ibid., p. 274. Gallop, p. 78; Lacan, pp. 94–5. Bowie, p. 184. Wolf, p. 123. Clarke. Petchesky. Nash, p. 18. Ibid., p. 22. Katz Rothman; Petchesky. Nash, p. 5; see also Katz Rothman; Petchesky. Lacan, p. 306. Gallop, p. 85. Enright, p. 112
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chapter 17
Waiting on Death Row1 Tamara Kohn
To wait, to watch. Vocation Of the prisoner and the poet … The prisoners, whose stretch is finite. Look straight in Time’s face, and see The unrepeatable marvel of each second …2 I wish to reveal in this essay the creative impulse that potentially blossoms in a waiting arena that is off-limits to most law-abiding people. As the poem above suggests, to wait as a prisoner is to be watchful—to be attentive to the present. I will explore the presentness of waiting in this essay by considering the experiences of a particularly invisible set of incarcerated individuals who wait over many years for an unnatural death. The particular existential space they inhabit can for some provide a sense of hope embodied in rigorous self-action and creative production or what Cavafy (in the 1904 poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’) famously considered ‘a kind of solution’.3 To challenge the conditions of stasis and stagnation implicit in the term ‘waiting’ (and popularly associated with the notion of incarceration) with one of active making of selves and attentiveness to the present requires a strong illustrative case, so in this essay I will attempt to provide this through an analysis of how
some prisoners on death row in California wait for their state execution. My discussion derives primarily from personal communications (letters, poems, essays) as well as crafted gifts (drawings, paintings, hand-crafted toys) I received from two men, Jay and Manny, who spent sixteen to seventeen years on death row in San Quentin before being executed by lethal injection by the State of California in 1999.4 From this collection of private material and the ideas that these men’s words reveal about their then-‘present selves’ and what was meaningful in their lives, I reflect upon different potential qualities of existential ‘being’-in-waiting for their execution. This material will reveal something of the huge irony that out of this horror of waiting for a prescribed death that is passive in the sense that the outcome is out of the prisoner’s control, can emerge an active, strong and new creative impulse to learn to craft—to make things as an expression and celebration of a reborn, refigured and ‘better’ self. Manny was a black Vietnam veteran convicted of the first degree murder of an elderly woman in 1980. Before I examined the details of his case history, I met Manny several times in the ‘waiting room’ of San Quentin and I began to correspond with him. My growing appreciation of this man was formed out of these interactions that we shared in the moving present and continued until his execution. He sent my son presents constructed from scraps he could access on the row. He had a hotplate in his cell and he cooked Cape Verdean dishes for other men on his block. I sent him spice packets that he said one could only get in the UK. Manny taught himself how to read and write in prison and he wrote fluently and eloquently to me about his daily life and his state of mind: My days are (all) filled with something different. I plan them that way. Seldom do I stay in darkness, I’m starting to paint not so good right now. I use my finger more than the brush! Within a year of his execution, he wrote: All my life’s story is already down on paper, I won’t bother to edit any of it, God Knows what the truth is. I figure when
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I’m gone he will judge me or that spark that gives me life; in this world I don’t look for too much. I know I’ve been sober and Good for 18 years! So I just wait like we all do. On one level, therefore, he, like we all do, waited for visitors, for mail, for spice packets to get delivered, for decisions to be made that were beyond his control. But in this last quote he was talking about waiting for Divine judgment—for his God to know the truth about his whole life including his present self—a self revealed to his friends and relations through his letters and gifts, but locked away from a public that only wanted to go over and over and over his distant past deeds committed through a dark ill period in his life. It is only after I got to know Manny’s present that I investigated his past. The story that led him to death row included a childhood of poverty and violence; active service in Vietnam, including the vicious battle of Khe Sanh; and evidence of acute mental illness (post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) and drug abuse upon his return to the United States. The further ingredients of his case—the poor initial legal representation, his mental state, the political environment, the sadness and fury of the victim’s family—were repeated in most legal briefs and newspaper articles that I came to review later. There was a clear disjuncture between my understanding of Manny during the last ten years of his life and the texts that positioned him publicly. When Manny died, his lawyers put a document together dedicated to his children that included eulogies and letters that would give them a hint about the ‘other side’ to their father that they could begin to understand. But where in the passage of Manny’s life and death do these ‘sides’ reside, and how are they portrayed in different contexts? Months before his death, a San Francisco Chronicle article began, ‘There are two sides to Manny Babbitt—the Vietnam War hero, and the convicted killer of an elderly woman’.5 As these two identities (hero and killer) relate to events and times long past, the article implies that Manny’s personhood ended well before his wait on death row had even begun. However, the ‘person’ of Manny revealed in his letters and the recollections of others close to him would suggest that the period of the long trial, the interminable wait, the dismal crossroads in which he resided for nearly eighteen years (startlingly equivalent to the time that a newborn grows to be an adult) is where
