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Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism
In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages—anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity—often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published October 7, 2016
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About the author
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
14 books45 followersElizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
December 29, 2021
Frequently slipping into a beautiful way of seeing and speaking, this book is very thought provoking about basics like "life" and "being human". I found the conclusion really unsatisfactory, the usual sort of cop-out. It's easy enough for a relatively privileged, securely employed white person to get philosophical about future suffering (of others). I don't think Povinelli means to sound as callous as all that but she shrinks away from anything more activist than just accepting it. To be fair I think her life and work have not been spent hiding from the problem and doing nothing but at the end i would have liked anything more constructive or open.
Having critiqued the (lack of adequate) conclusion I have to admit this book made me think and feel really hard- about creeks, rocks, mists and humans. The idea of the city in the last chapter, the BWO helped me understand Deleuze and Guattari who speak about the BWO (I believe it was their idea originally) but come across as being high on some substance and lack the clarity that Povinelli's messy sludgy imagery gave me. The idea that "recognition" is just the next policing is worth considering too.
I suspect I will reread this book some time or read more from Povinelli.
Having critiqued the (lack of adequate) conclusion I have to admit this book made me think and feel really hard- about creeks, rocks, mists and humans. The idea of the city in the last chapter, the BWO helped me understand Deleuze and Guattari who speak about the BWO (I believe it was their idea originally) but come across as being high on some substance and lack the clarity that Povinelli's messy sludgy imagery gave me. The idea that "recognition" is just the next policing is worth considering too.
I suspect I will reread this book some time or read more from Povinelli.
November 18, 2019
Having read ‘Geontologies’ and thought on it for a few days, I remain uncertain of its central thesis. Povinelli makes it clear that she is trying to go beyond Foucault’s famous idea of biopower to some newer concept of power that apparently ties in with object-oriented ontology. However I couldn’t quite grasp it. As I’m a dilettante of theory-reading, perhaps that is not surprising. Still, I found the examples of practise engaging: Povinelli is an anthropologist who spent a great deal of time living with indigenous Australian people. Her accounts of their interactions with the Australian government and use of technology to record their cultural history are readable and vivid. The philosophical sections, on the other hand, made me wonder at times, “Isn’t this what Andreas Malm warned you about in The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World?”. In that book, he confronts the recent philosophical turn to considering natural resources as ‘actors’. Povinelli does not claim this as such, rather she questions how different things would be if places important to indigenous Australian culture were viewed in this way, as having some level of personhood. While this is undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment, the fact is that in the dominant logic of capitalism they are not. Australian law has scant respect for the personhood and rights of indigenous people, it seems, let alone their lands. Povinelli consistently acknowledges this, despite it seemingly undermining the purposefulness of much of her philosophical material:
My hope when reading theory is always that it will better explain the world as it is and how it could be. ‘Geontologies’ does introduces a new perspective via vignettes of indigenous Australian life. However it didn’t quite coalesce for me into something I could explain to someone else (my test of whether I understand). The discussion of how life and nonlife can be distinguished, and whether they should be, was thought provoking. Less promisingly, the chapters tend to end with questions to which the instinctive answer is either No or a shrug, such as these:
The style and content of ‘Geontologies’ reminded me somewhat of Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, although I found Povinelli’s practical examples more appealing and meaningful. While my philosophical understanding does not seem further advanced, I liked the accounts of indigenous Australian culture very much. The subtitle ‘A requiem to late liberalism’ appears unwarranted, as the book is not about late liberalism to any great extent. Povinelli does however summarise the carbon economy rather effectively:
...Not many politicians and capitalists are likely to consider Two Women Sitting Down, tjelbak snakes, or any of the other Nonlife existents that this book discusses capable of smelling humans, of having intentionally based actions, or of actively interpreting their environments. I would wager that for most non-Indigeneous manganese is not thought capable of uttering ‘groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger, or anger’ in a factual sense. When pushed they would probably admit that they thought Two Women Sitting Down, durlgmo, Old Man Rock, Tjipel, and tjelbak are fictional existences, narrative overlays to underlying real phenomena.
My hope when reading theory is always that it will better explain the world as it is and how it could be. ‘Geontologies’ does introduces a new perspective via vignettes of indigenous Australian life. However it didn’t quite coalesce for me into something I could explain to someone else (my test of whether I understand). The discussion of how life and nonlife can be distinguished, and whether they should be, was thought provoking. Less promisingly, the chapters tend to end with questions to which the instinctive answer is either No or a shrug, such as these:
After all, the question is not whether these meterological and geological forms of existence are playing a part in the current government of the demos. Clearly they already do, economically, politically, and socially. The question is what role has been assigned to them as they emerge from a low background hum to making a demand on the political order. As the drama of climate change accelerates and the concept of the Anthropocene consolidates, will existents such as the tjelbak be absorbed into the policing of Life and Nonlife, markets and difference, Logos and phonos? Or will they disrupt the material and discursive orders that prop up these forms of governance?
