la trobe university essay
Truths, Illusions and Collisions
Veronica Brady
'TRUTH' IN NIETZSCHE'S VIEW, can be defined as 'movable host of
metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of
human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically
intensified, transferred, and embellished.' 1 That is a
'postmodern' view, of course, which is why it may be a useful
point to begin. It is also the reason why I would like to reflect
on something that happened to me recently and then use that as
metaphor -- as Nietzsche also argued, the desire for metaphor is
not only a fundamental human drive but also a mode of discovery.
This is what happened, unimportant in itself but, I hope, worth
thinking about. Two youths in a four wheel drive went straight
through a stop sign -- a rhetorical gesture, I suspect (four
wheel drives in the city usually belong to a culture of display).
Then they embellished the gesture by making a U-turn. In the
course of it, however, they collided with physical reality, me,
on my bicycle. I don't know what it meant to them -- it was
probably irritation and worrying about scratches to the car. But
for me the collision was instructive -- as well as bruising. When
you are at the wheel of a four wheel drive you can feel above the
law; being higher off the ground than others can seem to confer
a special licence. For the upwardly aspiring as these two young
men seemed to be the truth by which they live is often the belief
that might equals right. Another point Nietzsche makes comes to mind here: Truths are illusions which we have forgotten as illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their sensuous embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. 2
It is probably the case that the 'truths' by which these two young men live are not much concerned with actual physical reality: by and large the world of rhetorical display in which a four wheel drive plays an important part rests, as Baudrillard puts it, on 'the exaltation of signs based on the denial of the reality of things'. 3 The bump I received, however, pointed out to me the illusory nature of this belief in 'truths' and may even have reminded my assailants that there is a reality outside their desires which is not always subject to them. That is why the incident leads me to reflect on our current situation and on the ideological impasse we seem to have reached, in this country perhaps especially.
It is evident, I think, in two recent widely different and apparently unrelated events of a more public kind than my encounter with the four wheel drive. They are the Prime Minister's proposed preamble to the Constitution and Ken Gelder's and Jane Jacobs' book on relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, Uncanny Australia. 4 But both illustrate an inability to see what is actually the case and thus a way ahead.
To me the Prime Minister's preamble reflects an even more illusory kind of 'truth' than usual, a devotion to outworn cliché which reflects an inability to see where we are now and what the way ahead may be -- as limited as that of the youths in the four wheel drive, perhaps more so since he is driving, metaphorically by the rear vision mirror. This is evident not only in his evocation of 'mateship' and the pious belief in upward mobility and the work ethic but, in my view, even more crucially, in his refusal to acknowledge Aboriginal claims to their unique place in our story arising from a determination to insist on the `patriotic' and triumphalist version of our history and reject what he calls 'the Black armband school' -- it is not conducive after all to his desire to make us all relaxed and comfortable.
Uncanny Australia is a different case. Its authors are sympathetic to Aboriginal culture and aspirations and, unlike Mr Howard, they are also aware of the seriousness of the impasse we have reached in our relations with them; in fact it is the main subject of the book. The point of comparing it with the preamble, however, is that its authors do not see a way out of the impasse, apart from vague hopes about 'the redistributive powers of post-coloniality' (p.143) What interests me is that in my view a way out is implicit in the emphasis they place on the disturbing effects of what they call 'Aboriginal sacredness' -- a sense that a particular view of the world does not seem to be able to account for a situation usually points to the need to revise it. Implicitly too, they are aware of this need: '[i]t is precisely because Aboriginal sacredness appears so out-of-step with modernity that it is able to be identified as the very thing modernity needs.' (p.1) But it is here, I think, that their position comes to resemble the Prime Minister's; they may sympathise with Aboriginal culture and even think that we may have something to learn from it but for all that they are not able to move outside the ideological boundaries of our culture. They are unable, it seems, to explore the full meaning of the word 'sacred'.
