Representations of the Secular Neutrality, Spirituality and Mourning in Australian and Canadian Cultural Politics
Representations of the Secular Neutrality, Spirituality and Mourning in Australian and Canadian Cultural Politics
Sophie Sunderland B.A. (Hons)
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia
School of Social and Cultural Studies Discipline of English and Cultural Studies
2009
ABSTRACT
This thesis explores the ways in which ‘the secular’ is represented in contemporary Australian participatory art, screen, and print cultures. Secularisms are currently the subject of analysis in a broad range of disciplines within the humanities, and this thesis intervenes upon the field by focusing on the cultural politics of representations of embodied, spatialized secularisms. The secular is commonly defined in opposition to the ‘religious,’ and can also be extrapolated to the division of public and private spaces. Thus, by considering the occlusions and violences inherent in the ways bodies negotiate and are constructed through space, this thesis argues for the fluidity and porosity of these oppositions. By drawing from Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini’s notion of secularisms, understood as specific, situated narratives of the secular, as well as Talal Asad’s and William E. Connolly’s conceptions of the secular, this thesis identifies ‘neutrality’ and ‘spirituality’ as two key narratives of the secular around which questions of language, embodiment, affect, and subjectivity are set in motion. Here, a regime of representation that constructs ‘religious’ subjects as outsiders to an imagined Australian national identity is critiqued and reconsidered in terms of anxieties about remembering and living with difference and loss.
Rather than defining ‘the secular,’ this thesis seeks to maintain focus on the context and contingencies of enunciation. Thus, firstly the conflation of secularism with ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ is explored through a discussion of ‘defining’ secularisms, alongside critique of representations of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). By identifying the ways in which this ‘everyday’ text signals exclusions through the privileging of British Protestant Christianity in its contents, colonial history and usage, I consider how ‘neutrality’ is made contextually and contingently. This argument is then renegotiated in representations of subjectivity in two documentary texts. Read comparatively, God on my Side (2006) and John Safran versus God (2004), destabilize notions of a ‘neutral’ secular subjectivity through spatialization and participatory narration. John Safran’s performative, participatory engagements with the ‘religious’ blur boundaries that, through comparison with Andrew Denton’s God on my Side, illuminate the repetitious performativity of making ‘religious’ Others through the production of white, Anglo- Celtic, middle class, heteronormative, male, ‘secular’ identity and privilege.
Not unlike the secular, the ‘spiritual’ is a ubiquitous term closely associated with, and yet differentiated from, institutional ‘religion.’ Australian spirituality studies scholar David Tacey’s significant body of work imagines the desert and Indigenous subjectivity as homogenously and contrastingly ‘spiritual.’ Thus, for the purposes of this study, the spiritual functions as a trope that intersects with narratives of secular, white, Anglo- Celtic, urban subjectivity as fundamentally ‘lacking.’ By closely reading Tacey’s works, alongside other relevant media, I argue that these constructions of space and subjectivity erase difference and enact neo-colonial violence. In order to complicate this narrative, I offer a reading of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999) in which representations of women’s negotiations of ‘spirituality’ through grief and loss destabilize normative heterosexual, patriarchal relations and subjectivities. Here, secular mourning is a suggestive concept that foregrounds ‘affective economies’ of loss, grief, and mourning alongside openness to the ways in which identity is made and lived relationally, and differently.
Given that the representations of Australian secularisms I identify are made by locating ‘the religious’ elsewhere, this thesis reflects upon this process by including a contingent comparative study of representations of Canadian secularisms. Participatory art including the Secular Confession Booth (2007) in Toronto and The Booth (2008) in Perth, news media debates about secularism in Ontario and “reasonable accommodation” in Québec, as well as Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction novel Brown Girl in the Ring, offer provisional and yet compelling sites for reflecting on the ways in which secularisms intersect with narratives of national identity. Further, this study places the limits and conceits of Australian representations of the secular into sharper relief. Thus, this thesis contributes to studies of critical whiteness, spatiality, critical mourning, and affective economies of relationality, as well as Australian-Canadian studies and cultural studies, to offer a reading of how critical secularisms, including secular mourning, set in motion possibilities for living multiple modes of potentiality and difference.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract 3
Acknowledgments 7
List of Figures 9
INTRODUCTION Secular Privilege: Religion, secularism, and nation 11
Interlude 29
CHAPTER ONE Word Power: Secularism and the Oxford English Dictionary 31
Interlude 79
CHAPTER TWO Act Neutral: Embodiment and secular privilege 81
CHAPTER THREE Spirituality and the politics of ‘lack’ 123
Interlude 171
CHAPTER FOUR Secular Mourning: Spatial negotiations 173
Interlude 229
CODA (Confessing to) Reading Canadian secularisms 231
CONCLUSION Happy Mourning 265
References 271
Appendices 299
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the extent I have written this thesis, this thesis has also written me. It is therefore a special pleasure to acknowledge, within these pages, those who have engaged in this process with me and helped make it what it is. I firstly want to thank Gail Jones for her sensitive and invaluable supervision during the first three years of this project. Gail’s integrity, depth of knowledge and generous assumption of my abilities helped inspire my personal, intellectual and professional dedications to the task. Thank you so much. I am grateful to Alison Bartlett for taking over supervision after Gail left the university, and for offering the highest level of thoughtful engagement with me and my work. Alison’s extraordinary ability to think alongside me and thus to help open space for new possibilities and directions within this research has contributed significantly to its integrity. I must also thank Tanya Dalziell for her openness to this project and for her attentive communication that bears fruit long after the conversation has finished.
An important contribution to this thesis was a significant travel award from the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ) which enabled me to stay in Toronto for five months. This enabled me to gain an understanding of my positioning intellectually, relationally, personally and professionally that could not have happened had I pursued study only in Australia; a sensitivity which is perhaps reflected in the redistribution of the planned Canadian comparative component from half of this study to a reflective discussion in the Coda. For making my time in Canada warm, welcoming, intellectually rich and fun, I cannot thank enough Jamie Scott, Emily Gilbert, Nick, Josh, and Angela Failler, who generously hosted me in Toronto and Winnipeg, and each made my time in Canada rich, stimulating, and unforgettable.
My second acquired home in Toronto was within the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University. Seth Feldman, Laura Taman and Gregory Klages were exceptionally kind in welcoming me to the Centre and sharing their office space, thoughtfulness and humour. It was a pleasure to conduct research in a new environment alongside such lovely and committed people. I must also thank Eva Mackey, Geraldine Finn, Janet Groen, and Steve Bailey for giving their time to discuss this project. Thank you also to Deborah Cowen for making me welcome in New York and to Talal Asad especially, who not only met with me but also generously read and commented on my work.
This thesis has benefited immensely from travel to various conferences, and so I kindly thank the Dean of Arts and the Postgraduate Students Association at the University of Western Australia, as well as the Graduate Research School who awarded me no less than three travel grants, and particularly ACSANZ for a second grant to travel to Brisbane. I would especially like to thank Tseen Khoo, Olivia Khoo and Dean Chan for going out of their way to help fund a trip to Melbourne to the Asian Australian Studies Research Network Workshop with David Eng, given my research was obliquely relevant to the topic.
I would also like to thank people whose engagement with this work has opened up unexpected friendships and dialogues. Thank you to Liana Christensen, Golnar Nabizadeh, Siri Barrett-Lennard and Jen Hayward for reading chapters and papers critically and creatively. Thank you also to Robyn Owens and Michael Azariadis who generously found time to read and comment on my research. I have had excellent mentors in Gareth Griffiths, Judy Johnston, Susan Broomhall, Krys Haq and Robyn Owens. I also thank Lisa Cluett, Siri Barrett-Lennard, Liana Christensen, Lucy Reilly and Cheryl Lange for their invaluable mentoring, and for making my research a priority within our work program.
I especially want to acknowledge those who have helped me come to the place where writing is possible. Thank you, most of all, to Judy Griffiths. Thank you to Jude Carlsson, Wendy Roach, Jenni Werner, Sheree Bootes, Wendy van Duivenvoorde, Elizabeth Prendergast Jones, and Angela Failler whose very different engagements with me are each owed a special place in the development of this work. Thank you to my family, and especially James Sunderland for his careful intelligence and avid support of my ambition. A big thank you to my Mum, and to Alexia Pinakis for bringing over home-baked dinners as I laboured over the final version of this work. And thank you to Kath Forbes, for your friendship, depth of thought, and daring.
Finally, I want to acknowledge Gavin Rowcliffe’s powerful influence on the making of this thesis. It is dedicated to his memory.
LIST OF FIGURES
1. Kelly, Deborah. “Cloud Projection.” Beware of the God, 2005. 14
2. Oxford English Dictionary Tabernacle, Crawley, 2008. 29
3. “The circle of the English language” Oxford English Dictionary, 38 1989.
4. World Youth Day Pilgrimage, Perth, Western Australia, 2008. 79
5. Safran, John. “Exorcism.” John Safran versus God, 2004. 113
6. Stengel, Hans. “Another word comes on bended knees.” New York 119 Times, 1923.
7. Watson, Jenny. House painting: Box Hill North, Melbourne, 1976. 171
8. Watson, Jenny. House painting: Box Hill North, Melbourne, 1977. 171
9: Todd Julie & Jesse Ewles. “Secular Confession Booth.” Nuit 229 Blanche, Toronto, 2007.
INTRODUCTION
Secular Privilege: Religion, secularism, and nation
In 2007 the Australian federal government inaugurated a “citizenship test” for prospective citizens. The test consists of twenty multiple-choice questions with topics including Australian flora and fauna, sporting achievements, electoral processes and ‘Australian values.’ While the test was being drafted, a report in The Age broadsheet revealed the following question that would ostensibly be included in the test:
What forms the basis of Australia’s values?
a) teaching of the Koran b) the Judeo-Christian tradition c) Catholicism d) secularism (Roskam 2007)
The correct response was (b) the Judeo-Christian tradition. This may seem a curious response in a reputedly ‘secular’ nation. Section 116 of the Australian Constitution, which was drafted in the 1890s and made law at Federation in 1901, delineates that the State cannot legally establish a religion; nor can it impose religious observance upon its citizens. Section 116 reads:
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth. (Commonwealth of Australia, s. 116)
It follows that one religion is not to be privileged over another, and that Australia is a ‘secular’ nation.1 Yet for the purposes of the citizenship test, the correct answer is not d) secularism. What might it mean that, further to being a wrong answer, secularism is represented alongside three categories that connote ‘religion’?
As is the case in most multiple choice quizzes, the ‘correct’ response can be weighed against the extent to which other options ring true. That is, the correct response need not be seen as an objective fact, to the extent that these exist, but rather respondents are likely to hedge according to the contents of the other responses. Hence, if options included ‘bananas’ or ‘dog-walking,’ the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ would appear more prominently as a correct answer. It is therefore interesting that the options include two significantly ‘religious’ options, an ostensibly political doctrine, and a more diffusely religious ‘tradition.’2 I would like to give some attention to these options before considering the question of secularism more directly. The inclusion of Catholicism can perhaps be accounted for by Census data that shows Catholicism is Australia’s largest religion with 26.6% nominally identified with the religion (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006). Indeed, whilst Irish Catholicism was a minority religion at Federation in 1901 during the assimilationist White Australia Policy, the gradual cessation of the policy in the 1950s through to the 1970s enabled Roman Catholic migrants from Mediterranean nations to increase in numbers (Brett 2003). Thus, we can perhaps account for the
1 Lawyer Stephen McLeish argues that Section 116 is a “strange” section of the Constitution because it needs to be interpreted for its underlying “impulse” toward “neutrality” rather than its terms of reference. See: McLeish, Stephen. “Making Sense of Religion and the Constitution: A Fresh Start for Section 116.” Monash University Law Review 18.2 (1992): 207-36. Further, Tom Frame and Tom Wallace argue that Australia cannot be described as ‘secular’ on the basis of Section 116. Frame argues that Section 116 implicitly blurs lines between religion and government because separation is not explicated. Frame’s view is shared by Tom Wallace, who argues that the 1981 “Defense of Government Schools” case, which critiqued the use of the word “for” in Section 116, set out that non-establishment of the church is indicated by the Constitution. For Wallace, this vulnerability to critique does not amount to the express separation of church and state, and thus for him, Australia is not secular. See: Frame, Tom. Church and State: Australia’s Imaginary Wall. Sydney: UNSW P, 2006; Wallace, Tom. “Is There a Separation of Church and State in Australia and New Zealand?” Australian Humanist. Autumn. (2005): 32 pars. 2 For the purposes of this thesis, ‘religion’ remains a contestable term that does not have a resolved meaning. Given the focus on representational strategies that comprises this study, and ambiguities about the ways in which ‘religions’ are defined and practiced, along with the multiplicities of differences within specific ‘religions,’ I do not attempt to argue within the terms of what ‘religion’ might actually mean but instead consider the affects, effects and cultural politics set in motion through specific, situated representations. inclusion of Catholicism on the basis of demography and religio-cultural history. The other ‘religious’ option, the ‘teaching of the Koran,’ can be read as an effuse gesture to Islam. Islam is a minority religion, with a figure of 1.5% recorded in the most recent Census data (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006). Census data is restrictive and rudimentary, and these figures can also be considered in the light that the ‘religion question’ is optional, but nonetheless these figures suggest its minority status. However, Islam has featured prominently in the Australian media and public culture, particularly since 9/11, as synonymous to terrorism, and by extension, to terror (Chong 2006; Pugliese 2006: 14-20). There are a number of available readings that account for the expression ‘teaching of the Koran,’ including disinclination to mention Islam, anxiety that ‘teaching of the Koran’ refers to interpretations of the text that might not be described as specifically Islamic, or it may simply be preference for stylistic variety. I leave this question an open one, and yet note that, to score well, potential citizens must not state that Catholicism or the Koran are associated with Australian values. This leaves the options of ‘secularism’ and the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition.’
Invocation of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ suggests a continuing, historical heritage rather than the ritual practice of Judaism and/or Christianity. That is, the term might be described as quasi-religious and quasi-historical. Further, its hyphenation arguably signals difference, but can also be read as the suggestion that Judaism is an historical antecedent to Christianity; thus, the ‘Judeo-Christian’ asserts “both assimilation and relation” (Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2000: 13-4; Stratton 2000: 228). That is, the ‘Judeo- Christian’ absorbs Judaism and Christianity into one ‘tradition,’ whilst suggesting their difference. Furthermore, the term excludes the third Abrahamic faith, Islam, as well as other religions and codes. During his eleven year leadership as prime minister from 1996 to 2007, John Howard brought the Judeo-Christian tradition and secularism together in his not infrequent discussions of national values, as in this statement made during a radio interview:
I think an Australian value is that we are a secular society in the correct meaning of that term, which is that we don't have an established religion but not secular in the sense that our culture is not influenced by the Judaic-Christian ethic; it plainly is. (Howard 2006)
Here, ‘secularism’ and the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ are linked through the rhetoric of national culture. However, the Judeo-Christian tradition functions as the limit of the secular. Ultimately, within this logic, the extent to which Australia is not secular is the mark of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Given the exclusionary effects of the tradition, one possible interpretation is that religions and codes that lie outside its confines are subject to the principle of secularism. Here, secularism would function to organise the ‘free’ expression of Catholicism, Sikhism, Islam, and so on, within the limits of Constitutional law. The question of what the secular might ‘really’ mean, and thus whether Australia is actually secular is not the focus of this thesis, although these observations do raise some important questions in this regard. Rather, the citizenship test question is a rich and telling textual moment at which to consider how the language of a national imaginary has specific effects of ‘secularism’ and ‘religion.’ This thesis is focused on exploring how the language and textuality of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ functions in terms of privilege, and hence how subjects are imagined and made within these terms. In order to offer a contextual framework for this study, within which I will then situate my specific aims, I would first like to identify a broader narrative of anxiety about the intensification of ‘religion’ in Australian public culture.
Beware of the God
Figure 1. Kelly, Deborah. “Cloud Projection.” Beware of the God, 2005. Documentation photo: Dave Gravina. Reproduced with permission.
Deborah Kelly’s installation Beware of the God (2005) at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art projected the words “Beware of the God” on the sky above Sydney Harbour during overcast evenings. In a public lecture about the exhibit she stated, ironically, “I didn’t want people to go, ‘Oh, art.’ I wanted them to think, ‘It’s a miracle’” (Kelly 2006). That viewers might respond to the image with a deflated, ‘Oh, art,’ constructs the text in aesthetic terms, and it would seem in perhaps banal terms, over ‘religion’ or a political message. Yet Kelly also described her work as an interactive comment on the imbrication of the Christian Right in Australian politics, and to this end expressed her concern that Reverend and leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Party Fred Nile had endorsed it (Kelly 2006). Hence, the potential readings of this exhibit bear attention. I suggest that the inclusion of the definite article is crucial in a reading of this text. Whilst “Beware of God” would potentially assume consensual knowledge of to whom or what “God” might refer, the God destabilises resolved understandings of God – to the extent these exist. “The God” raises questions including which God, whose God, and where “the” God might be? Within the context of anxiety about religion in Australian politics that I will now describe, it becomes probable that “the” God, emblazoned on the ether through a trick of the light, refers to the invisiblising of the importance of religion within the Australian political secularism contemporary to the installation.
As we have seen in the example of the citizenship test, it is not enough to claim that secularism is the separation of religion from State. This “subtraction” (Taylor 2007: 22) narrative constructs the secular through the negation of the religious, but neglects the embroilment of the religious with state institutions including government. Within the Australian context, this is argued cogently by Holly Randell-Moon, who states, “[r]eligion cannot be unbound from the political (nor other) institutions in Australian society” (Randell-Moon 2006: 12 Original parentheses). Randell-Moon draws attention to the inclusion of “Almighty God” in the Preamble to the Australian Constitution, alongside the opening of Parliament with Christian prayer, and running of parliamentary services by the Christian Fellowship as structural processes that dissolve any doubt of the importance of Christianity to the Australian government. This argument is differently borne out by Judith Brett’s revisionist study of the imbrication of religion with major political parties in Australia. Brett argues that both before and since Federation British Protestantism was privileged within the main nonlabour parties above the Catholicism associated with the Australian Labor Party (Brett 2002: 39-56). Further, both David Marr and Amanda Lohrey indicate a rise in religion and conservative social policy in government since the 1990s, where Lohrey pays particular attention to the conservative Family First party, associated with Pentecostalism, which was successful at the 2004 federal election (Lohrey 2006; Marr 1999). The structural importance of Christianity within government was reinforced recently when both current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull successfully argued to retain prayers in parliament, in the name of “long-standing tradition” (Metherell 2008). Here, “tradition” again appears to legitimate the invocation of the ‘religious’ without directly offering Christianity as a legitimating argument. However, anthropologist Talal Asad makes the significant observation that it is indeed the State that patrols and organises the place of ‘religion’ in society (Asad 2005). In this respect critiques of secularism based on the apparent encroachment of religion into government fail to consider their structural co- implication.3 Asad suggests a more complex relation in which oppositions including
3 The blurred lines between church and State are made explicit in the Australian context because of the “Scientology Case.” During 1982-3, the Church of Scientology was declared a religion in a case fought against the Commissioner of Pay-Roll Tax in Victoria. A “four-point religious test” was established for use in Australian courts to define ‘religion’ and thus settle disputes about pay-roll tax, from which religions are exempted. See: Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Pay-Roll Tax. (1983). Victoria. Accessed 14 Mar 2008, from http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi- bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/HCA/1983/40.html?query=Church%20of%20the%20New%20Faith%20v%20Co mmissioner%20of%20Pay-Roll. secular/religious and public/private are mutually constitutive rather than exclusive. In this sense, religion and secularism are continually, repetitiously made in contingent, contextually specific ways that resist transhistorical narratives. With this in mind, I would like to briefly outline the context that gives rise to critiques such as Randell-Moon’s, in order to gain critical purchase on how both ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ are imagined and represented in cultural production.
Howard’s leadership was pervaded by attention to the Christianity of members of parliament. Health Minister Tony Abbott, who trained in a Catholic seminary before moving into politics, was scrutinized for his meetings with Archbishop George Pell. The public disapproval of this arrangement was expressed brilliantly by artist Tony Sowersby’s painting The Cardinal with his Abbott. Sowersby won a Bald Archie – a parody of the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture – for the image, in which Abbott is depicted as a small puppet on Pell’s ogre-like figure (Creagh 2005). Here, it is suggested that Abbott is controlled by a gothic Catholic doctrine. Further to this controversy, in 2006 Abbott was embroiled in debate about his capacity to veto permission for the ‘abortion pill’ RU486 to be imported to Australia. In an article titled, “I’ll wear ovaries t-shirt again,” The Sydney Morning Herald published a picture of Greens Party senator Kerry Nettle in protest, wearing a t-shirt that read, “Mr Abbott get your rosaries off my ovaries” (2006). This supports the perception that Catholicism was important in Abbott’s decision making, and that his Catholicism has specific impacts and violences on procreative women’s bodies. However, in an interview discussing Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Australia in 2008, Abbott strongly stated he would be “appalled” if he were to use “purely Catholic” precepts in policy decisions (Abbott Pope). Yet in a feature in the national broadsheet The Weekend Australian Magazine, Abbott is pictured holding a Bible in a double page spread opposite the Pope, in which he mentions that his policy decisions aimed at reducing abortion rates were inspired by his Catholicism (Abbott My Life: 17). Thus, Abbott’s Catholicism in public discourse ambivalently avows the personal importance of his Catholicism and his commitment to ‘secular’ government.
Abbott was not the only minister under scrutiny for the importance of his religious commitments in political praxis, but his Catholicism was constructed as a significant source of anxiety. By contrast, in 2004 Member of Parliament Peter Costello, an Anglican, addressed the conservative Pentecostal stadium church, Hillsong, in Sydney and stated that “Judeo-Christian values” were needed to counter the differences between Christians and Muslims in Australia (Maddox 2005: 222-4). In 2006, MP Danna Vale infamously argued that high abortion rates in Australia among non-Muslim women would cause Australia to become a “Muslim nation” in fifty years (Peatling 2006). In this instant, Vale fused her claim that a Sydney imam had said Australia would soon become Muslim with statistics of abortion rates, hence fuelling a claim that the imam was describing a demographic actuality and eventuality. This resonates with the language of “Us” and “Them” that Marion Maddox describes as a tool of the Howard government, and is indicated in Costello’s espousal of exclusionary “Judeo-Christian values” (2005: 180). Maddox argues that ‘Them’ is a shifting category in which predominantly women’s bodies are produced as threats to an exclusionary, imagined national “We.” She lists Muslims, lesbians, feminists, single parents, and Indigenous subjects variously positioned as Them (78). In the case of Costello’s usage, it appears that “Judeo-Christian values” are synonymous to national values; a point that echoes Howard’s construction of Australian values. To return to Vale’s comments, anxiety about national identity is intensified through the representation of a statistically justified national emergency. Here, Australian identity as emphatically non-Muslim but “Judeo-Christian” is expressed as a quantifiable, measurable artefact that creates a ‘need,’ or even responsibility, for (non-Muslim) women to offer their bodies for procreation and parenting. This rhetorical strategy, repeated by both Costello and Vale, can be described as ‘Howardage.’ Holly Randell-Moon coins “Howardage” as a discursive use of language particular to the Howard government in which “policy becomes palatable but invisibilises the strategies that construct the policy” (2006: 17) in her argument that the government’s policies were saturated in unacknowledged Christian ideology and values. I would like to expand Randell-Moon’s concept to acknowledge that speaking positions are also invisiblized in this strategy. Whilst Catholicism, which has a history of British Protestant oppression in Australian national and political history, is constructed as the premise of Abbott’s decisions, attitudes and hence arguably his speaking position, debates engaging Anglicanism and Protestantism are not explicitly located at the level of the subject.
British Protestantism holds a privileged position in Australian culture, and arguably, politics. Given that Queen Elizabeth II is Australia’s Head of State and head of the Church of England, its privileging is a structural fact. Indeed, British Protestantism was instrumental to colonial praxis and retained hegemonic power at Federation, and has functioned since the demise of its demographic privilege as a “shadow-” or “quasi- establishment” (Egerton 2000: 92; Lyon 2000:4). This suggests that Protestantism, or more specifically, Anglicanism, is politically, socially, and religio-culturally ingrained in the structures that shape the ways in which Australian identity and social praxis are imagined. In this instance, it is useful to consider Raymond Williams’ description of hegemony. He argues that in hegemonic configurations, “a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem[s] to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense” (Williams 1977: 110). In the hegemonic configuration I am describing, the precepts and peculiarities of British Protestantism invested in major public institutions in Australia come to form ‘common sense’ understandings of how society ought to function, and hence, who is accepted within ‘society.’ That is, the ‘pressures and limits’ that make ‘common sense’ can be identified as the apparent normalcy of Anglican institutions and practices as opposed to other, seemingly more religious, institutions. This naturalization of Anglicanism as ‘the religion which is not one’ was demonstrated recently by Labor MP Lindsay Tanner. Whilst speaking on the political television programme Q&A he remarked, “I’m not religious. I’m an Anglican” (2008). To the extent that secularism organises, defines, and delimits ‘religion,’ exalted categories of Judeo-Christian values and Protestantism become invisible, and yet visible in their effects on bodies and subjects. It remains to be said, then, that regardless of what ‘Christianity,’ ‘Judeo-Christian,’ and ‘Protestant’ might mean, reading representations of bodies and notions of national space enables an understanding of how ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ are constructed in contemporary Australian cultural politics.
Secularisms in context
This thesis identifies representations of embodiment and uses of language in cultural texts that both augment and set in motion questions about what ‘secularism’ and ‘religion,’ or its corollary ‘spirituality,’ might mean as provisional, contingent terms. Here, two specific narratives of the secular, or, drawing from Jakobsen and Pellegrini, secularisms (2008), namely secular ‘neutrality’ and public ‘spirituality’ are identified as narratives that might appear less urgent than questions of religion in politics, the rise in religious fundamentalisms amidst global flows of capital and bodies, and increased attention to discourses of the sacred in Australia since the influential Mabo decision of 1992 in which native title was recognised in law. However, the ‘secular,’ understood as an epistemic category with multiple histories, can be productively approached indirectly. An oblique point of entry resists adopting lenses of established histories that command readings that foreground church – state relations and post-Reformation European Enlightenment disaffection with clergy, without disavowing these pursuits.4 Rather, by locating analysis upon the specific, contingent affects and effects of invocations of ‘neutrality’ and ‘spirituality’ in a range of participatory art, print, and screen cultures, different textures and tones of how ‘secularism’ is imagined and mediated, and implicated with violence, can be vitalised. This makes space to cast suspicion on the idea that secularism is synonymous to rationality, justice, liberty and objectivity, whilst finding critical lacunae at which affective embodiments produce new possibilities for living (with) difference.
Since the 1990s in Australia a wealth of literature has emerged in the field of critical whiteness studies. In critical engagements with influential works such as Richard Dyer’s White (1997) and Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters (1993), Australian critical whiteness scholars have variously developed contingent readings of whiteness as a fluctuating signifier inextricably linked to power and privilege, that entrenches the
4 This dominant narrative is cogently described and diversified in the following seminal texts: Martin, David. On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994; Bellah, Robert N. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. white, Anglo-Celtic subject as ‘mainstream’ and dominant amidst the official policy of multiculturalism (Castles 1996; Hage 1998, 2003; Gunew 2004; Moreton-Robinson 2004; Perera 2007; Riggs 2007). Jon Stratton has extrapolated this mainstreaming of the white Anglo-Celtic subject to the entrenchment of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a “monomorality” that performs exclusionary work (1999: 181). Indeed, the Judeo- Christian, a relatively recent neologism that I will discuss in more detail in Chapter One, was commonly used by infamous conservative One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson in discussions of her xenophobic immigration policy targeted at reducing flows of Asian migrants. Stratton argues that the invocation of the Judeo-Christian absorbs the language of racism, and implies that ‘Asians’ have a different and incompatible moral code to the dominant ‘Australian’ culture (1998: 105-33). Indeed, the importance of national identity has a history that emerged in the 1970s with the Whitlam government and was instrumental to debates during the 1990s over multiculturalism. During this time politicians from the left and right, embodied by Prime Ministers Keating and Howard respectively, in different ways, imagined Australian identity as multicultural, with an Anglo-Celtic core (Stratton 1998: 105-33).
On the other hand, Ghassan Hage indicates the whitening function of Christianity, exemplified by the procedural and social acceptance of Lebanese Christian migrants over Lebanese Muslim migrants (Hage 1998: 60). Here, the cultural politics of whiteness and the ‘Judeo-Christian’ are linked in their exclusionary effects. Indeed, Alia Imtoual draws these points together:
[R]eligon and nation, and religion and race, are inextricably linked even when that link is not immediately apparent or visible, or when the rhetoric of the nation claims that it is secular and that that secularism has expunged religion. I am arguing that there is no secularism without a religion that informs it. […] Christianity does inform all aspects of a white Australian world view. (2004: 82)
Here, Christianity and whiteness are inextricably linked, though I would urge for the specificity of white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity and Anglicanism in this network of privilege. Certainly, ‘religion’ cannot be unbound from the context of enunciation which includes modes of white Anglo-Celtic privilege. Returning to my argument that the Judeo-Christian forms the limit of secularism, it is possible to draw from Imtoual’s argument that Anglicanism and the Judeo-Christian are also linked in this mode of privilege. Indeed, Imtoual is arguing against the invisiblization of ‘religion’ within narratives of secularisms, which resonates with the invisiblization of Anglicanism through the rubric of national identity and the Judeo-Christian. In this way, secular privilege is the erasure of ‘religion’ from imagined white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity unless and until a ‘religious’ affiliation is announced. This process of invisiblization is analogously related to the methodological assumptions of this research, which I will now outline.
Approaching the Secular
In order to explore representations of the secular in contemporary Australian society, this thesis ‘ranges over’ a broad textual field. This enables the possibility of identifying and closely considering the nuances of particular, contingent narratives of ‘secularism’ in cultural context. By focusing on a broad range of cultural productions it is possible to identify patterns within representational strategies, in what can be provisionally identified as a regime of ‘secular’ representation. This approach does not suggest or assume congruity between genres and contexts, but acknowledges that broader cultural anxieties about ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ are mediated through a range of genres and contexts. Hence, by placing diverse texts side by side, or in awkward relation to one another, it is possible to acknowledge points of incommensurability whilst exploring similar narratives of secularism that might enable new insights and questions about the secular. This approach draws from Stuart Hall’s argument that it is through the play of word, image, text, and meaning that cultural myths are constructed and potentially interrogated (Hall 1997: 13-64). In this thesis I examine the ‘play’ of signs across genres in order to interrogate the ways in which narratives of secularism are constructed in terms of myths about Australian national identity. Hence, this thesis includes contemporary representations of secularism, religion and identity in public and performance art, screen media such as television series, documentary and feature film, news media, tourism campaigns, literature, public policy, the Constitution, dictionaries, and expository non- fiction.
Over-arching, and to a certain extent organizing, the eclecticism of this study is a sustained analysis of the secular. By drawing from contemporary interrogations and studies of secularisms, including the Foucauldian genealogical analyses of Talal Asad, Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen, and, further, William E. Connolly’s political scientific research, I draw specific representations of the secular from a contemporary Australian context alongside and into established fields of enquiry. This enables analysis of the discursive construction of Australian secularism, and hence invites consideration of its particularity. The question of secularism is vastly under-researched within cultural studies disciplines in Australia, and so this thesis ‘tests’ the limits of current research by writing into this silence. Rather than accounting for the lack of contemporary research on secularism in Australia (which is strongly counterposed to that of America where a contemporary scholarship burgeons across disciplines including cultural studies, English literature, philosophy, political science, religious studies, and anthropology) I seek to ask questions of the nature of the silence. Most particularly, I consider the ways in which a ‘common sense’ assumption of secularism in contemporary media diverts attention from the burdens that potentially face individuals and communities within secular regimes. Further, secularism may be understood as a technology of power and privilege that naturalizes the non-religious identity of some subjects, whilst emphasizing the comparative ‘religiosity’ of Others. Thus, the focal point of this thesis represents the assumptions of its method, which Marianne Jørgensen and Louise J. Phillips describe cogently:
The aim of discourse analysis is to map out the processes in which we struggle about the way in which the meaning of signs is to be fixed, and the processes by which some fixations of meaning become so conventionalized that we think of them as natural. (Jørgensen & Phillips 2002: 25-6)
By approaching the secular at the level of representation, within a broader discursive analysis, this thesis closely examines violences that are silenced through naturalization. In the case of the secular I would suggest this analysis is particularly urgent, given the concept’s naturalized association with tolerance, justice, religious freedom and rational public debate.
However, I would also like to complicate this Foucauldian approach by selectively drawing from Melanie Klein’s work within object relations psychoanalysis. This inclusion of opposing methodological assumptions is both jarring and necessary. Indeed, I would suggest these are not ultimately incompatible approaches to analysis, but when coupled produce resistance to the seduction of the desire for a clear, succinct reference point from which to make and answer claims. In drawing from Klein I focus particularly on mourning, which, interestingly, is a practice that is precisely preoccupied by the task of living impossible, seemingly separate worlds simultaneously: the world from which the loss took place is distinguished from that which forms the space of living after loss. The connection between these spaces – of memory, remembrance and grief – is the fluidity and messiness that forms promising ground for the question of boundaries between spaces and structures. In this sense, it is a highly productive lens through which to consider the limits of secularisms; namely, the question of how people live the boundaries between a ‘secular’ public sphere whilst maintaining private religious practice. Further, what are the boundaries of secularism if it is structurally linked with British Protestantism? Rather than ‘seal’ these boundaries, this thesis aims to explore the representations of grief, loss, spirituality, and ‘neutrality’ that people the fault lines of the secular. In the section that follows, I offer an outline of the chapters that comprise this thesis, and which do not explicitly build on one another in a linear fashion, but rather lend each other different viewpoints and vanishing points that harness a sense of the ways in which secularisms can be constituted at these fault lines in terms of power, identity, affect, and emotionality.
Neutrality, spirituality, and secular mourning
Whilst studies of structural modes of privilege are highly important in the terrain of secularisms and whiteness studies, as well as concern for the institutional violence performed and naturalized through them, there is a gap in critical scholarship that considers how linguistic and subjective ‘neutrality,’ which is also implicated in scholarly praxis, constitutes violence, privilege and disavowal. Insofar as the ‘neutrality’ of the State toward ‘religion’ is invoked in dominant political secularism, ‘neutrality’ also refers to dispassionate, ‘objective’ language and positionality. Chapter One offers a meditation on processes of defining and wresting with the ‘secular’ by critiquing the assumptions of definition. By seizing on the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles as an instructive cipher within this analysis, I consider the contents and history of this textual testimony to Victorian triumphalism as a text that calls into question boundaries between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ registers. Dictionaries are of course social and cultural artefacts, and yet the OED commands an authority that, as I discuss, enables it to be construed as a tool of objectivity, such as in the case of a dispute in Sydney about the zoning of a mosque. This first chapter sets in motion awareness to the provisionality of the utterance with attention to modes of white, Anglo-Celtic, ‘secular’ privilege. Here, ‘neutrality’ intersects with secular privilege with real effects on how bodies and spaces are administered and represented.