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a very significant proportion of Manny’s identity resided, despite its invisibility to the public. We are what we make of ourselves out of whatever we find available and meaningful. If we choose to hang onto our past titles and achievements, or, in this case, our horrific experiences and violent actions as a source for our identifications to others, we can, but ultimately we must rest our hopes not on others’ labels and assumptions, but on our constant ability to act on ourselves in the present. Shortly before his execution, Manny wrote: I think while I’m here at these crossroads it matters little if I look back, nothing there can be changed but I can continue to change with each passing moment ‘but into what’? If I were any more driven to do good, people would say look he thinks he’s a saint now. And I know some people who would say that!! I’m just a man who through public opinion finds himself in a pickle. I don’t hate myself as I once did nor am I in love with what I see … I was never afraid of the unknown, only in suspense of it.6 Manny describes with these (perhaps somewhat romantic or poetic) words a relation between time and self-character analysis in the waiting space. He judges himself in the present and recognises that his ‘goodness’ affects those moving through time with him who can witness or at least imagine some of his present through his actions and words—the friends he fosters inside jail and out. He finds himself ‘just a man … in a pickle’ through ‘public opinion’ that judges his past and locks his present into cells designed to deprive men of their freedom and hold them for years or even a lifetime of waiting in fear. Manny empowers himself in his writing by removing the fear from his state of ‘suspension’. Suspense (a natural correlate of ‘waiting’) therefore needn’t be positioned as passive—it may be reflexive and stimulating, or at least it was for Manny at that moment in time. Through my friendship with Manny and his lawyers I began to correspond with Jay, a Thai immigrant in San Quentin’s death row who had been convicted of assisting with a burglary that ended in the murder of two shopkeepers in 1981. The Jay I corresponded with was
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a soft-spoken, gentle man who became an accomplished artist in prison as well as a qualified monk. He wrote: ‘The sheer joy I feel when I am involved in a painting and it is coming out well … I feel terribly fortunate to have the gift of art in my life … I feel I can achieve anything I put my mind to.’ Of course he knew he couldn’t escape his impending death nor the grim place his body resided, but he felt he could intellectually and aesthetically achieve anything he wished to in his active present. He could grow in the waiting space of death row in a way that his life circumstances didn’t allow him outside. He meditated. He gave away more than 600 art pieces to friends over the years and used them to express his own changing self—butterflies appear in many, which he took to symbolise his transforming self in prison. Six days before his execution on 3 February 1999), he sent me a packet filled with three long essays (on ‘death’, on ‘karma and rebirth’, on ‘227 Rules of Discipline’). In the accompanying letter he wrote: ‘It’s been wonderfully hectic but easy paced around here. Time for me to pack to move tomorrow that’s why I have time to write. Enclosed you’ll find my essays, hope it’s not too late to arrive, so you can enjoy them fully.’ ‘Wonderfully hectic but easy paced’: the wait on death row can be shown to provide a field of contradiction in the experience of the condemned. Much of the professional and public writing on death row (legal, academic, political, media, religious, popular) analyses the history, politics, technology and morality embedded in the institution of the death penalty. These include the extensive works by sociologist Michael Radelet, ex-death penalty lawyer Michael Mello7, as well as a poignant piece on the process of execution by anthropologist Colin Turnbull.8 Other works document the life stories of individual cases with a focus on conditions and deeds: on troubled childhoods, abuse, war and poverty, mental illness, and then the various versions of events around the crimes and the effects of capital punishment on victims, on family, and so on (many newspaper and web articles are of this ilk). And here’s the crux: from the perspective of most of these particular narrative discourses, once convicted, these men’s identities are irretrievably and exclusively stuck with the story of their crimes and the nature of their deaths. While these tales, analyses and briefs might reveal the fact that they lived ‘on good behaviour’