This brings to mind Wittgenstein's proposition: 'One thinks one is tracing the outline of a thing's nature over and over again, and one is only tracing round the frame through which we look at it. A picture held us captive.' 5 This, I submit, is not the best position from which to move into a new century whose challenges and thus the creative response to them are different from those we have known -- think of the growing gap between rich and poor, the decline, if not the collapse of civil society, the return to centre stage of indigenous peoples and cultures long marginalised and oppressed, the environmental crisis, and so on. Continuing to operate according to the current picture may well be putting us, like the short-sighted driver we have been referring to, on a collision course with 'reality': our 'truths' may well be dangerous illusions.
To return to it, Uncanny Australia is in fact about one such collision, between Aboriginal culture and that of 'mainstream Australia', in which they see Aboriginal claims for the importance of sacred places and sacred sites as the key element. It takes a positive approach, arguing that these claims have been 'crucial in recasting Australia's sense of itself' (p.xi) and they cite a range of examples from the Mabo and Wik judgments, the disputes over Coronation Hill, Uluru, Kow Swamp and Hindmarsh Island, and to the rise of the One Nation party, to support this view. But having said that, it seems unable to go any further. The premises of the culture on which Aboriginal claims are based are very different from ours but Gelder and Jacobs seem to despair of finding common ground seeing the situation in terms of Lyotard's notion of the 'differend', 'a...conflict between two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both parties'. (p.17)
Personally I do not see the situation quite this way. But for the moment I am interested in Gelder's and Jacobs' inability to find some common ground. Admittedly, this reflects the 'collapse of the Grand Narrative' characteristic of our time -- another concept which I would like to examine further. But I want to suggest that its source may be as much psychological as intellectual. They may in fact share something of the unease, even panic, which Aboriginal claims for the significance of the sacred seem to have aroused not just in ordinary Australians but even in powerful and worldly-wise figures like Hugh Morgan or John Elliott or -- though they do not mention him in this connection -- the Prime Minister himself. Aboriginal emphasis on the sacred, they argue, borrowing the term from Freud, have turned Australia into an `uncanny' place, making what once seemed familiar, seemed `home', somehow unheimlich, and thus somehow threatening. They see this as a significant moment of decolonisation:
The peoples we thought we had defeated and were about to disappear from history are returning to challenge not only our hegemony but even our sense of identity: [W]hat is 'ours' is [beginning to appear] also potentially, or even always already, 'theirs': the one is becoming other, the familiar is becoming strange.'(p.23)
This is very much to the point and helps to explain many of the actions and reactions of the present Government and also the anxieties of many Australians. But why then do they not try to move across the boundary and attempt to understand the Aboriginal side of things? In fact they make a conscious decision not to do so: 'Our book is not about the Aboriginal sacred as some kind of "thing-in-itself". We shall not be delving "anthropologically" into the content of Aboriginal sacred beliefs and practices', they write in the introduction. Instead they take their stand firmly within our culture and within the academic sub-culture to which they belong, to focus on 'discourses of the sacred'. (p.xi)
They have every right to do this, of course. My point, however, is that in doing so they remain within an ideological enclosure which suspects the metaphysical and concerns itself with the rational and demonstrable. That means, I think, that they can offer no way out of the impasse they describe -- what is to be done? Scholarly detachment is all very well. But it seems to me, especially in situations of this kind when two cultures confront one another, that scholarship also has a public responsibility. Thought prepared to take risks -- thought may have something important to say -- as Gelder and Jacobs suggest in fact when they say that 'the relationship between Aboriginal sacredness and modernity may be more intimate than first might be imagined' and even suggest that this relationship may hold the key to the future:
[Although] Aboriginal sacredness retains its other-worldly, residual features,...it is also activated as something emergent, as integral to what we might (or should) 'become'. It is precisely because Aboriginal sacredness appears so out-of-step with modernity that it is able to be identified as the very thing modernity needs. (p.1)