Chapter Two develops and hones analysis of this narrative by focusing on representations of embodied negotiations of ‘neutrality.’ This chapter engages with two documentary texts that situate ‘religion’ outside Australian national space. Comedian and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television personality Andrew Denton’s documentary film God on my Side (2006) forms a useful point of comparison with irreverent ABC and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) television and radio host John Safran’s comedic documentary series John Safran versus God (2004). Both Denton and Safran are well-known for their humour, and Safran is particularly infamous for his willingness to expose the boundaries and hypocrisies of dominant Australian cultural myths and values. Both chose to make the Christian Right the explicit focus of their programmes (indeed in Denton’s case it is the exclusive focus), and perhaps more strikingly, both texts locate the Christian Right in the United States. Examined together, these texts intersect to offer a nuanced reading of how ‘religious identity’ is located outside an imagined ‘secular’ yet implicitly ‘Judeo-Christian’ Australian nation. By considering the generic strategies that are used to represent the ‘religious’ in these popular texts, I compare and contrast Denton’s ‘neutral’ and disaffected mode of interviewing with Safran’s embodied, participatory praxis, which is intensified at the series’ end in an extended episode detailing his exorcism by an Evangelical Christian pastor. By discussing this ‘telling’ and unsettling moment, in comparison with Denton’s apparently even-handed performance, I make a case for ‘neutrality’ as an ideologically constructed, performative form of privilege that intersects with secular privilege and the production of ‘religious’ Others.
The catastrophic events of 9/11 have had a strong impact upon the ways in which ‘religion’ is imagined to intersect with the public sphere, and has drawn significant attention to the place of religion in society. This is most strongly reflected in America, where a wealth of literature critiquing the particularities and vicissitudes of the secular has recently emerged, and from which I draw in this study. However, concern about the place of the ‘religious’ in society is not a new concern. In order to destabilize assumptions that 9/11 or the Bali Bombings that followed mark the moment at which religion became important in Australian public culture, the final two chapters focus on invocations of the ‘spiritual’ in 1990s print and screen texts. Here, I identify representations of ‘spirituality’ that intersect with narratives of a cohesive, homogenous ‘secular’ Australian national imaginary. Chapter Three discusses links between the popular intellectual works of spirituality studies scholar David Tacey, Pat Dudgeon’s short story Four Kilometres (2000), and the most recent Tourism Australia (Come Walkabout 2008) advertising campaign that projects anxieties about national identity and whiteness onto both Indigenous subjects and the desert. Through disavowals of difference these subjects and spaces are construed as inherently and homogenously ‘spiritual.’ Thus, I argue for a nuanced cultural politics of the ‘spiritual’ by considering how the construction of a reified, dominant, white, Anglo-Celtic subject that fundamentally lacks a ‘spiritual’ identity intersects with a regime of secular privilege.
Chapter Four both repeats and draws together the arguments about the importance of space and embodiment to ‘neutrality’ and ‘spirituality’ within the discourse of the secular I identify, and is also a point of departure from these concerns. By offering a close, resistant reading of Jane Campion’s feature Holy Smoke (1999), which intersects with anxieties about family and nation that were prevalent in mainstream 1990s Australian cinema and enacts a point of departure from these, I introduce the concept of secular mourning. The film’s narrative depicts a young, suburban, white Anglo-Celtic Australian woman’s embroilment in a cult in India, after which her family send her to the Australian outback for ‘deprogramming.’ Whilst the film is saturated in ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ tropes and iconography, I offer a reading of the way in which spatial narratives of relationality, alongside affective economies of mother-daughter relations function within the context of ‘spirituality’ to destabilize patriarchy. Here, it is possible to suggest that a ‘secular’ imaginary forms ideological and visceral scaffolding for the maintenance of the patriarchal nuclear family. In order to conceptualize this relation, this chapter draws on scholarship that links melancholia and mourning as categories of feeling and engaging with the world that are political and agential rather than simply pathological. By locating narratives of death and loss that pervade the mother-daughter relation in Holy Smoke and that engage the characters in proleptic mourning, or anticipated grief, boundaries between the mother and daughter are rendered porous. Here, mourning performs the material of exchange such that multiple, anticipated realities and subjectivities are lived simultaneously, and vitalised through difference. Here, ‘religion’ is negotiated among multitudes of alterities. This concept forms the premise for a closing discussion of the renovation of the former Port Hedland Detention Centre, which controversially detained asylum seekers for periods of up to five years during the 1990s until its closure in 2003, and was a place of hunger strikes, riots, and death. It was reopened in 2008 as a beachfront holiday resort for tourists, with the high perimeter fence described on the resort’s website as a security measure enabling guests to relax (Beachfront 2008). This refusal to memorialize loss and violence is continuous with the disavowal of human rights that made the detention centre. However, secular mourning conceptually opens up a space for perceiving these erased losses by refusing to disengage from affective economies of relationality and by interrogating the processes and cultural politics of boundary-making.
Finally, this thesis closes with a provisional comparative study that re-contextualizes the arguments I have made for the particularity of Australian secularisms by offering a reading of Canadian cultural politics and secularisms. This both registers an attempt to consider the politics and elisions of ‘neutrality’ and objectivity in another context, whilst, among significant differences, also arguing for similarities in the ways in which Canadian print news media and Australian print news media represent the assumption of a unified, homogenous national identity in representations of ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ subjects as outside and Other to the nation. By repeating the invocation of Canadian national identity as cosmopolitan in comparison to Britain and the U.S., and in this case Australia, and invoking suspicion of this process, the Coda offers a point of reflection on the previous chapters, and on the limits and conceits of the narratives of the secular I have identified.
Given the strong suspicions of ‘neutrality’ I set in motion through discussion of uses of language and embodied praxis, it is imperative I also draw attention to the modes of privilege that this thesis and I enact, benefit from, and represent. The secular privilege I benefit from has been reinforced, not least, when I have presented papers drawing from this research at conferences. This was made clearest at a graduate conference. My paper discussed the implicit Christianity of David Tacey’s ubiquitous concept of Australian ‘spirituality.’ During question time I was asked whether, despite what I had argued, I ‘personally bought’ Tacey’s argument for the importance of spiritual connection and sociality. The question pre-supposed that my academic speaking position and my personal beliefs could be separated. It also gestured toward the apparent invisibility of the ‘spiritual’ in my discourse and appearance. Thus, I knew I could hedge. Many similar encounters and exchanges throughout my candidature have reinforced my secular privilege through the anxious question of whether I am ‘really’ religious. The desire to find my partisan interests, however, is diffused and invariably deflated if I answer that I am not, or if I choose to mention my family is nominally Anglican. That is, there is often a sense that I am somehow less ‘interested’ than someone who could be described as ‘religious.’ This has similar resonances with my experiences of white privilege, in that, due to my physical appearance, I am not infrequently asked to explain my ‘heritage,’ often by strangers. My Anglo-Celtic whiteness is not assumed but provisional upon avowals that reinforce the assumption of my difference from this category, given that I am in many cases helpfully reminded I ‘don’t look it.’ This relational mode of negotiating privilege is of course a behaviour of privilege, from which I continue to benefit in the social and religio-cultural disavowal of Indigenous, Muslim, and other disenfranchised subjects constructed as partisan and interested rather than ‘ordinary’ (white) and secular (Imtoual 2007: 194). It is within this context that this study interrogates the ways in which borders are negotiated at the level of subjectivity, intersubjective relations, and national space. As a further gesture toward the importance of critical ‘spaces between,’ I have included an Interlude between most of the chapters. The images that form the Interludes are revisited and discussed within the progress of each chapter, but in their placement between the pages of text, function as questions that might arrest, or perhaps haunt, the reading process, and thus might be seen hesitantly as sites of possible interpretations and lines of flight that further dissolve certainties about what the ‘secular’ might mean.
- Interlude -
Figure 2: Oxford English Dictionary Tabernacle University of Western Australia, Crawley. Personal photograph by author. 7 Apr 2008.
The tabernacle is situated in the corridor of the English and Cultural Studies department at the University of Western Australia and contains a reprinted first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with reading-rest. The site is decorated with a print of a mosaic from a Byzantine church that depicts sixth century figure Maximian, Archbishop of Ravenna in the Court of Justinian. Beneath the print is a framed, handwritten note:
The Oxford English Dictionary has been placed here by the English Dept. for consultation by everyone who appreciates the value of a good dictionary. Treat it kindly.
1 CHAPTER ONE
Word Power: Secularism and the Oxford English Dictionary
Secular L. sæcul ris, f. sæcul-um generation, age, in Christian Latin ‘the world’, esp. as opposed to the church. […] I. Of or pertaining to the world. […] 2. a. Belonging to the world and its affairs as distinguished from the church and religion; civil, lay, temporal. Chiefly used as a negative term, with the meaning non-ecclesiastical, non-religious, or non- sacred. […]c. Of literature, history, art (esp. music), hence of writers or artists: Not concerned with or devoted to the service of religion; not sacred; profane. Also of buildings, etc., Not dedicated to religious uses. […] 3. a. Of or belonging to the present or visible world as distinguished from the eternal or spiritual world; temporal, worldly. - - - Oxford English Dictionary (1989)
Rigorous, sustained analysis of a given concept will often begin with definition of terms. This is certainly the case in studies of the secular. Scholars of the secular including anthropologist Talal Asad (2003), philosopher Charles Taylor (2007) and political scientist William E. Connolly (1999) begin their book-length studies with reference to the term’s etymological progression sourced from dictionary definitions. This is a common practice in scholarly texts, and may not seem noteworthy. However, it is often in the most ‘ordinary’ of moments and practices that significant meaning can be made. Indeed, in their analyzes of
2 the secular both Asad and Connolly cite dictionaries in order to critically reflect upon the conceits and limitations of etymological, historical narratives of definition (Asad 2003: 31; Connolly 1999: 21-2). Most particularly, they take issue with the structure and authority of the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (OED). Connolly describes the OED’s definition of the secular as “a partisan secular history” (1999: 22) and thus suggests that the term is broadly implicated in the genre of the dictionary itself. Thus, it cannot be described as a ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ authority. However, the OED is the most authoritative generalist English monolingual dictionary to date. What might account for its continuing authority? Connolly and Asad’s suspicions of the OED’s blind spots in defining the secular emphasizes and perhaps reinforces the text’s authority whilst also casting suspicion on its ‘neutrality.’ But why might scholars of secularism be interested in the assumptions of dictionaries, and of the OED in particular? This chapter takes up these questions by arguing that in its prevalence and ordinariness in scholarship and administrative practices, the OED works to anchor the ‘secular’ to an imagined, fundamental binary opposition between (Christian) ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ that presupposes the text’s ‘objectivity.’ In this chapter, representations of the OED undermine this binary, and set in motion questions of how ‘objectivity’ and subjective violence intersect in the almost inescapable task of defining terms.
For English-speaking societies such as those in Britain, Australia, Canada, the United States of America, India and New Zealand/Aotearoa, the OED, first published in ten volumes in 1928 (as the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles) and currently revising its third edition for completion in June 2037, is deemed the most authoritative of generalist monolingual dictionaries (McKusick 1992: 23; Brewer 1993). Simon Winchester, who recently authored a best selling novel and monograph on the history of the OED, describes the text as a “great twentieth century monument” (2007) and “the ultimate English dictionary” (1999: 91). Certainly, the massive project of selecting and cataloguing a printed English lexicon is a significant achievement in historical lexicography and online web design. However, representations of words in the dictionary cannot be construed as their transparent, translatable, intrinsic and consensual meanings. The dictionary is a specific genre that does not accommodate the specificities, contingencies, and multiple registers of the utterance (White 1993: 124; Willinsky 1994: 206). In addition to its mandate to provide definition for all ‘English’ words in print, the OED is a cultural artifact. 3 Given its inception in imperial Victorian England, the text arguably reproduces colonial, literary, commercial, scientific, and masculinist agendas that shape the definitions offered (Willinsky 1994). In turn, these agendas are implicated in its elevated, even exalted, status as “a quasi-scriptural authority” (McKusick 1992: 23). A perceptual paralleling of the OED with ‘religious’ (Christian) significance and associated moral value is made most emphatically explicit in Winchester’s reiteration of an adage originally attributed to Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language published in Britain in 1755: “One asked for The [Oxford English] Dictionary much as one might demand The Bible, Hymns Ancient & Modern, or The Prayer Book” (Winchester 2003: 32 Original emphasis). An exploration of representations of the Oxford English Dictionary as an exalted, quasi-divine text is therefore a useful point of entry to understanding not only what the ‘secular’ might mean, but crucially, to better understand the ways in which the text participates in a secular discourse that exalts ‘the (printed) word.’
In their recent and important collection Secularisms, Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini place less emphasis on debating “terminological precision” because of the significant reach and pervasiveness of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ (Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2008: 11). Their collection focuses on pluralities of embodied, affective, and politically invested realities and violences associated with lived experiences of specific secularisms and thus does not take ‘better terminology’ as its project. Nor does this study, and so I am not agitating for a ‘better dictionary’ that might more accurately define the secular. Such a search would eclipse the richness and depth of meaning that is invested in, and produced by, the terminology already in use. Rather, I devote this time and space to consideration of the way in which the secular is represented in relation to etymological narratives of progression as well as the OED. This enables a critical engagement with, and witnessing of, the ways in which a practice as seemingly simple as consulting the dictionary can indeed enact the violences and silencing that Jakobsen and Pellegrini specify. That is, I suggest it is not only ‘everyday’ or ‘difficult’ words that are at stake, but also their organization and historicization in print. In order to gesture toward the conceit of dictionary-making in its fascination with the making of authority, I turn now to a discussion of the significance of etymology in understandings of what the ‘secular’ might mean.
4 Into the saeculum
A prominent proponent of accurate and nuanced definition of the ‘secular’ is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose extensive study A Secular Age meditates on three differing senses of the term with respect to concepts of public space, and regional and national modes of belief. He argues for the term’s historical and political specificities (Taylor 2007: 22). Whilst it should be noted that Taylor restricts his study to North Atlantic iterations of ‘the secular’ and thus gestures toward multiplicities of secularisms, it is productive to consider the ways in which his study finds authority in using an etymological narrative to position the (North Atlantic) term’s origins in Latin Christendom. Taylor refers to Latin as offering “the original [sense], from which my three meanings […] are derived” (Taylor 2007: 54). In this basic narrative of etymological progression, Taylor analogously links the ‘secular’ to concepts of time:
‘Secular’, as we all know, comes from ‘saeculum’, a century or age. When it begins to be used as one term in an opposition, like secular/regular clergy; or being in the saeculum, as against in religion (that is, some monastic order), the original meaning is being drawn on in a very specific way. People who are in the saeculum, are embedded in ordinary time, they are living the life of ordinary time; as against those who have turned away from this in order to live closer to eternity. The word is thus used for ordinary as against higher time. (Taylor 2007: 54-5 original parentheses)
Here, and as is noted in the epigraph to this chapter, the ‘root’ of the secular is Latin. Taylor reinforces this point of origin by positioning iterations of the secular, such as its imagined “opposition” to religion, as specific meanings that have ‘branched’ from the common, etymologically established origin. He further ties the concept to time by arguing that the Ancient Greek Platonic ideal of “higher” time, associated with the divine, contrasts to the “imperfection” of secular, “ordinary” time, and that “higher time” is expunged in contemporary empty, univocal, scientific units (2007: 55-70). Notably, for Taylor the importance of etymology is established through the language of Latin Christendom and also through reinforcing the paradoxical sense that the ‘secular’ is a product of contingent practices and concepts, and yet has a static, unchanging, core referent that shapes understandings of various iterations (Crowley 1989: 111-2). In this sense, for Taylor the
5 word ‘secular’ can be seen to carry an extraordinary, persistent weight – the constructed primacy of Latin – that is imagined to be both independent of and fundamental to specific developments in usage.
Given Taylor’s focus on etymology and temporality, it is useful to consider Benedict Anderson’s argument that “homogenous, empty time” (Anderson 2006: 70) is linked to European practices of studying languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anderson argues that imagined “homogenous empty time” (a concept originally cited by Walter Benjamin, who argues it is inextricably linked to narratives of ‘progress’ (Benjamin 1973: 263)) legitimates studies of linguistic patterns and grammars that fractured the “divine provenance” associated with the “old sacred languages”: Latin, Hebrew and Greek (Anderson 2006: 70-1).1 He attributes the dissociation of these languages from the sacred/divine to the contemporary emergence of lexicographical analysis, grammar and philology. According to Anderson, the etymological research that was central to these studies of language forced the mingling of “sacred languages” with contemporary, everyday usage as they were printed together across the pages of lexicographical texts (70- 1). Here Anderson argues that this notion of time is fundamental to understandings of the secular, and as such Taylor and Anderson’s works can be productively read together – indeed, Taylor (2007: 54-61) borrows from Anderson in this respect – to articulate the ways in which representations of language are integral to making and reproducing constructions of the secular. That is, given Anderson’s famous thesis that modern, national communities are imagined, we can extend this concept further to analyze the ways in which an imagined secular society is reinforced and reproduced at the level of representation. I am not concerned with the question of whether a scientific chronos is ‘really’ secular, but instead call attention to the strong contextual association between shifting ideas of the secular and language practices. Here, Taylor and Anderson situate lexicographical practice in terms of an ideological and imagined shift ‘in[to] the saeculum.’ If this is the case, then the OED, a
1 In a somewhat different vein that argues a similar point, Simon Winchester describes in his history of the OED the parallel between geology and philology in early 19th century Britain, when “both rocks and the language were thought to have a divine origin” (p. 37). The imagined intermingling of language with the divine, in the sense that words are “God-given” through an Adamic conception of history, is made clear here, and Winchester’s note that this was later interpreted as a “frankly weird association” (p. 38) works to privilege and further elevate the ‘monumental’ practice of compiling the OED according to scientific, historical principles. See: Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 6 seemingly inexhaustible project begun in 1857 and continuing in its mandate to ‘fix’ the English language through historical, etymological research and extensive quotations, must be the ‘secular’ text par excellence.
In definitions such as Taylor’s, etymology functions to authenticate, rather than merely predate, a word’s meaning (Struever 1983). Hence, in Saussurean terms, a diachronic mode of meaning-making is privileged over the synchronic. Emphasis on diachronic ‘truth’ is reinforced in the OED’s current mandate to revise and authenticate the etymology of each listed term, with the stated aim of differentiating “documented and hypothetical” origins (Durkin 1999: 11-2). Despite Taylor’s meticulous research and establishment of multiple, contingent senses of the secular, his privileging of an a priori etymological sense risks reinforcing the hegemony of historical Christianity (Latin Christendom) within the definition, and also reduces the breadth and reach for reimagining the secular with respect to heterogeneous moral codes and ideologies that are not reducible to this historical- linguistic origin.2 But perhaps ironically, Taylor’s usage of etymology can additionally be read as an interweaving of the diachronic with the synchronic across the pages of his book. In this sense, the textuality of A Secular Age subverts the authority of the etymological meaning. With this play of representational strategies and meanings in mind I have placed the OED’s current definition of the secular in the epigraph to this chapter to acknowledge the dominant, etymological and historical mode of definition as dominant; and more crucially, to physically place this style outside the situated, contingent modes of definition the body of this chapter will offer. Incidentally, the OED defines epigraph: “A short quotation or pithy sentence placed at the commencement of a work, a chapter, etc. to indicate the leading idea or sentiment; a motto” (1989). Given my intention to performatively draw attention to the role of the dictionary in the process of meaning- making, and to decentre this mode, my use of the epigraph is reflective of the work of this chapter: to both subvert and acknowledge dominant understandings of the secular through
2 Pluralities of secularisms are enacted politically and critically, such that locating the term’s origin in Latin- Christendom, whilst suggestive of the term’s multiple inflections in modes of temporality and space, also risks reducing understandings of the secular to a European ‘authority.’ Key texts that emphasize the multiple inflections and irreducibility of the term include: Connolly, William E. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1999; Parla, Taha and Andrew Davison. “Secularism and Laicism in Turkey.” Secularisms. Eds. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. pp. 58-75; Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003; Bhargava, Rajeev. Ed. Secularism and its Critics. Delhi; New York: Oxford UP, 1998; Smith, Christian. Ed. Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social-Movement Activism. New York; London: Routledge, 1996. 7 analysis of the OED and its contents. Before considering discrete representations of the OED in two key Australian moments including the OED Tabernacle reproduced in the Interlude preceding this chapter as well as the ‘Sefton mosque case,’ I would like to offer a broader context for critiquing the OED’s resonances with masculinist, Christian, British literatures and conceits.
Narrativising the OED
One can thus trace th[e] lexicographic revolution as one might the ascending roar in an arsenal alight, as each small explosion ignites others, till the final blaze turns night into day. - - - Benedict Anderson3
I have described the OED as the secular text par excellence, and so I would now like to contextualize this claim by examining its elevation of ‘literary’ terms, taken from British (predominantly English) literature, to the imagined centre of a constructed, imperial understanding of ‘standard English,’ which is sometimes described as the Queen’s English. Sir James Murray, who was third and longest-serving editor of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED, renamed the OED in the 1933 edition), and who wrote the introduction to the first fascicle, figured the English language in terms of a core/periphery structure. This meant that some words were central and common, whilst others were on the outside reaches of ‘standard’ usage. So which words constitute the ‘outside’? Murray offered a diagram that informed, and continues to inform, this core/periphery structure, which is included in the prefatory material to the current, second edition of the OED. For the OED, ‘literary’ and ‘colloquial’ words are conflated as ‘common’ usage such that these define the ‘centre’ of ‘standard’ English vocabulary and make words ‘foreign,’ for example.
3 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006 ed. 72. 8
Figure 3: “The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre.” Preface. Oxford English Dictionary, 1989.
Of course, one person’s colloquialism is another person’s dialectal term. However, if we consider that predominantly English literature constitutes “common” English terms, it is probable that colloquial terms are strongly related to English, middle class vernacular in this imaginary. Here, literature is construed at the ‘centre’ of the English language, and given Gauri Viswanathan’s argument that secularism is the “defining” marker of literature, it is possible to suggest that the secularism of the OED is made not only through the ‘objective’ lexicographical practices of categorization emblematized above, but also through the canonization of (men’s) English literature (Viswanathan 2008: 466). Thus, the constructed morality of canonical masculinist English literature such as that which populated the NED and 1933 OED is arguably formulated as the ‘heart’ of both English language and secular conceit.
I would like to extrapolate from Viswanathan’s studies of literature’s enmeshment with colonial apparatuses to consider intersections between the OED and Australian colonial history. Viswanathan argues that colonial missionary projects inculcated and canonized English literature as a method of interpellating colonized subjects within a British Anglican moral code (Viswanathan 1989). These concerns are inflected in a speech acknowledging publication of the NED in 1928 by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. He stated he would choose the text above all others if ever “stranded on a desert island” by noting, “Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays – they are all in this one book” (Baldwin qtd in Winchester 2003: xxiv Original emphasis). Here, British literature becomes the mantle and praise of the OED’s achievement, cultural significance, and perhaps also its moral worth. Further, it is perhaps not pushing the boundaries of probability to suggest that Baldwin’s
9 ‘desert island’ refers not to an hypothetical, exotic cultural vacuum but, given the legitimating colonial myth of terra nullius that erased Indigenous nations and cultures in the production of ‘Australia’ as uninhabited land, this reverie on some level refers to the ‘island continent’ ‘down under’ that is dominated topographically by desert. In Australia colonial education, missionary programs, and commerce reproduced British histories, novels, poems and plays that arguably exalted Englishness. Alistair Pennycook notes that English language was (and continues to be) imposed on minority groups as the dominant means for access to and recognition within the public sphere, and thus informs discourses of Aboriginality and nation (Pennycook 1998: 216-7). The links between print culture and colonialism are suggestive of this hegemonic apparatus. Thus, Baldwin’s invocation of “our histories” also marks the erased and marginalized histories that make the context and structure of British colonialism, and print culture, which are here localised on and within the text of the OED. Thus the OED can be read as a colonial apparatus through its exaltation of print culture and British literature within a core/periphery framework that maintains and mediates colonial hierarchy.
As I have noted, for Viswanathan literature is endowed with the capacity to mediate Christian values and moral codes in colonial contexts. In a similar vein, Simon Gikandi affirms the importance of literature in colonial projects; “texts were important and indis- pensable weapons in the imposition of [British colonial] rule and governance” (1996: xix). Viswanathan’s and Gikandi’s nuanced analyzes of South Asian and African colonialisms suggest that the making of the English canon also structured what Englishness might mean within Britain (Viswanathan 1989; Gikandi 1996). Yet Viswanathan takes this further by situating colonial praxis within the framework, and thus the making, of what secularism might mean.
Literature’s unique relation to the religious culture it superseded made it an ideal instrument for conveying religiously inspired ethical values in a secular framework and, as I have argued elsewhere, an effective and palatable means by which Christian ideas could be im- parted in colonial settings without inciting potential rebellion and resistance by colonial subjects practicing different religious faiths. (Viswanathan 2008: 466)
10 Viswanathan’s suggestion that the naturalization of Christian ethics and practices were displaced into an historical epoch by the construction of literature is the historical background to her claim that pedagogical constructions of English literature enabled the mediation of Christian, Anglicized values in ‘secular’ colonies such as India. In the Australian context, this view is also produced by Pennycook’s suggestion of links between English, Anglicanism and colonialism. Interestingly, Pennycook notes the combined “Anglicist zeal” (Pennycook 1994: 100-1) and passion for English language and literature of Archbishop of Dublin Richard Chevenix Trench. Trench provided the original inspiration and plan for the OED project in a presentation to the Royal Philological Society in London in 1857 entitled, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1860). In a discussion of canonical English literature it may seem obvious to defer to authors, poets and playwrights including Milton, Keats and Shakespeare. However, it is precisely these authors that the OED exalts by qualifying and defining ‘everyday’ English words through quotations drawn from masculinist literatures. Thus, the OED catalogues and makes the canon in a didacticism that reinforces, and to a certain extent exceeds, the colonial practices of secularism and British (Protestant) moral codes in its status as a canonical text that is structured by colonial textual weaponry. Hence, it is perhaps not too much to state that the intertextuality in play here functions in the manner of a closed circle: one who finds the need to consult the OED is faced with a printed lexicon that asserts its secularism through literature, its objectivity through historical etymological conceit, and its hierarchy through a spatial economy of language that mirrors imperial narratives of domination. It is therefore no wonder that the British Prime Minister would find himself ‘at home’ abroad with a companion OED.
In my argument that the OED makes a remarkably salient, although unexpected, point of reference in debates about the secular, I have identified its invocation of British literature. This link is perhaps intensified by Simon Winchester’s novel The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A tale of murder, madness, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Surgeon (1999) is preoccupied with the importance of British literary quotations to the original OED project. However Winchester’s narrativization of the process of inviting volunteer readers from English-speaking communities in Britain, North America, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, South Africa and India to locate the quotations is constructed in a saga of crises and conflicts about money and passion, and is framed in terms of mythic heroism:
11
It was referred to simply as the Big Dictionary. When conceived it was a project of almost unimaginable boldness and foolhardiness, requiring great bravura, risking great nemesis. Yet there were men in Victorian England who were properly bold and foolhardy, who were more than up to the risks implicit: this was, after all, a time of great men, of great vision, of great achievement. Perhaps no time in modern history was more suited to the launch of a project of such grandiosity; which is perhaps why duly, and ponderously, it got under way. Grave problems and seemingly intractable crises threatened more than once to wreck it. Rows and delays surrounded it. But eventually, and by which time many of those great and complicated men who first had the vision were long in their graves, the goal, the goal of which [lexicographer Samuel] Johnson himself might have dreamed, was duly attained. (Winchester 1999: 90-1)
Winchester plots the compilation of the OED as a generic hero’s journey. The lexicographers, and in particular Murray, are represented as brave, courageous men who entered uncertain territory to combat opposing forces and ultimately emerge triumphant at the novel’s dénouement. Ironically, of course, there is no signal of a dénouement in the OED’s structural deferral of finding the borders of ‘English.’4 Whereas the novel structurally signals the borders of the text’s development by ceasing with the deaths of Murray and his interlocutor – the prolific contributor, murderer, and schizophrenic Dr W C Minor – the novel functions to memorialize and exalt the text as a British, Victorian imperialist, male success. Perhaps this is why it is possible to identify a semiotic of colonial exploration at stake in Winchester’s narrative, through references to uncertainty, bravery, vision, crises and ‘attainment.’ This masculine narrative, which is characterized not only structurally but also through diction – ‘boldness,’ ‘foolhardiness,’ ‘crises,’ ‘vision,’ ‘goal’ – is quintessentially heroic and arguably colonialist. This argument is perhaps supported by
4 Ongoing interest in the OED project is represented in the current development of its third edition. However, the OED project is also a popular cultural phenomenon in Britain, where in 2006 and 2007 Balderdash and Piffle was broadcast on BBC2. The television programme, which borrows from the OED’s online WordHunt, was hosted by both BBC2 and the OED, and invited audiences to locate and contribute quotations of specific words for which the OED had a scarcity of material. The following texts were published contemporaneously: Games, Alex and Victoria Coren. Balderdash and Piffle. London: BBC Books, 2006; Games, Alex and Victoria Coren. Balderdash and Piffle: One sandwich short of a dog’s dinner. London: BBC Books, 2006. Further, in 2008 Ammon Shea’s popular text that details his journey reading the entire OED in one year was published, suggesting continuing strong interest in the text, particularly with its size, in consumer markets. See: Shea, Ammon. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21 730 Pages. New York: Penguin, 2008. 12 the text’s celebration of the ideological as well as historical elements of the OED’s compilation in Winchester’s description of the text as a Victorian legacy:
[I]t is widely accepted that the OED has a value far beyond its price; it remains in print and continues to sell well. It is the unrivalled corner-stone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection. And it is still cited as a matter of course – ‘the OED says …’ – in parliaments and courtrooms and schools and lecture halls in every corner of the English-speaking world, and probably in countless others beyond. It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone. (Winchester 1999: 25)
The masculinity of the Victorian era is counterposed onto generic heroism. Also the size of the OED forms part of Winchester’s construction of grandiosity – he waxes lyrical about the seventy year time period marked between the project’s origin in Trench’s address in 1857, to the publication of the last fascicle of the NED in 1928. Attention to time is also matched by quantity: “scores of millions of characters, and, in at least its early versions, many miles of handset type” comprise the “enormous and enormously heavy volumes” (24). This phallic quality of the OED is also reproduced in analysis of the text’s cultural resonances. Notably, the text’s monumental size was reinforced in a recent study of systemic sexism within the OED that found conservative gender norms and stereotypes by measuring sexist citations according to prevalence (Fournier & Russell 1992). Here, significant quantities of repetitions of particular categories identified as sexist are constructed as meaningful indexes to social norms, such that the text is constructed as a representation of social norms in English-speaking societies, that nonetheless reinforces phallocentric precepts. Certainly, the OED is variously depicted as excessive in both literal (and virtual online) size, and also in terms of its impact on the ways in which meaning is made, which lends further esteem to the editors who putatively ‘conquer’ the terrain of the English language. I now turn to a discussion of the importance of the Victorian English Bible in the making of the OED’s structure and authority, before applying these arguments to two specific, contemporary Australian cultural moments.
13 The OED or the Bible
Part of the exaltation of the OED is made through its association with the ‘religious.’ Simon Winchester establishes Trench as a “divine” (Winchester 2003; 2007). Although for Winchester this esteem is linked to Trench’s key role in developing the dictionary, ‘divine’ has further resonances. As I have mentioned, Trench held a prominent role as Archbishop of Dublin. He also had a significant influence on the English Bible:
As English Bibles had been sent abroad by the boat-load, in editions that had benefited by Trench’s biblical scholarship, the way was being prepared for a new English dictionary to follow. That Oxford University Press, principal publisher of the Authorized Version of the Bible, would see fit to acquire the Trench-inspired OED some two decades later only adds to this particular conjunction of corresponding texts in the cultural extensions of the Empire. (Willinsky 1994: 22 My emphases)
Education studies Professor John Willinsky argues for a strong correlation between the imperial project of Christian hegemony and the desire to create a comprehensive dictionary of English (Willinsky 1994: 60, 114). In this sense the Bible and the OED form companion texts. However, in his address to the Philological Society Trench argued that the NED should offer a descriptive catalogue of the English lexicon, which he argued would galvanize British nationhood through “latinization” of terms (Trench 1860: 4-8). Here, a moral, prescriptivist methodology is put aside. Yet in linguist Roy Harris’ analysis, Trench’s approach, “ensured that the word continued to be [under] the permanent, quasi- divine surveillance provided by lexicography” (Harris 1980: 133). Thus, although the shift to word descriptivism and thus inclusiveness might suggest movement toward an objective, disinterested catalogue of the English language (White 1993: 130) it is also strongly linked to exaltation within a discourse of the moral virtue of lexicography and nationalist sentiment, further to the historically resolved religious figure of Trench as its initiator. The making of the ‘objectivity’ of the text is linked to the adoption of rational, scientific principles of descriptive enquiry, which suggest the text’s secularism, if we provisionally understand the ‘secular’ in its dominant form as the opposition of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ or reason. By weaving together twin narratives of Christian origins and scientific process, the OED can be read as a textual secularism in its undermining and interweaving of crudely
14 imagined ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ categories, such that they ‘melt into’ one another. Here, secularism is imagined as the co-constitution of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ such that they mutually inflect one another in specific, contingent intersections.