The style and content of ‘Geontologies’ reminded me somewhat of Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, although I found Povinelli’s practical examples more appealing and meaningful. While my philosophical understanding does not seem further advanced, I liked the accounts of indigenous Australian culture very much. The subtitle ‘A requiem to late liberalism’ appears unwarranted, as the book is not about late liberalism to any great extent. Povinelli does however summarise the carbon economy rather effectively:
The key to the massive expansion of capital was the discovery of a force of life in dead matter, or life in the remainders of life: namely, in coal and petroleum. Living fuel (human labour) was exponentially supplemented and often replaced by dead fuel (the carbon remainders of previously alive entities) even as the ethical problems of extracting life from life have been mitigated. Capitalism is an enormous smelter, shovelling into its furnace the living and the dead.
June 30, 2018
The first chapter of the book is a cartography of western philosophies and schools of thought, in relation to Foucault's biopower only to start unpacking the identified problems throughout the rest of the book. She is attempting to move from the 'inadequate' term biopower and biopolitics to Gerontology and what she calls Geontopower.
Unfortunately, I have not been patient enough to finish the book and left it off on page 45.
Povinelli -Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University– is trying to describe the contemporary condition of "late liberalism/settler late liberalism" (not of capitalism, because probably that has been done many times) through the perspective of indigenous Australian peoples. A task that seems to become complicated by her Eurocentric philosophical discourse and language.
She acknowledges the fact that the construction of our life is built upon the destruction of others. However, she fails to produce a practical decolonial methodology. She rarely mentions colonialism or decolonialism. In chapter 2, the account of her activism on Two Women Sitting Down case against a mining company in Australia could be helpful for those unfamiliar with indigenous peoples right to self-determination.
Overall, [maybe] this book can be a helpful tool (as an introduction) for the majority of white academics who are interested in ontology, object-oriented-ontology, Anthropocene, plant consciousness, new materialism, antinormativity, etc. to start thinking about indigenous epistemology, cultural studies or even post-colonialism and border imperialism.
Unfortunately, I have not been patient enough to finish the book and left it off on page 45.
Povinelli -Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University– is trying to describe the contemporary condition of "late liberalism/settler late liberalism" (not of capitalism, because probably that has been done many times) through the perspective of indigenous Australian peoples. A task that seems to become complicated by her Eurocentric philosophical discourse and language.
She acknowledges the fact that the construction of our life is built upon the destruction of others. However, she fails to produce a practical decolonial methodology. She rarely mentions colonialism or decolonialism. In chapter 2, the account of her activism on Two Women Sitting Down case against a mining company in Australia could be helpful for those unfamiliar with indigenous peoples right to self-determination.
Overall, [maybe] this book can be a helpful tool (as an introduction) for the majority of white academics who are interested in ontology, object-oriented-ontology, Anthropocene, plant consciousness, new materialism, antinormativity, etc. to start thinking about indigenous epistemology, cultural studies or even post-colonialism and border imperialism.
January 1, 2023
I loved this book, even though I'd be hard pressed to say what it's actually about, or what Povinelli's thesis is. She suffers from the word salad syndrome of poststructuralist theory, but in her hands that language is somehow hypnotic and poetic instead of offputting, which is its usual effect on me.
"The three figures of geontopower are, from one perspective, no different than Foucault's four figures of biopower. The hysterical woman (a hystericization of women's bodies [how is that different from the first phrase?], the masturbating child (a pedagogization of children's sex), the perverse adult (a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure), and the Malthusian couple ( a socialization of procreative behavior: Foucault cared about these figures of sexuality and gender not because he thought that they were the repressed truth of human existence but b/c he thought they were symptomatic and diagnostic of a modern formation of power" (15) (she elaborates these in "Will be otherwise/the effort of endurance") "The problem was not how these figures and forms of life could be liberated from subjugation but how to understand them as indicating a possible world beyond or otherwise to their own form of existence."
So -- I don't know the technical difference between a "figure" and a "form." I don't really know what she's arguing about these four images, and how they related to what she posits as the equivalent geontological figures: the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus, and how they "displace the division of Life and Nonlife as such." I'm intrigued by the prescience of her notion of the virus, particularly in the time of COVID (the book was published in 2016). She never does really go into the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus and what they're supposed to be about, or what they might mean.
"How does [the] ascription of the qualities we cherish in one form of existence to all forms of existences reestablish, covertly or overtly, the hierarchy of life? Finally, the Virus and its central imaginary of the Terrorist provide a glimpse of a persistent, errant potential radicalization of the Desert, the Animist, and their key imaginaries of Carbon and Indigeneity" (18) What? Like most all post-structuralism, what is here posited as established fact seems to me to require significant (a) exposition and (b) production of evidence. Though it's intriguing.
"Whereas the Desert is an inert state welcoming a technological fix, the Virus is an active antagonist agent built out of the collective assemblage that is late liberal geontopower" (19).
"Is it possible to assert that Two Women Sitting Down [a rock formation on traditional Aboriginal lands in Australia] and other existents like her should matter equally to or as much or more than a form of human existence? Or, riffing on Fredric Jameson, is it easier to think of the end of capitalism than the intentional subjectivity of Two Women Sitting Down and Old Man Rock? If not, on what basis do we allow or deny geological formations like Two Women Sitting Down an equal standing before the law? (Jameson, Future City)" (p. 35).