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(or not!) for many years in prison, beyond that they are effectively positioned in a static limbo of self-hood that doesn’t end until they are executed. You and I are permitted to ‘make ourselves’ and present this to others through our present activities, opinions and occupations and not necessarily through the crazy things we might have done in our youths, but the selves that enter the extreme surveillance, confinement, routine and brutality of death row are often imagined to lack the ingredients and wherewithal for such agency even while they often provide evidence for it in their writing, art, craft and so on. A fascinating exception to this blindness of the media and its usual failure to report what happens in prisoners’ daily lives after conviction can be found in Luke Davies’s article, based on interviews with Van Nguyen and others on death row for drug trafficking in Southeast Asia.9 The article closely examines the personal productivity of waiting—the way some of these men actively started to ‘build things’, to ‘stay in the moment’ (as opposed to the unproductive, helpless torture of waiting for the families involved). Perhaps we could say that ‘self making’ is an idea that is cognised only in association with ideals of freedom, choice and mobility. High-security prisons are not associated with these terms in the popular imaginary (although some scholars have provided evidence of the power of incarceration to stimulate innovation and political action, for example, Feldman’s study of prison resistance in Northern Ireland).10 This allows us to consider, then, how being on death row may be qualitatively different from being in other imprisoning spaces. Manny and Jay were not ‘doing time’ (in the sense that they were not anticipating a return to some self and social world ‘outside’ that had been put on hold for a limited period); they were ‘doing death watch’. They were waiting and watching. When they were locked alone in their cells painting and writing, they were not fighting a battle that would lead them to a different future after the passage of time, but they were looking inward and then actively crafting a confirmation of what they found there. Many different representations of death row life are produced and available for interested audiences, but still, I would argue, they fail to fully recognise the potential power of generating a new
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‘self’ through education and craftsmanship. One published genre includes, for example, letters, writings and interviews with inmates and families—mostly from an anti–death penalty perspective for likeminded consumers in order to document the humanity of the prisoners and the emotional and moral turmoil that situates each case. These include titles such as Welcome to Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row, Writing for their Lives: Death Row U.S.A., Death Row Letters: Correspondence with Donald Ray Wallace, Jr. and Death Row: Interviews with Inmates, Their Families and Opponents of Capital Punishment.11 Some prisoners have published books that document their own stories12. A notable example here is Stanley Tookie Williams, a fairly recently executed prisoner in California who was once a Los Angeles street fighter and West Side Crips gang leader.13 He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for publishing several books in his later years on the row in which he used his story of ‘redemption’ to help future generations of youths.14 The writing was produced entirely as a tool for effecting communal change. Anthropologist Melissa Schrift has examined the production of commodified crafts (often called ‘outsider art’) in Angola Prison that prisoners sell to a consuming visiting public to provide them with an aura of rehabilitation.15 There are also various blockbuster films that transport viewers to the drama of death row—The Green Mile, The Thin Blue Line, and Dead Man Walking are fairly recent examples, films that manage to evoke deep emotional responses in audiences by bringing them close to a cruel world they will never witness first hand. Cultural and literary critics have examined how capital punishment and murder are mediated by literature, film, media and other aesthetic forms in order to produce ‘sentiment’ and ‘controversy’ as well as to sell products.16 And yet the focus throughout tends to rest on the utilitarian, intentional effect these media have upon others in a public audience, and this deflects attention from the very personal expressions of discovery produced in the privacy of prisoners’ cells as they wait for other people’s decisions to be made on their criminal cases. The way in which the prisoners themselves are affected by the process of producing art and text during their wait in prison is ignored. I would argue further that the autodidactic nature of the writing, cookery and crafting only
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heightens the sense of achievement and transformation felt by the imprisoned craftsperson. Of course, the waiting cloud of possible loss through death hovers over more people than just the prisoners on death row—they include grieving parents, partners and children, angry, grieving families of victims, evidence-hunting lawyers, judges, politicians, human-rights activists, journalists and reading publics who are all caught up in a whirlwind of concern about past and future specific events pertaining to individual inmates as well as the general moral debates on capital punishment. They all are responding, I would argue, directly to a larger social system of punitive and inexorable control that draws our gaze directly from the past crime to the future threat of death (the waiting for) and generally neglects the productive humanity in the middle (the waiting in). Remember how Foucault demonstrated that prisons were originally designed to be instruments of transformation (like hospitals) but that they failed from the start—only producing more delinquency.17 This helps explain why prisons are popularly seen as human dustbins waiting for disposal. Crapanzano’s ethnography Waiting: The Whites of South Africa emphasises waiting’s ‘special orientation with time’—its only meaning lies in the future ‘arrival or non-arrival of the object of waiting’.18 ‘Waiting becomes a moral allegory—our virtue is rewarded and our