There is another possible layer of meaning that I would like to add here to re-read and re-present Trench’s preference for ‘latinization’ of the printed English lexicon. Jacques Derrida’s neologism “globalatinization” (Derrida 2002: 50) refers to the way in which the modern discourse of ‘religion’ is tied to Anglo-American cultural and linguistic imperialism:
[T]he world today speaks Latin (most often via Anglo-American) when it authorizes itself in the name of religion. Presupposed at the origin of all address, coming from the other to whom it is also addressed, the wager of a sworn promise, taking immediately God as its witness, cannot not but have already, if one can put it this way, engendered God quasi- mechanically. (Derrida 2002: 64 Original parentheses)
For Derrida religion and language are inextricably linked, even where ‘religion’ disappears in parlance. Latin and religion are co-implicated such that words take on a fullness of meaning that Derrida argues is “repressed” in processes of secularization, which is here understood as the separation of the form of words from meaning through the systematised oppositions (Derrida 2002: 223). This would suggest that the utterance brings the religious to bear, whether or not this is immediately acknowledged. Derrida interrogates the idea that language, and thus the speaker, could be divested of religious or “sacred” underpinnings and thus speak from a neutral/secular position in a secular “metalanguage” (Derrida 2002: 191-227). That is, if my reading is correct, he casts suspicion on the possibility of speaking outside the paradigm in which the English word and Latin Christendom are co-implicated. The OED project can be seen as a crude, material representation of the representation of the religious in intimate connection with ‘English’ words. That is, if I can knit Derrida’s argument with the particular representational strategy of the OED, it would seem the historical, scientific principles of etymological narrative and extensive quotations form loci that reproduce and reinforce ideological assumptions of British, biblical, masculinist authority. The OED’s reliance on books of the Bible (which are matched only in quantity by the works of Shakespeare) in citations, and the hierarchical classification of canonical,
15 white, English literature in contradistinction to literatures and words identified as ‘dialectal,’ ‘slang,’ ‘technical,’ ‘foreign’ and ‘scientific’ not only elevate some words to common usage but also, in a useful pun, produce the idea of an inextricably linked literary- religious ‘common sense.’5 Thus I augment Viswanathan’s statement that literary secularism displaces the religious by instead suggesting that these categories are mutually and structurally co-implicated. Further, following Derrida’s statement, “Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like an English word
Consideration of the elevation and exaltation of ‘English’ and masculinist, Anglocentric literature is usefully represented in the structure and iconic status of the OED. Indeed, the words listed in the dictionary are arguably represented in such a way that the synchronic and diachronic complexities, and thus the sociopolitical context, of the utterance are silenced; hence undermining the reason for consulting the text (Curzan 2000: 108). Consultation therefore mobilizes agendas beyond the instance of the utterance and propels and compels the word into particular discourses of power and privilege. Overlaying the structural issues of etymological progression and Latinization is the reverent narrative of the OED as a passionate endeavour of (male, middle class, Victorian English) lexicographers, with “hopes and intentions spiritual, moral, and commercial,” to “not only spread English influence abroad, but spread the influence of the Church of England into the darkness of the native world” (Winchester 2003: 42-3). This colonialist narrative of
5 There is a wealth of literature that explores the impact of ideology on etymology and dictionary production. Selected texts that touch on these concerns include: Benson, Phil. Ethnocentrism and the English dictionary. London: Routledge, 2000; Mugglestone, Lynda. Ed. Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000; Fournier, Hannah S. and Delbert W. Russell. “A Study of Sex- Role Stereotyping in the Oxford English Dictionary 2E.” Computers and the Humanities 26 (1992): 13-20; Struever, Nancy. “Fables of Power.” Representations 4 (1983): 108-27; Willinsky, John. Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 16 privilege and authority, for my purposes, constructs the OED as a cipher for localizing the conceits of the secular, through which it is possible to problematize understandings of the ‘secular’ as that which exnominates the ‘religious’ through narratives of ‘objectivity,’ or ‘ordinariness.’ That is, the OED is a useful exemplar that highlights the ways in which the secular and the religious are co-implicated. More figuratively, at the level of representation of etymological narratives and through the endless proliferation of supplements, editions, words and citations, the OED ironically enacts the perpetual deferral of resolved meaning and is therefore also a salient metaphor for theorisations of the ‘secular,’ which elude singular, reductive definition. I turn now to a discussion of the ways in which a situated representation of the OED both participates in and interrogates the dominant cultural myth of the ‘secular’ as that which opposes the ‘religious.’
The OED Tabernacle
The Interlude preceding this section depicts the OED Tabernacle at the University of Western Australia. I dare to offer a definition from the OED: ‘Tabernacle’ is defined, among other senses specific to religious buildings and rituals, as “A canopied niche or recess in a wall or pillar, to contain an image” (OED 1989). According to the OED, it is also variously linked to religious praxis: “A place of worship distinguished in some way from a church” (OED 1989). This might appear to resolve the text’s meaning, given that the OED Tabernacle is a recess in a wall within the corridor at the Arts Faculty building, and there is an image installed within it, of Archbishop Maximian of Ravenna. Yet, the location of the Tabernacle within a university building complicates this reading, as does its purpose to provide space for consulting the OED. To remain with definition for a moment, the OED’s definition of the ‘secular’ includes those buildings that are “not dedicated to religious uses” (OED 1989). This renders the Arts Faculty building a nominally ‘secular’ space. In this reading, the Tabernacle, within a definitively ‘secular’ architectural site, co- implicates religious heritage with the utility of the OED and, by extension, perhaps calls the secularity of the building in which it is housed into question. That is, the Tabernacle can be described as ‘secular’ because of its situation in a ‘secular’ building, and ‘religious’
17 because of its status as a tabernacle that houses an historical Christian image and thus connotations as an altar-space. The inclusion of the OED within this assemblage, as both a ‘secular’ text and one which, if we remember Winchester, has Biblical connotations, reinforces this complex layering. Yet analysis restricted to terminology, and most particularly to those offered by the OED in the light of the critiques I have made, are perhaps opportunistic and certainly limited. Indeed, I perhaps ought to admit here that, to my knowledge, I gave the title OED Tabernacle to this assemblage – thus ‘tabernacle’ may appear a self-serving selection of terms in comparison to ‘stall’ for instance. However, given the combined situation of the print from a Byzantine church mosaic, built-in book- rest, and positioning in a recess, the choice of title seems apt according to the dictionary definition. This suggests the confounding intertextual play of terms and meanings within the volumes of the OED, and considerable ironies and gaps in definitions in the context of enunciation. That is, I am attempting to signal the importance of contextual specificities and contingencies in making meaning. To extend this discussion beyond a limiting cross- referencing exercise I would like to now examine the Tabernacle contextually.
Many students within the English and Cultural Studies department frequent the corridor that houses the OED Tabernacle; without indication of close attention to it. However, academic staff have variously spoken warmly about its presence in the corridor and admitted consulting the OED volumes despite ease of access to the online, up-to-date version available in their offices immediately adjacent the tabernacle.6 Thus, what is the Tabernacle’s significance? Or, given the students’ apparent ignorance to it, what is its insignificance? Certainly, the Tabernacle is an anomaly in the otherwise stark corridor punctuated only by office doors and noticeboards. Perhaps it is because it is an oddity that it is invisible to many of the students. When I mentioned it to an undergraduate critical theory class whilst teaching within the department, none of the students said they knew of it, and some appeared puzzled by this. Their inability to see it may be that their purpose for using the corridor is purely to attend classes and access academic staff (although this can
6 At the 2008 School of Social and Cultural Studies Graduate Conference at the University of Western Australia, I presented a paper that included discussion of the OED Tabernacle. I asked the audience of approximately forty staff and graduate students to raise their hands if they had ever consulted the OED at the Tabernacle. Two hands were raised; both belonged to English and Cultural Studies staff members. After my paper, several people approached me and admitted they had never noticed the Tabernacle, despite having passed by it many times. This lends further weight to my argument that its meaning is inherently unstable, and hence makes a useful parallel to the unstable, multiple meanings of secularisms. 18 involve waiting in the corridor close to the Tabernacle). Or it may be due to lack of need for the text, given the English and Cultural Studies department is joined to the library by a covered walkway, and the library houses a range of reference texts and dictionaries both in hard copy and online – including the OED. This possibility is supported by John Algeo’s claim that in the case of the OED, “The electronic text is now the enduring and causal entity. Printed texts are incidental effects, conveniences for particular limited purposes” (Algeo 1990: 140). However these admissions further beg the question of the Tabernacle’s cultural and institutional significance.
The framed, handwritten note offers a clue. It reads:
The Oxford English Dictionary has been placed here by the English Dept. for consultation by everyone who appreciates the value of a good dictionary. Treat it kindly.
The Tabernacle’s ‘value,’ further to the role of encasing the ‘good dictionary,’ cannot be its utility for passersby to locate definitions of words, as this rarely occurs, and its contents is relatively outdated. Further to the assumption that an English and Cultural Studies department might be concerned with providing access to a printed English lexicon, particularly in the decidedly literary form privileged by the OED, its function, in this reading, is the elevation and exaltation of the text within a paradigm of care, inherent worth and elitism: for ‘everyone who appreciates the value of a good dictionary.’ Justified by the print of Byzantine Archbishop Maximian, this paradigm includes a Christian historicity that is not quite not ‘religious’ and not quite not ‘historical’ (replacement of the print with a crucifix, for example, would alter the meaning significantly). It is also ironic: invisible to (some of) the students who frequent the department, the Tabernacle participates in the discourse of dictionary-making that obscures the exclusionary cultural politics and effects that are central to its construction:
19 dictionary A dictionary is a word-book which collects somebody’s words into somebody’s book. Whose words are collected, how they are collected, and who collects them all influence what kind of book a given dictionary turns out to be and, in turn, whose purpose it can best serve. Though thousands of dictionaries exist for many different purposes, men have edited or written virtually all of them; and the words they have collected have, in large part, been from the speech or writing of men. Women’s invisibility as language producers is closely bound to the scholarly practices of dictionary-producers. (Kramarae & Treichler 1985)
The construction of “malestream” dictionaries has clear effects for the ways in which words are represented, and underrepresented (Winter 2000: 107). Although Kramarae and Treichler, as well as Bronwyn Winter, refer to the contents of particular masculinist dictionaries such as the OED, I would like to extend these observations to the Tabernacle. If we view the Tabernacle as an assemblage that produces a situated and particular representation of the dictionary, its sometime invisibility can be understood as an ironic repetition of the exclusionary, élitist practices that inform the OED’s history, historicity and contents. In this reading, the Tabernacle’s purpose is not merely to provide access to the volumes of the OED beneath the reading rest, but also includes the production of a didactic, self-authenticating paradigm of scholarly worth, and represents the persistence of Christian, British, exclusionary patriarchal orthodoxies. However, its authority is marvellously shattered by the students’ bafflement that it exists. Here, attention to the context and cultural politics of invisibility and exclusivity potentially enables subversive play.
The Tabernacle’s construction within a paradigm of elevated value and worship resonates with John Willinsky’s description of the cultural politics of the OED as Christian, masculinist, and Anglocentric (Willinsky 1994: 113-4; 188-9; 201-5; Benson 2000: 51-3). Willinsky puns on the Bible’s waning popularity for the Oxford University Press in both Britain and its colonies during Victorian imperialism, by describing the OED as “an Authorized Version of the English Language, a second Book of Books” (Willinsky 1994: 41). In this context, the Tabernacle endows the corridor with a material representation of British historicity, Christianity and masculinity, and the constructed primacy of literary, canonical English. Through these intersecting narratives, the Tabernacle complicates how we might understand a particular space and/or text as ‘secular.’ That is, the OED
20 Tabernacle functions as both a colonial relic and an enduring feature of an English and Cultural Studies department that teaches and researches women’s studies, and postcolonial theories and literatures. It is a ‘secular’ (‘nonreligious’) site and a quasi-religious space for exalting the (literary / historical / English) word. Here, the boundaries between imagined opposites blur.
Despite the choice of the British OED for the Tabernacle (over the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, for instance), it does not follow that the OED is ‘Christianized’ by the accompanying print of Maximian – though I have already noted the OED’s historical and religio-cultural links with discourses of Christianity including the production of the English Bible. Neither do I suggest that the Byzantine print is ‘secularized’ by the OED’s presence and the designation of the Arts building as a ‘secular’ space. Such a reading depends upon the idea that an ongoing, essential element of the ‘religious’ lurks unchanged within the ‘secular,’ and vice versa (Taylor 2007: 22; Asad 2003). Rather, the play of words and images represented in the Interlude arguably blur boundaries in a haeccity that materially articulates the discourse of the secular as implicated with, but not reducible to, the religious, art, and the cultural politics of in/visibility. Indeed, in this reading the Tabernacle can be viewed as an interactive art installation, as well as a dictionary consultation post, a form of worship, and a British historical artifact situated within a contemporary Australian context preoccupied with questions of coloniality and postcoloniality, and histories of exclusion and invisiblization (Gunew 2004; Mishra & Hodge 1991).
I would like to dwell further on the importance of in/visibility. Not unlike the ‘secular,’ which can be described as a socio-cultural concept more commonly and institutionally ‘taken-for-granted’ than gender, race, ethnic, and religious studies, the Tabernacle, as I have described, appears to fade from view in the corridor despite its explicit hailing of care, value, and good scholarship. In a further layering of meaning, and wordplay, I quote Gerry Turcotte at length:
Swear words, in French, are all religious. Eucharist. Sacristy. These are the stuff of the best exhortations. Since my father had forced me to go to English school, I delighted in filling my homework with these words, a perpetual rebellion. ‘A bit religious,’ one of my teachers
21 commented in the margins, ‘but a lovely story.’ How could she know that my words were not what they seemed? That as she read other words emerged. ‘It must be lovely to be bilingual,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I answered. Tabernacle, I thought. Chalice. (Turcotte 2004: 54)
Tabernacle, here, accrues additional meaning. For the purposes of this analysis, Turcotte’s work signals the points of departure from standard, received meanings that pervade and vitalize situated exchanges. This playful admission signals the ways in which meanings can be made through gaps in understanding, modes of incommensurability, and power differentials. That is, the English of the OED proves inadequate in the context of situated meanings, which is eloquently drawn out by Turcotte’s narrative of growing up in a bilingual Québecois household in Canada. I would like to draw attention to Turcotte’s description of witnessing “other words” emerging on the page “as she read.” Interestingly, for Turcotte the swear words were rebellious inasmuch as his teacher read – and appreciated – them. The production of ghostly meanings ‘between the lines’ unsettle the binaries of word/meaning, text/context. Unlike the ironically in/visible OED Tabernacle, the subversive pleasure of in/visibility is present to and manipulated by Turcotte, and embodied in his delight. Of course, the frisson of this moment is enhanced by the power differential between student and teacher. Thus, the importance of embodied affect in meaning-making can be seen as a site of subversive potential.
I will return to the importance of the body in these instances shortly. For now, given the modes of in/visibility and irony I have been developing in relation to the dictionary, language and the secular, a useful way of pursuing this point further is to focus on the ways in which the contents of the OED make meanings. Derek Attridge argues that etymology – a core principle of the OED – implies both conservative and transgressive possibilities:
Etymology can be used […] to confirm a dominant ideology, to deny the possibility of purposeful change, to reinforce the myth of objective and transcendent truth; but it can also be used to unsettle ideology, to uncover opportunities for change, to undermine absolutes and authority – and to do so without setting up an alternative truth-claim. […] It depends on the way in which words we regularly encounter, and treat as solid, simple wholes (representing solid, simple concepts), can be made to break apart, melt into one another, reveal themselves as divided and lacking in self-identity, with no clear boundaries and no evident centre. (Attridge 1987: 202 Original parentheses) 22
Although Attridge is not concerned with the coproduction of the religious and secular here, his understanding of etymology – a core structural assumption of the OED – suggests that whilst etymologies appear to offer transcendent, decontextualized meanings for words, they are also homonyms and puns in wordplay. What might it mean to substitute Attridge’s polyvocal, synchronic reading of etymology with the OED Tabernacle? The Tabernacle can be read as the composite relation of several discrete texts; particularly through a selective reading of the Maximian print’s articulations with the space of the reading rest and OED volumes, along with the OED’s structural dependency on literary and (increasingly) non-literary quotations as intratextual and intertextual references. However, through registering these associative relations in space, and with consideration to the broader ‘secular’ space of the university Arts building, as well as the persistence of the play of in/visibility, neither the building nor the Tabernacle can be described as simply, wholly ‘secular’ to the extent that they cannot either be described as ‘religious.’ These apparently incommensurable categories of religious/secular, visible/invisible, care/neglect, and serious/playful are exhausted as one melts into the other. Playfulness, here, refers to the endless play of meanings that inform the one through the other, without resolution or resort to a transcendent, univocal, diachronic register, but rather to irony and a plenitude of possible, provisional meanings.
Playfulness is important in this reading of representations of the OED as it enables the text to be viewed in more subtle connections with context. Allon White argues that an attitude of “seriousness” is indexical to dominant conceptions of standard English as fundamentally literary (1993: 130-4). Here, canonical English literature, such as that which is privileged within the OED, simultaneously and authoritatively catalogues “comic,” “partisan,” and “not-to-be-taken-seriously” word forms as dialectal, foreign and slang (White 1993: 130-4). With this in mind, if we return to the Tabernacle – which arguably reproduces ‘seriousness’ through its elitist interpellative note that figures the OED as the text of informed, careful scholars – understandings of discrete ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ categories are undermined as the Tabernacle functions figuratively, materially and provisionally as a unit(y). Its status, which we are told is ‘good’ in presumably moral as well as scholarly senses, is arguably linked to its privileging of British canonical literature and Biblical references, as well as etymological narratives. Indeed, as we have seen from 23 Taylor’s analysis, etymologies locate the origins of the secular in quasi-divine, masculinist and exclusionary imaginings of ‘secular’ time and space that privilege Christian, patriarchal “fables of power” (Struever 1983). In order to deepen this analysis of the Oxford English Dictionary as an heuristic device with which to explore and unpack the conceits of the secular, I turn now to a discussion of the authority of the English dictionary, including the OED, in debates about the zoning of the Sefton Mosque in Sydney in 1998.
Defining space: Dictionaries and authority
Dictionaries are dictators with a strange way with words. - - - Allon White7
What the eye is to the lover – that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with – language – whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue – is to the patriot. - - - Benedict Anderson8
In the Acknowledgements pages of his study Why I Am Not a Secularist, political scientist William E. Connolly describes Australia as “the most secular country I have yet to visit and the least haunted by religious wars” (Connolly 1999: ix). It appears that this reference is in relation to the lack of an established State religion, and lack of historical evidence of war and genocide on religious grounds.9 He goes on to link representation of
7 White, Allon. Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 124. 8 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006 ed. 154. 9 An argument, however, can be made that the genocide of Indigenous peoples and (ongoing) invasion of Indigenous nations in Australian history and culture cannot be unbound from British Protestant religious and ideological legitimations. This argument is signalled by Marion Maddox in her study of constructions of the ‘religious’ in Australian federal politics. She argues that the elision of Indigenous religions and spiritualities in dominant understandings of institutional ‘religion’ signals modes of Christian privilege in understandings 24 the term ‘secular’ in the OED with debates about the term’s meaning, by noting changes in its listed senses. For Connolly the dictionary forms an exemplary cultural narrative of the ‘secular’ that is paradoxically implicated in the discourse it attempts to ‘objectively’ define:
The OED story, in fact, becomes a partisan secular history of the sacred/secular division in the West, adopting as neutral terms of analysis several concepts and themes that became authoritative only through the hegemony of secularism. (Connolly 1999: 21-2)
Thus the OED is ‘blind’ to the contextual, ideological narrative of secularism that shapes and authenticates its definition of the ‘secular.’10 Connolly also claims that, despite the OED’s definition of the secular as a “negative term,” it is represented chronologically in a way that refers increasingly “positively” to “public authority, common sense, rational argument, justice, tolerance, the public interest, publicity, and the like” (21). These qualities are strikingly similar to those attributed to the OED itself in an assemblage of literary, academic and judicial contexts, including that of Connolly’s analysis. However, I would like to dispute this suggestion, and instead argue that ‘secularism’ and subjective violence are not mutually exclusive. A dispute in 1998 in Sydney between the Bankstown Council and the Bangladesh Islamic Centre of New South Wales demonstrates this point, and renders Connolly’s comment that Australia is “most secular,” in terms of its apparent lack of religious conflict, a broad stroke of the brush.
After the Bangladesh Islamic Centre purchased a disused Presbyterian church in suburban Sefton, Sydney, the local government refused permission for the building to be
of ‘religion,’ and that thus reinforce colonial hegemony. See: Maddox, Marion. For God and Country: Religious dynamics in Australian federal politics. Canberra: Department of the Parliamentary Library, 2001. 10 Talal Asad, in his analysis of the secular, refers to the term’s sense development and quotations in the OED in order to situate his analysis of the “sacred” as that which has changed conceptually over time: “The sacred, constituted first by anthropologists and then taken over by theologians, became a universal quality hidden in things and an objective limit to mundane action. The sacred was at once a transcendent force that imposed itself on the subject and a space that must never, under threat of dire consequence, be violated – that is, profaned. […] It was in the context of an emerging discipline of comparative religion that anthropology developed a transcendent notion of the sacred” (33). Once again, this emphasizes the contingencies of understandings of terms further to what is implied in the dictionary. Although he does not make this link explicitly, Asad describes discontinuities in the OED’s representation of the sacred and goes on to align an essentialized sacred ‘essence’ with “late nineteenth century anthropological and theological thought” (31). Given the relevant contemporaneity with the compilation of the OED, it is possible that the assumption of a sacred ‘essence’ in the OED definition is analogous to and symptomatic of the transcendentalist, essential meaning that Asad describes is historically produced in late nineteenth century scholarship. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 31-7. 25 used as a place of worship. The resultant debate was fought in the Land and Environment Courts with the aid of six selected dictionaries (Halligan 1999: 154-5). These were cross- referenced by lawyers who disputed whether a church can be defined as a mosque (Marsh 1998: 1; Halligan 1999: 154-5). Aside from, but arguably attendant to the xenophobia here, it is curious that dictionaries were privileged as authoritative sources with which to zone a place of worship.11 The OED was referenced along with the Macquarie, which author Marion Halligan mockingly glossed as “the holy book of Australian usage” (Halligan 1999: 155) in her recount of the case.12 Halligan’s mockery explicitly parallels monolingual English dictionaries with Biblical authority and echoes similar comments made about the OED by John Willinsky. Halligan was perhaps indicating that theological scholars and figures were usurped by dictionary consultation and interpretation in the case. Here, dictionaries arguably function as technologies that limit access to space and representation for minority groups; on succinctly ‘religious’ grounds. Given the close structural and historical relationship between Christianity and dictionaries such as the OED, however, it is important to note the lack of equal access to representation produced by the use of dictionaries here.13 By limiting discourse to the semantics of the terms ‘church’ and ‘mosque,’ the use of dictionaries situates and reifies Muslims within an authoritative lexical discourse that has material, exclusionary effects at the levels of subjective space, local government policy, and worship. Christianity, emblematised by the disused church, is privileged both in this instance and, arguably, through assumed links between Christianity
11 I have chosen to analyze the OED in this respect because it is more popular in Australia than the Macquarie dictionary. Moreover, the Macquarie, which nevertheless has a strong reputation in Australia, has adopted many of the etymological and structural principles of the OED in its construction. 12 It is common practice to use dictionaries in court cases. It is therefore useful to consider the interests these texts serve. A further and pressing example of this is demonstrated in Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s analysis of the Yorta Yorta decision in the High Court in 2001, which refused Yorta Yorta sovereignty. Moreton- Robinson writes that Justice Callinan referred to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘tradition’ to find that the definition “is insufficient to establish Indigenous possession” (2007: 119). Here, the OED functions as a tool of “patriarchal white sovereignty” and possession. See: Moreton Robinson, Aileen. “The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta decision.” Taking Up The Challenge: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies in a Postcolonizing Nation. Ed. Damien W. Riggs. Adelaide: Crawford House, 2007. 110-24. 13 Stephan Kerkyasharian, the Chairman of the New South Wales Ethnic Affairs Commission involved in resolving the dispute, was confused by the use of dictionaries in the case: “I think the decision by the Land and Environment Court to rely on the dictionary interpretation of some dictionaries, and reject others, and to turn round and say that while a church is a place of worship and a mosque is a place of worship it does not necessarily follow that a church and a mosque can be interchangeable as places of worship, is puzzling to say the least.” Kerkyasharian, Stephan. “Mosques and Priests.” The Religion Report. Interview. Lyn Gallacher. ABC Radio National: Australia. 4 Nov 1998. Accessed 24 Aug 2008, from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/trr9845.htm.
26 and English (Pennycook 1994: 100). Further, an extraordinary faith is placed in lexicography to determine the organization of communities, institutions and land use.
I have been arguing that the monolingual generalist English dictionary, as a specific historical and religio-cultural technology, can be usefully viewed as an ironic appendix to meaning-making rather than a final signified. Thus, in the case of the Sefton Mosque it is crucial to consider the social conditions that shape the utterance. Talal Asad’s critique of the public sphere in ‘secular’ democratic societies is helpful here. Asad argues that religious groups may need to use various forms of force to be acknowledged:
If the adherents of a religion enter the public sphere, can their entry leave the preexisting discursive structure intact? The public sphere is not an empty space for carrying out debates. It is constituted by the sensibilities – memories and aspirations, fears and hopes – of speakers and listeners. And also by the manner in which they exist (and are made to exist) for each other, and by their propensity to act or react in distinctive ways. Thus the introduction of new discourses may result in the disruption of established assumptions structuring debates in the public sphere. More strongly: they may have to disrupt existing assumptions to be heard. (Asad 2003: 185 Original parentheses and emphasis)
Asad’s comment that the public sphere is shaped and mediated by assumptions and beliefs is vital to a nuanced understanding of the place of religion in ‘secular’ societies such as Australia. It also intersects with Jennifer Sinclair’s argument that in dominant Australian culture, expressions of religiosity are deemed “extraordinary” in contrast to a dominant, “(secular) ordinary imaginary” (Sinclair 2004 Original parentheses). She describes, “a national discourse that continually asserts the desirability of the ordinary” (2004: 179). The mainstreaming of ‘ordinariness’ as non-religiousness is echoed by claims that “average Australians” do not appreciate overt religious expression (Hussain 2001:97; Bouma 2006: 47-8). Sinclair locates the ‘ordinary’ in the production of a national imaginary that mainstreams a white, Anglo-Celtic subject and culture represented in Australian media as emblematic of the banal, ‘ordinary’ and ‘secular’ (280-2). Thus, if we read Asad and Sinclair together, the revitalization of the former church at Sefton is ‘extraordinary.’ This was certainly the case for the nearby residents and Council whose suspicions resulted in the court case, given Islamic worship is construed as particularly disruptive to the existing
27 cultural myth of ‘ordinariness.’ For example, Sinclair links ‘ordinariness’ directly to xenophobia toward Muslim women wearing the hijab: “That the hijab has a symbolic meaning signifies that it is ‘not ordinary’ and therefore the wearer is excluded from the (secular) Ordinary Australian imaginary” (Sinclair 2004: 289 Original parentheses). A radio interview with Stephan Kerkyasharian, the Chairman of the New South Wales Ethnic Affairs Commission, revealed that nearby residents used lawnmowers to disturb worshippers during prayer times (Kerkyasharian 1998). Here, duties to care for the home and yard become noisy tools of anti-Muslim protest. Interestingly, the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 was a spectacle of kitsch ‘Australiana,’ including large floats in the shape of thongs (sandals), oversize prawns (shrimp), and a lawnmower that “tried to mulch a dignitary in a spoof that both sent up Australia's suburban dream and symbolized the country's famous antiauthoritarian streak” (Longman 2000). The residents’ choice to use lawnmowers (rather than music, for instance) to distract worshippers at the Sefton mosque can be read in this light as particularly pejorative, rather than instrumental. Further to producing noise, the lawnmowers represent and co-opt the ordinariness through which the worshippers are defined. The violence enacted here can be read as a representation of the exclusionary cultural politics and symbolism of Australian ‘secular’ ‘ordinariness.’
I would like to further contextualize Sinclair’s claim by arguing that the Sefton mosque conflict is also an expression of nostalgia for the fracturing of Christianity that shaped Australian society at Federation in 1901 until the 1950s. This putatively lost prominence is palpably represented by the vacant Sefton ex-Presbyterian church. Despite the ongoing presence of a diversity of religious communities practicing in Australia before, during and after the 1950s, rivalries between dominant British Protestantism and Irish Catholicism formed the dominant imaginary of religious difference (Brett 2002). Despite the relative prominence of Judaism, this remained the case until, as I mentioned in my Introduction, the White Australia Policy was modified in the decades after World War II to enable other ethno-religious groups entry to Australia (Carey 2003: 85). At Federation in 1901, Census data shows 96.1% of those surveyed identified with a Christian faith, with the majority Anglican (39.7%) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006). By 1976 the total figure for Christianity dropped to 78.6%, and at this time the gap between Anglican and Catholic denominations was reduced to just 2%, in comparison to 17% in 1901 (Australian Bureau
28 of Statistics 2006). I do not offer these figures as a ‘proof’ of progress, or secularization, nor indeed of actual religious participation (Indigenous subjects, for instance were not recognized as citizens until 1967), but they are useful to support the narrative of a fractured Christian (Protestant) hegemony. It was not until the 1970s and the advent of official multiculturalism that the shift to a multifaith polity took place (Brett 2003; Stratton 1999). I suggest that these historical and contextual markers of Christian hegemony surface obliquely in the Sefton Mosque case. In this light, Bangladesh Islamic Centre’s purchase of the disused church symbolises both religiosity and extra-ordinariness. Moreover, and in a complicated layering of affect, anxiety about the disused church’s purchase and attendant Muslim praxis can be read as desire to preserve the symbol of a nonreligious (but implicitly Christian), ‘ordinary’ suburban culture. Here, dictionaries function as technologies for the reproduction and preservation of imagined secular (Christian) ordinariness, whilst a disused church emerges as a fetishized emblem of ‘ordinary’ ‘secular’ Australiana.
The Sefton mosque case and the OED Tabernacle can be conceptually linked as spatial narratives, given that both are made through the production of specific bodies and bodily disciplines. Chora, in both Jacques Derrida’s and Elizabeth Grosz’s analyzes, refers to an undifferentiated quality of space that gives rise to the idea of ‘place’ but which is not reducible to a specific materiality. In Space, Time and Perversion: The politics of bodies, Grosz reads chora as that which enables thought between space and place, in terms of spatiality. For Grosz, chora is synonymous with functions to “nurse” “support” and “incubate” and thus with the maternal; qualities that are culturally assigned to women (Grosz 1995: 115, 120-1). Yet women’s access to, and culturally assigned abilities to inhabit and name space is undermined in phallocentric discourse. The phallocentrism of contemporary architecture and theorizations of architectural space is central to Grosz’s agitation for the usefulness of chora. She draws attention to the elisions, exclusions and violences of uses of space and place; particularly in the imagined disembodiment of male subjects and paradoxical displacement of embodied subjectivity onto women. This process is associated with the expunging of modes of femininity, including women, from the conceptualization and materialities of space (Grosz 1995: 111-24). Interestingly, Jacques Derrida links chora with religion in his essay “Faith and Knowledge” and argues “chora would situate the abstract spacing, place itself, the place of absolute exteriority” (2002: 57). Grosz’s and Derrida’s studies can be provisionally brought together to suggest that chora 29 offers a point of departure from readings of the contents that make ‘actual’ spaces to consider the functionality of space which, drawing from Grosz, includes the making of embodied subjects. Chora invites a reading of the Sefton church/mosque and the OED Tabernacle beyond questions of their ‘religious’ content or ideologies. It is possible to view the Tabernacle as a masculine space given that it is within a university building and comprised of masculinist texts. But it is also a space that advocates care and nurturing: ‘treat it kindly.’ The didactic note in the Tabernacle instructs the body to behave in a way that mobilizes a nurturing, caring, supportive body and, more importantly, draws awareness to the materiality of the site and embodied relations in space. This is a stark contrast to the disembodied authority implied by the narratives of patriarchy and colonialism surrounding and informing the OED. Through the note, the assemblage arguably transgresses the disembodied phallocentrism of the assembled objects and increases attention to embodied participation. This suggests a level of reflexivity about the ways in which the space is inhabited, and by extension, by whom. Here, the sensoriality and physicality of the space – and arguably the actual and metaphorical frailty of the OED itself – are highlighted. Perhaps, then, the enigmatic character of the Tabernacle as an in/visible assemblage, can be hesitantly but profoundly linked to the dis/appearance of specific bodies in space. In the case of the Sefton mosque the dictionaries, which are represented as rational authorities without reference to the historical and religio-cultural contexts of the texts, ultimately control bodies: specific ‘Muslim bodies’ experience the violence of cataloguing, silencing and marginalization. In analysis of the OED Tabernacle and Sefton mosque case I have described two spaces defined by dictionaries, to different effects for embodied participation. To further locate these arguments in relation to secular discourse and to fracture dominant modes of understanding the affects and effects of the ‘secular,’ I turn now to a critique of the dominant, imagined secular/religious binary.
30 Beyond a Secular/Religious Binary
Secularism. Whatever that means. - - - Randa Abdel-Fattah14
In the light of readings of the OED as a textual site that localises specific occlusions, violences and constructed boundaries, it is useful to now situate this study within current analyzes of secularisms. There is a broad and burgeoning scholarship in studies of secularisms within disciplines including political science, anthropology, sociology, English literature, cultural studies, philosophy, performance studies and religious studies, and in which various methodologies wrest with and produce debates about the post-secular, secularism, secularisms and narratives of secularization.15 Furthermore, political secularisms are produced differently in different national and global contexts such that the secularisms of France, India, Britain and the U.S. for example, cannot be approached with a monolithic theoretical structure (Asad 2003). That is, secularisms can be seen both conceptually and politically as heterogeneous and non-unified, with points of commensurability and incommensurability. This confirms the need for situated, highly specific analysis in order to avoid universalistic readings that overlook the cultural politics of enunciation. For my purposes, and in order to carry forward the arguments I have been making about the structure and uses of the OED, I would like to focus on how the ‘secular’ can be productively imagined and used beyond its normative definition in opposition to ‘religion,’ in order to critique the commonplace notion that the ‘secular’ is inherently and inextricably linked to ‘freedom’ and emancipation from oppression.
A significant text within the proliferation of narratives that negotiate the ‘secular’ is Talal Asad’s influential Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Asad
14 Abdel-Fattah, Randa. “The Politics of Faith.” Perth Writers’ Festival. Octagon Theatre: University of Western Australia, Perth, 22 February 2008. 15 Selected key texts include: Jakobsen, Janet R. and Ann Pellegrini. Eds. Secularisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2008; Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Belknap; Harvard UP, 2007; Pecora, Vincent. P. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2006; Lewis, Jeff. Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence. London: Pluto, 2005; Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003; Connolly, William E. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1999.
31 configures the secular as a set of practices that make and remake ‘religion.’ That is, the secular works through sets of oppositions, and is thus fluid and formative, rather than static and primary, in the making of social praxis. “The secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, although it works through a series of particular oppositions” (Asad 2003: 25). This interrogates and undermines the ‘negative’ term set out in the OED and concomitant binary oppositions that imagine strict, transhistorical boundaries between ‘secularism’ and ‘religion.’ Asad’s genealogical, Foucauldian mode of analysis also evades installing and privileging empiricist narratives of the ‘secular’ that are central to sociological ‘secularization’ theory, where secularization is imagined in terms of the decline of demographic and institutional religious identifications.16 Asad also averts an essentialist, etymological mode of definition by focusing on “the grammar” of the concept in “exploration of epistemological assumptions of the secular” (Asad 2003: 25). Here, he draws from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to language and meaning-making. For Wittgenstein, “[t]he answer lies in attending to the kind of things that we are permitted to say […], by the rules of the conversation” (Kerr 1997: 146). In Post-Secular Philosophy, a recent edited collection that meditates on the ‘religious’ imperatives in primarily European men’s continental philosophy, Fergus Kerr suggests that Wittgenstein’s conceptual grammars harbour implicit and explicit theological intensities (Kerr 1997). Indeed, Wittgenstein writes, “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar)” (Wittgenstein 2001: 373 Original parentheses). This supplements other scholars’ attention to the apparent religiosity, ‘magical’ quality and theology of Wittgenstein’s descriptions of language-games and conceptual grammars (Hudson 1975; Malcolm 1993). However, for my purposes, it is useful to consider how Wittgenstein’s depiction of grammar as a contextual process of naming deconstructs static binaries. Thus, as Asad describes, attention to the grammars of representations of the ‘secular’ performatively undermines imagined, separable ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ categories.