Her friends behave as if there are stakes to how "one attends to the human and nonhuman things" (69). There's a lot of talk of ghostly remnants (things that had life and are now denuded of it), though how this is different from dead things is unclear (perhaps geological things are undead, though she elsewhere deploys the figure of the zombie as an alternative/abject of capitalism). And how is that different than others characterizing indigenous views of the sacredness of the earth? Maybe it's not? Just phrased differently? She does at least point to traditional people who want the earth formations to remain undisturbed, and others who want to mine them to get funds to send the kids to good schools, which goes against the usual romanticized monolith of native peoples.
I think she does speak to what most estranged and irritated me about poststructuralist/postmodern theory when I studied it in the mid-90s - the argument was that everything is rhetoric, everything is social meaning. But that made no sense -- clearly there were chemicals in the water that caused cancer; clearly babies conceived in spring in farm country, when certain chemicals are applied, had a higher risk of birth defects. These were, to my mind, incontrovertible realities in the actual world, not just "discourse." But then there's the question of how we "know" anything and the social location of that process -- even if we're holding a fossil from before the time of human beings, how we know that has to do with a bunch of socially constructed science (71). And the problem is that that science leaves some people/viewpoints/realities out, while constructing itself such that if you disagree with it, you seem like a flat earther (75). "The existential terror evoked but then directed by another equally terrifying prospect -if we do not allow human existents to be one entity on a temporal line of entities then we will become a creationist or maybe a primitivist, an Animist, an irrational buffoon - reinforces the radical outside of that which we touch here and in this place, and nowhere else" (76).
In the imaginary of the peoples with whom Povinelli works, "truth was not a set of abstract propositions but a manner of attentiveness and proper behavior to the manifestations of a field of interinvolved materials" (tracing a path between where you were and where you are and seeing (presumably from a birds eye view) if that path resembles any other significant patterns (79).
Aboriginal people were presumed to be living fossils from another time. They got more rights in 1976, but could only mobilize them by "Under the Land Rights Act, Indigenous groups in the Northern Territory could make and win land claims if, and only if, they could demonstrate that they
_retained_ a specific kind of totemic imaginary and thus were something akin to Meillassoux's notion of an arche-fossil, a trace from a period of time anterior to the violence of settler colonialism . . . . the best evidence that an Indigenous group was a living arche-fossil was their belief that forms of Nonlife actively listened to humans . . ." Whatever evidence they presented had to feel to the state as evidence of a time before the state. And only those entanglements from before the state mattered - not the current analysis. "Major social and analytic accomplishments that allowed people to survive the present had to be presented as a dumb totemic repetition of the past" (80).
Summarizes research/writing from thinkers like Pierce that we need to think about thinking differently, "recent biological research indicates that something much like thinking -- an experiential sensitivity, at the very least, -- goes on in such entities as trees, slime mold, and bacteria, even though none of these organisms have brains" (83).
Points out that philosophers worried about geontology and whether objects exist and have relationships with each other or that they aren't withdrawn and indifferent are equally odd/useless to the Karrabing and others like them.
In making the film Windjarrameru: The Stealing C*nt$ with her Karrabing Film Collective friends, there are sometimes character and other discontinuities. "What might appear to be aestethic slippages are actually the aesthetic registers and manifestations of Indigenous life in geontopower. Sometimes people who were in earlier scenes are in jail or must wait for a phone call from social services, so we shoot around them. WE could insert extradiagetic footage but we think that allowing unavoidable inconsistencies to be a part of the visual field might be more powerful" (86).
90 - painful scene about real ways Karrabing can be safe from the carceral state by hiding out in a place so chemically poisoned police won't come in - and saying to one another, our grandparents died here, now we can.
"The real question is . . the causes for the differential distribution of kinds of entanglements . . . the world of objects and subjects is not flat. It must be viewed from the unequal forces redrawing and demanding certain formations as the condition for an object's endurance, extension, and domination of interest. this is not to make humans the center of the object-assemblage world, nor to make other things passive. Rather it is to make the forces that produce centers and passivities the name of the game" (91).
People did not ask where a geontological formation was born or where it died, they "asked how and why she responded to different people and didfferent human actions in this or that way - giving fish and crab or witholding htem. Her existence was witnessed in indicative dimensions and activities. If someone wanted to know more about Tjipel they were told to interact more intimately with her and follow her topological coordinates elsewhere" (93-94)
Tjippel and her human kin were integral to each other's arrangement -- well, yes. Again, this seems to be what indigenous folks have been saying for a long time. I'm not sure what's gained by expressing it in terms only scholars can understand. Does offer a story of how "if this rapport was broken, Tjipel would not die, but she would turn away from her human kin. After all, she had changed her arrangement of existence [twice before] . . first, she was an adolescent girl who dressed up as a young man. Then she became a creek. These morphological mutations did not kill her. Quite the contrary. They allowed her to persist in a different form. If she changed for a third time, she would once again persist but this persistence might be in a form inimical to human forms." (94).