vice is punished.’19 We learn and become disciplined through the waiting process. I think this is useful to think with in the context of death row—with death as the understood immutable object of waiting, discipline and learning become possible. If we then accept Hastrup’s suggestion that the self has no essence, only character, emerging from one’s actions20, then we can view Manny and Jay’s productions in waiting as keys to the making of their transformed self identities. Of course there are many different possible readings; to write and to make things could be read as the men simply filling time, or it could be about their production of gifts that imply a return gift (of care and active campaigning), or of providing ‘evidence’ (of ‘good behaviour’ and ‘reform’) that could play into a future plea bargain for life. Any or all of these functional readings are possible, but one could additionally suggest that, in waiting on death row, prisoners
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are producing variously skilled pieces of ‘art’ and craft and selfexpression for their own sake and pleasure and for the sense that there is life before death in such a place. As a death row inmate at the Polunsky Unit in Texas wrote, ‘Creativity is the last vestige of our humanity in here to remind ourselves that we are living beings’.21 A human need for self-affirmation and a sense of worth can perhaps only be fostered through the creative process when all other avenues are shut. Following Sennett’s reflections on ‘the Craftsman’22 and working with what I have from Jay and Manny and others like them, I would like to conclude by emphasising the import of producing physical things with skill and care that in turn may provide a window into the makers’ social dealings with others and their shifting consciousness of self—self as agent rather than passive spectator. Waiting in captivity for death can be seen from the evidence of at least some prisoners as a process through which humanistic and proactive expressions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ may be discovered through self-education and the honing of new skills. This expression happens and is worth noting regardless of whether or not you feel this is or should be relevant to the final outcome of a prisoner’s case. It reveals a place of personal empowerment that only needs pen and paper, fabric, food, time … as well as a consciousness that one’s ‘self’ needs expression and through it an affirmation of the possibility of a sense of redemption. It embodies a personal challenge to the prisoner’s public profile, one that may come to feel staged, remote, false, and even foreign. Expressions of being and becoming in waiting captivity allow any who witness them to understand that a person who commits a crime is not always the same person who is punished for it.23 Productions emerging out of such waiting, even in the living hell of death row, provide compelling evidence of the power and potential of the human spirit while also demonstrating the blindness of any state that supports capital punishment.
Notes 1
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I am grateful to my sister, Jessica Kohn McGuire (California Deputy State Public Defender), for bringing me with her into this world of death row and introducing me to her client Manny. Thanks as well to Peter Vassallo
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4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
for his helpful comments as well as to all the other contributors to this volume for their collaborative and supportive efforts. Excerpt from ‘Death Row Poets’ by UA Fanthorpe, in Mulvey-Roberts, p. 201. See www.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/texts/cavafy.html for the full text, translated by Keeley. Thanks to Dave Watson for introducing me to this work by Constantine Cavafy (1864–1933). The poem exquisitely describes the mounting excitement and energy and creative preparation that goes into the waiting process for a community who expect a visitation from their barbarous enemy. When those ‘barbarians’ never appear, all focus and meaning is lost. The analogy cannot work completely, of course, but the state of productive waiting for an undesirable other (be it a horde of dangerous ‘strangers’ or the state executioners) shares a focus in that poem and this piece. It is important to note that these two men are exceptionally ‘sympathetic’ cases. Involvement in the commission of a felony in which anyone dies, regardless of intent, is considered by California law to be a capital offence. Many of the men on death row committed very violent and intentional murders, and some of these have not been transformed into ‘good’, productive and creative people in their period of incarceration. For the purposes of this essay, therefore, I am describing a creative potentiality as demonstrated in a few clear cases and in the interests of a deeper understanding of a particular arena of waiting. San Francisco Chronicle, 29 March 1999, p. A4. I am grateful to California Deputy State Public Defender Ellen Eggers , who shared this private letter from Manny. Mello. Turnbull. Other works of note here include Radelet and Borg; Robinson; Koosed, Capital Punishment (vols 1 and 3). Davies. Feldman. By Arriens, Mulvey-Roberts, Leslie and Dicks, respectively. See Rossi; Lopez and Perez-Torres. The Crips are a Los Angeles gang primarily made up of African Americans. Many of the 677 inmates on California’s death row at the time of writing came to the row from street-gang violence. Williams, ST, Blue Rage and Life in Prison. Schrift. Kennedy, p. 30. Foucault, Power—Knowledge, pp. 39–40. Crapanzano, p. 44. Ibid. Hastrup, p. 199. Mulvey-Roberts, Introduction title page. Sennett. See Waterkeyn, p. 187; Leslie.