16 Selected key texts in this field include: Berger, Peter.Ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics Washington DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans, 1999; Bibby, Reginald. Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada. Toronto: Stoddart, 2002; Bruce, Steve. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Malden: Blackwell, 2002; Bouma, Gary. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-first Century. Port Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006; Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 32 For Asad, the secular is not simply a ‘negative’ term always already linked to the presence or absence of ‘religion,’ but instead, and more profoundly, forms a complex, contingent concept that makes corporeal, subjective and political space (2003; 2005). This questions the idea that ‘religion’ is transferred to the private sphere in a ‘secularized’ polity, and as such resonates with Michel Foucault’s understanding of religion as culturally constructed. Foucault writes: “At a particular moment in the past, something happened that made religion appear. Religion was made; it did not exist before” (Foucault 2000: 7). By refusing an essentialist understanding of religion as an enduring artifact or presence, Foucault and Asad conceptualize the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ in terms of sociopolitical contingencies that are localized through notions of space and embodiment. Hence, the affects and effects of the ‘secular’ are registered in the cultural politics of subjective embodiment.
In order to make the idea of ‘slippage’ between concepts of the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ clearer, I will quote Asad at length. The following passage clearly interrogates imagined boundaries between ‘secular’ and ‘religious,’ and teleological narratives of emancipation ‘from’ reified, static concepts of ‘religion.’
The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviours, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life. To appreciate this it is not enough to show that what appears to be necessary is really contingent – that in certain respects ‘the secular’ obviously overlaps with ‘the religious.’ It is a matter of showing how contingencies relate to the grammar of concepts – that is, how the changes in concepts articulate changes in practices. […] I take the view, as others have done, that the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories. However, I do not claim that if one stripped appearances one would see that some apparently secular institutions were really religious. I assume, on the contrary, that there is nothing essentially religious, nor any universal essence that defines ‘sacred language’ or ‘sacred experience.’ But I also assume that there were breaks between Christian and secular life in which words and practices were rearranged, and new discursive grammars replaced previous ones. (Asad 2003: 25 Original parentheses and emphases)
33 Crucial to Asad’s argument is his expansion of the ‘secular’ to include more than antagonism to ‘religion.’ Hence, arguments pitched around the question of the presence or absence of ‘religion’ vis a vis ‘secularization’ do not comprise the term’s final meaning or utility but rather form part of secular discourse. However, it is remarkable that Asad accounts for his understanding of the secular here by carefully describing its boundaries and contingencies, and emphasizing what it is not. Again, and in a substantially different theoretical context, this ‘negative’ method of definition draws attention to the preoccupation with borders and boundaries inherent in the (endlessly deferred) process of definition and suggests the pervasiveness of this mode of language. This point is made by Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, who also argue that the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are inextricably linked categories (2008). They argue that in this way the coproduction of religious and secular categories interrogates neat divisions that fuel representations of the secular as “more rational, more modern, freer, and less dangerous than religion” (Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2008: 11). This means that the secular is productively critiqued from angles that are not limited to dichotomy. It is precisely within this field of the contrived exaltation of terminological precision, most famously and comprehensively represented by the structure, biography, and authoritative status of the OED, that this chapter also enacts a line of flight from the restrictions and repetitions of binary secularisms.
Certainly, the burgeoning of studies of the ‘secular’ attests to the exhaustion of binary logic in this field. A “veritable explosion” (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008: 4) of critical literature has engaged the secular, secularisms, secularization, and the ‘post-secular’ since the 1990s. Jakobsen and Pellegrini argue for a multitude of narratives of the secular, termed “secularisms,” to address and particularize the variety of strands of meaning (Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2008: 13). Secularisms steers away from assuming that ‘secularism’ is the univocal expression of the secular in sociopolitical realms. One such secularism, the ‘post-secular,’ is described by spirituality studies academic David Tacey as an historical epoch after a ‘secular’ period (2000: 33). Here, a post-secular, post-religious polity acknowledges the autonomy of a ‘spiritual’ other-worldly realm in the making of positive social change (Tacey 1995; 2000; 2003). This usage resonates with the negative mode of definition associated with the secularization thesis and “subtraction” model (Taylor 2007). Here, the ‘secular’ is imagined to have ossified within an historical epoch and can thus be read as an anachronism defined by its displacement. However, perhaps the ‘post-secular’ is 34 more productively used not as a noun signifying an historical epoch, but as a verb signifying critique of the category of the secular. This enables new connections and possibilities at the interstices of understandings of what the ‘secular’ might mean in specific instances including in critical and political theory as well as contingent sociopolitical contexts (Boer 2005; de Vries & Sullivan 2006). A strong association with ‘religion’ serves to further dogmatize the religious within a totalizing discourse that allows little room for new understandings and imaginings of the secular. Here, the secular – or rather, secularisms – can be viewed as an often overlooked or taken-for-granted set of practices and beliefs that are nevertheless vital to the material ways in which bodies, subjects, texts and contexts are constituted in specific cultural contexts.
The secular/religious binary forms the logic of the popular ‘secularization thesis’ that an increasingly ‘secularized’ society has fewer links to ‘religion’ in public – and private – spheres (Viswanathan 2008: 466-7). Given the prominence of this aspect of the secular, it is useful to consider it more closely. Canadian historian George Egerton defines secularization as, “decline in the social ‘functions’ for traditional religion […] through differentiation and specialization, and reduction of the cultural salience of religious ideas and belief” (Egerton 2000: 110). This definition is closely tied to empirical, positivist studies of religious identification and participation in societies. Indeed, in his 1967 study The Sacred Canopy renowned sociologist Peter Berger felt able to describe Western culture as largely, and successfully, secularized. He argued that the dwindling of ‘religion’ in the public sphere in both Western and non-Western societies was a fact of progress. However, he revised his position in 1999 by roundly conceding: “[A] whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken” (Berger 1999: 18). This revision was based on empirical evidence showing rising interest in religion in both the West and non-Western, African and South American nations. However, in the announcement of reversed findings, Berger reinforces the same empirical method that underpins the binary framework.17 It is perhaps in this sense that secularization
17 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s more recent study of the secularize thesis uses empirical, sociological methods to study ‘religious’ identifications, and using survey data links secularize in Western liberal democracies to falling birth rates, as opposed to the developing world. Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. For further studies that situate ‘resurgent’ religion within global politics, see: Westerlund, David. Ed. Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics. London: Hurst & Co, 1996; Haynes, Jeff. Religion 35 theory is infused with ideological norms that are performatively obscured – including its ironic ‘sacralization’ (Hadden 1987: 587-611; Connolly 1999: 21-2). Within the field of literary analysis and cultural criticism, and yet in a strikingly similar line of debate, Vincent Pecora argues for a ‘blind spot’ at which an enduring, covert naturalization of a Judeo- Christian code of ethics and morality in the ‘secularized’ West undermines ‘neutral’ critique by Western scholars (Pecora 2006: 4-5). I will return to a discussion of the Judeo- Christian at the close of this chapter, however it would appear that discussion of the ‘secular’ dissolves and questions the possibility of ‘neutral’ ground upon which critique is made. This suggests a thematic of ‘secular’ debate as a mode of identifying co-implicated discourses (Sands 2008: 309). Hence, a re-reading of the ‘secular’ enacts and identifies the contingencies and conceits of binary opposition.
Precisely within this terrain is Robert J. Baird’s conception of ‘late secularism.’ He argues that the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ are almost imperceptible as transcendental ‘essences’ but instead work together to transform dominant understandings:
[L]ate secularism is the moment in which the epistemological shifts created by the coconstitution of religion and its so-called opposite, the secular, have so transformed our cognitive landscape that we see and feel their impact in domains seemingly removed from those of religion. The modern discourse of religion is most keenly appreciated in its invisibility. (Baird 2000: 134)
In this sense, ‘late secularism’ refers less to an epoch than to a critical lens through which the modern episteme, and hence print texts such as the OED, might be understood differently. Baird finds terrain for the study of secularisms through oblique lines of inquiry rather than petrified models of ‘religion’ and its negation. Given critiques of the perceived lack of ‘neutrality’ in ‘secular’ critique and secularization theory, it is possible that a fetish for the invisiblization of ‘religion’ informs and haunts the secularism of ‘neutrality.’ Yet, as I will argue throughout this study, I go further than Baird allows and suggest that a transformed ‘cognitive landscape’ extends to embodied registers of experience. Baird’s argument urges for the dominant usage of the ‘secular’ to be momentarily interrupted in
in Global Politics. London; New York: Longman, 1998; Benthall, Jonathan. Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith. London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008. 36 favour of questions about the specific impacts, behaviours and violences enacted through ‘secular’ discourse in everyday life. With this in mind, I now turn to a closer analysis of the ways in which the ‘secular’ can be understood more ‘positively’ as a violent enactment that breaks with binary understandings but in doing so, entails disciplines and limitations that undermine the idea of ‘freedom’ from social and religio-cultural constraint.
Secularism and violence
The idea of a ‘tolerant’ and ‘progressive’ secularism is one narrative among many; yet it endures alongside the binary logic that the ‘secular,’ as William E. Connolly describes, originates in post-Reformation, European Enlightenment separations of church and state (Connolly 1999: 19-20). Fracturing of these dominant narratives enables a broader reading of secularisms as they relate to contingent, situated texts and contexts. That is, secularisms cannot be described as particular “instances” of a broader, all-encompassing secular metanarrative (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008: 13). Whereas for Christopher Craig Brittain this recognition constitutes the term’s ‘tragic’ underpinnings in that the realisation of a secular state of affairs cannot be realized but is always structurally deferred or corrupted, I argue the concomitant expansion of possibilities that this admission makes is fertile ground for exploring associations between secularisms and violence (Brittain 2005: 161). I would like to recall my comments in the Introduction that in Australian political secularism, ‘secularism’ is imagined in political rhetoric as applicable to ‘religious’ groups. In this process Anglicanism is invisiblized within the rubric of national ‘Judeo-Christian’ values that supersede the categories of ‘religions,’ which are nevertheless determined by the State. In this sense, political rhetoric produces some subjects as ‘religious’ and other subjects as somehow ‘neutral.’ I will return to a reading of the Judeo-Christian in a moment. In order to gain critical purchase on what is meant by ‘violence’ in this instant, I would like to return to, and complicate, the discussion of temporality with which I opened this chapter, and which constitutes ‘root’ understandings of what the ‘secular’ might mean.
37 Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘homogenous empty time,’ cited by both Taylor and Anderson, conflates a scientific, positivist telos as ‘secular’ in contrast to notions of ‘eternity.’ If we consider that “the messianic thwarts the teleological unfolding of time,” with the messianic understood as “that which will never appear in time,” (Butler 2006: 218) ‘messianic time’ is a useful, and usefully ironic, conceptual tool with which to critique the ‘secular.’ In Judith Butler’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” modes of time are related to the production of State violence. Given that, “law legitimates the violence done in the name of the law, and violence becomes the way in which law instates and legitimates itself” (Butler 2006: 219) this must include the organization of public space including definitions and determinations of ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ bodies. Benjamin claims:
[T]he function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power. (Benjamin 2006: 281)
I expand Benjamin’s discussion of the violence of law-making to the disciplining of subjects within secular discourse in terms of definitions of public space and the enactment of citizenship within that space. Indeed, Talal Asad describes the secular as “an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion” (2003: 5 Original emphases and parentheses) – to which I would tentatively add the politics of race, sexuality and ethnicity. This suggests that the cultural politics of embodied representation is made through discursive enunciations that are negotiated and reworked through nominal identity categories. I would now like to draw this sensitivity to embodiment together with temporality. For Benjamin the present is “shot through with chips of Messianic time” that undermine “homogenous empty time” (Benjamin 1973: 265). If we consider Butler’s claim that an unfolding, teleological mode of time engenders the loss, guilt and suffering that make sovereignty, then the signification of time (as ‘secular’), sovereign subjectivity and State violence cannot be unbound from one another. It is therefore possible to paradigmatically link ‘secular’ ‘ordinary’ time to the violence of the
38 State that constitutes and naturalizes specific modes of subjectivity and action. This is a conceptual approach that highlights and undermines hegemonic associations of the ‘secular’ with freedom, justice and liberty; without, as Jakobsen and Pellegrini posit, displacing notions of freedom onto ‘religion’ (2008: 11). Here the idea of ‘homogenous empty time’ becomes ‘full’ and ‘enlivened’ through consideration of effects and ideological assumptions that are, perhaps paradoxically, made possible through consideration of an imagined, non-teleological point of departure. By contrast, Charles Taylor argues that a secular chronos is central to the historical production of the public sphere in modern, “direct-access” societies where, “people conceive themselves as participating in a nation- wide (sometimes even international) discussion” based on simultaneity (Taylor 2007: 210 Original parentheses). Yet as we have seen in Asad’s formulation, the idea of a direct- access society obscures modes of dominance that restrict participation within the public sphere for some members of nations and communities and privilege others. It also obscures the coercion and discipline that Butler explicates is central to participation in the public sphere, and that can be related to projects of naturalization and invisiblization. Not only this, it obscures the actions that exist outside the (violence of) law that draw attention to and critique the cultural politics of the public sphere, and for which Walter Benjamin offers the example of the exalted criminal (Benjamin 2007: 271).
To unbind the ‘secular’ from its default twinning with the ‘religious’ and as ‘freedom’ enables a fracturing of the binary logic I have been discussing. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues for the importance of developing critical purchase on the ‘secular’ as part of a language system and thus as an abstraction. Within the context of post-9/11 terrorism and its intersections with gender, politics, religion and violence, Spivak highlights problems with assuming that the ‘secular’ is an achieved, essential state or telos. She places violence within, rather than in opposition to, the discourse of the ‘secular,’ which she describes as,
[A] mechanism to avoid violence that must be learned as mere reasonableness. It is as thin as an ID card, not as thick as ‘identity.’ […] [W]e ought to acknowledge that secularism is only ever in the letter, and that we ought to train fiercely to protect it as such. No religion has a special privilege to it. (Spivak 2004: 106)
39 Spivak’s discussion preserves the ‘secular’ as an abstraction, whilst maintaining that its dynamism is produced and contained through persistent critique. Imagined as a state-based mechanism to avoid violence, however, the disciplines of the ‘secular’ are obscured from discussion. Indeed, Spivak’s secularism arguably occludes an understanding of the ‘secular’ as that which, following Asad, is produced in the power dynamics of everyday, embodied exchange within the public sphere, and instead locates its inception at the level of the State: ‘in the letter’ of law. Spivak’s work makes an important argument for distinguishing secularism with the ability to manage ‘religious’ conflicts and violence, but this needs to be understood as a particular rather than general instance. Her study can therefore be read as symptomatic of a specific secularism that does not draw attention to embodied practices cultivated through discourses that might also be called ‘secular.’ Spivak’s comment invites the question of what the learning of ‘reasonableness’ might entail, and perhaps suggests association between discipline and a political position of anti-violence.
Whilst Spivak focuses on secularism ‘in the letter,’ Asad more explicitly focuses on the making of bodies through the discourse of the ‘secular.’ I have been suggesting that the representation of ‘objectivity’ as a corollary of ‘secular’ discourse and parlance is undermined by consideration of the context of the enunciation. Thus, as the representations of the OED I have offered suggest, language and embodiment form two sites at which the ‘secular’ can be narrativised and critiqued. This is evident in Asad’s description of blurred boundaries between religious practice and public reason within a secular liberal democracy:
[T]he public sphere in secular societies (whether in Europe or in the Middle East) is more than a space of communication and debate, […] it is inhabited by embodied subjects for whom politics and religion cannot always be easily separated. Perhaps that is why the liberal state finds itself having to try and impose on its citizens the disciplines and limitations that it calls secularism. (Asad 2005 Original parentheses)
Here, communication and debate is broadened beyond language and ‘objectivity’ or reason to include bodily and subjective exchange. Asad suggests that secularism, rather than freeing subjects from the ‘dogma’ of religion, in fact imposes its own set of limitations, as not all subjects have the secular privilege that includes the choice to leave religious convictions and practices unsaid or ‘at home.’ For Asad, the idea of the secular as a neutral
40 public sphere for rational debate is therefore inherently problematic, and this is precisely because he calls attention to the embodied, sensorial interaction of citizens in the public sphere – some of whom are denied access to representation through State-based modes of discrimination and hegemony (Asad 2006: 278; Asad 2005; Asad 2003: 5). This is a substantially different conceptualization to that of William E. Connolly who argues for a refashioning of the modus vivendi of the public sphere; a pluralisation of the ‘secular’ that includes the compassion and empathy of citizens as well as a minoritisation of Christianity to a religion among others without hegemonic ideological privileges (1999: 3). Whilst this is a highly suggestive ethical position, in my reading Asad’s attention to the constitutive subjectivities of secular discourse is productive in its assumption of pluralities of difference, which Connolly’s position does not risk. Or more simply, who gets to decide what constitutes a compassionate act?
As I noted earlier, Connolly mentions the dominant narrative that secularism has its origins in Europe, in the religious pluralisation and concomitant relativism sparked by the Reformation, before its embrace in the Enlightenment (1999: 20-1). One effect of dominant understandings of secularism, he argues, is its tendency to construct religion as an essential category. He states:
[T]he word ‘religion’ now becomes treated as a universal term, as if ‘it’ could always be distilled from a variety of cultures in a variety of times rather than representing a specific fashioning of spiritual life engendered by the secular public space carved out of Christendom. (Connolly 1999: 23)
Here, Christianity and secularism are inextricably linked. Connolly’s thesis is that the secular is contingent, and in a constant state of becoming. Religions, through modes of intersubjectivities, and most importantly the organising structure of secularism, are constantly modified, and thus religions and secularisms function differently over time in various social and political contexts. However, what might be meant by ‘spiritual life’? Connolly is concerned that some modes of secularism in liberal democracies cannot “sustain the [cultural] diversity they seek to admire” (Connolly 1999: 6). However, there is slippage between religion as a universal term and the ‘spiritual life’ that it appears to intrinsically reference. Connolly’s refashioning of secularism in an “ethos of generous
41 engagement” (3) pays closer attention to a “visceral register of subjectivity and intersubjectivity” (3) which he argues is dismissed by secularisms that espouse “reason, morality, and tolerance” (3). It is not clear how the ‘visceral register’ might be particularized in Connolly’s usage, however given the suggestion of a universalistic ‘spiritual life’ Connolly’s refashioned secularism also reinforces essentialist narratives. Thus, I would like to modify Connolly’s suggestions by drawing them together with the sensitivities of Asad’s attention to power and privilege to address the importance of the cultural politics of embodied participation, such that sensorial registers are linked with differences and incommensurabilities in thought, action and belief. Connolly describes the visceral register as including emotional intensities that change over time. That is, multiple and contingent “arts of the self” cultivate subjectivities and actions (Connolly 1999: 148). This can be read as an embrace of embodied, contingent and ethically sensitive ways of forming points of connection and departure between ‘religious’ (and ‘nonreligious’) subjects. Indeed, Connolly makes space for the ways in which thought affects and effects participation and decision-making in the public sphere. Attention to sensorial, embodied modes of thought, language, and action and the intensities that inevitably undermine ‘rational’ participation gesture toward recognition of difference. Connolly suggests that in a refashioned political and visceral secularism, “no constituency’s claim to embody the authoritative source of public reason is sanctified” (Connolly 1999: 7 Original emphasis). It remains, though, that the authoritative source is implicit in and assumed in this claim. It is interesting that the term ‘spiritual’ appears in this discourse on implicit modes of authority, community and embodiment. I will return to this narrative of secularism in Chapters 3 and 4. For my current purposes, I would like to consider a point of intersection between embodiment, violence and language that is suggestive of the importance of context in making secularisms.
Sneja Gunew presents a highly insightful, situated analysis of the ways in which English acquisition in diasporic communities has tangible somatic affects and effects that discipline and “choreograph” the body in readable, material, experiential ways (Gunew 2001: 729- 47). ‘English,’ which Gunew distinguishes in ‘standard’ received form from the situated, locally articulated englishes of a globalizing socius, has what might be described as a somatechnic function. The displacement of an-other language at the point of English acquisition involves somatic registers and behaviours that shape meaning-making and 42 representation. Gunew offers an evocative anecdotal narrative of her experiences negotiating English speaking and learning in Australia, where speech acts are inextricably linked to corporeal morphology and belonging (729-47). Indeed, in a not unrelated fashion, Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick argue for the production of sexual languages – that is, they argue that sexual identity is produced through the effects and corporeal affects of the technology of language (2003). Here, somatechnic articulations define and conceive of the body in terms of cultural and ideological space that cannot be described as ‘empty.’ The idea of a ‘direct access’ public sphere, upon which Connolly’s thesis arguably depends and reimagines, can therefore be interrogated to offer a subversive conception of the public sphere as that which is enunciated through specific modes of language that make and shape bodies and bring corporeal choreography and performativity into account. This amounts to closer attention to the violence that categorizes bodies in terms of received social categories and calls for a cultural politics of the “space between” language and context (Finn 1992: 108-29) as well as, recalling embodied participations in secular societies, dominant notions of secular / religious categories. A specific instance of this is founded in representations of the OED: the prototypical form of ‘received’ standard English. Charlotte Brewer argues that for the purpose of authorial accountability, “authority,” is associated with ‘objectivity,’ and as such authority-effects are produced through representations of less “personality” (Brewer 2005: 286). ‘Neutral’ modes of definition that do not appear to be partisan or interested on the part of the lexicographer are thus made through language. This privileging of an imagined disembodied English-speaking subject is precisely the violence of objectivity assumed and enacted through the textuality of the OED, and to which Gunew draws attention, and which I will now consider in closer detail by arguing that the Judeo- Christian absorbs and repeats these elisions.
43 The Judeo-Christian
Etymologies and hyphens both memorialize the making and breaking of historical bonds. - - - Michelle R. Warren18
I began this chapter by offering a reading of the history, contents and representations of the OED as a cipher with which to witness and enact critique of the conceits of the ‘secular.’ In a similar way, I would like to return to the dictionary to think about how the ‘Judeo-Christian’ is formed in cultural debates about nation, identity and Islam. In the context of American history and politics, Mark Silk argues that the term Judeo-Christian was used in the early twentieth century to define American liberal democracy against Nazi fascism and later the communism of the Soviet Union (Silk 1984). His work reveals that the term morphs with differing usages according to what it is defined ‘against.’ In a similar fashion, in discussion of Jewish GIs in the Second World War, Deborah Dash Moore links the Judeo-Christian tradition to the production of a spirit of “Americanness” (Dash Moore 1998: 31-53). For Dash Moore, the Second World War inaugurates the idea of “the Judeo- Christian tradition as America’s faith” (Dash Moore 1998: 46). Thus the Judeo-Christian, which can be described in the context of Silk and Dash Moore’s work as a shibboleth, needs to be contextualized. This is a claim most starkly reinforced by the absence of definitional material for the term in the OED. Here is a list of the totality of current quotations pertaining to the term in the OED.
1899 Lit. Guide 1 Oct. 146/1 The total abandonment of the Judæo-Christian ‘continuity’ theory. […] 1939 New English Weekly 27 July 237/2 The Judeo-Christian scheme of morals. […] 1957 N. FRYE Anat. Criticism 145 The appearance of the Judeo-Christian deity in fire. 1960 Encounter Mar. 34/2 The religious zeal of Judeo-Christianity. (OED 1989)
18 Warren, Michelle R. “Memory out of Line: Hebrew Etymology in the Roman de Brut and Merlin.” MLN 118.4 (2003):1014. 44 ‘Judeo-Christian’ is not a headword in the OED but is listed in the quotations of the lemma “Judaeo-, Judeo-” (1989). I’d like to recall William E. Connolly’s argument that the OED’s definition of the secular is blind to the seepage of Christian/sacred modalities it depends upon. He ironizes the idea of a ‘secular’ separation of powers by demonstrating that ‘neutral’ definition is structurally eluded and that this is particularly salient in the case of the secular. I argue that the representation of the Judeo-Christian, which is given minimal attention by the OED, is a good example of the ways in which religio-cultural and ideological ‘blind spots’ are reproduced and represented textually within the text.
If we consider Viswanathan’s and Pecora’s arguments that the Judeo-Christian is central to ‘secular’ discourse and eclipsed in analyzes of literature and culture, the OED’s short shrift to the neologism would appear to be reinforced within the structure of the OED itself, given the minimal citations offered. Indeed, it is interesting that Samuel Huntington’s influential and often cited “clash of civilizations” thesis, which draws on Bernard Lewis’ alignment of the West with a Judeo-Christian heritage and “secular present” in a “clash of civilizations,” is developed through a constructed opposition to Islam, which is imagined as “an ancient rival” (Huntington 1993: 22-49; Lewis 1990: 60). This construction of Islam works to further legitimate tying together the ‘Judeo-Christian’ and ‘secular’ as imagined homogenous unities somehow ‘natural’ to one another whilst obscuring the context of their alignment. This also lends further curiosity to the lack of significant attention to the term in the OED. Given the apparent currency of the Judeo-Christian, it is curious it is not defined and instead is limited to a series of quotations. Indeed, in the absence of a definition, one must scan numerous quotations under the headword ‘Judaeo-, Judeo-’ to locate instances of ‘Judeo-Christianity.’ The 1910 quotation taken from Encyclopedia Britannica refers to Judeo-Christianity as a ‘very obscure phase of Christian development’ suggesting the neologism’s strangeness. This contrasts heavily with Bernard Lewis’ suggestion of ancient rivalry between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ based on the Judeo-Christian. The OED’s listing also privileges Christianity. Later citations appear to use the term to refer to a common ‘deity’ and ‘zeal.’ In contrast to the headword ‘Judaeo-, Judeo-’ under which “Judeo- Christian” appears, the headword ‘Christian’ does not include the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ within its quotations and sense development. Given the term’s extraordinary significance to the politics of globalization, notions of secularism, citizenship, nationalism and cultural criticism, what might it mean that it is significantly under-represented in the OED? 45
As I described in the Introduction, Jon Stratton argues that the Judeo-Christian has been recently invoked in Australian politics to legitimate a racist politics that imagines a white, Anglo-Celtic mainstream Australian subject and culture. He gives the example of conservative, former One Nation Party leader Pauline Hanson’s xenophobic construction of Australian culture as Judeo-Christian in contrast to ‘Asian’ culture (1998: 58-60). Stratton argues that for Hanson “the Judeo-Christian background of white Europeans” was constructed to legitimate the idea that Asians do not share Australian values because of an incommensurable moral doxa (Stratton 1998: 59-60). Here, the cultural politics of whiteness and race is linked to the invocation of Judeo-Christianity which defines and demarcates what ‘white,’ ‘Australian,’ and ‘morality’ might mean. This also eclipses the realities of a fragmented Australian multicultural and multifaith socius that includes non- white, non-Anglo-Celtic Jews and Christians. Certainly, there are complexities about relations between Judaism and Christianity that analysis of the term Judeo-Christianity can usefully localize, such as Daniel Boyarin’s genealogical analysis Border Line, which studies heresiology, or, “the science of heresies” (Boyarin 2004: 2). Boyarin argues against the imagined existence of intrinsically discrete faiths to locate Judaism/s and Christianity/ies in terms of power dynamics attendant in the period of the first to fifth century BCE. This forms a highly useful point of reference from which to critique the relations and mode of difference implied and invoked by the term, however this is also a useful opportunity for me to reinforce that for the purposes of this analysis, I am concerned with the subjective and political effects of invocation of the Judeo-Christian in cultural politics that runs parallel to these important theological arguments.
Whilst it has been argued that the Judeo-Christian represents continuities between religions and ‘traditions,’ it is also the case that the hyphen suggests rupture (Boyarin 1994: 89; Warren 2003: 1014). The stretching of ‘Judeo-Christianity’ across an imagined historical (and biblical) time, indicated by the use of the prefix ‘Judaeo,’ privileges a linear telos of religion, and risks privileging Christianity in a narrative of ‘progress.’ That is, the neologism can be read as a product of a modern context rather than indexical to a given historical period, and dismisses the ongoing practices and developments of Judaisms and Christianities. By contrast, Connolly argues that the term is a subversive decentring of
46 hegemonic Christianity. He situates this within his argument for the ‘politics of becoming,’19 claiming that:
In U.S. history positive examples of the politics of becoming can be found in antislavery movements, feminism, gay/lesbian rights movements, the introduction of secularism, the effort to place ‘Judeo’ in front of the ‘Christian tradition,’ the right to die, and so on. (Connolly 1999: 59)
This reading offers the Judeo-Christian as a transgression of an oppressive status quo. Arguably, Connolly’s placement of the Judeo-Christian tradition among these sociohistorical events has two effects. On one hand, the importance of religion is foregrounded among the primary political categories including race, gender and sexuality. On the other hand, Connolly suggests that the use of the prefix ‘Judeo’ decentres Christianity. In this sense, the terms are co-implicated given the ways in which religious freedom and sexual freedom continue to function as interlocutors that raise questions about progressive notions of ‘tolerance’ associated with secularism (Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2003). Further, there is a sense in which the word ‘effort’ functions tellingly to reinforce an assumed and therefore hegemonic ‘Christian’ centre, and raises the question of who makes the effort, and on whose behalf? Here, a paternalistic model of social change can be seen to be subtly reinforced. Further, this effort fails to recognize the myriad fractures and pluralities within and between Christianities and Judaisms, given that the term arguably homogenises a variety of faiths that are not adequately described by either of these terms.
In this light, I would like to turn to the language of former Prime Minister John Howard, as his usage of the term in public discourse between 1996 and 2007 was common.
I […] regard the Judeo-Christian influence on Australia as the single greatest influence for good in the Australian community. But I do respect the secular tradition of Australia […] My belief in the centrality of the family, my very strong belief in private business
19 Connolly’s term “the politics of becoming” involves the refashioning of public life through transgressions of norms and assumptions, in order to critique contemporary limitations and usher in a greater sense of ontological and epistemological freedom within the nation-state: “The politics of becoming is purposive without being teleological. It engages actors who, as they pursue a particular line of flight rendered available to them, do not remain fixed enough across time to be defined as consistent and masterful agents” (58). This suggests uncertainty and multi-directionality of social change, however it is unclear how power works in this structure. Connolly, William E. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Michigan: U Minneapolis P, 1999. 47 enterprise, my very strong belief in […] the stabilising influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic in this country. Those beliefs haven’t changed at all. And you can find at every point of my time as Prime Minister a re-affirmation of those things. (Howard 2004)
This passage is a striking repetition of the quote I included in the Introduction to this study. Howard invokes the secular as a preface to exalting the Judeo-Christian ‘ethic’ that is conflated with moral virtue and Australian-ness. Here, actual bodies and identities are implicitly outside an imagined centre through the violence of lack of representation. This violence is revisited and represented in the pages of the OED. Perhaps the term cannot be defined but only quoted because it functions as the limit of secularism, and at the limit of ‘neutrality.’ That is, ‘definition’ of ‘Judeo-Christian’ might require an unravelling of the conceits and inequities that underpin the ‘objectivity’ and ‘freedom’ of ‘secular neutrality.’
In this chapter I have offered multiple narratives and productions of the OED to localise the question of how a narrative of ‘neutrality’ is co-implicated in what the secular might mean. This also sets in motion questions about the contingency and provisionality of secularisms in context. Although this chapter has focused on language and objectivity, embodiment and space have formed spectral interlocutors with these concerns. This was concretized, or more precisely, corporealized, in discussion of the affects, disciplines and choreography of English speaking and acquisition. Thus, the following chapter intensifies focus on aspects of embodiment in representations of ‘religion’ that produce ‘neutrality’ as an embodied performance. However, it becomes clear that whilst some subjects, as we saw in Howard’s concept of selective secularisms, are produced as ‘religious’ secular privilege works to erase ‘religion’ from the ‘neutral’ body. Thus, the following chapter examines and contrasts productions of ‘neutrality’ in the visual, textual and generic strategies of two recent Australian documentary texts.
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- Interlude -
Figure 4: World Youth Day Pilgrimage Perth, Western Australia Personal photograph by author. 24 May 2008.
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51 CHAPTER TWO
Act Neutral: Embodiment and secular privilege20
neutrality n. The state or condition of not being on any side; absence of decided views, feeling, or expression; indifference; impartiality, dispassionateness. - - - Oxford English Dictionary (1989)
One has the impression that many filmmakers are afraid of looking. What is it in ordinary things that they fear to see? - - - David MacDougall21
At the 2008 Perth Writers’ Festival in Western Australia, I attended a panel session entitled The Politics of Faith that featured three Australian authors. Prominent lawyer and academic Waleed Aly opened his presentation by commenting that the panel was “two thirds Muslim” and thus “hardly representative of faith in our society” (Aly 2008).22 Before beginning the formal part of his presentation, Aly described his discomfort with being constructed as “a representative of Islam” in public conversation, because “every word and every action is informed by [notions of my] Muslimness” (Aly 2008). In this aside, Aly
20 An earlier, abridged version of this chapter titled “Neutralizing Secularisms: Representations of the secular in John Safran versus God and God on my Side” was published in The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies in 2009. For further reference, it is included in Appendix 1 of this document. 21 MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006. 8. 22 Aly often features in the Australian media discussing law, religion, secularism, and Islam. He is author of the popular book: People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and the West. Sydney: Picador, 2007. Furthermore, Aly co-hosted Salam Café, a comedic religious-themed variety and talk show on SBS television in 2008. During publicity for the programme Aly noted the sociopolitical context of fear attached to Muslims by remarking, “There are a lot of people who are just happy to see Muslims on TV that are not terrorists.” Trad, Sanna. “TV’s lighter side of Islam a hit but not everyone’s laughing.” The Weekend Australian. 17-18 May 2008. 7. See also: Salam Café. Waleed Aly, Ahmed Imam and Susan Carland. SBS Independent. 2008. Accessed 20 Dec 2008 from, http://www.sbs.com.au/salamcafe/. 52 identified the disproportionate attention on Islam and Muslim subjects in debates about ‘religion’ in dominant Australian culture, which was mirrored and reinforced by the overrepresentation of Muslim speakers on the panel. Further, he called attention to an overdetermined link between Islam and politics; in particular the perceived fusion of ‘religious’ praxis with subjective identity. The panel session can be seen as a ‘telling’ instance from which to begin considerations of how, in an apparently ‘secular’ society, some subjects are produced and interpreted in terms of ‘religion.’ In the case of The Politics of Faith panel, Anglican and Catholic religions, which as we have seen have prominent places in Australian politics, are represented in their absence. The trope of absence is not insignificant. This chapter identifies a regime of representation that constructs ‘religion’ as outside and thus absent from the ‘secular ordinary’ Australian national imaginary and geographical national space. In order to argue that this trope of absence is repetitiously enacted and performed, I offer readings of Andrew Denton’s documentary film God on my Side (2006) and John Safran’s documentary television series John Safran versus God (2004) which are contemporary texts that subtly reinforce the absenting of ‘religion’ from nation.