Makes the point that Tjipel does not face prospect of being fracked or deep sea mined "symbolically," but through her materialization - that we already "drink the decision that she and others make int eh dissolved sediments and effluents of a busted Tjipel. She already drinks the effects of numerous other decisions others have made to break other forms of existence and distribute their wasted materials across her country in order to fuel commercial industries whose goods trickle down in secondhand form" (109). Well, yeah. That's what I was saying in the 90s when scholars were arguing everything is a form of discourse. Like Harry when his friend tells him infidelity is just a symptom, and he he replies "well, that symptom is f-ing my wife," the discourse is material. I guess I'm glad academics have caught up to this reality, but who or what is Povinelli trying to convince or move with this convoluted language about it? Elsewhere she says it's her Karrabing partners who asked her to do a PhD to serve as their needed anthropologist for land claims, so maybe she's just doing what she's gotta do to do that. I don't know. It seems like she has interesting things to say, if she'd just say them.
Discusses role of mining in Australian politics: "Gillard and her political party are only insofar as they are part of the intensified regions of extractive capital and the late liberal state of governing difference." (110)
Ranciere's definition of politics as the place where there once was consensus that erupts into dissensus. Which - isn't this just about the subaltern, and the way in which every now is a combination of what came before and whatever will emerge, a la Jameson? (130) But "are we contributing to a repetition of the cunning of late liberal recognition in which the modes, qualities, forms, and relations that already exist are merely, or primarily, extended to others? Is the call to recognize the liveliness of the (in)animate other another version of the call in liberal recognition to recognize the essential humanity of the other, as long as the other can express this otherness in a language that does not shatter the framework of the liberal common?" (130) "the movement between policing and politics" is made possible by the move from demonstrative objects to first- and second-person pronouns" (131) (Has she read Aldo Leopold on this?)
On Foucault: "his concern was not to find some position that was freed from governance entirely but that asked to be governed differently. Foucault's answer may appear tautological: the transition from being a residual within the population to an instance of a people depends on a sort of person who is capable of hearing, feeling addressed, and acting o the command to exit this inert position and actively differ . . . she must be willing to put herself in danger and at risk, no matter that no one else seems willing to do so . . . the point of critique was not to [do this] but to maintain oneself as noise, as an irritant, as a buzzing swarm of mosquitos just outside the range of a swatting hand or a spray can filled with DDT (134).
124 Quotes Ranciere's definition of politics as precisely that moment when what had formerly been an "us" has a group that says "um, no, that is NOT us" and claims its voice (125). This fits with movement in critical theory "from epistemological to ontological concerns"
I'm so fascinated by sentences like this, which are nearly impossible to interpret: "how does the Karrabing experimentation with informational capitalism intervene and iterate the increasing tension of geontopower in semiocapitalism?"
"Cribbing from Foucault, power archives itself in the sense that the sedimentation of texts provides a hieroglyph and cartography of dominant and subjugated knowledges . . . if an archive is a power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life . . . the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within - or distinct from- this form of power. . . . not just to collect subaltern histories but to investigate the compositional logics of the archive as such" (148-9).
Notes certain kinds of archives that can restrict access based on native rules -- Ara Irititja (151) How these encode stranger and kinship sociability (or not).
"Knowledge about country should be learned, but abstract truth is not he actual end of learning. Learning - knowing the truth about place - is a way to refashion bodies and landscapes into mutually obligated bodies." (157).
"Every new technological innovation is in retrospect experienced as nothing more than the dull repetition of previous hopes for uncomplicated happy endings - this time, the technology will decisively interrupt the injustices of the given social world. [Wendy] Chun pushes us to ask how they are being build such that they direct and constrain the future?" (158). (Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, and Lisa Marie Rhody. "Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows between the dark and the light" differences: A Journal of feminist Cultural Studies, 25, no. 1 (2014): 1-25.
Problematizes such access -- who gets to say who can access what? And what if the question is - there should/should not be an archive at all (160).
"Whether business-to-business or consumer-centered . .. . the metaphor of the cloud obliterates not just the Internet's physical structure but also sedimented meanings of the word _cloud_," incluidng "hautnting images and disastrous consequences of mushroom clouds" and "idiomatic uses that invoke storm clouds to convey experiences of fragility, impermanence, haziness, concealment, darkness, danger, gloom, and anxiety" Imaginary of the cloud meets materiality in PCBs,
Ways in which precision of cartographic GPS lines also allow/required by mining and the military/industrial/security complex. "The key to the massive expansion of capital was the discovery of a force of life in dead matter, or life in the remainders of life: namely, in coal and petroleum. Living fuel (human labor) was exponentially supplemented and often replaced by dead fuel (the carbon remainders of previously alive entities) even as the ethical problems of extracting life from life has been mitigated. Capitalism is an enormous smelter, shoveling into its furnace the living and the dead" (167).
"Life is not the miracle -- the dynamic opposed to the inert of rocky substance. Nonlife is what holds, or should hold for us, the more radical potential. For Nonlife created what it is radically not, Life, and will in time fold this extension of itself back into itself as it has already done so often and long. . . . Get out the musical instruments. Put on the robes. Say a mass of remembrance for the repose of the souls of the dead. Cling to life if even in the form of its mass extinction." (176-7). Is she serious about this? It seems the opposite of what she's been saying, too simplistic and binary.