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Index
act of waiting, 91–2 acute waiting, 199–202, 205 Adam, Barbara, 76 aesthetics, 48–9 Age, 139 agency in waiting, 2, 7; activity, 90, 94, 96, 121–2, 127–8, 133, 198; death row, 223; diminished by drought, 81; ‘existential’ waiting, 23; Macedonian bachelors, 114–15, 120; passivity, 90, 122, 138; patience, 176; pregnancy, 213; ‘situational waiting’, 21–3; stuckedness, 100–1 Agonie et Resurrection (Petrovic), 156, 161 Ahmed, Sara, 185, 187, 191, 202, 204 Albanel, Christine, 185 Albania, 157 Almond, Gabriel A, 59 Altman, LL, 201 Annals School, 44 anticipation, 214–15 Anzulovic, B, 151, 164 ‘Ariane’, 189 attention: death row, 218; love, 169–70, 180; waiting on, 169, 173, 180
attentive waiting, 67 Australian, 139 Australian Bureau of Meteorology, 147 Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, 140 Australian Coal Association, 141 Australian Conservation Foundation, 141 Australian Student Environment Network, 144 Australian Youth Climate Coalition, 141, 145 Babbitt, Manny, 219–21, 223, 225–6 Bacon, Francis, 171 Badiou, Alain, 103–4 Baer, Hans, 8 Ballard, Roger, 131 Barroso, José Manuel, 188, 192 Barthes, Roland, 66, 74 Bauman, Zygmunt, 44 Beck, U, 23, 36–7, 76–7, 95 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 27, 29–30, 32, 36–7 belong, waiting to, 195–208 Bergson, H, 73–4, 196, 206 Berlant, L, 208
Berliner Konferenz für europäische Kulturpolitik, 188 Beyond Zero, 141 Bich, 198–207 biding time, 6, 80–3 Bloch, Maurice, 152–3, 162–4 ‘boat people’, 199, 203 boredom, 18, 21 Bosnia, 150–1, 155, 158–9, 161 Bourdieu, P, 2 Bowie, M, 214 Bozic-Vrbancic, Senka, 10 BP Australia, 140 Brown, Bob, 145 Brunetti, Mauro, 24–5 Buddhism, Tibetan, 71–3 Bush, George W, 135 bushfires, Victoria, 147 Camp for Climate Action Australia, 141 Canberra Times, 145 Carbon Equity, 141 Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (Australian Government), 143 Cash, John, 5–6 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 44–5 Cavafy, Constantine, 218 chaos and waiting, 60–4 chronic waiting, 199–202, 205 Clean Energy for Eternity, 144 climate action groups (CAGs), 138–42, 144–8 Climate Action Network Australia, 141 Climate Action Summit, 144–5, 147 climate change, 135–48; anthropogenic, 77, 82, 136, 148; anxiety, 77; mitigation strategies, 142–6; waiting on, 136–48 Climate Emergency Network, 141 Climate Mitigation Policy Modelling (Treasury Dept.), 143 Climate Movement Convergence, 141 Coleridge, ST, 171 Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 138–9 contingency, 40–4, 48, 138 control of control, 46–7 Corcoran, PE, 92, 94, 120–2, 133 Cordner, Christopher, 10, 12 Corfu, 157, 161 Council of Europe, 185 Crapanzano, V, 2, 122, 138, 225 credit, 48 crisis, 97–8, 101–5 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 102 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 49 Croatia, 150, 155–9 ‘Culture 2000’, 190 Dali, Salvador, 60–1 Darwin, Charles, 42 Davies, Luke, 223 Dawson, Andrew, 8–10, 124 Dawson, Damien, 144 Day of Resurrection, 55–6 Dead Man Walking, 224 death and rebirth waiting, 71–3 death row, 218–26; creativity, 219, 222, 224–6; literature, 224 Death Row: Interviews with Inmates, Their Families and Opponents of Capital Punishment (Dicks, S), 224 Death Row Letters: Correspondence with Donald Ray Wallace, Jr. (Leslie, C), 224 Delors, Jacques, 185, 187 determinant judgement, 172–3 development and waiting, 57–60 Diver, Stuart, 100 Dnevnik (Daily News), 155 Dora Karmo, 68, 70, 72, 74 Downfall of the Serbian Empire (Karadžic), 154 Driver, Tom, 29–30 drought, 76–85 drought proofing, 78–9 Duarte, F, 123, 125 Dwyer, Peter, 4–6