Both Denton and Safran pursue expressions and representations of ‘religion’ in their texts, which are based on travels outside Australia. Within the structure of Safran’s television series, religious ‘road-tests’ form a generic segment of each episode, where Safran ‘tests’ a religion to decipher whether the experience feels ‘true’ for him. That is, he seeks to find a putatively ‘real’ religious experience mediated through his perception. This approach is also typical of Safran’s participatory style. From his initial foray in amateur documentary on the reality series Race Around the World in 1997 to his successful regular television series John Safran’s Music Jamboree (2002) and Speaking in Tongues (2005- 2006) as well as the scheduled 2009 show John Safran’s Race Relations, Safran’s critiques of the Australian mainstream media, popular culture and national mythology have been mediated through the cultural politics of his embodiment. Safran’s whiteness and ambivalent Jewishness are performed and mediated as integral to the making of ‘religious’ exploration abroad, which contrasts starkly to Andrew Denton’s ‘neutral’ approach in God on my Side. Denton is a well-known media personality in Australia whose variety and chat shows The Money or the Gun (1989), Live and Sweaty (1991), and Denton (1994) developed his popularity during the 1990s. Denton now produces a host of comedy 53 programmes for the ABC and commercial networks, whilst hosting the primetime series Enough Rope, for which he is well known for eliciting personal stories and revelations from guests. It is therefore not surprising that God on my Side is comprised of a host of interviews with some mild comic relief inserted between clips. The film was shot at a Christian convention in Texas within the U.S. where Denton draws intimate stories of personal ‘faith’ from interview subjects whilst maintaining an even-handed, dispassionate façade. The repetitive, perhaps customary quality of Denton’s and Safran’s ‘signature’ styles form useful, intersecting lines of exploration into how ‘neutrality’ is performed and mediated. Whilst I argue that Denton’s ‘neutrality’ is reinforced and made through his white Anglo-Celtic, middle class, heterosexual, patriarchal, able-bodied, middle aged, agnostic/secular positioning, and that this is interrogated by Safran’s performative and selective engagements with his Jewish identity and other religions, I also situate these texts as exemplary performances that intersect with and unpack the narrative of ‘secular neutrality.’ Giorgio Agamben offers a refined definition of the example as a “singularity among others” (Agamben 1993: 10). That is, for Agamben, the example is not simply an instant within a metanarrative, and is thus “neither particular nor universal” but “shows its singularity” (10 Original emphasis). In naming this critical intersection as exemplary I suggest that, read together, these texts produce readings and reflections on ‘secular neutrality’ and secular privilege that may be hesitantly applied to other media texts and contexts not reducible to ‘religion.’ In this way, analysis of representations of ‘neutrality’ opens lines of questioning in debates about performativity and privilege.
This chapter continues the work of the previous chapter by signalling that the ‘secular’ cannot be easily conflated with ‘tolerance’ and ‘freedom’ from violence. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that the dominant narrative of ‘secular neutrality’ I identify is intimately linked with the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ and ‘Australian values’ I have been identifying and, further, these are linked to death and disavowal. In order to elucidate this claim, which forms the contextual and conceptual background for my critiques of Denton and Safran’s texts, I offer readings of two pilgrimages. The first, the Catholic World Youth Day pilgrimage hosted in Sydney during July 2008 forms a useful point of comparison to what has become known as the Gallipoli Pilgrimage. The Anzac Day pilgrimage to Gallipoli memorializes Australia’s ‘diggers’ who died, or rather were sacrificed, during World War I. By discussing the narratives of space, nation and neutrality that animate these pilgrimages, 54 I consider how the discourse of ‘national values’ intersects with law such that the non- neutrality of law cannot be unbound from the rhetoric that produces the nation as a “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson 2007).
Beyond annoyance: World Youth Day
There is no neutrality. - - - Waleed Aly23
At the same time that the Olympic torch was relayed around the globe preceding the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Catholic World Youth Day (WYD) pilgrimage was marked by the WYD cross and Madonna icon’s journey to cities, towns, and rural localities in Australia. This large, significant event, I will argue, sets in motion particular questions about the ‘neutrality’ of the State. The pilgrimage required similar road closures and administrative burdens to those that occurred when Sydney hosted the Olympic Games in 2000. However the disruption of WYD was also registered in laws that were not put in place during the Games. In the lead-up to WYD, the New South Wales government passed the World Youth Day Regulation law that included a clause regarding the behaviour of potential protesters and onlookers. Maximum penalties of $5,500 were applicable to actions causing “annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event” (New South Wales 2008). The imposition of this clause sparked strong debate in the media (Brown 2008; Court challenge 2008; Pelly 2008; Youth Day 2008). Two activists successfully argued the case in the Federal Court, as the laws potentially restricted them from handing out fliers, condoms, and symbolic coat-hangers to pilgrims in the WYD precinct (Pelly 2008). Although the law was eventually amended in order to preserve a level of free speech, it raises the question of why the feelings of the pilgrims were so important.
23 Aly, Waleed. “The Politics of Faith.” Perth Writers’ Festival. University of Western Australia, Perth. 22 Feb 2008. 55 The WYD pilgrimage was developed by Pope John Paul II in 1986 to inspire youth within the Catholic religion and has been continued by Pope Benedict XVI. The photograph in the Interlude to this section was taken at a suburban church in Perth at the arrival of the WYD cross. The young speakers at this event were invariably emotional about their devotion to their faith, and when the cross arrived amidst chanting and drumming, many people cried and sang together. This emotionality was intensified in television coverage of the July event. In events leading up to WYD mass, Stations of the Cross was re-enacted in Circular Quay and culminated outside the Sydney Opera House. The reporter featured in the live broadcast of the event was tearful and occasionally speechless, such that the studio anchor commented frequently and repetitively that it was a highly emotional event. Hence, the feelings of WYD pilgrims were pivotal to the mediation and representation of WYD. This was supplemented by public debates about the subjective nature of the laws’ inclusion of the pilgrim’s feelings. How might law ‘neutrally’ ascertain and police feelings of ‘annoyance’?
The neutrality of law is assumed and yet the concept itself can be described as “opaque” (Cobb & Rifkin 1991: 37). Sara Cobb and Janet Rifkin suggest that a general assumption of the neutrality of law makes it “exceedingly difficult to raise questions” about the interests and agendas set in motion through law (37). A salient example of the violences enacted through law was former Prime Minister John Howard’s amendment to the Marriage Act in August 2004 to definitively exclude same-sex couples from the institution (Australia. Marriage Act. s. 5). This was described by Howard as a decision based on representational politics and thus the claim that Australians do not want same-sex couples to gain access to marriage (AAP PM targets gays 2004). At the same time the government also amended the Family Law Act to ensure gay couples could not adopt children from overseas: “The government is fundamentally opposed to same-sex couples adopting children” (AAP PM targets gays 2004). Here, heterosexual procreative families are privileged in law, in line with unstated Christian values. Not long after the Marriage Act and Family Law amendments, the government passed the Anti-Terrorism Act in 2005. The Act can be read as both speculative and subjective, founded not least in its provision to detain suspected terrorists in order to prevent an imminent attack, and thus in the absence of the attack’s occurrence (Australia. Anti-Terrorism Act). In her cogent analysis of the Act, Maria Giannacopoulos argues, “When law signifies as being neutral […] it hides the violence of 56 its origins as well as the violence involved in its continuing operations” (2006: 14). In this vein, Joseph Pugliese writes that the Act subjects Muslim Australians to the violence of surveillance and racial profiling and figures Muslims as “interlopers” within the nation (Pugliese 2006: 15). For Giannacopoulos, the laws reinforce the fundamental link between whiteness and violence of Australian law. She draws from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s argument that white possessive logic underpins “patriarchal white sovereignty,” which is inextricably linked to the denial of the Indigenous sovereignty it cannot own (Moreton- Robinson 2007: 110-3). In Moreton-Robinson’s analysis of the High Court’s Yorta Yorta decision in 2001 that refused native title on the grounds that the Yorta Yorta people did not continue traditions on their lands, the logic of white possession underpins patriarchal white sovereignty, which “has served to define the attributes of person-hood and property through the law” (2007: 113). That is, the law legislates in terms of assumptions that benefit the logic of white possession, and thus those positioned as white subjects, and cannot accept logics and modes of difference that do not mirror these conceits (Cowlishaw 2004: 144). Thus, when Howard justified the Anti-Terrorism laws by stating they were needed to reassert Australian values (Dodson & Kerr 2005), slippage between law, subjective ‘national’ values (which we know for Howard are exclusionary and ‘Judeo-Christian’) and racism can be drawn together to suggest an ideological rather than ‘neutral’ position. Indeed, this position is more aptly described as ideologically neutral.
In his discussion of debates about the Anti-Terrorism Act, Anthony Burke articulates a strong relationship between fear and the law. He begins by describing his “surge of dread” (2006: 210) during prime ministerial announcements of the anti-terrorism legislation Bills, and in the progress of his paper makes links between affect, national values and anti- terrorism law. Burke argues that fear of violence and death is produced in nationalist rhetoric as the legitimation of securitization and curtailment of civil liberties. Here, “insecurity and xenophobia” (210) produces national and subjective Others to the white nation. Thus, the whiteness of the nation and law is “aimed squarely at the hearts of white Australians” (205). That is, the logic that (white) Australia is fearfully vulnerable to losing possession legitimates the disavowal and erasure of Indigenous subjects and Muslim Australians on the basis of protecting national values. Here, law, values and affect are knitted together.
57 How does this relate to the WYD legislation? As I have mentioned, two queer Sydney activists successfully argued for the amendment of the laws in the Federal Court, so that they could hand out leaflets and condoms, wear protest t-shirts and communicate with the pilgrims. Indeed, the protestors represented in the media were variously from the NoToPope coalition protesting the historical and contemporary oppressions of the Catholic church and doctrine, gay and lesbian rights campaigners including safe sex and pro-choice advocates, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous people protesting abuse trauma within church and missionary contexts (Lambert-Patel & Bright 2008). The ‘annoyance’ law, then, would in the first instance silence voices and bodies positioned in various ways and to various extents outside heterosexual procreative family units and the rhetoric of the national ‘Us’ (Maddox 2005: 78). Otherwise put, the law ensures that subjects who emblematise the myth of the heterosexual, Christian/Catholic, procreative family unit feel good. This resonates with Burke’s observation that the rhetoric of (white, Judeo-Christian) Australian values as exclusionary, violent and fearful is legitimated through the edict “We are good” (209 Original emphases). In the making of emotional religious subjects, whose good feelings are protected by law, despite the loves and devotions and sacrifices felt by many who might have ‘annoyed’ the pilgrims, the laws can be seen to reproduce an anxiously white Anglo-Celtic, Judeo-Christian nation that feels and identifies as ‘good.’
WYD is a unique and perhaps carnivalesque event. It is a disruption rather than an everyday reality, and the special laws further suggest the event’s difference from everyday metropolitan life. In this sense, the event is ‘strange.’ Thus, in downtown Sydney, WYD makes the Catholic religion prominent and visible in the closure of three hundred roads, media representations of affective pilgrim bodies, a high police presence and securitization project including the demarcation of specific WYD precincts in downtown Sydney, and special laws. This production of provisional and yet fundamentally ‘religious’ bodies and spaces, proscribed in law, are spatially, temporally and thus alienably ‘religious.’ It is useful here to draw from Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the concept of the stranger within the context of the shifting proximities between subjects produced through discourses of multiculturalism and postcoloniality (2000). Ahmed suggests that through the politics of the encounter, “some others are designated as stranger than other others” (2000: 6). That is, whilst the encounter depends upon negotiations of otherness, strangerness is intensified in the political construction of ‘other others.’ To return to the affective, Catholic WYD bodies 58 represented as other to the normative workings of Sydney and New South Wales law, it is possible to suggest in the light of Ahmed’s work that these bodies are not as other as the other others disavowed by and elided within law. Through the machinations of the WYD it is possible to suggest that the Catholic others appear to demonstrate the ‘neutral’ secular tolerance that preserves the free exercise of religion. Other others are disavowed through the reified display of Catholic ritual. In this way, the embrace of WYD, which was also funded and endorsed by the government (further, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd met with the Pope and opened the event by proclaiming, “Some say there is no place for faith in our society. I say they are wrong” (Rudd 2008)) eclipses and disavows the intolerance and non- neutrality upon which the law is based and through which the violences of ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ continues to produce Indigenous subjects and Muslim subjects as the ‘other others’ that render tolerance of Catholics possible.
This onshore pilgrimage might be provisionally read as a twin of the offshore pilgrimage made annually to Gallipoli on Anzac Day, which commemorates the mythological World War I ‘diggers.’ Here, I would like to consider the Gallipoli pilgrimage as an emblematic exaltation of the codified ‘Australian values’ of mateship, maleness, masculinity and war. Sociologist and theologian Gary Bouma places a strong emphasis on the importance of the ‘Anzac spirit’ to Australian identity and ‘values’ by suggesting the myth forms the ‘spiritual’ fabric of the ‘national soul’ (2006). Bouma argues that Australians are not overtly ‘religious’ in inclination or institutional affiliation but share ‘spirituality’ founded on the mateship, egalitarianism and emotional shyness of the ‘diggers’ (2006). Bouma’s concept of the ‘spirituality’ of Anzac Day and the Gallipoli pilgrimage is echoed by John Hannaford and Janice Newton, who describe the annual exodus of (mainly white Anglo- Celtic) Australians to Gallipoli as a “true pilgrimage” (2008: 3) that indicates an Australian “secular spirituality” (7). They stake their argument on the aesthetic similarity of Turkey’s topography to that of Australia (although this observation suggests that the myth of the outback or beach culture is invoked here, given diverse topographies in Australia including tropical and maritime rainforest, alpine ranges, and deserts, notwithstanding industrial, pastoral and agricultural space and Indigenous nations and country), the availability of stereotypical beer, meat pies and hot showers at the purpose-built “Boomerang Café and Vegemite Café” (18) near the site, as well as the emotionality of the pilgrims (31, 43). Hence the pilgrimage is supplemented by everyday Australian iconography within the 59 context of spirituality and emotionality. These ideas were reinforced by the ABC religious television programme Compass which hosted a special “Gallipoli Pilgrimage” edition featuring the travels and travails of young white Anglo-Celtic Australians travelling to the site (2006). I suggest that the pilgrimage performs the work of exalting ‘Australian values,’ which as I have suggested are continually reiterated in political rhetoric as Judeo-Christian, and as material, affective representations of the ‘goodness’ of maleness, masculinity, war and mateship. That is, the Judeo-Christian tradition is literalised as a ‘secular’ avowal of the Anzac spirit such that the ‘Judeo-Christian,’ the ‘secular,’ and Anzac ‘spirituality’ melt into one another as almost indistinguishable concepts.
In her influential study, From Diggers to Drag Queens, Fiona Nicoll identifies the myth and logic of the Anzac spirit as a white fantasy (2001: 111). Through close attention to the semiotic of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Nicoll makes a strong link between embodiment and the invocation of a national ‘spirit.’ I will quote her at length:
The years following federation saw the formulation of a range of policies specifically aimed at the national body. The 1901 White Australia Policy, the Aboriginal Protection Acts and later assimilation policies were designed to stem and/or regulate the movements of ‘black’, ‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ bodies, whilst the 1903 Report on the White Birth Rate was concerned with encouraging recalcitrant Australian women to make their bodies available for the reproduction of large quantities of little (white) Australians. Such national policy objectives could hardly be furthered at the level of cultural representation if the national spirit was unfettered from a specific embodiment. (Nicoll 2001: 111 Original parentheses, my emphases)
In this light, the production of the national spirit cannot be dissociated from the historical naturalization of white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity and privilege. Nicoll gives close attention to the management of bodies that produces the national spirit. Taking up from this suggestion, the Gallipoli pilgrimage represents a moment of intensification where the movement of white bodies memorializes the national spirit. Hannaford and Newton describe the grieving bodies they encountered at Gallipoli as a community of bodies joined in mutual mourning, at which point differences between individuals evaporated. These differences included, “age, gender and profession […] Turks, Australians and New
60 Zealanders, young and old, ‘suits’ and ‘hippies’” (2008: 28). It is notable that race is not mentioned. The pilgrims’ grief is described as visceral and overwhelming: “veterans warned novices that they could expect to ‘weep buckets.’ Grief was extremely evident in several contexts” (31). It is significant that the work of mourning at this site is described by Hannaford and Newton as indistinguishable from the work of affirming ‘Australian’ values. In their interviews with pilgrims they note that these included, “loyalty, giving or doing the right thing for mates or other Australians. Some mentioned irreverence for authority and the respect for individuals as well as ‘looking after your mates’” (38). Moreover, “Travellers were in general more able to voice the value of ‘belonging’, to Australia and to the world” (38 Original emphasis). Through a shared grief that is made and represented outside the geopolitical boundaries of the nation, belonging to Australia (being mates in and with ‘Australia’) is made affectively through affirmation of the national values that are linked with exclusionary rhetoric and law. Here, mourning reproduces and affirms the imagined vulnerable whiteness of the nation. That is, recalling Moreton-Robinson, I suggest that white possession and sovereignty is made through the mourning of white, Anglo-Celtic deaths that simultaneously disavows and reinforces the elision of the deaths upon which the white Australian nation was founded. Hence, it is possible that the whiteness of the Gallipoli pilgrimage is not mentioned by Hannaford and Newton because of its hegemony. In my reading, placed side by side the two pilgrimages function to suggest the complexities of discourses of ‘secularism’ whilst setting in motion questions about the importance of space in relation to ‘religion,’ as well as the imbrication of ‘neutrality’ with projects of white (secular) privilege. Hence, with these narratives and spatializations in mind, I now turn to a broader discussion of the conceits of documentary film in order to provide a theoretical context with which to then test the representation of spatial narratives of secular privilege, ‘religion’ and affective embodiment in comparative studies of God on my Side and John Safran versus God.
Documentary film
The documentary genre, which arguably holds ‘objectivity’ as a desired, yet ultimately unattainable ideal, is well suited to representing the subtle assumptions and vicissitudes of
61 ‘secular neutrality.’24 In assumedly presenting subjects ‘as they are,’ the documentary can be seen to be concerned with ‘neutrality.’ The genre, famously coined by John Grierson as “the creative treatment of actuality” refers technically to the representation of historical events and social issues through the use of formal cinematic conventions in film, and for Grierson is ideally geared toward social instruction (Hardy 1946: 11). Further, and within the Griersonian understanding that was established in the late 1920s and has continued to shape contemporary Anglo-American and thus arguably also Australian documentary film practices and preferences, it advances “serious social analysis […] as the legitimate purpose of the documentary” (Plantinga 1997: 28). Certainly, given the association with ‘non- fiction’ and history of ‘observational’ documentaries, the genre, which covers a range of styles including films that borrow from and interweave formal, cinéma vérité and self- reflexive styles, might be seen to refer to the capture of ‘reality’ on film. Yet critical analyzes of documentary texts consider the plethora of technical, ideological, narrative and sociopolitical mediations that comprise the documentary (Pramaggiore & Wallis 2006: 249). In a further complication of any unified, unmediated observational ‘reality’ associated with documentary, it has also been argued that the large range of approaches to “actuality” loosely described as ‘documentary’ undermines the sense of a single genre (Plantinga 2005: 115). Despite this acknowledgement, Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis refer to the capture of unmediated ‘reality’ as the ‘ideal’ that defines the aspirations of documentary form (2006: 249). This perhaps assumes that there is a ‘reality’ that under particular circumstances could be ‘captured’ by filmmakers and viewed by audiences. Thus, for the purposes of this analysis ‘documentary’ will not signify a missed opportunity, but instead I consider these texts at the level of representation; particularly in the light of Stuart Hall’s observation that it is through relationships between language and meanings that cultural myths are produced, reinforced and possibly subverted (Hall 1997: 13-64). Indeed, for my purposes documentary forms a rich site of analysis for considering the ways in which language and bodies are situated and represented in relation to narratives and myths of ‘religion,’ Australian identity and ‘secular neutrality.’
24 Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis refer to documentary as striving for the ‘ideal’ of representing unmediated reality. See: Pramaggiore, Maria and Tom Wallis. Film: A Critical Introduction. Boston: Pearson, 2006. 249. 62 Far from producing ‘neutral’ representations of history, documentary is a genre that has historically been associated with the practices, policies and ideologies of the State and in formulating national identity (Nichols 2001: 582). Bill Nichols complicates and contextualizes the history of the genre by linking it with the modernist avant-garde, suggesting that this linkage is a “blind spot” in accepted histories of documentary (2001). Although the notion that there are blurred distinctions between ‘fictional’ film and documentary is established, Nichols specifies that these distinctions are historically and generically co-implicated. This revision of accepted histories of the documentary form, which Nichols dates to 1895 through to the 1920s, reminds us that ‘documentary’ is a highly constructed genre formed in concert with the aesthetic and sociopolitical practices of the context in which it is created and thus cannot be unbound from these structures and strictures. Indeed, in his book Representing Reality, Nichols frequently cites fictional feature films in order to elucidate his claims about the codes and conventions of documentary film, thus highlighting the co-implication of the genres in technological, sociopolitical, ideological, aesthetic and critical contexts (Nichols 1991). The notion of an underlying ‘reality’ that documentary would ideally depict might therefore seem a pessimistic description of a genre that, it would follow, must always represent the failure of its objective. However, this chapter will not depart from concern for that which documentary texts ‘lack.’ Here, I consider the way in which ‘secular neutrality’ is made in such a way that ‘religiosity’ is constructed as absent from the body of the participant observer, and in this way absent from the national body. This is reinforced by travel outside the nation to find ‘religious’ subjects. That is, this chapter is concerned with the invisible, ‘neutral’ participant-observer in ‘secular’ context. Carl Plantinga problematizes the privileging of ‘objectivity’ in documentary film by advocating texts, “that take conflicting positions into account in a balanced fashion” (Plantinga 1997: 30). But I argue Plantinga does not go far enough, if we consider that it is the always-already acculturated and sociopolitically positioned filmmaker who makes decisions and shapes a version of ‘balance.’ Through analysis of the trope of the filmmaker’s unacknowledged and yet ever- present, subjective and sensorial body, I will emphasize the (per)formative role of subjective embodiment that arguably subverts dominant understandings of secularism and the concept of filmic and conceptual ‘neutrality.’
63 The Australian television series John Safran versus God and documentary film God on my Side can both be categorized as texts that engage with elements of the documentary genre, however each shares a link with television. John Safran versus God aired on Australia’s SBS channel during 2004. Andrew Denton is a television journalist whose documentary film was made in collaboration with the ABC which, as I described earlier, also broadcasts his weekly talk show, Enough Rope with Andrew Denton.25 Given that these Australian documentary texts share strong links to Australian television it is helpful to consider documentarian and film theorist David MacDougall’s concern about the broader influence of television on Australian documentaries:
Even in Australia, where there is a fairly lively documentary tradition, the regressive impact upon documentary of a conservative television establishment is evident. Styles derived from public affairs broadcasting and journalism predominate: narrated films centered around an on-screen presenter, wholly narrated films, and interview-based films. Films that can be pre-scripted are vastly preferred by producers and funding organizations – even organizations established in order to stimulate the exploration of society or creative development in the arts. Film length is very often arbitrarily standardized at a television hour, regardless of the demands of the subject – even if the film has little hope of being sold to television. Film subjects are chosen with an eye to their journalistic interest or political timeliness. The sentiments expressed are predictably those that champion underdogs, expose injustice, and side with ideologically respectable causes. (MacDougall 1998: 227-8)
MacDougall’s reservations about the politics of contemporary television journalism as ‘conservative’ and thus ‘regressive’ for documentary are clear. He is concerned that the conservatism associated with television journalism impedes the quality and innovation of documentary films. These sentiments are echoed by Plantinga, who refers to journalism as primarily concerned with the pursuit of “objectivity” and privileging of “evidence”; a
25 The programme website further establishes the privileging of this style in its statement: “The winner of Australia’s top light entertainment and top journalism awards, Enough Rope is being watched on Monday night’s [sic] by one in every four Australian households. The success of Enough Rope has proven the truth of its motto: ‘Everyone has a story.’” Aside from stating the popularity of the show, this short paragraph simultaneously indicates the popularity of the show’s style, in interviewing subjects in order to elicit personal narratives, without reference to the contrived, structured televisual situation in which this occurs and shapes narratives. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. By Andrew Denton. ABC TV. Australia. 2003-2008. Accessed 12 Apr 2008 from, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/about/about.htm.
64 concept he refutes on the basis of its narrowed scope for representation (Plantinga 1997: 29-30). These sentiments are shared by At the Movies co-host and film reviewer David Stratton, who described God on my Side as “an extended chat show,” perhaps implying a link to the style of Enough Rope (Stratton & Pomeranz 2006). Denton’s film, which was indeed broadcast on ABC television after its release in cinemas, appears to neatly fit into MacDougall’s set of concerns; particularly given the ‘political timeliness’ of its references to current controversies such as conflicts over land rights in Israel through the film’s depiction of Zionist views of interviewees, as well as images of Osama bin Laden and the importance of the Christian right to the Bush administration. Denton’s film portrays a highly commodified form of evangelical Christianity situated in Texas, which is part of the U.S.’s ‘Bible Belt.’ By limiting its narrative and argument to interviews, the film reproduces the broader conservatism of a journalistic style associated with television journalism as noted by Plantinga and MacDougall, and reproduces and reinforces assumptions and limitations that are embedded within the interview process itself. By discussing the ‘blind spots’ of the interview process first, I will then proceed to apply these ideas to Denton’s text more directly.
Interview-based documentary
Moribund documentary tends to be produced when one already knows how to approach a subject even before encountering it. - - - David MacDougall 26
The interview is a paradoxical procedure, in that the opportunity for openness and candour in the asking of questions and giving of answers simultaneously gives rise to opacity and confusion (MacDougall 1998: 117). That is, the apparent interrogation and self-revelation implied in the questioning and answering procedure can indeed raise more questions about the contextual conditions of the interview itself rather than glean a straightforward, ‘simple
26 MacDougall, David. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. 225-6. 65 answer.’ The social conditions in which the questions and answers are proffered are as central to the text as the represented exchange, and invite consideration of the power dynamics and sociopolitical issues at stake, and which shape the questions, answers and meanings (Nichols 1991: 50-1). Given this tendency for interviews in documentary film to raise questions, as well as represent answers in a situated audiovisual scene, I would like to consider Trinh Minh-ha’s nuanced and suggestive discussion of the complexity of interviews:
With the best intentions, interviewers sometimes get caught up in their own framing, being too eager to proceed with their list of preformed questions, regardless of what the answers given are and where these are heading. In other words, they rarely commit themselves in their questions, which are often based on answers they have already assumed ahead of time. Hence they are more anxious to carry out the task as planned than to engage in the conversation itself. In the end, even though the voice of knowledge may be deferred to the interviewee, and unless one remains inventive and exerts one’s skill to make detours so as not to get caught up in mere ‘answering,’ as interviewee, one can only speak within a preconceived role and a forced itinerary. (Trinh 1999: 248)
Hence interviewers, in this view, are limited by the practice of assuming the outcome of an interview before it is enacted. The most profound implications of Trinh’s statement are founded, I argue, in the phrase ‘they rarely commit themselves in their questions.’ What might committing oneself to questions mean? The OED defines “commit”: “give in charge or trust, entrust, consign.” And further, “Also, to trust oneself to (the elements, the sea, etc.)” (OED 1989). Insofar as I commit a repetition of violence and disavowal by selecting a dictionary definition in the light of my reservations about the text in the previous chapter, this definition is instructive in its repetition of trust and gesture toward an-other. In this light Trinh’s statement implies a giving over of the self during and to the interview process instead of a goal-oriented ‘going through the motions.’ This might seem a relatively straightforward understanding of the commitment of the interviewer to the interview itself, but bears attention. The progress of the interview, when at its most innovative and dynamic, requires the interviewer’s trust in the process itself, in the doing of the exchange. Here, a gap for unknowing is opened in which assumptions might be unmade, and at which point inertia or radical departure from the issue at hand could take place. In the absence of this
66 potential, the interview hails the interviewee to a particular, intended speaking position which comprises the “creative weakness” of the documentary and for MacDougall signals its “moribund” status (Trinh 1999: 248; MacDougall 1998: 225-6). Thus, the encounter itself is constituted as a site of both the opening up of potential and its loss. It might therefore be construed, in part at least, as the representation of a missed opportunity for new ideas and connections, rather than a relaying of what occurred.
In a similar vein to Trinh, Nichols argues that the interview is inextricably linked to power, which invokes and includes ethical and political concerns (Nichols 1991: 51). He writes:
The interviewer’s skill is often revealed by his or her ability to appear at the service of the interviewee whose speech he or she actually controls, somewhat in the manner of a ventriloquist. (Nichols 1991: 52)
Echoing Trinh’s discourse, Nichols construes the interview as a form of puppetry in which the interviewer performs the role of enquirer within the broader framework of anticipated outcomes. It is important to recognize here that the interviewer is not a ‘natural,’ but performs the part of ‘the interviewer’ in a given context, and often according to the anticipation of a specific outcome. As context for this claim, and perhaps touching on what Trinh refers to as the subversive abilities of interviewees, Nichols is explicit in his argument that interviews are shaped through hierarchical power structures that are performed on an everyday basis as part of social discourse, and which are exemplified by confessional, therapeutic, interrogative and legal exchanges, which ordinarily privilege the interviewer/institution (Nichols 1991: 50). If the interview re-presents the hierarchical exchanges that take place in everyday life, including the power differentials that privilege specific institutions and their proponents, returning to Trinh, the ‘guerilla’ tactics that interviewees may need to utilize in order to subvert these rituals become important.
Because of their attention to power and the performative aspect of interviews, Trinh’s and Nichols’ arguments are useful for pinpointing the tensions that exist around reading documentary interviews. Although Trinh, Nichols and MacDougall abhor ‘moribund’ interviews to varying degrees, there is also a sense in which it is instructive for cultural
67 analysis. By viewing documentary interviews that portray the unchanged, perhaps unimpeachable interviewer questioning the interviewee without putting themselves into (the) question or submitting to the possible opening up of new ideas and knowledge that is signaled but not always realised during the interview, we can gain an understanding of the specific anxieties and cultural narratives that are activated through this process. Within this paradigm of analysis, close attention to embodied praxis and settings as well as narrative framing offer lines of enquiry into the cultural myths that are reinforced and subverted through the film’s textuality. Given that bodies perform the interview procedure, I would like to take Trinh’s and Nichols’ arguments further, whilst taking for granted the impossibility of transparent, ‘equal’ and objective interviews, to identify modes of enactment that are invested with power, and which appears to be overdetermined by a preference for the representation of (performative) ‘secular neutrality.’
Documentary texts made in the style of cinéma vérité as God on my Side and John Safran versus God are, may produce the appearance of spontaneity through the production of a seemingly free-flowing conversation, however filmmakers can decide to conceal their own views during the exchange and during editing (Chabot Davis 1999: 31). This concern is echoed by Trinh in her critique of using interviews in cinéma vérité.
Such a strategy is not only naïve (suggesting that reality, events and ideas can be captured unmediated and reduced to a question of pros and cons), it also denotes a politically and creatively weak stance (as it remains unaware of its own formation and politics in its desire to pass for neutral, unbiased information). Although multivocal in its appearance, the final product as a whole lacks a voice of its own, and ultimately what you have is simply a noncommittal stance, more preoccupied with correct formulas than with social inquiry. The politics of the interviewer are not absent here. They are quite evident in the way the mesh of questions and answers is constituted; but this is usually not engaged with, and hence the work remains caught in the binary machine that governs the programming of information in the media. (Trinh 1999: 248)
Here, Trinh mentions the ‘voice’ or ‘final product’ of the interview. Rather than reducing agency to the interviewer or filmmaker, or to the subject, she advocates a space outside but interconnected with this apparent dualism. Indeed, within the theoretical framework offered
68 by Trinh and Nichols, there is no dualism inherent within the interviewer/interviewee relation, as in most cases the interviewee is markedly shaped and influenced, that is, interpellated, both culturally and technically by the interviewer and the enactment of the role of interviewee. This is signaled by Trinh’s awareness of the seemingly ‘multivocal,’ and yet ultimately univocal interview. Moreover, central to Trinh’s critique of the interview is her attention to the assumption of the “unbiased” neutrality of the information presented in the interview. That is, ‘neutrality’ is read and assumed through the image of the bodies involved in the exchange, and at the level of representation, which aggregates to the ‘voice’ of the ‘final product.’ Trinh claims that the univocity of this reading practice and interviewing practice is the formation of a ‘noncommittal stance.’ That is, not only is the interviewer unavailable to the unanticipated outcomes that might be evinced during the exchange, but audiences are presented with a specular production of the enactment of neutrality. These ideas invite critique of the uniqueness of the event through situated analysis of the cultural politics of representation.
If objectivity is closely related to power structures, as Nichols and Trinh argue it is, the documentary text reproduces and reinforces these power structures in the representational strategies that comprise its textuality. The interview, far from representing ‘other’ viewpoints can thus function to reinforce the norms that structure understandings of ‘objectivity,’ and thus its index, ‘neutrality.’27 By fusing the arguments of Trinh and Nichols, and taking them further to include analysis of the embodied, politically situated and acculturated filmmaker/interviewer, we can further analyze embedded modes of power that are linked with the assumption of ‘neutrality.’ This amounts to a situated, specific reading of interview-based documentary film as an embodied representation of how neutrality is produced culturally. Filmmaker Andrew Denton is unequivocal in his idea that he was “neutral”, and/or “secular” in his interviewing technique in the filming of his documentary (AAP Denton 2006). By following Trinh and placing the performance of ‘neutrality’ that Denton enacts into question, I argue that this film reinforces and reproduces an implicit masculinist hegemonic discourse central to ‘secular neutrality.’ This
27 In his discussion of re-conceptualising “objectivity,” Carl Plantinga offers the idea of a “balanced” range of viewpoints as an alternative to the capture of “unmediated” actuality. However, I suggest this does not consider the assumption of a ‘neutral’ ground on which decisions about “balance” might be made, and thus how/through whom these arguments might be represented. See: Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 29-32. 69 means that Denton’s own politics – and in this I am including his positioning as a political subject as well as his political convictions – and those which he represents are simultaneously marginalized and yet made through representations of a liberal tolerance of Othered religious subjects. In this way, his interviewing style can be read as having ‘secular neutral’ effects. In this analysis, I would like also to keep in mind Agamben’s conceptualization of the example. Hence, I offer analysis of the film as a singularity among others such that this analysis is made in conversation and composition with my reading of John Safran versus God that will follow. Hence, this chapter forms a singularity that offers a reading strategy that might apply to other representations of religion, secularism and neutrality and is not limited to the diageses of Denton and Safran’s texts, nor to Denton and Safran. This is also a point of departure from a comparative analysis that might assume static texts upon which theory is overlaid in a diagnostic fashion. Yet, in putting reading practices into question following Trinh, this comparative analysis both resists and inevitably repeats the violence of selection, representation and anticipation of outcomes at stake, and in doing so perhaps represents the im/possibility of finding ways to be more ‘neutral.’ Yet, as this chapter will suggest, perhaps there is a benign quality to the performative avowal of non-neutrality that is underrated.