"The three figures of geontopower are, from one perspective, no different than Foucault's four figures of biopower. The hysterical woman (a hystericization of women's bodies [how is that different from the first phrase?], the masturbating child (a pedagogization of children's sex), the perverse adult (a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure), and the Malthusian couple ( a socialization of procreative behavior: Foucault cared about these figures of sexuality and gender not because he thought that they were the repressed truth of human existence but b/c he thought they were symptomatic and diagnostic of a modern formation of power" (15) (she elaborates these in "Will be otherwise/the effort of endurance") "The problem was not how these figures and forms of life could be liberated from subjugation but how to understand them as indicating a possible world beyond or otherwise to their own form of existence."
So -- I don't know the technical difference between a "figure" and a "form." I don't really know what she's arguing about these four images, and how they related to what she posits as the equivalent geontological figures: the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus, and how they "displace the division of Life and Nonlife as such." I'm intrigued by the prescience of her notion of the virus, particularly in the time of COVID (the book was published in 2016). She never does really go into the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus and what they're supposed to be about, or what they might mean.
"How does [the] ascription of the qualities we cherish in one form of existence to all forms of existences reestablish, covertly or overtly, the hierarchy of life? Finally, the Virus and its central imaginary of the Terrorist provide a glimpse of a persistent, errant potential radicalization of the Desert, the Animist, and their key imaginaries of Carbon and Indigeneity" (18) What? Like most all post-structuralism, what is here posited as established fact seems to me to require significant (a) exposition and (b) production of evidence. Though it's intriguing.
"Whereas the Desert is an inert state welcoming a technological fix, the Virus is an active antagonist agent built out of the collective assemblage that is late liberal geontopower" (19).
"Is it possible to assert that Two Women Sitting Down [a rock formation on traditional Aboriginal lands in Australia] and other existents like her should matter equally to or as much or more than a form of human existence? Or, riffing on Fredric Jameson, is it easier to think of the end of capitalism than the intentional subjectivity of Two Women Sitting Down and Old Man Rock? If not, on what basis do we allow or deny geological formations like Two Women Sitting Down an equal standing before the law? (Jameson, Future City)" (p. 35).
Her friends behave as if there are stakes to how "one attends to the human and nonhuman things" (69). There's a lot of talk of ghostly remnants (things that had life and are now denuded of it), though how this is different from dead things is unclear (perhaps geological things are undead, though she elsewhere deploys the figure of the zombie as an alternative/abject of capitalism). And how is that different than others characterizing indigenous views of the sacredness of the earth? Maybe it's not? Just phrased differently? She does at least point to traditional people who want the earth formations to remain undisturbed, and others who want to mine them to get funds to send the kids to good schools, which goes against the usual romanticized monolith of native peoples.
I think she does speak to what most estranged and irritated me about poststructuralist/postmodern theory when I studied it in the mid-90s - the argument was that everything is rhetoric, everything is social meaning. But that made no sense -- clearly there were chemicals in the water that caused cancer; clearly babies conceived in spring in farm country, when certain chemicals are applied, had a higher risk of birth defects. These were, to my mind, incontrovertible realities in the actual world, not just "discourse." But then there's the question of how we "know" anything and the social location of that process -- even if we're holding a fossil from before the time of human beings, how we know that has to do with a bunch of socially constructed science (71). And the problem is that that science leaves some people/viewpoints/realities out, while constructing itself such that if you disagree with it, you seem like a flat earther (75). "The existential terror evoked but then directed by another equally terrifying prospect -if we do not allow human existents to be one entity on a temporal line of entities then we will become a creationist or maybe a primitivist, an Animist, an irrational buffoon - reinforces the radical outside of that which we touch here and in this place, and nowhere else" (76).
In the imaginary of the peoples with whom Povinelli works, "truth was not a set of abstract propositions but a manner of attentiveness and proper behavior to the manifestations of a field of interinvolved materials" (tracing a path between where you were and where you are and seeing (presumably from a birds eye view) if that path resembles any other significant patterns (79).
Aboriginal people were presumed to be living fossils from another time. They got more rights in 1976, but could only mobilize them by "Under the Land Rights Act, Indigenous groups in the Northern Territory could make and win land claims if, and only if, they could demonstrate that they
_retained_ a specific kind of totemic imaginary and thus were something akin to Meillassoux's notion of an arche-fossil, a trace from a period of time anterior to the violence of settler colonialism . . . . the best evidence that an Indigenous group was a living arche-fossil was their belief that forms of Nonlife actively listened to humans . . ." Whatever evidence they presented had to feel to the state as evidence of a time before the state. And only those entanglements from before the state mattered - not the current analysis. "Major social and analytic accomplishments that allowed people to survive the present had to be presented as a dumb totemic repetition of the past" (80).
Summarizes research/writing from thinkers like Pierce that we need to think about thinking differently, "recent biological research indicates that something much like thinking -- an experiential sensitivity, at the very least, -- goes on in such entities as trees, slime mold, and bacteria, even though none of these organisms have brains" (83).
Points out that philosophers worried about geontology and whether objects exist and have relationships with each other or that they aren't withdrawn and indifferent are equally odd/useless to the Karrabing and others like them.