Similarly on another occasion in the course of an ABC Radio National program Jacobs told the interviewer that 'the occupation of Aboriginal sacredness may be a crucial requirement for our culture'. 6
There is something almost wistful about this and about passages in the book like the one in which they write, seeming both to believe and disbelieve what they report:
Some of us may think of Aboriginal sacredness as anachronistic in a modern, secularised nation state such as Australia. It can seem as if modernity had somehow left it behind, as -- in a time in which `nothing is sacred' -- sacredness can only be conceived of nostalgically as something good which has been `lost' and which at best exists only as a residue in the form of heritage sites or preserved objects. (p.1)
This kind of ambiguity is common enough, of course, and another note of the 'postmodern'. But in another sense theirs is a fairly old-fashioned view in that in the long run they are defending the status quo, both political and intellectual. Thus the hope that they offer in conclusion is that we may in the future recognise the need to build what they call 'an uncanny experience', that is the challenge of Aboriginal claims for the sacred into what they make the overarching reality, the 'experience of democracy', and make it part of our 'post-colonial narrative'. (p.143)
In my view this is not very helpful -- wistfulness can be disabling -- since it leaves the crucial question (which they are perceptive enough to pose) unanswered:
Why is it that a sceptical and rational modernity allows something apparently irrational, Aboriginal spiritual belief, so much space, so much presence? Why does Aboriginal spiritual belief command so much attention from modern Australia? (p.74)
In this way their position reminds me of the image Horkheimer and Adorno use to describe the position of those who continue to put their trust in what is left of Enlightenment culture as 'the bound listener [who] wants to hear the Sirens...' but who has 'hit upon an arrangement by which he [she] as subject need not be subject to them' and lives therefore by 'the wistful logic of the passer-by'. 7 Gelder and Jacobs remain within the culture, culture which cannot cope with difference and in this sense remains assimilationist.
This is clearest perhaps in their definition of the sacred which is drawn from the early twentieth century sociologist, Emile Durkheim, for whom it was essentially a social phenomenon identified with religion which in his view provides social unity, organising a people 'into one single moral community'. (p.4) This is usually one of religion's effects, of course, especially in indigenous cultures. But it could also be argued that the sacred is not necessarily synonymous with religion and that in any case religion can have a creative function beyond the merely social and political. Baudrillard, for instance, points out that it can also be socially unsettling: 'The religious experience has always been about a denial of the real, something like a radical doubt -- the idea that what is essential happens elsewhere.' 8 The range of alternative behaviour and thought sanctioned by any culture is limited but this kind of experience can and often does challenge and extend it.
This brings us to Rudolf Otto's famous and widely accepted definition. For him the sacred or the holy (the word he prefers) is something 'other', an encounter with a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a presence which is mysterious (since it is also a kind of absence) since it interrupts everyday experience and rational calculation with the intuition of a reality beyond all bounds and all calculation filling us with awe and trembling but also fascinating and drawing us to itself. The evidence suggests that this is how it functions in indigenous cultures, and the account Uncanny Australia gives of the effects Aboriginal sacredness has had on Australian society generally suggests that it may do so even in a secular culture which denies its claims. Once more then we return to the refusal -- or inability -- to explore the other.
This is also apparent in its reaction to David Tacey's work on the importance of the sacred in Australia. His notion of the sacred echoes Otto's. The sacred is a foundational reality, undergirding existence as a whole. As Gelder and Jacobs paraphrase his argument, 'the sacred flows into everything he describes; it is omnipresent; it is, in fact, [his] book's most "promiscuous" feature.' (p.13) The overtones of this word suggest their disapproval; they value clear definition, it seems, and are clearly puzzled by the fact that the sacred also represents 'an absence'. If one accepts Otto's definition and that it is beyond rational understanding and human control then there is no problem with this, of course; it means that there are 'more things in heaven and earth' than can be accounted for in a purely rational philosophy.