God on my Side: performing secular neutrality
[W]e tried with this documentary to let people speak for themselves as much as possible. - - - Andrew Denton28
Where does the filmmaker stand? - - - Bill Nichols29
28 AAP. “Denton to reveal Bush film.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 14 June 2006. Accessed on 15 August 2007 from, http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/dentons-guerilla-job-on- bush/2006/06/14/1149964587276.html. 29 Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991. 79. 70 God on my Side was released nationally in Australian cinemas, amid a considerable amount of publicity as Denton travelled around Australia attending initial screenings and hosting audience question time. The setting of the film is the Texas Gaylord Convention Centre in Dallas during the 63rd National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention, which appears to be a showcase for vendors of commodified, evangelical Christianity. Denton’s film points to the political implications of the participants he interviews by including clips of President George W. Bush endorsing the convention, and drawing concerned attention to the absolutism of some subjects’ views via Denton’s commentary. He states his intention at the beginning of the film: “I’ve come looking for the everyday believers, whose lives are wrapped in the love of Christ.” This is followed by a clip of President George W. Bush addressing the Convention. Hence, a link between politics and ‘everyday’ believers is made early in the film. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Denton referred to his approach to both the subject matter and interviewees as “neutral,” and “secular” (AAP Denton 2006). It is interesting that he brought these terms together, and further suggests their complementarity in dominant imaginaries of what ‘secular’ might mean. Denton described this approach as “respectful” of others’ beliefs (AAP Denton 2006). Hence, Denton does not describe the interview as a creative moment at which his subjectivity, beliefs, feelings, and body might be ‘put into question’ but rather refers to the generosity implied by performing ‘secular neutrality.’ How might he go about this?
In distancing himself from this style Denton is both showing a preference for a ‘talking heads’ style of cinéma vérité that, without self-reflection, can be seen to assume the fair representation of subjects’ views. He states his amicable intention, “I was very careful to treat people respectfully and neutrally” (AAP Denton 2006). Yet he also noted, “I guess it was a bit of guerilla documentary making” (AAP Denton 2006). Whilst the resistance and agendas of the quintessential guerrilla are structurally resolved through the specific oppressions it resists, the semiotic of Denton’s guerrilla is the tactical strategy of ‘neutrality’ through which the evangelical Christianity is subtly and yet powerfully made and reinforced as non-neutral and non-secular. That is, the production of ‘secular neutrality’ makes the fundamentalism of the subjects’ religiosity through the absent-presence of views embodied and performed through Denton’s representation onscreen. Whilst Denton’s subjects are overdetermined as ‘religious’ they can also be read as ‘extreme’ – indeed he describes them as “fundamentalist” (AAP Denton 2006). This is 71 made clear at the beginning of the film when he describes the subjects as, “evangelical voters who put [George W. Bush] over the line and into the White House” (2006). However, Karen Kopelson is clear that ‘neutrality’ indicates the mobilisation of hierarchical power relations that privilege white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual bodies (Kopelson 2003: 122). In deciding to perform a ‘neutral’ position, Denton enacts secular privilege in line with his privilege as a subject who fits the ‘neutral’ criteria.
Whilst Denton claims the importance of ‘neutrality’ to his performative style, he also admits that he finds the fusion of religion with politics “confronting” and concerning (Kroenert 2006). His desire to appear ‘neutral’ therefore implies two assumptions: that ‘religion’ can be distilled and represented without mediation, and that there is a risk of betraying affect or emotion in this situation. Here, ‘neutrality’ functions in the manner of a mask. ‘Confronting’ connotes both an affective disposition and the enactment that his film depends upon, in that God on my Side ostensibly ‘confronts’ the audience with what is ‘really’ going on in evangelical American Christianity, which is reinforced by Denton’s style of ‘confronting’ interview subjects with secular neutrality. As a concept, ‘confronting’ arguably reinforces a dominant, essentialist understanding of religion as that which is opposed to an apparently static and yet, as we have seen, equally constructed and shifting ‘neutral’ secularism. It also reinforces the strangeness of ‘religion,’ in that finding something ‘confronting’ suggests ‘it’ is not familiar to him. This notion of separable opposites is produced at the outset of the film, when Denton states in a voiceover set to images of Osama bin Laden and agitated Muslim protesters who are assumedly in the Middle East:
If there really is a clash of civilisations, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at our side. It’s easy to look at the other and to question where faith can take people. Yet, I wonder, if the telescope was turned around, what might we look like? (2006)
The spin of Denton’s telescope bypasses the putative ‘neutral’ subject and refocuses on the Christian Right in the U.S. The apparent opposition between the ‘other’ and ‘us,’ which is simultaneously linked with the Middle East as opposed to the U.S., and Islam as opposed to Christianity, places Australia within this dichotomy by showing Denton travelling to the
72 United States to research the group for whom he uses the inclusive pronoun “we,” and which can be extrapolated to a discourse of “Us” versus “Them” (Maddox 2005: 78). Australia is thus geographically and performatively removed from the apparent Christianity/Islam dichotomy, and yet implicitly aligned with the United States and Christianity. Indeed, in his account of security politics since 9/11, Anthony Burke argues that Australia and the U.S. are particularly close by suggesting that it, “is spatially remote from us – vastly so – but culturally close; an ontological extension of home, a source and harbour for the Australian identity” (Burke 2006: 197). In this sense it is not surprising that Denton should choose America to conduct interviews on Christianity within the rubric of finding what ‘we’ look like. The familiarity of America is thus offset by the ‘strangeness’ of Denton’s encounter with fundamentally ‘religious’ subjects. Thus, the production of a ‘neutral’ position is ironically enacted through representations of both radical Islam and Christianity, and both the Middle East and the U.S., which is paradoxically linked to Australia and thus arguably sets up an understanding of the ‘secular’ as specific to the West and a shared Christianity.
Denton’s film can be seen as a representation, and perhaps exaltation, of the unimpeachability of his constructed ‘neutral,’ ‘secular’ position in a specifically evangelical Christian context. However, this is complicated by the film’s closure. A long interview with the McDuff brothers, who run a ministry programme in Texas and who regularly attend the Convention, is spliced throughout the film. The interview is conducted in a small private room, and forms the film’s closure. Denton asks the four white, elderly men, “If I was a man of Islam and I sat here and said to you, I know what I know what I know about the Qur’an, why would I not be right?” The men answer, “Because that’s not the word of God.” The scene cuts to a black screen with a quote in white text, attributed to Jesus Christ, “This is my commandment; that you love one another, as I have loved you.” Here, a Christian message is used to expose the apparent hypocrisy of the McDuff brothers’ statement. Additionally, Denton’s use of a Christian message despite his ‘neutral’ and ‘secular’ position suggests further ironic play.
73 Irony is not the only lens through which to view this ambivalent mode of representation.30 The spatiality of the interview is crucial to the politics and enactment of the exchange. The DVD copy of God on my Side catalogues the full versions of three interviews Denton has conducted with Christian actor and author Jennifer O’Neill, the McDuff brothers, and Jewish/Christian Pastor Doug Batchelor for the purposes of the film. During the film, heavily edited clips from these core interviews are spliced between shots of Denton approaching various vendors and booths on the Convention floor, and montages of Christian television broadcasts overlaid by commentary. Each of the interviews is set in a separate, ‘private’ room within the convention centre, and in the case of the three featured interviews, the rooms are darkened. The dim lighting can be seen to encode privacy as it creates visual contrasts that draw the audience’s focus to the interview subject whilst casting the room in darkness. This is intensified through the heavy reliance on close-up shots of the subjects alongside Denton’s attentive figure shown nodding and listening in cut-aways. Given the apparent privacy of these rooms – of course, at least one camera operator is present – a ‘confessional’ interview situation is constructed through the exchange of questions and answers, as well as the setting.
In the relative seclusion of the darkened interview rooms, or perhaps booths, the subjects reflect on their personal journeys. This is most explicit in the case of Jennifer O’Neill, a Christian Hollywood actor and pro-life campaigner, who is first introduced addressing the Women’s Luncheon, which functions as a segue into her interview with Denton. A fly-on- the-wall style is used to record her speech, given to an all-female audience, in which she refers to herself as a “messy messenger” who shares her sense that the women “all have a bit of Desperate Housewives in us” but deal with personal issues in a Christian way. She clearly assumes her audience is Christian women; in the light of this, does it matter that Denton’s film crew was recording the event? Further, what does it mean for Denton’s audience, interpellated as Denton-like everymen, to consume this reified spectacle? By following this scene with a personal interview in which O’Neill appears to divulge her personal history in the small darkened room, in which cut-aways reveal Denton politely
30 Kimberly Chabot Davis offers a useful critique of reading documentary film in terms of irony as a socially specific, class based, white, liberal practice that limits the political efficacy and reach of a text. For an expansion of this argument, see: Chabot Davis, Kimberly. “White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Verite and the Politics of Irony in "Hoop Dreams" and "Paris Is Burning"” South Atlantic Review 64.1 (1999): 36. 74 nodding and listening. His questions are edited out so that we hear only O’Neill’s ‘testimony.’ Minutes later, more interview footage with O’Neill includes a cut-away to her signing copies of her autobiography, Surviving Myself, and then, before a return to the interview with Denton, the text continues to utilise the fly-on-the-wall style, with Denton’ voiceover announcing, “On the convention centre floor, some of America’s sins are hard to miss.” The camera sweeps down to capture a range of differently-sized and configured plastic representations of foetuses on display at the National Right to Life booth. The camera then refocuses to a medium shot that reveals a customer in heated debate with the two women behind the desk. Denton does not intervene to ask questions, as he does at every other booth, in the guise of a consumer. What is ‘hard to miss’ about this scene? Denton’s voiceover states, with him not quite off-camera but standing adjacent to the camera, holding a bottle of water, “Not everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.” He then draws backward to stand off-camera whilst the women’s argument about morals and rights continues. Ultimately this scene acts as a cut-away during the interview with O’Neill, whose anti-abortion position is described by her belief that “God doesn’t make mistakes.” But it also reveals something about Denton’s positionality. He appears to be both a consumer and a compelled voyeur in the scene on the convention centre floor beside the Right to Life booth.
I suggest that at this moment of Denton’s silence, hovering at the edge of the frame as the women debate abortion, his positionality is rendered clearer. He stands silent. By way of comparison, Denton is gregarious and appears happy to be ‘taken in’ by the various other vendors and displays at the convention. He jokes with the Christian Gourmet vendor about ‘sinful’ foods, and asks for a reading of Romans with his first name, Andrew, substituted in the bible at the Personal Promise Bible stand. He asks the McDuff to sing for the camera, and requests help from a sculptor who claims to find traces of the Holy Spirit on his fingertips, although in this case Denton offers a bemused glance to the camera. In each case, however, Denton is congenial and animated in his willingness to participate. He asks questions from a puppet called Mumps, and replies with “That’d be good” when the Noah’s Ark vendor suggests a visit to Australia. Throughout this scene of commodified religious production, Denton is overwhelmingly polite, shaking hands and introducing himself as “Andrew Denton from Australian television;” an introduction that affords him relative religious anonymity – and ambiguity, given that he implies he is observing rather than 75 participating – relative to his subjects, whilst also acknowledging that filming is taking place. Yet at the Right to Life he withdraws from the frame, before a return to O’Neill proclaiming her anti-abortion stance, relative to her personal experience and beliefs. Whilst he occupies a ‘neutral’ space as the interviewer in relation to O’Neill, he does not engage with the women in conversation or access the space. Rather, he stands with a drink in his hand, observing. Denton’s presence within the frame can thus be seen to remind the audience that this is not simply benign, unobtrusive ‘fly-on-the-wall’ vision, but rather, the women are visually produced as the embodied, emotional ‘Them’ in opposition to his ‘neutral’ ‘everyman’ figure. Elizabeth Grosz’s discussion of corporeal ‘universality’ is particularly useful here:
I have been concerned with the ways in which a corporeal ‘universal’ has in fact functioned as a veiled representation and projection of a masculine which takes itself as the unquestioned norm, the ideal representative without any idea of the violence that this representational positioning does to its others – women, the “disabled,” cultural and racial minorities, different classes, homosexuals – who are reduced to the role of modifications or variations of the (implicitly white, male, youthful, heterosexual, middle-class) human body. (Grosz 1994: 188 Original parentheses)
The violence produced through Denton’s performance of ‘secular neutrality’ and hence reinforcement of the dominant ‘universal’ subject is that all of his subjects are reduced to reified images and variations figured as non-neutrality. Hence, the Right to Life booth functions as a critical lacuna at which this pejorative effacement of difference is made most clear.
However, Denton is clear he meant to be unobtrusive and ‘generous’ through adopting ‘secular neutrality.’ It is worthwhile considering this position in the context of Burke’s discussion of national values, in which Burke argues that feeling and being seen as generous and ‘good’ is integral to the production of the white national body, this generosity can be seen as a narrative that is underpinned by anxiety (2006: 209-10). The construction of generosity or goodness as non-ideological, natural and needing protection underpins Burke’s argument that whiteness functions hegemonically in Australian dominant culture
76 through a politics of fear about Others. With this in mind, I would like to consider Trinh’s contemplation of links between film-making and ideological positionality:
To deny the reality of film in claiming (to capture) reality is to stay ‘in ideology’ – that is, to indulge in the (deliberate or not) confusion of filmic with phenomenal reality. (Trinh 1991: 43 Original emphases and parentheses)
Further to Denton’s presence as interviewer and voiceover, and concomitant choices about the location of the interview process, and following Trinh, we can consider his politics as an important narrative that shapes both the reading of and the diegesis of the text itself. Denton’s maleness, heterosexuality, status as a married father, white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity, and middle class position place him within the imagined Australian mainstream. This also places him within the national and Western ‘us’ he explicates at the beginning of the film. In the Right to Life scene, we see him patrolling the limits of the frame. This gender binary is produced visually and ideologically. Further, Denton’s decision to conduct interviews, to locate his research in the U.S., and to focus his analysis of religion on a National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Texas and limit discussions of politics to George W. Bush and representations of some attendees’ Zionism, without a move to self-reflexivity, are silenced. Thus, whilst Denton’s performance of ‘neutrality’ appears to help solicit information from his subjects, this production of the secular does not present a point of departure from the Us/Them, secular/religious dichotomy. As a result, popular understandings of resurgent religion as an upset to ‘neutral’ secularism are reproduced and reinforced. Further, the idea of a reassuringly unimpeachable secularism is figured through the representation of an Australian ‘everyman’ maintaining ‘neutrality’ in relationship to ‘religion.’
77 John Safran versus God: exorcising secular neutrality
If photography does not steal the soul it steals something very like it, something deeply enough felt to generate the fraught ethical debates which uniquely surround the making of documentary films and photographs. - - - David MacDougall31
For the most part, and not unlike Denton’s film, John Safran versus God places ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ subjects in sites geographically external to and separable from Australian geopolitical space. Indeed, in an interview Safran reinforced the view that ‘religion’ is not a major concern within Australia:
I’ve been all around the world […] and pretty much no-one is like secular Australia. Just everyone from people I’m sure your audience would hate, maybe George W. Bush, to people your audience might love, like East Timorese Freedom Fighters, to them religion is just so important. (Safran 2004)
Here, the uniqueness of Australia within the logic of a globalising ‘religious’ economy Safran conjures is made through the absence of ‘religious’ politics, conflicts and feeling. However, this narrative is to some extent fractured by the diegesis and style of the series. By way of contrast to God on my Side, I suggest that John Safran’s series functions generically to critique the impartiality of the participant-observer within the limits of a self- reflexive cinéma vérité style. This critique is most dramatically represented in the portrayal of exorcism in the final episode of the series, which enacts the limits of the ‘neutral’ participant-observer by privileging an embodied, visceral performance of engagement with faith that makes a stark contrast to Denton’s disembodied ‘impartiality’ and also to the rest of Safran’s series in which he readily addresses the camera both visually and verbally. I will return to a discussion of the exorcism shortly. In establishing his self-reflexive
31 MacDougall, David. “When Less is Less: The Long Take in Documentary.” Film Quarterly 46.2 (1992- 1993): 45. 78 approach, throughout the series Safran playfully reminds that his series is on SBS, which is associated with ‘multicultural’ rather than ‘mainstream’ programming, and therefore a marginal production. He emphasizes that he is a minor celebrity and that his target audience is marginalized “left-wing pinkos.” Although the show won two prestigious Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Comedy Series and Outstanding Achievement in Craft in Television (original concept) in 2005, and, incidentally, aired in Finland and Sweden in 2006 and the United States in 2007, the rhetoric of marginality is repeatedly reinforced. Since its critical success and popularity in Australia Safran fronted a spin-off religious chat show Speaking in Tongues (2005) also on SBS. Following that, Safran and co-presenter Father Bob McGuire, who was featured in John Safran versus God and was co-presenter of Speaking in Tongues, have worked together since co-presenting a weekly programme on the alternative national radio broadcaster Triple J, Sunday Night Safran. This suggests a significant level of interest amongst Australian audiences in issues related to religion, albeit through the lens of Safran’s apparent and playfully reinforced marginality.
Despite the officially multicultural and multifaith premise of Australian society, Safran decides, for the most part, to leave Australian shores. He says, “I might have to travel to Japan to work out Buddhism, and Haiti to crack Vodouism, but I knew I only had to walk up the street for Catholicism.” It would seem, then, that Safran’s show works within prescribed cultural myths about the ‘neutrality’ of the Australian public sphere through an imagined contrast between external, exoticized ‘religious’ spaces and the invisiblization of Christian hegemony. Indeed, the show is structured such that each episode offers a ‘religious road-test’ of a specific religion or faith, prefaced by Safran’s question: “Just say, I’m following the wrong religion?” In these segments, Safran travels between different nations, cultures and religions to ‘test’ various faiths. During each ‘road-test,’ Safran’s performance of Jewishness functions in an ambivalent mode of avowal that forms the punchline of his meeting with a Grand Dragon from the Ku Klux Klan, but remains unacknowledged in, for example, the footage of his stay at a Buddhist Zendo in Japan. This performative negotiation of religious identity potentially reproduces the secular ideal that assumes ‘religious’ identity can be distilled from the utterance and/or event. This resonates with the trope of ambivalence that historically shapes representations of Jewishness in Australia. Jon Stratton makes a convincing case in his book Coming Out Jewish that constructions of Jewishness in Australia reveal the assumptions of whiteness. He suggests 79 that Anglo-Jews were constructed as white during the White Australia Policy, however the discourse of race that Othered the Asiatic Jews who gained access to Australia whilst the Policy was gradually dismantled brought the relation of Jewishness and whiteness into question. In this process, Christianity was linked to whiteness such that Anglo-Jews were ambivalently produced as white. Thus, Stratton argues that white, Anglo-Celtic ethnocentrism simultaneously and paradoxically invisiblizes Jewishness through the exalted whiteness and Judeo-Christian monomorality of the imagined mainstream, whilst differentiating and ethnicizing Jews (Stratton 2000, 220-250).32 Indeed, Safran’s comment in an interview about the series resonates with Stratton’s claim:
If you were black you'd just go ‘Oh, it's an objective fact I'm black,’ and it would be easier to reconcile than when you're Jewish it's a bit of an abstract thing. I mean, there is that thing where your mother was Jewish bla bla bla so there is a genetic thing on that level, but it's not like this real solid, objective thing like I'm black or I'm an Arab. (Brady 2004)
Safran offers a biological narrative of race which imagines static racial signifiers found in the corporeality of bodies, and also dismisses histories in which Jewishness was racialized and ambivalently constructed as “both white and non-white” (Stratton 2000: 209) and “black” (Pellegrini 1997: 21). Safran’s essentialist construction is not the assumption of this study, but it is perhaps useful to consider that through invoking an essentialist racial narrative Safran describes ambivalence. Indeed, Pellegrini argues that in such contexts of racialization Jewishness can be seen to represent “the crisis of racial definition” through ambivalence (Pellegrini 1997: 21). It is useful here to consider Jan Larbalestier’s statement that whiteness functions elliptically and often invisibly in terms of power (Larbalestier 2007: 125). She writes that in contemporary Australian multiculturalism, “whiteness is still conjured up as the unmarked marker of alterity” (126). In this light, Safran’s comments can also be seen to reproduce the invisiblized power dynamics that raise the question of his whiteness and Jewishness. Within the context of the series, Safran’s identification with
32 Another compelling reading of Safran’s performance of Jewishness can be gleaned from Ann Pellegrini’s critique of “Jewishness as gender.” Pellegrini historicizes and critiques the Western, Christian construction of Western male Jews as feminine, and associated with hysteria, by outlining anti-Semitic misogyny that both invisiblizes Jewish women and performed racist violence. Given Safran’s eventual submission to exorcism and apparent loss of rationality, this analysis sets in motion important questions about reading practices and modes of anti-Semitism in Australia. See: Pellegrini, Ann. Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race. New York; London: Routledge, 1997. 17-20. 80 Jewishness functions to undermine the assumed ‘neutrality’ of the interviewer, since this identification becomes critical to some road-tests but is not as important in others. For instance, when Safran tries to join the Ku Klux Klan his Jewishness is performed as a punchline that guarantees he cannot join: here, the flux of passing, performing and contingently making identities within the progress of the exchange marginalizes ‘neutral’ performativity and parodies the generic ‘neutral’ interviewer in documentary texts. In comparison to Denton’s disembodied avowal of ‘secular neutrality,’ here religious identity is constantly articulated in relation to power and the cultural politics of whiteness that are stirred through the physicality and conditions of the road-test.
Each of the eight episodes in the series begins with an image of a barren, rocky landscape beneath a lightning sky, with heavy metal music in the background and a deep, austere, male voice quoting Revelation 20:7: “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison.” A pale hand breaks through the rocks and Safran emerges, thin and spectacled, in a black dinner suit. Comically playing the Devil, he strides out from the earth and glares defiantly into the heavens, whilst straightening his tie. The suggestion of a Christian moral dimension to the show is evident in this opening sequence. It is thus not surprising that the series ends with Safran’s exorcism, performed in the U.S. by evangelical Christian pastor, Father Bob Larson. Safran’s decision to place the exorcism at the end of the series was made in consultation with Father Bob during preparations for the programme, with the understanding that its impact would be strongest after he had experienced a spectrum of religious ‘road-tests.’ The inclusion of this dramatic event also reinforces Safran’s apparent willingness to engage the religious encounter through embodied praxis. On his way to the exorcism, Safran muses,
I’ve thrown myself into a lot of religions over the course of this series. I’ve met Hindu gurus, Freemasons, Christian racialists, Jewish extremists, witch doctors – and then there were the ceremonies. I drank Native American peyote in Arizona, I meditated in a Japanese Buddhist zendo, I skulled mead in a Viking ceremony, I got a Muslim cleric to place a fatwa on a colleague, there was the chicken-blood washing in Mozambique, wearing sacred Mormon undergarments in Salt Lake City, and of course, the thing that shook me the most, the Papa Gede Vodou ceremony in Haiti, where a goat was sacrificed to venerate the head
81 spirit of all the dead, Papa Gede. What I’m getting at is, if anyone’s left themselves open to nasty stuff from the spirit realm entering their lives, it’s probably me. (2004)
Through this narrativisation, Safran disrupts the idea that each of his ‘road-tests’ were discrete, contained occurrences after which Safran ‘goes back to normal’ before the next episode. Rather, it is suggested that Safran may be personally affected by these experiences. Importantly, these experiences are constructed as bodily experiences that connect him with ‘the spirit realm:’ he consumed mead, meditated, had the ‘chicken-blood washing,’ wore Mormon undergarments, and witnessed the ritual killing of a goat, the latter during which his distress was expressed to the camera both visually and verbally. Not only, then, do these experiences appear to have been enacted bodily in one way or another but they also function, through the trope of the body, to dissolve the disembodied neutrality that is important in Denton’s film, such that Safran’s body functions as a locus for questions about embodiment, ‘religion’ and the making of boundaries.
The exorcism takes place firstly in a small office, and then in front of an audience at a small convention. In the office, Safran and Father Bob discuss Safran’s personal history, including his love relationships. It can be read that the accrual of ‘religious’ experiences is registered affectively, supplemented by familial relations and sexual relationships. Alternatively, it is possible to suggest that these bonds are figured within the rubric of ‘religious’ experience. Moreover, these are inextricably linked as that which suggests how and for what purpose the exorcism will take place. Whilst Safran offers a long list of religious experiences, Father Bob repeatedly appears startled and concerned by the range and number of ‘encounters.’ Thus, during the confession Father Bob introduces Safran to the audience as a serious case, and agitates for the audience’s assistance in the exorcism through prayer and intention. Safran stands at the front of the audience with Father Bob, who begins the exorcism by placing a Bible on Safran’s forehead and praying as Safran alternately convulses and moans, growls, and smiles vacantly. This is the first time in the series at which Safran ceases to relate his experiences to the audience in his customary, dry, confessional style. Father Bob commands “the demons” to leave Safran’s body, and he repeatedly touches the bible to his head. Safran appears to cower away, before hitting at Father Bob who exclaims, “You’ve become a breeding ground for the Devil,” and “You’re a prize Satan wants.” He again solicits assistance from the audience, however whilst Safran
82 appears out of control moaning, Father Bob expressly asks African-American audience members to stand up and pray together, chanting for the “vile African spirits” to leave Safran’s being. Surrounding Safran’s doubled-over body, white Anglo-American Father Bob and two of the African American audience members repeat “out, out, out,” as Safran becomes unsteady. Safran appears shaken and overwhelmed, and is voiceless. His inability to address the camera and relate to the audience is reinforced by a short clip of production crew member, Roland Kapferer, expressing his concern: “I’ve never seen John look like that before. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was something in the room, the whole room was different.” Here, Safran’s lack of voice and distance from the ‘neutral’ position is emphasized by the comments and concern of a substituted ‘objective’ observer.
The exorcism was discussed extensively in the Australia media as a strange, unsettling event, and in interviews Safran maintained his bewilderment and lack of memory as to what took place (Bragge 2004; Howland 2004; Safran 2004). In a Radio National interview he said it was a ‘strange’ experience, of which he doesn’t remember much: “I guess something happened […] there’s no way I can act that well”. He also said in the same interview that the experience was “true” for him, but that it didn’t mean he needed to convert to Christianity (Safran 2004).33 Arguably, the ‘strangeness’ of the event is the dissolution of the ‘neutral,’ unaffected participant-observer through the foregrounding of an embodied, visceral enactment that includes the sociopolitical associations that discipline and mediate the body, and which in this case are exemplified through Safran’s Jewishness in relation to the Christian praxis at hand. Safran explains in the DVD outtakes that he discussed the exorcism with Father Bob Larson during the making of the show, and was advised to ‘road-test’ the exorcism last. This arguably reinforces the importance of ‘removing’ the ‘religious’ experiences and Jewish identity from the subject-body, given that exorcism implies removal, as much as it can be read as an active participation in a specific Christian ideology and praxis. Further, the clear racial coding of the apparent ‘spirit realm’ manifesting through Safran is unmistakeable. Here, sociopolitical identity
33 Interestingly, in the series’ DVD outtakes Safran is shown to have converted to Christianity under the direction of Father Bob. This is not the first time Safran has converted to Christianity in the making of a television show. In the ABC reality-documentary series Race Around The World that aired in 1997 Safran was baptised in Uganda. He then referred to himself as “a black Protestant” and “not Jewish any more.” Arguably, this advances a stronger argument for reading the exorcism as a performative moment that draws attention to performative engagements with the cultural politics of identity and subjectivity, rather than an unmediated, transparent event, whilst also emphasizing the ambivalence through which Safran narrates racialisation. Race Around The World. Dir. Stephen Jones. ABC TV. Australia 1997. 83 categories are essentialized within the rubric of religious bodies, and a link between whiteness and Christianity is constructed and emphasized, given that it is the spirit of Papa Gede that the African American subjects are invited to help exorcise whereas Anglo- American Father Bob is ‘responsible’ for the other ‘demons’; assumedly this is due to a generalised, racialized narrative of ancestry. Here, with respect to Safran particularly, I am suggesting that through the image of the ec-static body, an impasse is constructed that proves ‘unsettling’ as ‘secular neutrality’ is fractured such that the cultural politics of race and embodiment are rendered explicit.
Figure 5: Safran, John. “Exorcism.” John Safran versus God, 2004. Photograph supplied by John Safran 27 Jan 2009 Reproduced with permission
The photograph above shows Safran appearing distressed, unable to address the camera, and assisted by others in comparison to his usual direct address to the audience, which suggests the trauma of the exorcism. However, I would now like to consider the significant shift of style that differentiates the exorcism episode from the rest of the series. The final scene of Safran’s exorcism does not end with Safran’s usual address to the audience, “Until next time, go to hell.” Further, and also unlike the other episodes, the exorcism takes up most of the episode and is filmed in long takes instead of highly edited short clips. David MacDougall discusses the effect of highly edited documentary texts:
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[T]here is a loss of the sense of encounter. As the film becomes a polished, professional work, its connections with the historical act of filming, which were so evident in the rushes, gradually disappear. This is especially true of television documentaries, which typically begin with a title sequence whose purpose is to characterize the program as a fully packaged (and therefore predigested) institutional product (MacDougall 1992-1993: 41-2 Original parentheses and emphases).
It is possible that the increased ‘sense of encounter’ is established not only bodily through Safran’s appearance as ec-static, but also through the use of the long take, which disrupts the generic narrative style of the series. That is, the series is resolved into a repetitive sequence of highly edited segments, and insofar as the final episode appears to depart from this structure, this is experienced as unsettling. Whilst watching Safran morph from his initial agreement to be exorcised and arrival at the small convention, into a howling, moaning, smiling body that grabs at Father Bob and dismisses the camera and thus the audience, it appears this is somehow ‘unmediated,’ or happening in ‘real time.’ Ultimately, the assurance of the highly structured, repetitive segments is lost and never recovered, as we do not see Safran reappear at the end and offer his perspective of what happened on the ‘road-test.’ This lack of satisfactory closure in which conflicts are resolved is a postmodernist technique that critiques linear narrative styles by raising a multiplicity of questions over answer/s (such as the quintessential postmodernist novella The Crying of Lot 49 (1979) by Thomas Pynchon, in which the detective genre is subverted and critiqued by the raising of ever-more questions instead of linear progression toward a singular answer). Thus, insofar as the final episode represents a generic rupture, it is unsettling.
The representation of Safran’s body as a contingent locus produced through specific circumstances and encounters unsettles narratives of a priori, cohesive identity categories. I would like to relate this to Trinh’s discussion of the generic interview:
As we’ve seen, the interview involves the sighting and sounding of something imprecise to be discovered. A ‘bad’ translation is then one that remains oblivious to the necessary becoming of the text, to this third ground, where what comes through asserts itself as neither speech nor writing. (Trinh 1999: 250)
85
Trinh is discussing the process of translating from a recorded interview to the written word, and the ‘loss’ that happens (which of course can be read not as a loss, if we focus on the production of the meaning of loss as positive in and of itself) when creating a new medium from the ‘same’ information. However, the concept of the ‘third ground’ as ‘something imprecise to be discovered’ is suggestive. This might be read as the unformed potential that is inherent to the exchange, but unharnessed in the formulaic interview. For Trinh, if the interviewer and interviewee are present to the interview itself, that is, to the exchange and not the outcome, then something unique can occur. Indeed, in this sense, John Safran’s exorcism is a presencing of the committed interviewer. Trinh privileges the resultant imprecision as the blurring of boundaries within the interview process that constitute a ‘third ground.’ In losing his speaking position and becoming embodied and non-rational as well as distanced from his Jewish identity it becomes difficult to place what is happening and what it might mean to Safran. This is precisely unnameable due to its uniqueness and unpredictability. I am not attempting to romanticize the exorcism or offer it as an alternative to ‘secular neutrality.’ Indeed, the violences of the exorcism are palpable. Rather, this representation is useful for highlighting the commonplace assumption of ‘neutrality’ as a performative mode of privilege which, in the light of Safran’s performance, makes the violence of Denton’s unimpeachable ‘neutrality’ clearer. Through comparison with the representation of Denton’s comparatively rational, disembodied engagement with evangelical Christianity, the cultural politics of the encounter in Safran’s text raises questions about the assumptions of secular ‘neutrality,’ and the coimplication of the body in performing secular ‘neutrality.’ That is, the naturalization of disembodied mainstream secular ‘neutrality,’ is fractured through this enactment of embodied, visceral subjectivity, and as such highlights the invisiblising hegemonic and exclusionary functions of ‘neutrality.’
86 Conclusion: Safran versus Denton
My language has been murdered. My language has been murdered. - - - Pauline Pantsdown, I Don’t Like It34
In his lecture series The Neutral, Roland Barthes differentiates ‘neutrality’ from “the Neutral,” which refers to the baffling of established paradigms:
My definition of the Neutral remains structural. By which I mean that for me, the Neutral doesn’t refer to ‘impressions’ of grayness, of ‘neutrality,’ of indifference. The Neutral – my Neutral – can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. ‘To outplay the paradigm’ is an ardent, burning activity. (Barthes 2005: 7)
Given its intensity, it might be possible to construe the exorcism scene in John Safran versus God as an exemplar of Barthes’ version of ‘the Neutral.’ However, in my reading, this is not what Barthes describes. Rather, Barthes offers a conceptual strategy or figure, termed ‘the Neutral,’ to refer to the action or process of undoing and expanding established dichotomies. Given the ‘secular’ paradigm that includes a politics of Us/Them, secular/religious, and rational/affective, the placement of Denton and Safran side-by-side in this analysis works to unravel the assumptions of ‘secular neutrality’ through an explicit focus on the embodied enactment of participation with the ‘religious.’ This line of flight, in concert with Barthes’ concept, represents a refusal to reinforce a dichotomous politics that relies upon the certitudes offered by the politics of Us/Them; which is perhaps what Trinh perceives as “stuck in the binary machine” (Trinh 1999, 248). The fracturing of this structure can be seen as a point of intensity from which new possibilities for viewing secularisms emerge. Thus, through establishing the co-implication of ‘neutrality’ with performative embodiments, I have argued for a rereading of the ‘secular’ as a narrative that is co-opted through modes of privilege associated with white, Anglo-Celtic, Judeo- Christian hegemony. By linking Denton’s comparatively rational engagement with evangelical Christianity and Safran’s enactment of embodied, reflexive subjectivity, we can more clearly identify the performativity of ‘secular neutrality.’ This enables a disruption of
34 Pantsdown, Pauline. “I Don’t Like It.” Rec. 1998. Triple J Hottest 100 Volume 6. Sydney: 1999. 87 the dominant myth of ‘secular neutrality’ as a causal agent for social harmony. More precisely, it offers space for reflexive engagement with narratives that elevate the white, Anglo-Celtic, Judeo-Christian subject to invisibility through the construction of expressly ‘religious’ Others.