In making the film Windjarrameru: The Stealing C*nt$ with her Karrabing Film Collective friends, there are sometimes character and other discontinuities. "What might appear to be aestethic slippages are actually the aesthetic registers and manifestations of Indigenous life in geontopower. Sometimes people who were in earlier scenes are in jail or must wait for a phone call from social services, so we shoot around them. WE could insert extradiagetic footage but we think that allowing unavoidable inconsistencies to be a part of the visual field might be more powerful" (86).
90 - painful scene about real ways Karrabing can be safe from the carceral state by hiding out in a place so chemically poisoned police won't come in - and saying to one another, our grandparents died here, now we can.
"The real question is . . the causes for the differential distribution of kinds of entanglements . . . the world of objects and subjects is not flat. It must be viewed from the unequal forces redrawing and demanding certain formations as the condition for an object's endurance, extension, and domination of interest. this is not to make humans the center of the object-assemblage world, nor to make other things passive. Rather it is to make the forces that produce centers and passivities the name of the game" (91).
People did not ask where a geontological formation was born or where it died, they "asked how and why she responded to different people and didfferent human actions in this or that way - giving fish and crab or witholding htem. Her existence was witnessed in indicative dimensions and activities. If someone wanted to know more about Tjipel they were told to interact more intimately with her and follow her topological coordinates elsewhere" (93-94)
Tjippel and her human kin were integral to each other's arrangement -- well, yes. Again, this seems to be what indigenous folks have been saying for a long time. I'm not sure what's gained by expressing it in terms only scholars can understand. Does offer a story of how "if this rapport was broken, Tjipel would not die, but she would turn away from her human kin. After all, she had changed her arrangement of existence [twice before] . . first, she was an adolescent girl who dressed up as a young man. Then she became a creek. These morphological mutations did not kill her. Quite the contrary. They allowed her to persist in a different form. If she changed for a third time, she would once again persist but this persistence might be in a form inimical to human forms." (94).
Makes the point that Tjipel does not face prospect of being fracked or deep sea mined "symbolically," but through her materialization - that we already "drink the decision that she and others make int eh dissolved sediments and effluents of a busted Tjipel. She already drinks the effects of numerous other decisions others have made to break other forms of existence and distribute their wasted materials across her country in order to fuel commercial industries whose goods trickle down in secondhand form" (109). Well, yeah. That's what I was saying in the 90s when scholars were arguing everything is a form of discourse. Like Harry when his friend tells him infidelity is just a symptom, and he he replies "well, that symptom is f-ing my wife," the discourse is material. I guess I'm glad academics have caught up to this reality, but who or what is Povinelli trying to convince or move with this convoluted language about it? Elsewhere she says it's her Karrabing partners who asked her to do a PhD to serve as their needed anthropologist for land claims, so maybe she's just doing what she's gotta do to do that. I don't know. It seems like she has interesting things to say, if she'd just say them.
Discusses role of mining in Australian politics: "Gillard and her political party are only insofar as they are part of the intensified regions of extractive capital and the late liberal state of governing difference." (110)
Ranciere's definition of politics as the place where there once was consensus that erupts into dissensus. Which - isn't this just about the subaltern, and the way in which every now is a combination of what came before and whatever will emerge, a la Jameson? (130) But "are we contributing to a repetition of the cunning of late liberal recognition in which the modes, qualities, forms, and relations that already exist are merely, or primarily, extended to others? Is the call to recognize the liveliness of the (in)animate other another version of the call in liberal recognition to recognize the essential humanity of the other, as long as the other can express this otherness in a language that does not shatter the framework of the liberal common?" (130) "the movement between policing and politics" is made possible by the move from demonstrative objects to first- and second-person pronouns" (131) (Has she read Aldo Leopold on this?)
On Foucault: "his concern was not to find some position that was freed from governance entirely but that asked to be governed differently. Foucault's answer may appear tautological: the transition from being a residual within the population to an instance of a people depends on a sort of person who is capable of hearing, feeling addressed, and acting o the command to exit this inert position and actively differ . . . she must be willing to put herself in danger and at risk, no matter that no one else seems willing to do so . . . the point of critique was not to [do this] but to maintain oneself as noise, as an irritant, as a buzzing swarm of mosquitos just outside the range of a swatting hand or a spray can filled with DDT (134).
124 Quotes Ranciere's definition of politics as precisely that moment when what had formerly been an "us" has a group that says "um, no, that is NOT us" and claims its voice (125). This fits with movement in critical theory "from epistemological to ontological concerns"
I'm so fascinated by sentences like this, which are nearly impossible to interpret: "how does the Karrabing experimentation with informational capitalism intervene and iterate the increasing tension of geontopower in semiocapitalism?"
"Cribbing from Foucault, power archives itself in the sense that the sedimentation of texts provides a hieroglyph and cartography of dominant and subjugated knowledges . . . if an archive is a power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life . . . the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within - or distinct from- this form of power. . . . not just to collect subaltern histories but to investigate the compositional logics of the archive as such" (148-9).