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eco-socialists, 141–2 Eliot, TS, 174 emissions trading scheme (ETS), 140–1, 144 emotions, 67, 202–3, 206, 208 enchantment of waiting, 74 ends of waiting: Heavenly Serbia, 9; religious, 5; waiting for waiting to end, 12, 95 ‘Enlargement of Minds’, 190 Enright, Anne, 217 Erasmus program, 190, 192 Esplanada das: Culturas, 184 Etolo people, 93 Europe, waiting for, 184–93 European Commission, 185, 188 European Parliament, 185 European Union, 136–7, 143–4, 184–93 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, 184 Evans-Pritchard, EE, 109 ‘existential damage’, 24 existential mobility, 97–9, 105 existential waiting, 4–8; agency, 23; boredom, 18, 21; boundaries, 45; Brunetti, Mauro, 25; death row, 218; economic development, 6; passivity, 66; religious, 6, 9; removed from time, 21; representation, 20; scallop fishing, 20; Waiting for Godot, 74; Warlpiri-speaking Australians, 21 familial obligations, 107–20 Fanon, Frantz, 34 Feldman, Allen, 35–6, 223 feminism, 212–13, 215–16 foetal personhood, 215 fort da game, 9 Foucault, Michel, 103, 225 Fox, M, 212 Freedom Socialist Party, 141 ‘freedom’s children’, 36–7 Freud, Sigmund, 9–10, 186 Friends of the Earth Australia, 141, 145
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Friends of the Earth Melbourne, 144 Friends of the Earth Sydney, 144 From Blessing to Violence (Bloch), 152 Fromm, Erich, 178–81 fused group, 102–4 future, waiting for: contingency, 40; drought, 82; identification, 47; multiple temporalities, 51; Pakistan, 63–4; pregnancy, 214–16; progress, 41; refugees, 198–9 G8, 137 Gallop, J, 216 Garnaut, Ross, 140, 142 Garnaut Climate Change Review (Garnaut), 142–3 Garrett, Peter, 144 Gavrilo (Patriarch), 156, 163 Gebusi people, 16 Giddens, A, 23, 95 Global Climate Coalition, 137 Global Climate Information, 137 global warming see climate change globalisation, 58–9, 122–5, 131–2 Goethe, JW von, 49 Good Company and Violence (Knauft), 16 Goolagong-Cawley, Evonne, 176–8 Gore, Al, 139 Goulburn Valley, Victoria, 76–85 governmentality, 103, 105 Green Mile, The, 224 Green Party, 138–9, 142, 144–5 Greenhouse Challenge Program, 138 Greenpeace Australia, 141, 144–5 Group Psychology (Freud), 186 Habermas, Jürgen, 50 Hage, Ghassan, 123–4, 188–90 Hamilton, Clive, 146 Hansen, James E, 137 Hanson, Pauline, 98 Hansonism, 99–100 Hastrup, K, 225 Hawke, Bob, 138 Heavenly Serbia, 9, 151–5, 159, 161–4
Hegel, GWF, 34, 40–1, 103 Heidegger, Martin, 9 helplessness and waiting, 64, 82, 122, 138 Herald Sun, 147 Herzegovina, 150–1, 155, 159 Heyrman, Hugo, 19–20, 22 Hitler, Adolf, 156 ‘home’, 121, 123–6, 132 homelessness, 124 hopelessness, 200 Howard, John, 135, 138–40 Hua, Anh, 124 ICTY see International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ‘Idea of Perfection, The’ (Iris Murdoch), 169 Žižek, Slavoj, 191 impatience, 7, 46, 73–4, 138, 173 ‘in wait’, 110, 112, 120 Inconvenient Truth, An (Gore), 139 Indian diaspora, 125–32 Ingold, T, 68 Institute of Public Affairs, 137 Insurance Australia Group, 140 Intercultural Dialogue Day, 184, 191 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 137, 139 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 155, 158, 160–1 investment and waiting, 185–7 James, Henry, 74 Jay, 219, 221–3, 225–6 Jennaway, Megan, 148 Jesus, 55 JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army), 156–7 Jovan (Bishop), 159 Judah, T, 151 Juncker, Jean Claude, 192 ‘Kaleidoscope’, 189 Kant, Immanuel, 49, 169, 171–3, 177, 179–80