In this and the previous chapter I have offered a reading of a ‘secular neutral’ paradigm by exploring the ways in which representations of language and embodiment are produced spatially, affectively, and contingently in concert with the cultural politics of enactment. Following Barthes’ ‘Neutral,’ perhaps a way of outplaying this paradigm is, ironically, to recall Safran. I would like to quote a monologue at length, taken from a scene in which Safran is seated in front of a lit fireplace, wearing a smoking jacket and sitting in a velvet armchair. Dressed in his Devil-suit, he reflects on his love of Scrabble and ‘annoyance’ with fellow Scrabble players. Safran’s direct address to the audience in this scene playfully revisits the narratives of the Oxford English Dictionary, language, and the exclusionary cultural politics I have identified.
It is life’s great paradox that there’s nothing I prefer more than a game of Scrabble, and nothing I prefer less than my opponents, who are always accusing me of putting down words that aren’t real. Sure, if I put down a word and you haven’t seen it before, it must be because it’s not real. There’s no chance there’s a word you haven’t encountered before, you know everything, you’re the font of universal knowledge, you’re a walking Funk & Wagnalls, you arrogant frigging a-hole! Anyway, what has all this got to do with religion? Well, if I’m playing a game of Scrabble, and I put down the word RABBI, no one’s up in my face, no one has a problem, even though it was originally a Hebrew word they correctly identify it as a foreign word that’s been absorbed into English. Yet if I put down Q-I-B-L- A, QIBLA, which is in the Oxford English Dictionary, suddenly everyone’s getting huffy, flapping their arms about, running around the rumpus room, sending Scrabble pieces everywhere. ‘John, there’s no such word as Qibla!’ Well, let me tell you what Qibla is. Qibla is the direction of the sacred stone in Mecca, to which Muslims turn when praying. Only a billion people on the planet face Qibla five times a day. But no, you’re right, you never heard of it at Xavier College, so it’s not a real word. Not like Eucharist. ‘But John, there’s no such thing as a Q without U word. Mrs Tippitt told me that in Grade Three and I will not be moved on the issue.’ Well, listen you xenophobic a-hole, there’s an Arabic sound that’s not quite a Q, and not quite a K, and for whatever reason, linguists like the
88 Oxford English Dictionary people have deemed words with this sound to be spelt Q without U. But what really annoys me, is as you can imagine, most of my friends are left-wing pinkos, and on any other issue would be falling over themselves to accommodate the richness of multicultural diversity. Yet put down Qibla, and suddenly I’m playing with Pauline Hanson. I try to explain it’s an Arabic word. ‘We live in Australia! We don’t speak Arabic here, we speak English!” Listen hippie, when you break through the fence of Woomera Detention Centre and whip out the Scrabble board, they’re going to want to put down QIBLA. Now, you might say, ‘Hey I’m not Muslim, what do I care if Qibla is ripped from the Scrabble dictionary?” Well I’d like to leave you with this: First they came for the Qibla, and I did nothing, for I was not a Muslim. Then they came for the Qi – Chinese circulating life force – but I did nothing, for I was not a Taoist. Then finally, the came for the Qabalah – an ancient form of Jewish mysticism – and there was no one left to stand up for me. Until next time, go to hell. (2004)
Safran’s unnamed reference to the unrepresentable violence of the Holocaust here suggests the radial violences produced through what might seem an innocuous word game. The Scrabble game can be read as a cipher here for emphasizing the modes of exclusion that centralise a white, Anglo-Celtic, Christian and English-speaking monolingual subject. Here, Safran can be seen to critique xenophobia toward Muslims that is practiced subtly through identifying the limits of ‘standard’ English language. Indeed, Safran suggests that the limits of English language are patrolled and normalized through, as Moreton-Robinson describes, the logic of white possession. This logic is performed through the subjects of the people Safran identifies as his friends who, in being sent up as élite Xavier College ex- students, are thus assumedly middle class, Christian males. Further, the privileging of the white, Anglo-Celtic Christian subject within the discourse of official multiculturalism is suggested through the phrase ‘accommodate the richness of multicultural diversity’ which articulates the selective process of making ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ differences. This echoes Sneja Gunew’s description of ‘costumes and cookery’ multiculturalism where the ‘richness’ of diversity is constructed as something to be enjoyed and consumed by a dominant, white Anglo-Celtic subject (2004; Hage 1998). Here, English language is inextricably linked to the construction of the nation as a white possession and through this, the construction of Others.
89 The regulation of bodies through words, and words through bodies, is rendered crucial in Safran’s linkage between exclusionary language practices and the exclusion of Muslim bodies from human rights as asylum seekers within the desert site of Woomera Detention Centre. It therefore bears closer analysis. By legitimating the Q words within the logic of the decisions of the Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers, there is a sense in which the OED ‘people’ are constructed as ‘neutral’ in comparison to the xenophobic ‘Australian’ society and yet are also the arbiters of social inclusion and diversity, despite the text’s exclusionary projects and investments as a dictionary of English. That is, the text’s ‘neutrality’ is both a tool for religious tolerance and yet suggests that religious tolerance is made through absorption of words into English, which is then represented in the dictionary. This conjures an image of ‘religious’ words inspected and selected, not unlike the following cartoon that appeared in the New York Times in 1923, with reference to the then new Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. The title of the article was, “Getting into the English Dictionary: Every new word must pass an inquisition to be admitted to the select 500,000” (Austin 1923).
Figure 6: “Another word comes on bended knees to the lexicographer, pleading for admittance to the dictionary.” Hans Stengel in F. A. Austin, New York Times. 3 Jun 1923.
The notion of a ‘select’ and therefore exclusionary yet élite group is uncannily similar to the logic that I have argued in the cases of the Gallipoli and WYD pilgrimages produces specific bodies outside the ‘core’ values and embodiments of the (white) nation. It is interesting to note the representation of the apparently middle class, white lexicographer
90 wearing spectacles and holding a large magnifying glass, which suggests the surveillance that organises the body-words, which are gendered, small in comparison to the lexicographer, and in various modes of movement beneath his over-arching watch. Hence, the cartoon can be read, in the light of Safran’s treatise on Scrabble, as a metaphor for the conceits and violences of the possessive logic of whiteness and nation in which ‘neutrality’ functions as a corollary and technology of privilege.
In the following two chapters I will re-consider constructions of space, embodiment and language at intersections with the narrative of ‘Australian spirituality.’ I gestured toward this imaginary earlier in this chapter, by recalling the ways in which Fiona Nicoll, Gary Bouma, and John Hannaford and Janice Newton have conceptualized nationalistic ‘spirituality’ in terms of ‘digger’ mythology and embodiment. Importantly, ‘spirituality’ within the context of the Gallipoli pilgrimage was made through the work of mourning. I conceptualized this as an affective production of the nation that disavows the bodies and deaths of Others. This forms the background for the arguments for ‘secular mourning’ I will signal in Chapter Three and develop in Chapter Four. However, for my current purposes it is productive to consider Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies,’ which she formulates as a relational mode of producing affect and emotion such that emotions do not ‘belong’ to nor are manufactured by a corporeal being but rather are formed through social exchange. She writes,
the narratives that seek to preserve the present through working on anxieties of death as the necessary consequence of the demise of social forms also seek to locate that anxiety in some bodies, which then take on fetish qualities as objects of fear. (Ahmed Affective: 135)
Some bodies are produced as objects of fear through and in relation to anxieties about the social forms and narratives that make the present. This conservative production of fear perhaps intersects with the anxieties about the death of the nation as a white possession that are preserved through the ‘digger’ ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ mourning at Gallipoli. Indeed, Ahmed refers explicitly to the asylum seekers whose deaths and losses “remain unmourned by the very nations who embody the hope of a future for those seeking asylum” (136). As we saw in Safran’s reference to (now closed) Woomera Detention Centre, where asylum seekers were detained for periods of up to five years in the desert, these ‘religious’ and
91 racialized bodies are produced as objects of fear against which the projects of ‘spirituality’ and mourning are imagined. The following chapter expands this analysis by focusing explicitly on the works of Australian spirituality studies academic David Tacey, in order to consider the ways in which narratives of whiteness and Christianity are negotiated within the rubric of the ‘spiritual.’
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93 CHAPTER THREE
Spirituality and the politics of ‘lack’
spiritual, a. and n. A. adj. I. 1. a. Of or pertaining to, affecting or concerning, the spirit or higher moral qualities, esp. as regarded in a religious aspect. (Freq. in express or implied distinction to bodily, corporal, or temporal.) - - - Oxford English Dictionary (1989)
[T]here is no spiritual vacuum one can point to as evidence of religion’s total decline. - - - Gauri Viswanathan35
In the preface to Volume IX of the Oxford English Dictionary (1933), editor William Craigie notes that the word ‘spirit,’ with twenty-four senses, is one of the longest entries in the volume and most difficult to succinctly define. According to the OED, ‘spirit’ is etymologically rooted in each of the sacred languages: Latin, Greek and Hebrew (1989) with etymological tracings finding it to mean “breathing, breath, air,” and hence, “the animating or vital principle in man.” Spirit, then, is closely bound with notions of life and vitality. What happens when these human qualities are extended to the nation, such that it is possible to describe an ‘Australian spirituality?’ This chapter will discuss iterations of the spiritual in concert with narratives of nation, in order to question the politics and ideologies that underpin this marriage. ‘Spirituality’ is notoriously difficult to succinctly define and yet, as we saw in the case of the ‘secular’ spirituality associated with the Gallipoli pilgrimage in the previous chapter, commonly forms a contradistinction to ‘religion’ (Rose 2001; King 1998; Zinnbauer 1997). Discussions of the term’s meaning and importance
35 Viswanathan, Gauri. “Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 466-76. 94 within contemporary culture in the West are preoccupied with defining ‘spirituality,’ particularly through its imagined contrasts to ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ (Roof 1998; King 1998; Boyd 1994; Maddox 2005: 161; Finn 1992). Yet the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ are compellingly understood as mutually constitutive rather than discrete categories (Kaufmann 2007: 609-10). Further, in making contrasts to both the ‘secular’ and ‘religious,’ the ‘spiritual’ can be seen as a third term that potentially breaks the tension of the dichotomy. Perhaps it is this semantic possibility that enables authors of the ‘spiritual,’ such as Tacey, to suggest that the ‘spiritual’ marks a break with ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ and thus the possibility of social transformation (1995; 2000; 2003). However, I will suggest that constructions of an ‘Australian spirituality’ in contemporary, popular scholarly literature form a contingent secularism that hinges upon an imagined ‘other-world.’ I identify a regime of ‘Australian spirituality’ that expressly links the ‘health’ of Australian society and identity to narratives of ‘spiritual’ transformation that depend upon the autonomy of a benevolent, but depoliticized, ‘other-world.’
Of course, the ‘spiritual’ can be invoked in many contexts not directly linked to nation. ‘Spirituality’ can be imagined as a set of practices and beliefs associated with healing and meaning-making that is not limited to a specific overarching national identity or religious tradition (Mulcock 2001). For anthropologist Jane Mulcock, a turn to the ‘spiritual’ connotes a positive embrace of emotion, intuition and feeling: sensorial modes of being and knowing that resist the regime of reason that characterizes dominant constructions of secularism. There are many published narratives of ‘spirituality’; for example, Ursula King advocates a feminist spirituality concerned with “sharing an empowering holistic vision pointing to a richer sense of reality, reverence for life, and a commitment to new forms of community” (King 1989: 121). This definition engages a sensibility beyond the bodily and material, and yet also assumes the centrality of the body and political communities of bodies to ‘spiritual’ identification. This imbrication of the political with the spiritual resonates with the discourse of the spiritual I identify, in which positive social change is imagined through appeals to an other-world. In cases of ‘Australian spirituality,’ I pay close attention to the cultural politics of embodied subjectivity, which cannot be easily separated from the ‘spiritual’ even when it is represented as a beneficial realm or force beyond the political.
95 The ‘Australian spirituality’ I identify and critique in this chapter is a specific narrative that I do not attempt to generalise to an understanding of what the spiritual really is. I do not argue that the transgressive potential of the spiritual as a concept, practice and/or belief is impossible or implausible; nor do I argue that moves toward ‘the spiritual’ are inherently conservative or limited to the concept of nation.36 Debates about the politics of the spiritual have been ongoing for some time, in which authors such as Tacey and Gary Bouma invest hope in the potential for notions of the spiritual to foster greater social harmony and a sense of ‘connectedness’ among members of communities, whilst others express concern about the elision of the politics of ‘spirituality’ within these discussions (Finn 1992; Dee 2006; Bouma 2006). By engaging these reservations in a close reading of David Tacey’s works that advocate public ‘spirituality,’ and acknowledging that beneficial social change is a welcome prospect, I maintain the importance of considering the cultural politics and agendas that ‘spiritual’ appeals to change set in motion. The language of ‘Australian spirituality’ I map reveals a pattern in which white, Anglo-Celtic Australians are constructed as ‘spiritually’ vacuous and in need of ‘spiritual’ sustenance from reified, spiritualized Indigenous subjects and cultures. Thus, this chapter draws close attention to the ways in which the ‘spiritual’ in connection with the idea of Australian national identity reinforces and reproduces white, secular, Christian privilege in ways that both essentialize and alienate ‘religious’ Others and Indigenous peoples and elevate and exalt the ‘spiritual’ dispossession of the dominant, Anglo-Celtic Australian, ‘Christian’ subject. Through discussing Tacey’s extensive body of literature on ‘Australian spirituality,’ which have gained attention in popular, political, and academic spheres, I argue that the ‘spiritual’ imagined as an intrinsically benevolent other-world divorced from the social, simultaneously dismisses and resurrects the social inequities, racist social structures and privileges that Tacey argues need to be dismantled.
36 There is a broad literature concerned with iterations of ‘spirituality’ in popular and academic disciplines including health science, sociology, and religion, and is commonly concerned with topics such as youth, women, aging, and environmentalism. Selected texts include: Low, Alaine and Soraya Tremayne. Eds. Women as Sacred Custodians of the Earth? Women, spirituality, and the environment. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2001; Mason, Michael, Andrew Singleton and Ruth Webber. The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia. Mulgrave: John Garratt, 2007; Moberg, David O. Aging and Spirituality: Spiritual Dimensions of Aging Theory, Research Practice, and Policy. New York; London: Haworth Pastoral, 2001; Oldmeadow, Harry. Ed. The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity. Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005; van Ness, Peter H. Ed. Spirituality and the Secular Quest. New York: Crossroad, 1996. 96 According to the epigraph to this chapter, the spiritual is defined by contrasts to religion, materiality, and the body. How might we account for this series of negations? Tensions between mainline churches and ‘spirituality’ are evident in discussions of spirituality that imagine ‘religion’ as authoritative, dogmatic, ritualistic, and institutional in contrast to the individualistic, experiential, personal, and private qualities identified as ‘spiritual’ (Maddox 2005: 161-2). Here, the ‘spiritual’ implies an individual focus, whilst implying that ‘religion,’ and by extension ‘religious’ subjects, are oppressed and constrained through doctrine. This suggests a movement beyond doctrinal differences because, “‘We’ can all be spiritual, it is an inoffensive category” (Maddox 2005: 163). By noting Maddox’s telling reservation about who ‘we’ might interpellate, it is possible that the ‘spiritual’ is invested in producing an implicit ‘Them,’ which will be the focus of this analysis. Certainly, Tacey is preoccupied with spirituality’s difference from mainline religious institutions (2003), although there is slippage in his work between ‘spirituality’ and Christianity that I seek to foreground. This chapter therefore asks: who benefits from spiritual practices and beliefs? And, crucially, how might we account for the centrality of a narrative of cohesive Australian national identity to representations of the spiritual? Central to these concerns is the idea of a “spirituality revolution” (Tacey 2003) or ‘post-secular’ epoch. These key terms suggest a shift toward a new mode of social praxis that is not reducible to mainline ‘religions’ or to ‘secularism.’ I draw these terms together to discuss ‘post-secular spirituality,’ which forms the core assumption of Tacey’s revolutionary ‘Australian spirituality.’ Given William E. Connolly’s statement that “The decentring of the nation is pertinent to the refashioning of secularism,” (1999: 83) this chapter raises curiosity about the importance of a core, cohesive national identity within Tacey’s spiritual discourse, and argues that a ‘post-secular’ shift does not entail a transgression of secularism, but instead reinforces modes of elision and privilege. It has been strongly argued that Australian multiculturalism constructs and entrenches an anxious white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity and culture that is imagined as mainstream and hegemonic (Vasta & Castles 1996; Hage 1998; Stratton 1998, 1999; Ang 2003). I suggest that ‘Australian spirituality’ continues this work and effectively re-affirms and reinforces the violences and limitations of white, Anglo- Celtic, Judeo-Christian hegemony. In order to furnish this claim, I argue that cultural and identity politics elided and yet prominent in the construction of ‘Australian spirituality,’ work in subtle but powerful ways to represent ‘the spiritual’ as an unimpeachably ‘good’ discourse of promise. 97
This chapter begins by mapping the terrain of ‘Australian spirituality’ through analysis of representations of Indigenous peoples as homogenously ‘spiritual’ in comparison to the constructed psychic and ‘spiritually’ ‘lacking’ interiority of white, Anglo-Celtic Australian subjects. I contextualize these ideas by discussing the 2008-09 Tourism Australia marketing campaign, which in its similarity to Tacey’s approach suggests the urgency and currency of this mode of representation. Here, I argue that the elision of white privilege and power produces ‘Australian spirituality’ as a neo-colonialism that elides the myriad connections and differences between Indigenous communities and non-white Anglo-Celtic communities and different modes of ‘spiritual’ and subjective formation (Lucashenko 2006). By drawing on Pat Dudgeon’s short story Four Kilometres, which satirises spiritualizations of Indigenous subjects, this chapter also considers the cultural politics of speaking positions within these debates. Finally, this chapter investigates how ‘spirituality’ is made textually, by moving past representations of subjectivity to genre and style. The subtleties of language and stylistic devices can produce an imagined incommensurability between ‘spirituality’ and critique, such that the ‘spiritual’ can be described as an unimpeachable discourse that structurally evades analysis due to its apparent status ‘beyond’ the material concerns of the public sphere. I will argue that this strategy is central to the exclusionary cultural politics of ‘Australian spirituality,’ and that by investigating its function at the level of textual representation, this tendency can be productively interrogated in order to imagine the spiritual differently. I turn now to a broader discussion of the concept of ‘post-secular spirituality’ before focusing on Tacey’s works directly.
Post-secular spirituality
‘Spirituality’ has been the subject of recent critical analysis, with a strong focus on the term’s ubiquity and vagueness (Rose 2001; Maddox 2005; Zinnbauer 1997). The spiritual has been described as loosely connected with the New Age movements of the 1960s and 1980s in Britain and California (Heelas 1996; Raschke 1996; Roof 1998) which in Australia can be extrapolated to the community of Nimbin in New South Wales, as well as Byron Bay on the northern New South Wales coast (Nearly Normal Nimbin 1995). Yet
98 whilst these communities might be described as isolated or ‘iconic,’ New Age ‘spirituality’ can also be understood as the practiced resistance and subversion of norms rather than utopic placement ‘outside’ social norms (Heelas 1996). Indeed, definitions of ‘spirituality’ that valorise experience and a sense of wholeness (Roof 1998: 211, 216) or, in Stuart Rose’s terms, awareness and connection (2001) suggest a subjective sense of belonging and fulfilment that arguably draws from dominant notions of disconnection, disharmony and dispossession. Yet for Wade Clark Roof it is also possible to consider the spiritual an “art” or “technology” of the self, in which “the spiritual self [is] an entity in the process of becoming” (Roof 1998: 217). This would suggest uncertainty about how or to what end the ‘spiritual self’ is made in relation to a complex of social and religio-cultural norms. This paradox is captured by Marion Maddox who summarises the spiritual as, “individualised, internal, eclectic, dynamic, anti-institutional and free form,” in comparison to religion, which is “organised, external, inherited, formulaic, regulated and traditional” (Maddox 2005: 161). Thus, whilst ‘the spiritual’ carries strong connotations of freedom, change, growth and promiscuity in available meanings, these meanings are made through the production of a staid, conservative notion of that which is intrinsically ‘religious.’
There is a sense in which the spiritual, understood as ‘eclectic,’ ‘dynamic,’ and ‘free form’ suggests slippage and movement across categories; described as “hybrid-fusion” by William Keenan (2003: 22). It is therefore possible the term is produced in concert with the ‘religious’ category. It is useful to consider the power dynamics and political effects of this apparent ‘freedom,’ in both definition and praxis. Liam Dee suggests that the construction of an opposition between “religion-as-institution” and “spirituality” is highly concerning in cases where the spiritual presupposes a ‘pure’ religious essence, that produces religion as comparatively partisan and inextricably linked to “dogma” (2006: 101). That is, for Dee ‘the spiritual’ risks functioning to ‘redeem’ the religious through disavowal, and thus to “play fast and loose with the social mediation of all spiritual beliefs” (Dee 2006: 101-2). Dee’s caution about the religious/spiritual binary is particularly instructive in identifying that constructions of the ‘spiritual’ can advance sociopolitical agendas without expressly addressing biases and assumptions. Thus, for the purposes of this analysis, ‘spirituality’ as a movement or practice is understood as a contextually and contingently specific construct made, imagined, and practiced. My position therefore contrasts with claims, such as Tacey’s, for the ‘spiritual’ as an always-already present, a priori emancipatory force, realm, 99 or belief, that acts upon society autonomously and without political investments and effects.37
Some scholars have undertaken to define the ‘spiritual’ through empirical studies of religious groups and subcultures. Stuart Rose’s study of the term’s popularity and meaning involved sending surveys to religious leaders, cultural commentators and authors to attempt to aggregate a unified definition (2001). Yet it is perhaps instructive that Rose’s study depends upon demographic analysis of the responses. That is, Rose defines the ‘spiritual’ through the lens of how, for instance, a rabbi or Methodist minister responded. Here, notions of the ‘spiritual’ are inextricably linked with the conditions and subjectivities of enunciation despite the desire for an abstracted, universalist definition. At the same time, the spiritual appears to offer a conduit for discussion of how religious ideas are connected. Further, ‘spirituality’ can be seen to overlap with discourses and cultural institutions beyond ‘religion’ such as in Roof’s analysis. Roof describes a range of movements, communities and events categorized as ‘spiritual’:
[T]he rediscovery of Eastern traditions; the Pentecostal, charismatic, and born-again evangelical movements; and, more recently, the many forms of New Age spirituality, Goddess Worship, neopaganism, ecospirituality, and even the latest craze of all-night Generation X raves. (1998: 215)
The paradigmatic cataloguing of activities under the rubric of ‘spiritual’ simultaneously implies ubiquity and ambiguity whilst suggesting an essential quality or trace that binds disparate practices. Hence, Protestant formations such as Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are aligned with rave culture within the rubric of ‘spirituality.’ Indeed, Graham St. John’s collection Rave Culture and Religion identifies spirituality with “post- traditional religion” and in direct relation to the dis/embodied, experiential connectedness of dance and ecstasy (2004). This signifies the breadth and reach of the idea of the ‘spiritual,’ which perhaps forms a conceptual umbrella under which perceived differences
37 Some texts that take this a priori position see: Boyd, Tom W. “Is Spirituality Possible Without Religion? A Query for the Postmodern Era.” Divine Representations: Postmodernism and Spirituality. Ann W. Astell. Ed. New York; Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1994. pp. 83-101; King, Mike. “Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science.” Leonardo 31.1 (1998): 21-31.
100 between ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ are debated, ameliorated, and elided. Incidentally, a further example of this broad ‘umbrella’ usage of the term can be found at the (public) institution of the University of Western Australia, where the sports science programme includes a unit run by an Anglican chaplain entitled ‘Sport and Spirituality.’ Here, the ‘religious’ (chaplain) and putatively ‘secular’ (sport and the university) are co-implicated through the broader term. Indeed, education is a fraught area of debate about the place of religion and secularity within schools and government funded institutions – a topic I return to in the Coda to this study. Yet it is useful to briefly mention Joanna Crossman’s identification of ‘secular spirituality’ within this context. She argues that this is a more expansive concept than ‘religion,’ and need not involve invocation of a God. “Secular spirituality,” for Crossman, ably co-exists with secularism in education and signals the de- legitimizing of traditional religion (2003: 513). This fusion of the ‘secular’ with the ‘spiritual’ suggests not only a re-imagining of secularism and its limits as a rational, public discourse, but also indicates slippage between the terms ‘spiritual’ and ‘secular’ through invocation of an antiquated ‘religious’ essence or practice.
Jane Mulcock situates the spiritual within everyday urban and suburban society and culture which she describes as the “spiritual supermarket” (Mulcock 2001: 170) for consuming artefacts and goods. ‘Spiritual’ products include incense, Buddha statues, crystals, and handmade rice paper (2001). She offers an evocative description of her office at the University of Western Australia, which is furnished with ‘spiritual’ artefacts from her tourism and research in Nepal, Tibet, North America, Hong Kong, and Japan. These acquisitions, as well as their positioning in her office as emblems of the ‘spiritual,’ and of her continuing interest in ‘spiritual’ practices and tourism, arguably represent the commodification and consumption of ‘spirituality.’ Here ‘spirituality’ and materialism are inextricably linked. Whereas it is possible to argue that Mulcock’s tokenism strips the artefacts of their historical, specific, cultural meanings, their meaning is simultaneously re- contextualized and re-encoded as a collection that furnishes Mulcock’s sense of the ‘spiritual.’ Here, global travel and tourism provide the conditions for ‘spiritual’ economies. Rey Chow offers a useful contextual structure for considering Mulcock’s practice in her book The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism by situating ‘the spiritual’ in direct relation to late capitalism and its enthusiastic embrace of remuneration for hard work: 101
Worldly success within capitalism stands de facto as the secular equivalent of a demonstrated conferral of grace and the assurance of religious salvation. […] Work may be spiritualized and idealized, indeed, but this spiritualization and idealization can now take calculable form, as remuneration. (Chow 2002: 44)
Crucially, Chow affirms that work is processually remade and redefined in terms of a constructed ‘spiritual,’ idealism that is not inherent within work. This suggests the ‘spiritual’ can be read as an effect, or perhaps affect, that is contextually and contingently made rather than a priori and monolithic. Further, the ‘spiritual’ is inextricably linked to the acquisition and flows of capital, as Mulcock’s work also affirms. Indeed, it can be argued that offices such as Mulcock’s, and suburban homes similarly decorated with ‘spiritual’ artefacts, are miniature, private museums of appropriated commodities. The neo- colonial resonances and Saidian Orientalism of this practice through the reification of specific ‘Eastern’ cultures, nations and practices arguably constructs an exoticized and spiritualized Other within the framework of commodity culture (Said 1978). In a similar vein, Slavoj Žižek claims that Westerners would be better to meditate in suburban homes in the U.S., for example, than to travel to Tibet to attain enlightenment – he argues that travel to an-other place in order to attain the specific goal of enlightenment undermines the Buddhist decree of non-attachment to place and to the attainment of goals (2001). Instead of resorting to the primacy of Buddhist tenets and therefore evaluating the ‘spiritual’ in terms of established religious tenets, I suggest there is more at stake. The ‘spiritual’ can be read as a term that in one sense accommodates and yet perhaps risks cannibalising the ‘secular.’ This is demonstrated by links to education and the market. Yet it is also staked in terms of its opposition to ‘religion,’ which, as we will see in Tacey’s work, includes a strong association with Christianity. Here, the spiritual arguably represents the slippage between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious.’ That is, I argue that rather than a ‘thing in itself,’ the very problem of defining the spiritual and the complex web of links to both the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ in such a way that these categories are necessarily remade and reimagined in particular ways, articulates that the function and effects of the ‘spiritual’ are closely linked to the impossibility of separating ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ categories in social practice and subject formation.
102 Rey Chow shows clearly in the excerpt above that the Protestant tropes of hard work, salvation and grace are produced in a ‘secular’ context that is dependent upon processes of ‘spiritualization’ (of hard work and capital). In addition, the idea of a secular epoch arguably stems from the secularization hypothesis I mentioned in Chapter One, which remains popular among sociologists including Peter Berger (1967; 1999), Steve Bruce (1996; 2002), and Reginald Bibby (1987; 2002) who empirically measure levels of non- participation and participation, to argue for the decline or ‘resurgence’ of ‘religion.’ Measuring ‘secularization’ in terms of religion eclipses the particularities of secularisms in varying contexts, and the ways in which the ‘secular’ is inextricably linked to the religious. Perhaps in this way ‘spirituality’ would appear a line of flight that leaves both ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ behind in history. However, as we have seen, the control, representation, definition and production of the ‘religious’ is central to understandings of how both the ‘secular,’ and for my current purposes the ‘spiritual,’ are imagined and represented. Insofar as the ‘spiritual’ is situated within global flows of capital, neo-colonial practices of appropriation, and the cultural politics of everyday life, it is untenable to argue that the ‘spiritual’ signifies an-other realm outside of the social and cultural conditions which produce it. Hence, for the purposes of this chapter, ‘spirituality’ and the ‘post-secular’ are imagined as contingent terms that are used in particular ways with specific effects, rather than as epochs, measurable phenomena, or ‘things in themselves.’ For this reason, the term “post-secular” might be used to connote critique of notions of the secular (Boer 2005). Hence, ‘post-secular spirituality’ can be more productively invoked as a critical locus that enables productive debate about connections between the politics of ‘religious’ subjectivity, secular privilege, and national identity. In this way, it possible to suggest that this chapter performs the work of ‘post-secular spirituality’ without recourse to an other-world. Before I explore how Tacey’s concept of the ‘spiritual’ and ‘post-secular’ contrasts with this understanding and is therefore useful in considering the conceits of the ‘secular’ that are reinforced through an imagined end to secularism, I now turn to a broader discussion of anxieties about Australian national identity that intersect with his work.
103 ‘Come Walkabout’: Whiteness, Tourists and Rebirth
During July to November 2008 when economic structures in Britain, the U.S., Europe, New Zealand, and Japan weakened in what quickly became known as the Global Financial Crisis, and during which the Australian dollar lost forty per cent of its value against the American dollar, the media became highly concerned with the desert. In its 14th-16th November edition The Weekend Australian broadsheet released a free 2009 calendar that showcased the Australian desert landscape. The following weekend The West Australian newspaper published a special supplement detailing personalities living in the Kimberley region in the state’s north, where Baz Lurhmann’s feature film Australia (2008) was filmed, and where supporting actor Brandon Walters was ‘discovered’ in the town of Broome. At this time Andrew Denton made an episode of Enough Rope called “On the Road: Kununurra” based on ‘personalities’ from the Kimberley region in Western Australia’s north (2008). These items coincided with an extensive international tourism campaign that began in October 2008 when Tourism Australia released an advertising campaign to attract international visitors. The advertisement, also by famous Australian director Baz Luhrmann, was designed to counter the previous, more aggressive and controversial 2006 advertisement that depicted model Lara Bingle on rugged coastline asking the now infamous question, ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ According to cultural studies academic Jon Stratton, the 2006 campaign intersected with cultural narratives of the Australian landscape as an aggressive space of danger and death (Stratton 2007: 167-96). Stratton argues that the advertisement’s apparent invitation is representative of a host of recent feature films that figure the Australian landscape as a sinister, “lawless” space of danger and murder (Stratton 2007: 175-6). Stratton argues that popular outback films such as Wolf Creek (2005) and Mad Max (1979) reinforce and reproduce an idea of the Australian landscape as fundamentally threatening. Certainly, more recent supernatural / thrillers including Lake Mungo (2008), Black Water (2008) and Rogue (2007) represent the outback as a claustrophobic space in which tourists are held hostage, assaulted and victimised. For Stratton, these films articulate the ideologies of the former conservative government, whose policies and practices, as I described in the previous chapter, included
104 the prolonged detention of asylum seekers in the desert.38 Thus, in response to Bingle’s cheeky, ‘So where the bloody hell are you?, Stratton’s claim that potential visitors would likely answer, “Too fucking frightened to come!” (196) seems pertinent. But Luhrmann’s advertisement focuses on the imagined healing, rejuvenating quality of the desert for the urban, and, perhaps most crucially given Chow’s comments about Protestantism, overworked, late capitalist middle classes. How might we account for the seemingly more benevolent, nurturing ethos of Lurhmann’s desert, in which the invitation to “Come Walkabout” is represented as a healing, personal – ‘spiritual’ – journey away from the hardships of economic volatility to rebirth, rather than death?
Lurhmann’s advertisement begins in New York City. A harried sales director is on the phone to her partner, who threatens to end their relationship: “It’s always work. You’re not the same person I fell in love with.” That evening, a semi-naked, nameless Indigenous boy walks unseen through the metropolis, leaving red-dirt footprints on the tarmac. He whispers to the bereft sales director in her sleep, “Sometimes we gotta go walkabout,” and pours red earth into her hand. The woman and her partner are then depicted in a vast Australian desert landscape, swimming atop majestic falls.39 Her pleased partner whispers “I’m glad you’re
38 A host of spoofs of the 2006 “So where the bloody hell are you?” campaign are posted on YouTube. Two include reference to the Villawood and Woomera immigration detention centres where asylum seekers were detained in the desert during former Prime Minister Howard’s leadership, and violence toward “ethnics” and “dirty towel heads,” signaling anti-Muslim xenophobia. The importance of Muslims and the beach is particularly pertinent given the highly publicised riots at Cronulla Beach, New South Wales in 2005 that involved prolonged attacks between those identified as Lebanese Muslims and as Anglo-Celtic Australians. See: “Where the bloody hell are you? Spoof.” YouTube. Danllic. Sep 13 2006. Accessed on 21 Nov 2008. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=411ueiat2sY; “Facelift: Where the bloody hell are you? 16th July 2007.” YouTube. gibsongroup. 15 Jul 2007. Accessed on 21 Nov 2008. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=IY_XR6QnjYs. Suvendrini Perera links the Cronulla riots with the mythological construction of the beach in Australian culture, represented in photographer Max Dupain’s well- known photograph “Form at Bondi” (1939), as a space and representation of the hegemony of white, Anglo- Celtic Australian bodies: “On this beach at Cronulla, appropriated as its native-ised and naturalized homeland by Dupain's archetypal white Australian (heterosexual and nuclear) holy family, Abraham's Lebanese- Australian family half a century later finds no place. The beach remains the rallying ground of Anglo- Australia, the preserve of decent, wholesome white bodies, policed in a variety of ways against any contaminating whiff of "dirty wog"—and, by implication, even dirtier black—bodies” (39). See: Perera, Suvendrini. “Race Terror, Sydney, December 2005.” Borderlands e-journal. 5.1 (2006): 65 pars. 39 It was reported that the broadcasting of this site, King George Falls, dismissed both its sacredness and the politics and policy of gaining permission to represent the site: “King George Falls in the Kimberley – [is] a sacred site for the Balanggarra people and accessible only through Aboriginal land with the permission of traditional owners. Kwini elder Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri accused Tourism Australia of ‘telling the rest of the world that it is OK to trample all over our culture’.” Gibson, Joel. “You’ve blown it: Kidman upsets Aborigines.” The Sydney Morning Herald. Online. 16 Dec 2008. Accessed 16 Dec 2008 from, http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/people/kidman-upsets-aborigines-by-playing- instrument/2008/12/15/1229189533076.html.