Notes certain kinds of archives that can restrict access based on native rules -- Ara Irititja (151) How these encode stranger and kinship sociability (or not).
"Knowledge about country should be learned, but abstract truth is not he actual end of learning. Learning - knowing the truth about place - is a way to refashion bodies and landscapes into mutually obligated bodies." (157).
"Every new technological innovation is in retrospect experienced as nothing more than the dull repetition of previous hopes for uncomplicated happy endings - this time, the technology will decisively interrupt the injustices of the given social world. [Wendy] Chun pushes us to ask how they are being build such that they direct and constrain the future?" (158). (Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, and Lisa Marie Rhody. "Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows between the dark and the light" differences: A Journal of feminist Cultural Studies, 25, no. 1 (2014): 1-25.
Problematizes such access -- who gets to say who can access what? And what if the question is - there should/should not be an archive at all (160).
"Whether business-to-business or consumer-centered . .. . the metaphor of the cloud obliterates not just the Internet's physical structure but also sedimented meanings of the word _cloud_," incluidng "hautnting images and disastrous consequences of mushroom clouds" and "idiomatic uses that invoke storm clouds to convey experiences of fragility, impermanence, haziness, concealment, darkness, danger, gloom, and anxiety" Imaginary of the cloud meets materiality in PCBs,
Ways in which precision of cartographic GPS lines also allow/required by mining and the military/industrial/security complex. "The key to the massive expansion of capital was the discovery of a force of life in dead matter, or life in the remainders of life: namely, in coal and petroleum. Living fuel (human labor) was exponentially supplemented and often replaced by dead fuel (the carbon remainders of previously alive entities) even as the ethical problems of extracting life from life has been mitigated. Capitalism is an enormous smelter, shoveling into its furnace the living and the dead" (167).
"Life is not the miracle -- the dynamic opposed to the inert of rocky substance. Nonlife is what holds, or should hold for us, the more radical potential. For Nonlife created what it is radically not, Life, and will in time fold this extension of itself back into itself as it has already done so often and long. . . . Get out the musical instruments. Put on the robes. Say a mass of remembrance for the repose of the souls of the dead. Cling to life if even in the form of its mass extinction." (176-7). Is she serious about this? It seems the opposite of what she's been saying, too simplistic and binary.
January 15, 2023
This book will clearly require at least a couple more re-reads. I still do not feel like I fully grasped what Povinelli means by geontologies/geopower, although I have a SENSE of what I think those terms mean. In some ways, Povinelli's text is like a foil to Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter, although it is not always clear how Povinelli is moving across different ideas. Other than chapter 1, which is an introduction to/summary of biopower and is therefore very dense and difficult to get through, the other chapters offer quite a bit to think about, although with some parcelling out required.
April 10, 2025
Geontopower, that is the distinction between life and non-life, is not just a new dominant mode of power, like biopower displacing yet coexisting with sovereign power, in that geontopower is the substrate of biopower et al even if it has come to further prominence in 'settler late liberalism.'
It's key symptomatic figures would be:
{The Desert: Represents the threat of Nonlife, the barrenness that can be revived through technological and capitalist intervention.
The Animist: Suggests everything is alive or can be, drawing on Indigenous worldviews but often used within settler liberal frameworks to reinforce control.
The Virus: Disrupts Life/Nonlife boundaries, mobilizing anxiety about contamination, terrorism, and uncontainable threats.}
In this is a critique of recognition. The move of yes the stone exists, but in this recognition it is relegated to the zero point of non-life and thus also relegating indigenous peoples to be a "safe other" that is accepted in a paternalistic way but obviously wrong or whatever.
The 'settler late liberalism' here is perhaps the other protagonist concept. "Settler" foregrounding that the settler regime is not a historical dimension of the current ruling order by a key facet. "Late liberalism" playing with late capitalism and neoliberalism highlighting how incorporation and recognition leads to subjugation with slightly more emphasis on governance and management and how that eschews transforming actual fundamental, even ontological, problems for recognition and management alongside the market. Specifically coming from the Australian context.
One interesting note is that to be represented in court indigenous people in Australia apparently have to have an anthropologist and a lawyer which is something.
Also very resonant with Dune re the figure of the Desert and neurosis around it. And troubles and Animist as too vital and often "safe other" that could even be deployed as a capitalist ontology which reminds me of the speech from the network. The Virus also makes a good figure as an ontological threat and an actual bodily threat and also a neurotic conception that reveals a certain disposition and justification for expansion of control and so on.
It's key symptomatic figures would be:
{The Desert: Represents the threat of Nonlife, the barrenness that can be revived through technological and capitalist intervention.
The Animist: Suggests everything is alive or can be, drawing on Indigenous worldviews but often used within settler liberal frameworks to reinforce control.
The Virus: Disrupts Life/Nonlife boundaries, mobilizing anxiety about contamination, terrorism, and uncontainable threats.}
In this is a critique of recognition. The move of yes the stone exists, but in this recognition it is relegated to the zero point of non-life and thus also relegating indigenous peoples to be a "safe other" that is accepted in a paternalistic way but obviously wrong or whatever.