Karadjordjevic dynasty, 161 Karoly, David, 147 Katrina disaster, 105 Keats, John, 170–2 Kierkegaard, S, 173, 176 Klein, Melanie, 10 Knauft, BM, 16 Kohn, Tamara, 11–12 Kojeve, A, 34 Kosovo, 150, 154–7, 159–60 Kosovo, Battle of, 153, 156, 158, 160 Kowal, Emma, 11 Krajina, 150, 155–9, 161 Kristeva, Julia, 32 Kubo people, 16, 19, 21–2, 89–96 Kyoto Protocol, 135, 138, 140 Labor Government, 138, 140–4, 146–7 Lacan, J: anticipation, 11, 212, 214; love, 186, 191; retroaction, 11, 212, 214; subjective time, 214; subjectivity, 213; temporality, 216 Lakha, Salim, 8 Lavoisier Group, 137 Lazar, 154, 159–60, 162 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 98 Lefebvre, Henri, 7 Lefort, C, 50 Lewis, Helen, 196, 204, 207 love: attention as, 169–70; Europe, 185–93; Freud, 186; Lacan, 186, 191; maternal, 178–81; national waiting, 185; paternal, 178–81; receptiveness, 173; social bonding, 186, 192 Luhmann, N, 42–3 Maastricht Treaty, 187, 189–90 Macedonia, 107–20; language and marriage, 114–15, 117; order of life, 108–11 Macedonian Orthodox Church, 119 Mahdi, Imam, 5–6, 55–65 Malik, Nadeem, 5–6 Mann, L, 67 Marcuse, Herbert, 104
Index
243
marriage, Macedonian, 107–20 Martin, E, 212 Marx, Karl, 44, 47, 102, 105 meaninglessness, 5, 30–2, 37 Mello, Michael, 222 Mercier, Vivian, 27, 32 mess of Western culture, 5–6, 29–30, 32, 36 migration: cultural taboos, 130–1; existential mobility, 98; professional mobility, 124–5; South Asian diaspora, 125–32; visibility, 198, 200, 206; waiting to belong, 195–208; waiting to return home, 121–33 Milne, Christine, 145 Miloševic, Miroslav, 162 Miloševic, Slobodan, 154–6, 158, 160–2 Minnegal, Monica, 7, 16 mobility, 97–9, 101, 103 mobility envy, 98, 101 modernisation risks, 77 modernity: conceptions of future, 41–2; late, 95; Macedonia, 107, 117; post, 95; reflexive, 95; ‘second modernity’, 36; temporalities, 40, 42–51; timescape, 76; waiting for the future, 1–2, 5; waiting modernities, 44–51 Molly K [boat], 17–18 Montenegro, 157 mountain climbing, 101 Mountain Wreath, The (Njegoš ), 160 movement, waiting before, 68–71 multiculturalism, 195; ‘cruel optimism’, 208 multiple temporalities, 1, 45, 51, 73–4 Murdoch, Iris, 169–70, 172, 177, 180 Murdoch, Rupert, 139 Musharbash, Y, 21 Nandy, Ashis, 34 Nash, M, 216 NATO, 155, 160 Nealon, Jeffrey, 32–3
244
Index
Nelson, Brendan, 144 Nemanjas, Kingdom of the, 153–4, 162 Nguyen, Van, 223 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 61 Nightline (ABC), 147 Niko, 17–18, 20–1, 25 Njegoš (Bishop Petar Petrovic I), 159–60, 163–4 nomadism, 68 Northern Ireland, 35–6 Okonkwo, Nnamdi, 22–3 ‘on time’, 8 Operation Punishment, 156 Origin Energy, 140 ‘outsider art’, 224 Pakistan, 54–65 Papua New Guinea, 16–17, 20, 89–96 Pardy, Maree, 10–11 Parson, Talcott, 59 Pascal, Blaise, 1, 9 passivity, 2; chronic waiting, 201; drought, 81; ‘existential’ waiting, 66; patience, 170; ‘situational’ waiting, 22; waiting out, 102, 105 see also agency in waiting patience: affirmation of the world, 177–8, 180; agency in waiting, 176; depth, 174–7, 180–1; passivity, 170; suffering, 170, 175; waiting, 173 Pearse, Guy, 138 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 40 philosophy of history, 40–1 Philosophy of History (Hegel), 40 pig hunting, 89–90, 92, 94 political economy of waiting, 3 politics of waiting, 2 pregnancy, 11, 210–17; readiness, 210; split subjectivity, 213–14, 216; ultrasound, 215–16; unique temporality, 213; waiting for birth, 211; waiting for conception, 210 pregnant embodiment, 213 Prey Into Hunter (Bloch), 152 progress, 41
‘queue jumpers’, 105 queuing: national differences, 2; self governing, 103; social order, 103–5; social waiting, 67; stuckedness, 104 racism, 98–100, 105, 197, 208 Radelet, Michael, 222 Radio Television Serbia (RTS), 155–6, 160 rage of waiting, 207–8 Raj, Dhooleka S, 125–9, 131–3 ‘Raphael’, 189 Rapport, N, 124 Ratner, C, 23 ‘rebounding violence’, 152–3 receptive waiting, 170–3 reflective judgement, 171–2, 180 religious waiting, 5–6, 9, 55–65, 152–64 Republika Srpska, 151, 154–5, 158, 161 resistance to the present, 122, 127–8, 130–2 restaurants, 90–5 resurrection, 151–2, 160–2, 164 retroaction, 214, 217 revolutionaries, 102, 104–5 Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre), 7 Rising Tide, 141, 145–6 risk society, 36–7, 76–7, 84 Robins, Rosemary, 6 rock climbing, 18–19, 23 Rostow, Walt W, 59 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 103 Rudd, Kevin, 138, 140, 142–7 Rundell, John, 1, 5–6 Salt Nightclub murders, 198–9, 201, 204 San Francisco Chronicle, 220 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 102–5 scallop fishing, 17–18 Scheff, Thomas, 196 Schelling, FWJ, 49 Schrift, Melissa, 224
Schubert, Violetta, 8 Schwartz, Barry, 136, 146 Schweizer, H, 74, 120 seasons, 67, 71, 78–80, 83–4, 91–3 ‘semiotic chora’, 32 Sennett, R, 226 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 102 Serbia, 150–64 see also Heavenly Serbia Serbian Orthodox Church, 156 serie, 102–4 Seven Up, 177 shameful waiting, 11, 195–208 ‘situational’ waiting, 4; active agency, 23; boredom, 18; Brunetti, Mauro, 25; embedded in time, 21; Niko, 21; Papua New Guinea, 20; passivity, 22–3; rock climbing, 18–19 Slovenia, 150 social waiting, 5–7, 9; conversation, 90; Kubo and Etolo peoples, 93–4; order of life, 110–12; queues, 67; synchronisation, 110; waiting for company, 16–17; Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 28–37 Socialist Alliance, 139, 141–2, 145 Socialist Alternative, 141, 145 Socialist Party Australia, 141 sociality, 5, 28, 30–1 Soft Construction with Boiled Beans. Premonition of Civil War [painting] (Dali), 60–1 Solidarity, 141, 145 spaces for waiting, 3 spirit mediums, 94–5 Stern, Nicholas, 139 Stern Review, The (Stern), 139 Stone, Oliver, 102 strategic waiting, 90 stuckedness, 7, 97–105; endurance, 100–2, 104; existential, 99; heroism of the stuck, 100–1, 104; queuing, 104 sublime, Kantian, 172, 177–8 sublime, Romantic, 172, 177–8
Index
245
supply side of waiting, 3 Svendsen, L, 18
Visy Industries, 140 Vojvodina, 150
Tan, Gillian, 6 technologies managing waiting: agricultural, 77, 79–80, 84; city life, 3; ultrasound, 215–16 They are waiting [sculpture], 22 Thin Blue Line, The, 224 Thompson, EP, 44 Thredbo disaster, 100–1 Tibetan nomads, 67–75 time: biding time, 6, 80–3; biological, 212–13; ‘church’, 44; circular, 39, 73; ‘clock’, 44–6, 48, 51; countertime, 46, 51; cyclical, 77–80; debt, 48; future-orientedness, 40; ‘historicisation’, 42; linear, 40, 109; ‘lived’ or fluid, 73, 296; monetary, 47–8; obstetrics, 212–13; ontological, 58–9; order of life, 109–11, 119–20; out of sync, 196, 206–7; political, 50–1; relational, 109–10; relativisation, 42; spent waiting, 3, 118; subjective, 214; ‘thought’ or mathematical, 73, 206; wasted, 90 ‘time-work discipline’, 44 Tito, JB, 159 transcendence, masculine and feminine, 172, 177–8, 181 transcendental religious waiting, 56–7, 163–4 transnational social spaces, 124–5 Tudjman, Franjo, 156 Turnbull, Colin, 222 Turnbull, Malcolm, 144 Turner, Victor, 123, 163
‘wait-and-see’, 137, 139–41, 146–8 Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (Crapanzano), 225 ‘waiting for’, 7, 10, 90–1, 93–6 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 5–6, 27–37, 66, 74 ‘waiting it out’, 98, 100–2, 105 ‘waiting on’, 7, 10, 90–2, 94–6, 169, 172–3, 180 Waiting [painting] (Heyrman), 20 Walks Against Warming, 141 Warlpiri-speaking Australians, 21 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 174 water use reforms, 81 weather waiting, 76–85 Weil, Simone, 169 Welcome to Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row (Arriens, J ed.), 224 Wenders, Wim, 190 Westpac Bank, 140 Wilden, A, 91 Williams, Raymond, 101 Williams, Stanley Tookie, 224 Wings of the Dove, The (James), 74 Wittgenstein, L, 174–6 Wolf, N, 214 Wong, Penny, 140, 144 World Economic Forum, 137 World Meteorological Organisation, 137 ‘world risk society’, 36–7 Writing for their Lives: Death Row U.S.A. (Mulvey-Roberts, M ed.), 224
‘underdevelopment’, 57–8 United Nations, 136–7 Ustasha genocide, 159 Van Gennep, A, 163 Vietnamese-Australians, 196–208; stereotyping, 203–5
246
Index
Young, Iris Marion, 50, 213 Yuendumu, 21 Yugoslavia, former, 150–1, 154 Zero Emissions Now, 141 Zlatko, 155–61