The 'settler late liberalism' here is perhaps the other protagonist concept. "Settler" foregrounding that the settler regime is not a historical dimension of the current ruling order by a key facet. "Late liberalism" playing with late capitalism and neoliberalism highlighting how incorporation and recognition leads to subjugation with slightly more emphasis on governance and management and how that eschews transforming actual fundamental, even ontological, problems for recognition and management alongside the market. Specifically coming from the Australian context.
One interesting note is that to be represented in court indigenous people in Australia apparently have to have an anthropologist and a lawyer which is something.
Also very resonant with Dune re the figure of the Desert and neurosis around it. And troubles and Animist as too vital and often "safe other" that could even be deployed as a capitalist ontology which reminds me of the speech from the network. The Virus also makes a good figure as an ontological threat and an actual bodily threat and also a neurotic conception that reveals a certain disposition and justification for expansion of control and so on.
November 18, 2023
I hadn't felt this bored in ages. I was expecting quite something from a well-known Australian anthropologist, yet this book is a dull mess. If the first chapter is quite something indeed, with her three concepts appearing in strength -the Desert, the Animist, the Virus-, her work all along the book is strange, to say the least. It's not an etnography, nor a philosophical argument, nor a social critique. Even if she speaks of the Aboriginal peoples she knows, her account is way too personal and, at the same time, too abstract, non-informative at all. There are some good points from time to time, and I appreciate the reference to Kohn and Bennet's work, but to me this book fails absolutely in trying to go beyond Life and Non life. Even if we can give rivers and mountains an agency, which would be animism and that is something I fully support, you can't give them intentionality nor Life. We might all be made of the same chemical elements, but not everything is living, you can't compare the whole metabolism and communication of a tree with that of a stone. She might say of that that I'm perpetuating a biontological approach and one might even call me disrespectful, but there's some point of the deconstruction at which one must stop, not because of being what's been called a belief by modernists, but because of falling in mistakes or falsehood.
October 17, 2017
As the future of human life—or a human way of life—is put under pressure from the heating of the planet, ontology has reemerged as a central problem in philosophy, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and in science and technology studies. Increasingly not only can critical theorists not demonstrate the superiority of the human to other forms of life—thus the rise of posthumanist politics and theory—but they also struggle to maintain a difference that makes a difference between all forms of Life and the category of Nonlife. Critical theory has increasingly put pressure on the ontological distinctions among biological, geological, and meteorological existents, and a posthuman critique is giving way to a post-life critique, being to assemblage, and biopower to geontopower. What status should objects have in various Western ontologies?
June 22, 2019
Sometimes baffled by its many erratic terminologies, I find the concept of 'geontopower' really intriguing. Povinelli traces the relation between late liberalism (though I'm still not sure what is the difference between late liberalism and neoliberalism and of course the good old fashion capitalism) and the Anthropocene based on the ontological case studies of indigenous Australian with a diverse range of theoretical background, which sometimes I feel quite hard to grasp. I like the stories that relate to the Karrabing Film Collective, though the last chapter on the digital app and how she theorises it was pulled too far to the level I don't find any coherence of that chapter to the whole thesis on the book. One passage that really memorable in this book, which when Povinelli argues that capitalism is the purest form of animism. Brilliant.
November 22, 2016
Excellent and current analysis of late liberalism with erudite and interdisciplinary theoretical knowledge. Povinelli is able to draw on her work with Karrabing Film Collective to give discussion to distinctions between life and non-life that maneuver discussions beyond post-humanism while also critically examining anthropocentricism.
September 1, 2018
I read this in a seminar, which is probably the right setting for a book this dense. It made for some fun discussions, but I think Povinelli could have used a good editor/ a few more drafts before publishing. If you are interested in ontology/ epistemology, constructions of nature, and/ or indigenous issues, this is worth reading.
September 20, 2020
i come back to this book every once in a while because povinelli's formulation of 'geontopower' feels very necessary & important. it's a great companion to other readings of material agency & threads a poetic understanding of capital's carbon imaginary.
July 3, 2023
Absolutely fucking brilliant.
November 10, 2023
I read this book for my honors states, markets, and societies class discussing modern settler states. It was an incredibly eye opening book, and I’m so glad we were able to finish it in class. It led to a lot of great discussions in class
The personal stories Povinelli included about her time living with the Karrabing made her statements about geontology and Life vs. Nonlife easier to understand. Many of her chapters offered me alternative ways to view our societal structures.
The personal stories Povinelli included about her time living with the Karrabing made her statements about geontology and Life vs. Nonlife easier to understand. Many of her chapters offered me alternative ways to view our societal structures.
August 3, 2024
I read this for a graduate school class. While it discussed some interesting and important topics, it was very jargon heavy and not something I would recommend for a casual reader.
December 17, 2024
A real brain bender
February 1, 2017
“Life is merely a moment in the greater dynamic unfolding of Nonlife. And thus Life is devoured from a geological perspective under the pressure of the Anthropocene and the Meteorocene. Life is merely another internal organ of a planet that will still be here when it is not, when we are not, undergoing its unfolding, creating who knows what. Will Life be a relevant concept there?”
October 22, 2016
I just finished reading, #highlyrecommended: ...Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus...
December 5, 2016
A beautiful and insightful book.
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