105 back.” This is reinforced by the text: “She arrived as Ms K Mathieson, Sales Director. She departed as Kate.” Here, the white, middle class, Anglo-American woman is suggested to have reconnected with her ‘lost self.’ The advertisement’s more solicitous slogan is, “Australia. Come Walkabout.” The advertisement is strongly linked to Luhrmann’s feature Australia (2008); both are backed by 20th Century Fox, and the boy in the advertisement is also played by Brandon Walters. It is perhaps not irrelevant to mention that Luhrmann’s feature plots and critiques the enduring colonial practices that produced the Stolen Generations; however, the advertisement can be described as a neo-colonial psychodrama. Constructed as mystical and ethereal, the Indigenous boy child is invisible to the city people he passes, but becomes visible to Kate during sleep. When she and her partner reconnect in the billabong, he is again absent. In a literal representation of Marcia Langton’s discussion of Indigenous representation in film, in which she argues, “The easiest and most ‘natural’ form of racism in representation is the act of making the other invisible” (1993: 24), the racist cultural politics of associating the Indigenous child with the unconscious becomes intensely visible. Here, the spiritual, naturalistic, and childlike are collapsed upon the dreamlike image of an Indigenous boy, whose subjectivity is arguably conflated with both the unconscious and the desert. Within this framework, his subjectivity is reduced to benefiting white, middle class projects of soul-searching and stress relief. He is also represented as fundamentally outside late capitalist society through his invisibility except during sleep and association with the (lost) desert/self. Thus, the advertisement can be read as a continuation, rather than rupture, of the discourse of aggression Stratton identifies with respect to the 2006 campaign.40 Here, the violence of the ‘spiritual’ is the way in which the Indigenous boy’s subjectivity is spiritualized – that is, his identity is overdetermined and invisiblized by a white, Anglo-American/Australian, psychoanalytic construction.
In the 2008 tourism campaign the desert plays a prominent, albeit imagined, role in which whiteness is arguably paralleled with ‘spiritual’ vacuity. Within this framework, and further to its construction as a real and imagined space, the desert forms the locus upon and
40 In the 2006 campaign a group of Indigenous people are depicted dancing in the desert, one of whom quips “We’ve been rehearsing for over forty thousand years.” The choice of the word rehearsing implies both that Indigenous cultural practices provide ‘theatre’ for onlookers, and that they have been awaiting the arrival of these ‘onlookers.’ Here, the reification of Indigenous peoples in traditional cultural practices for the benefit of non-Indigenous ‘audiences’ can be paralleled with the more recent advertisement. See: “So where the bloody hell are you?” Online. Accessed 28 Dec 2008 from, http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=rn0lwGk4u9o. 106 through which arguments about ‘Australian spirituality’ are contested. Whereas nineteenth century constructions of the desert imagine a “hideous blank” the contemporary desert is a spiritual, mystical centre (Haynes 1998: 261-80). This is conflated with reified constructions of Aboriginal peoples as fundamentally ‘spiritual’ and non-urban in contrast to non-Indigenous – and most particularly white Anglo-Celtic – urban spaces and subjects (Haynes 1998: 261-80). I will return to this preoccupation in my analysis of Jane Campion’s Australian feature Holy Smoke (1999) in Chapter Four. Importantly, the Australian outback, which includes the desert, is often imagined as a space outside modern economic structures despite the reality of tourism programmes, mining and agriculture, irrigation, urban sprawl and development, and land rights disputes that are contested in cities, administrative centres and in the outback (Gelder & Jacobs 1998). Yet Indigenous rights to land and country continue to be restricted; a practice which Aileen Moreton- Robinson links to white, Anglo-Celtic anxieties about (lack of) belonging to the land (Moreton-Robinson 2000: 30). I draw from Moreton-Robinson’s argument to suggest that the attribution of the spiritual to the desert in order to alleviate white Anglo-Celtic anxieties about estrangement from the land and the self, which are represented most animatedly in the Tourism Australia campaign, continues this power differential. Here, Indigenous peoples are simultaneously spiritualized, homogenised, and absented within a universalistic narrative of an essentially ‘spiritual’ desert environment. This produces a crude binary opposition that opposes white, Anglo-Celtic, middle class, urban spiritual vacuity to Aboriginal, spiritual, natural, desert-based, fulfilment, and eclipses the power politics at stake (Sunderland 2007).41 Here, white Anglo-Celtic subjects are arguably represented as reified, vacuous discoverers of a wellspring of Indigenous ‘spirituality’: a rejuvenating commodity in times of crisis. Furthermore, this mode of ‘spirituality’ eclipses the heterogeneous moral codes, religions, spiritualities and beliefs that are practiced and lived in Australian society by various and varied communities. Whilst I focus on the construction of whiteness as a hegemonic production of the ‘spiritual’ I therefore repeat this elision, and offer critique as a gesture toward the modes of difference that are disavowed through this invocation of ‘the spiritual.’
41 A copy of this article, which is an abridged version of this chapter, is included in Appendix 2. The article was published in Trans/forming Cultures eJournal as follows: Sunderland, Sophie. “Post-secular Nation; Or, how ‘Australian Spirituality’ privileges a secular, white, Judeo-Christian culture.” Trans/forming Cultures eJournal 2.1 (2007) http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/TfC/issue/view/39. 107 Indigenous / indigenous
A strong proponent of the psychic importance of the Australian desert to the concept of ‘Australian spirituality’ is academic David Tacey, whose publication record includes television and radio appearances, articles and monographs dealing with spirituality and religion, which have been broadly received and steadily produced since Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia was published in 1995. Titles of his works focused on ‘Australian spirituality’ include Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change (1997), ReEnchantment: The New Australian Spirituality (2000), Jung and the New Age (2001), and The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (2003). Throughout these works, Tacey claims that ‘spiritual transformation’ refers to new, ‘post-secular,’ symbolic and mythical connections with the land and the agency of Indigenous peoples. Here, ‘post-secular’ is used as a noun to signify an epoch after the demise of secularism, rather than a verb signalling critique of the secular. Tacey finds that spirituality is difficult to define, but suggests that it is not organised and institutionalised like religion, but “a desire for connectedness, which often expresses itself as an emotional relationship with an invisible sacred presence” (2000: 17). Tacey’s concern is that white, Anglo-Celtic Australians, particularly men, are far removed from ‘spirituality,’ myth and symbolism. He advances the need for a cohesive, national unity based on the validation of the ‘spiritual.’ His work can be effectively described as the construction of a ‘regressive’ and restrictive ‘religious’ authority and tradition against which a ‘post-secular’ paradigm that embraces ‘spirituality’ as an important facet of everyday Australian life is mounted. This constructed realm cites an imagined white, Anglo-Celtic subject associated with settler history as most in need of salvation.
Tacey’s main contention is that white Anglo-Celtic Australians suffer spiritual paucity: “The so-called ‘identity crisis’ of white Australians is itself a ‘spiritual’ crisis; it is a sense of disconnection from ourselves, from the land, from history and from the world” (2000: 128). Tacey constructs an indigenous (/Indigenous) ‘spiritual’ ‘other-world’ in answer to this concern. Not unlike the recent Tourism Australia campaign, he argues that harmony can be achieved through establishing connection to the land via an “aboriginal archetype” within the unconscious (1995: 7-11). Tacey’s Jungian psychoanalytic approach has been
108 strongly critiqued, particularly for its Eurocentrism and racism (Rolls 1998), yet Tacey remains clear that he does not advocate appropriation of Aboriginal peoples and cultures (Gelder & Jacobs 1998: 13; Rolls 1998: 171-87; Tacey 1998: 189-94). For Tacey, the small ‘a’ aboriginal references an archetypal image and is not based on actual Aboriginal subjects or culture. The archetype is alternatively named the “archaic dreaming soul” (1995: 11-2). Anthropologist Jane Mulcock uses a similar lower and upper case distinction, between “Indigeneity” and “indigeneity,” in her claim that the latter is useful for white, Anglo-Celtic subjects to describe the attainment of a sense of belonging to land and place in Australia (2007: 64). However, linkages of ‘spirituality’ with ‘aboriginality’ nevertheless invite the question of the status of Aboriginal peoples within this rubric. Indeed, Tacey frequently refers to the spiritual “gifts” of Australian Aboriginal peoples as central to the post-secular spiritual turn he advocates (2000: 160). Here, ‘aboriginal’ archetypes appear to be projected onto and concretised through Aboriginal peoples. Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs identify this slippage between terms and argue that despite Tacey’s claim he does not refer to Indigenous peoples and cultures, he nevertheless describes the archetype as “50 000 years old”: a figure that resonates closely with figures used to historicize Indigenous cultures in Australia (1995: 137).
Given that Tacey’s ‘spirituality’ is fundamentally linked to desire for social changes, which is implied in the idea of a spiritual revolution, it cannot be seen to be a concept imagined and produced in a religio-cultural and sociopolitical vacuum. Indeed, Tacey links it to the archetypal psychoanalysis of Carl Jung as well as to the ‘Judeo-Christian.’ He writes that Jung,
has not debunked religion in favour of a new kind of feel-good humanism or a dedication to human growth and potential. He has simply extended the Judeo-Christian vision to include much more of reality, or expanded the horizons of spirit. (Tacey 2001: 19)
For Tacey, the ‘Judeo-Christian,’ which as we have seen can be mobilised to signal exclusions within the context of Australia’s official multiculturalism and anxiety about national values, is important to understandings of how the ‘spiritual’ acts upon society and culture. Perhaps, then, it is Tacey’s perspective rather than politics that differs from former Prime Minister John Howard’s frequent invocation of the Judeo-Christian ‘tradition’ or
109 ‘heritage’ I described in Chapter One. Rather, Tacey describes a ‘vision’ that might imply looking forward rather than backward. Hence, the conservative politics of the ‘spiritual turn’ are subtly suggested. This is made most clear in Tacey’s less popular book Jung and the New Age. Tacey characterizes New Age movements as ‘feel good’ and therefore “broadly narcissistic […] and dangerously regressive” (2001: 15). They are also “Satanic [… in terms of] the human tendency to identify ourselves with God” (2001: 77). The language of Tacey’s critique of the New Age suggests a Christian moral underpinning. Here, representations of ‘aboriginal archetypes’ are produced within a paradigm that exalts a ‘Judeo-Christian heritage.’ This has important implications for the construction of ‘spirituality’ within Tacey’s work, and in which an homogenous Indigenous/indigenous subjectivity is imagined as central. Marcia Langton argues that Aboriginality is a discursive, historical and contingent construct formed processually between Indigenous and non-Indigenous social actors:
‘Aboriginality’ arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non- Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person watching a program about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book. Moreover, the creation of ‘Aboriginality’ is not a fixed thing. It is created from our histories. It arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white in a dialogue. (Langton 1993: 31 Original emphasis)
Within the discourse of ‘Australian spirituality’ I am outlining in relation to Tacey’s work, representations of Indigenous subjectivity as inherently ‘spiritual’ forms a specific Aboriginality that, in my argument, homogenises and reifies Indigenous peoples. This limits the possibility for dialogue given the racist, reductive Jungian constructions of Indigenous people that are imposed. By studying how the spiritual is represented in specific contexts, we can bring more to bear on the otherwise abstract idea of ‘spirituality’ by positioning it within the context of white, Anglo-Celtic and secular privilege, and hence create space for multiple perspectives, histories and identities rather than a monolithic, Jungian psychoanalytic model. In order to situate these claims, I now turn to a broader discussion of ‘spiritual’ vacuity that underpins Tacey’s claims for the need for a ‘spiritual turn.’
110 In possession of vacuity
In advocating a cultural shift to the post-secular, Tacey is not suggesting amendment of Section 116 of the Australian Constitution. As we have seen, the secularism outlined in the Constitution ably co-exists with a transcendent and arguably hegemonic Judeo-Christian moral code within the rubric of Australian values (Howard 2004, 2006; Das 2006). Instead, Tacey’s post-secularism signals a shift to a cultural embrace of a symbolic, mythical outlook and appreciation for the Australian landscape and Indigenous cultures, which hence constitutes the ‘spiritual.’ In order to garner evidence for the veracity of ‘Australian spirituality,’ Tacey discusses the work of white Anglo-Celtic Australian poets and authors such as Judith Wright, Les Murray, Henry Lawson and Patrick White (2000). He argues that these ‘prophetic’ figures articulate the underbelly of religious and spiritual feeling that is hidden, denied, and yet palpable in ‘secular’ Australian culture. For Tacey, these figures are vital to an argument for ‘spirituality’ because ‘Australians’ are inherently resistant to expressions of symbolic value and meaning: “When we Australians relax and are allowed to feel, our feelings are often religious, but our pronouncements are mostly secular” (2000: 240). Here, ‘we Australians’ forms a paradigm of qualities associated with Australian-ness: feeling, religion, and, it would seem, a kind of ‘secular’ mask. Hence, the mask, which can perhaps be linked to the secular ordinary imaginary Jennifer Sinclair associates with the Australian irreverence toward religion and symbol, hides a body of feeling that lies in wait (2004). I will return to the question of affect as this chapter progresses, however for now I would like to consider the effects of producing a national ‘secular’ ‘we’ within the narrative of ‘spirituality.’
Tacey is explicit about the imagined causal link between ‘white Australians’ and the condition of Australian society:
The gnawing emptiness that many white Australians feel at the centre of their lives is spiritual in nature. Many try to fill this emptiness with compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddism, cults, ideologies, substance abuse and various other kinds of escapism. Our symptomatic behaviour gives us no sense of enduring meaning and the inner emptiness always returns. […] Only by way of reconciliation with the land and its indigenous people can we achieve that belonging, connectedness, identity, purpose we seem
111 to lack. These are the spiritual values driving a grassroots movement that will transform this country. (2000:128)
Again, the use of the generalised pronoun ‘we’ and possessive ‘our’ produces Tacey’s assumed reader as ‘white’ and within this logic ‘spiritually’ lacking. This implies that non- ‘white,’ Australians are exempted from ‘spiritual’ transformation, and presumably the need for it. Further, the homogenisation of Indigenous peoples as a ‘spiritually’ rich or complete group is implied through their construction as of the land, in opposition to ‘white’ Australians’ imagined emptiness and disconnection from the land. Within the logic of this excerpt this works to exclude Indigenous peoples from the economic consumption, mass media and so on that Tacey cites to characterize ‘white’ contemporary Australian culture. In this way, Indigenous peoples and cultures are aligned with an idealised, ‘post-secular’ ‘spiritual’ realm of the land that is beyond the reach of ‘white Australians.’ Aboriginality and the ‘spiritual’ are thus positioned as always already outside the implicitly white, capitalist and modern sociopolitical realm. And yet, to be inside the capitalist mainstream Tacey describes is to have engaged in a pathological project of escape. Here, the psychic health of the white Anglo-Celtic urban subject requires the ‘indigenous archetype.’
Tacey’s suggestion that beneath a ‘secular’ façade lurks repressed feeling can be seen to parallel narratives of the nation as ‘secular’ and yet, as I described in the Gallipoli pilgrimage in the previous chapter, bonded through affect. Hannawood and Newton’s ‘secular spirituality’ knits together these outside/inside motifs in a variety of ways. That is, travelling outside Australia affirms the pilgrims’ sense of belonging inside Australia, such that the logic of the nation as a white possession is affirmed through pronouncements of common values and grief. I argued, following Moreton-Robinson and Ahmed, that this process of mourning can also be seen to be underpinned by the disavowal of those constructed as Other to the rhetoric of the nation. The invocation of ‘spirituality’ arguably reinvokes and relocates this work of national belonging at the level of psychic interiority rather than national space and war memorialisation. Andrew Lattas argues that the vacant, empty interiorised space imagined in contemporary, popular representations of white subjectivity, and which is accounted for as a lack of spirituality, is a “space of power” (1992: 51). He suggests that expropriation of subjective space for spiritual ‘lack’ operates as a locus through which panic about a waning national identity can be expressed. Here,
112 white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity becomes continuous with narratives of nation through a crisis about identity. Lattas is concerned that the creation of inner emptiness and concurrent extension of psychoanalysis to a national psyche produces ‘empty’ white people as victims of colonial history. He argues:
In this discourse Australians are instructed that they can overcome their inner nothingness by overcoming the haunting emptiness of the landscape; and that this is most likely to be attained through discovering the unique spiritual meanings which Aborigines read into the land, and by making these the basis of interiority. (1992:52)
Lattas connects psychoanalytic construction of the subject to Christian ideology through language:
In this psychoanalytic nationalist discourse the Aborigine also becomes a Christ-like figure inside our national psyches, and so in place of the killing of Christ we now have the killing of our (aboriginal) unconscious, reconstituted as the site of our sense of the sacred. […] Here, the suffering of Aborigines is internalised and appropriated by whites. The nation’s slaughter of Aborigines is reduced to the sacrificial loss of its own spiritual identity, as though the real loss was the killing of a psychic portion of itself. Such narratives, with the focus on the existential side of suffering, allow whites to emerge as the ‘true’ sufferers of history, for it is they who have lost their souls and consequently wander soul-less. (57 Original parentheses)
Lattas’ work, written three years before publication of Tacey’s first book detailing the lack of ‘spirituality’ in Australia, Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia, succinctly identifies the psychoanalytic, nationalist paradigm that Tacey’s work reproduces and reinforces. Here, the notions of inside and outside melt into one another, such that national identity and subjective identity are mirrored through the rhetoric of the white possessive logic that, in this case, cannibalizes the Indigenous subject/archetype within the psyche. Indeed, the slipperiness of these movements is perhaps also repeated and registered in Lattas’ use of language. He also refers to our national psyches, and our sense of the sacred. Here, Lattas repeats the structure I have been pointing to, in which an imagined, core, white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity is established as coterminous to national identity. This suggests the way in which uses of language both produce points of departure from dominant
113 understandings whilst risk reinforcing and repeating the violences of hegemonic constructions.
Andrew Lattas’ study of nationalist panic about Australian identity and lack of spirituality/depth deduces that Aboriginal subjects, lore and communities are indeed positioned as Christ-like redemptive sites. He claims that in the practice of turning to Aboriginal subjects and cultures for ‘spirituality’ and wholeness: “They become the Holy Other, that spark of divinity inside us. This interiorisation of Aboriginality is the means by which the West cannibalizes this imaginary Other in the process of trying to constitute its own being” (Lattas 1992: 57). Lattas’ use of Christian terminology is paralleled by Tacey. Tacey’s positioning of Aboriginal people as responsible for the ‘salvation’ of non- Aboriginal Australians, and by extension to reinforce the white, Anglo-Celtic subject as synonymous to Australian identity, is further developed in the following claim: “It is by rediscovering the presence of the spirit in creation with the help of indigenous religions that Christianity can recover the expansive dimension of the sacred” (Tacey 2000: 103 My emphasis). Following the logic of Tacey’s argument about social transformation, Christianity is clearly linked to the problem of the ‘spiritually vacuous’ white, Anglo-Celtic subject. An important point made here is that this practice involves the objectification of ‘the Aboriginal.’ This version of Aboriginality is not intersubjective and dynamic in the way that Marcia Langton discusses in Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television … (1993: 23-43). As I mentioned earlier, for Langton, Aboriginality is a discourse that is perpetually re-formulated through dialogic interaction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal subjects; thus producing Aboriginalities. Lattas shows how the excision of spirituality from the white (presumably Christian) subject performs a version of Aboriginality that does not include dialogue with Aboriginal people or culture but rather with an imagined form. Rather, white subjectivity becomes a locus upon which the appropriation of a version of ‘spirituality’ that has nothing, or little, to do with actual Aboriginal spiritualities is performed. Within this formulation Tacey’s use of language and assumptions restricts addresses to non-white, non-Indigenous Australians and thus the complexities of a multicultural society are further evaded, along with associated narratives and experiences of loss and belonging. Further, Tacey’s argument for an intrinsically ‘spiritual’ Indigenous subject elides the diversity of Indigenous religions and spiritualities as well as the history of missionary programmes that forced Christianity on Indigenous 114 communities, as well as Indigenous engagements with Christianities (Pattel-Gray 1996; 1998: 117-86). Here, the language of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ restricts thought to these binaries.
I would now like to consider more closely the importance of Christianity and whiteness to ‘Australian spirituality.’ For Tacey, the imposition of a monolithic, transcendental spiritual ‘other-world’ on the Australian sociopolitical, or material sphere, provides the key to the transformation of the ‘white’ condition, which can be seen as morally depraved, given his references to faddism, cults and escapism through drug use as chief social problems. This ‘other-world’, or realm, is narrativised as trans-historical and always already existent:
First we had spirituality (largely encased in religious tradition), then we had no spirituality (during the triumph of scientific materialism), and now we have spirituality again (looking for a new home, but not sure where it can be found). This little three-part story could describe the history of Western culture, with its dramatic shift from the premodern religious worldview, through secular humanism and reductive materialism, to contemporary postmodern science, with its renewed interest in the sacred potentials of matter in particular and human experience more generally. This narrative is also the story of my own life, from childhood religious belief, through intellectual enlightenment and disbelief, to present eclectic and pluralist spirituality. And this three-fold pattern is the history of Australia, from traditional Aboriginal animism, through white Australian sceptical materialism, to the present postcolonial and postmodern era where so many of us are talking about the ‘spirit’ of place, earth spirit, ancestral spirit, and even the spirit of things. After a relatively brief period of cultural exile, spirit has come back to haunt us, and it looks like being back to stay. (2000: 33 Original parentheses)
Here, the ‘spiritual’ is constructed as autonomous and fundamentally emancipatory, and so it can be read that Tacey imbues the spiritual realm with an agency that overdetermines ‘material’ and political affects and effects. Notably, insofar as ‘spirituality’ is figured as an enduring presence, Tacey narrates its existence in terms of life, death, and rebirth, or resurrection; hence arguably repeating a Christian messianic narrative structure. Also, Tacey’s notion of the ‘post-secular’ is framed here as the ‘postcolonial and postmodern era,’ in which the spiritual, constructed through an historical narrative as ever-present even
115 during its apparent ‘exile’ in ‘white,’ secular modernity, has seemingly returned. These terms appear to be synonymous to the broader term of ‘post-secular,’ such that the terms arguably function as historical epochs rather than critical terminology that would problematize processes of colonization and decolonization (Brydon 2000) as well as modernities. This is furnished by Tacey’s description of this imagined epoch as “a post- secular enlightenment, where religion and spirituality will return to centre stage and where secular materialism will appear out of date and anachronistic” (7). Here the ‘post-secular’ refers to an historical epoch that renders ‘secularism’ a construction of the past whilst both religion and the a priori ‘spiritual’ constitute the present. Yet as we have seen, Tacey’s constructions of the spiritual are closely tied with Christianity and the ‘Judeo-Christian.’
There is an ironic sense in which Tacey’s appeal to ‘white Australians’ simultaneously produces an imagined cohesive society of ‘white Australians.’ Jan Larbalestier argues that assumptions of a ‘white’ Australian community eclipse the cultural politics and power dynamics attendant to the utterance:
Appeals to a collectivity of ‘white’ Australians are a means of constituting the historical and social space of a ‘white’ Australian culture and its subjects. Notions of whiteness then signal the idea of a continuing and essential homogeneity of a core Australian identity. Constructions of such an identity, among other things, serve to elide both the cultural diversity of Australia’s population since 1788 and the contested and contradictory aspects of its construction. (1999:146)
Larbalestier’s statement affirms the importance of language to the making, or ‘constituting’ of the ideology of ‘white’ social cohesion. That is, the “secular ordinary” (Sinclair 2004) imaginary of Australian homogeneity can be seen to be repetitively announced and therefore reproduced at the level of fantasy. This is echoed by Jon Stratton’s note that imagined cohesion is made through “the preservation of Christian, European, indeed Anglo-Celtic white morality as the only legitimate moral system in Australia” (181). Preserving this monomorality, then, is linked to repetitive claims and interpellative appeals to white cohesion and ‘secular ordinariness’ underpinned by a Christian interiority projected onto the invisiblized Indigenous subject, and hence experienced as ‘lost.’
116 Following this line of thought, it is intriguing to note Tacey’s affective description of the importance of Christianity to the rhetoric of white ‘Australian spirituality’:
The notion that Christianity could be swept aside saddens and alarms me, because I then have to ask: But if individualistic and feel-good [New Age] spirituality is to replace it, from whence will the moral dimension and ethical aspect of human civilisation arise? (2001: 5)
In this light, Tacey’s spiritually vacuous white, Anglo-Celtic subject, then, can be read as a representation of anxiety about the centrality and transcendence of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ monomorality under multiculturalism, which is repetitively affirmed and grieved in order to preserve hegemonic configurations of power. This is reinforced through the repetitive use of Christian terminology and tropes in Tacey’s works. For example, he writes that the spiritual has “apocalyptic force”, which, once befriended, takes “us into its bosom for eternity” (2001: 196). Further, he constructs reconciliation as, “above all, a religious term used by the Apostle Paul” (2000: 127). Thus, discourses of reconciliation in Australia not reducible to Christianity are elided. Further, the Christian terms of reference perpetually reinforce that spirituality, whiteness and Christianity are indistinguishable from, or at least synonymous to, one another. Indeed, it becomes clear in the passage above that Christianity and humanity are synonymous, such that it is possible to ask whether there would be ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ society without ‘Judeo-Christian’ monomorality. Here, heterogeneous moral codes that make Australian multicultural, multifaith society are dismissed through the language of a sad and fearful, vulnerable white Judeo-Christian monomorality.
I have been suggesting that Tacey’s production of ‘Australian spirituality’ enacts neo- colonial violence. It is therefore useful to consider Fiona Nicoll’s statement that,
Within a colonial regime of representation, the non-Indigenous ‘settler’ subject is identified with the values of secular rationality while the Indigenous subject is relegated to the domain of the sacred and irrational. (Nicoll 2001: 173-4)
This suggests the importance of the Indigenous subject to the project of ‘secular rationality’ which Tacey frequently reminds his readers is indexical to white subjectivity and lack. It is possible to suggest then, that the making of a white ‘secular,’ ‘spiritually lacking’
117 Australian imaginary and ontology is also strongly linked to the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. It is useful to contextualize this anxiety about spiritual dispossession by recalling Aileen Moreton Robinson’s cogent argument, “Through the law, politics and culture the nation has been created as a white possession” (2005: 26). In this light, ‘possession’ is a particularly apt term, if we consider the tendency in constructions of ‘Australian spirituality’ for whiteness to be conflated with the loss of a ‘spirit’ or soul, which occurs simultaneously with the construction of a moral possession and psychic possession of a constructed Indigenous archetypal subject. Whilst I have been identifying the neo-colonial politics of the ‘spiritual’ in concert with whiteness and nation, it is important to remember that for Tacey discussion of politics is antithetical to what the ‘spiritual’ might mean. Hence, it is useful to consider more closely the apparent opposition between ‘spirituality’ and ‘politics’ which appears to supersede those claimed between ‘religion,’ the ‘secular’ and ‘spirituality.’
Spirituality or politics
David Tacey is not alone in describing the ‘spiritual’ as personal rather than institutional. Marion Maddox writes, “As a religious studies teacher, I regularly face classrooms full of people who declare that they are not at all religious, but very spiritual” (2005: 161). She writes of the moral and social capital that appears to be gleaned from identifying as ‘spiritual’ in comparison to ‘religious,’ which she argues is often conflated with institutions, oppression and dogma (161-3). Yet Maddox notes the language through which the ‘spiritual’ was deployed by the Howard government to end debates with church leaders about social welfare and industrial relations.
When Howard exhorts church leaders to stay on the ‘spiritual’ side of the floor, he presumably means something along the same line as my students: sticking to the spiritual means concentrating on the internal, self-focused aspects of religion that might suggest personal behaviours but has minimal involvement with the non-spiritual, political world. (163)
118 Maddox clearly identifies an assumption that the ‘spiritual’ is that which is not political. Here, the institution of the church is repetitively and semantically stripped of a place in the public sphere of debate, perhaps in line with a political secularism. This use of language occurs within, rather than outside, the discourse of a government strongly preoccupied with the production of Christian values in policy. This rhetorical strategy can be read as “Howardage,” which Holly Randell-Moon usefully coins to critique iterations of political rhetoric that obliquely invoke and normalize Christian values (2006: 17). The ‘Howardage’ of ‘spirituality’ is the suggestion that ‘religion’ is reducible to a ‘spiritual’ essence that is fundamentally antithetical to politics, and which dismisses the possibility of a (Judeo- Christian moral) politics of ‘the spiritual.’
Tacey takes up this concern in his argument that public institutions such as universities should be ‘open’ to the ‘spiritual’ rather than politics. He is most suspicious of cultural studies programmes that he finds too political, which he argues undermines the ‘spirituality’ of Indigenous subjects:
It is an appalling irony that, in tertiary education at least, Aboriginals will not discover an environment in which their spiritual culture can be shared and their gifts received. In ‘cultural studies’ programmes, they will meet a radical, elitist, subversive culture based on Marx and Foucault that will want to turn them into radicals and victims. The studies will be based on power, resistance and revolution, not accommodation or growth through love. They will meet a hardened materialist culture that regards sacredness as ‘cultural property’, and such property, they will be told, ought to be withheld and protected, not shared. The Aboriginal way, however, works in reverse: to withhold spiritual knowledge is to destroy it; only in sharing it is it strengthened and renewed. (2000:160)
This passage evokes the important issues of addressing, engaging and living with assumed differences that institutions work to overcode and overdetermine. Yet resisting the politics of institutions is argued here as a violence toward an idealised ‘Aboriginal way.’ It is possible to argue against this construction by noting Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s linkage of Aboriginal Spirituality to the land and thus to the politics of land rights and claims (Pattel- Gray 4-10). Further, and contrary to notions of unproblematic ‘spiritual sharing,’ in 1995 the Hindmarsh Island Royal Commission was set in motion to determine the validity of
119 Ngarrindjeri ‘secret women’s business.’ The complexities of the Commission are beyond the scope of this thesis, but it is important to note that the tenet of secrecy in relation a particular Indigenous spirituality and sacrality became a national focus which centred on the importance of secrecy to Ngarrindjeri culture rather than sharing (Maddox 2001: 263- 5). Hence, this event forms an important particularisation that does not reinforce Tacey’s suggestion of a transparent, translatable and shared spiritual ‘way.’ However, rather than pursuing this mode of argument, which would involve speaking from a position of knowledge about Indigenous spiritualities that I cannot sustain, it is useful to consider the strong link Tacey makes between public institutions and subjective experience. Here, the ‘spirituality’ of Indigenous subjectivity is imagined to be placed under threat by politicized education. This is the inverse of Maddox’s description of the Howard government’s de- politicisation of churches by invoking the ‘spiritual,’ which I mentioned earlier. In this light, it is possible to suggest that the ‘spiritual,’ rather than a thing-in-itself, can be seen as a tool that erases politics as a viable mode of debate by constructing politicisation as contamination of an imagined ‘pure,’ ‘spiritual,’ other-worldly essence.
Tacey’s argument suggests that opportunities for pedagogical engagements with ‘spirituality’ are inhibited by the interested, political positions of ‘cultural studies programmes.’ However this raises the sense that there are spaces within the institution that might be or should be de-politicized, or perhaps ‘spiritual’ and/or ‘neutral.’ This draws attention away from critique of the politics that underpins the construction and preservation of social and public institutions not limited to education and which, following Louis Althusser’s influential concept of “Ideological State Apparatuses,” includes the media, family, religion and I would suggest, health care (Althusser 1971: 121-76). Here, I would like to offer a brief anecdote to suggest that it is productive to consider the ideological and sociopolitical norms according to which bodies and institutions are inextricably linked through constructions of ‘religion’ that the discourse of ‘spirituality’ evades and thus risks inevitably conserving. This is demonstrated in the way in which my awareness that my body is marked as ‘religious’ came about within the public hospital system in Western Australia. As a small child I quite regularly visited hospital, and my mother would accompany me. At triage, she was inevitably asked to tell the nurse my religion, to which she would reply ‘C of E.’ I did not understand what this meant for a number of years, and without enough religio-cultural capital to realise she was using shorthand for ‘Church of 120 England,’ I assumed my family was of a rare ‘religion.’ This miscommunication, which is perhaps a product of the anxiety of a medical emergency, piqued my curiosity about ‘religion.’ But whilst the ‘religion question’ suggested there was something distinctive about bodies that made ‘religion’ important, as a ‘C of E’ body it was difficult to know what this was. Of course, ‘religion’ is paramount within the hospital. Some bodies cannot receive blood transfusions, or ingest certain foods, deceased Jewish bodies lie in repose for an extended period, and Muslim bodies may need to be faced toward Mecca when gravely ill. The carnality of religious praxis is enacted administratively at triage and in the development of suitable treatments and modes of caring for bodies. This implies different healing trajectories, different experiences of pain, and potentially different experiences of understanding and awareness between staff and patients. My experience as a ‘C of E’ body was of no restrictions, and no ‘special’ treatments or facilities. That is, within the ‘secular’ regime of science and reason that forms the public hospital, and as a body unmarked as the Anglican ‘religion that is not one’ it seemed there was scarce difference between the ‘institution’ and my body. Here, ‘religious’ bodies are made through continually repeated and restated embodied declarations, practices and interventions that negotiate the paradoxical invisibility of secular privilege. However, the avowal of ‘C of E,’ and hence the ‘religion question’ at triage, might hesitantly be described as an enunciation that opens up a moment at which secular privilege is rendered visible rather than invisible, and potentially albeit fleetingly called into question.
Hence, if bodies are made through the violences and conceits of institutions that cannot be described as ‘neutral,’ it is useful to return to Tacey’s argument for the sharing of Indigenous ‘spirituality’ by considering how this narrative makes and imagines a cohesive Indigenous ‘way.’ Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman offer a definition of appropriation that they apply to practices of sampling and allusion in music. However, despite the disparity in contexts, their definition can be read as highly relevant to my current purposes, as they draw close attention to the openness about stealing cultural objects and texts that is integral to the practice of appropriation: “With appropriation, one steals, and steals explicitly – but also unapologetically, as if the evidence of this theft was essential to the appreciation of the work” (Clemens & Pettman 2004: 6). This is a compelling definition given its awareness that the visibility of stealing is central, rather than simply the means to, an act of appropriation. This is instructive for considering how Tacey constructs Indigenous 121 ‘spirituality’ as ‘shared’ and suggests that questioning this pedagogical process performs violence. Here, the violence of appropriation is counterposed on to discourses of questioning and critiquing these acts. Hence, the racist construction of Indigenous cultures’ ‘gift’ of spirituality arguably asserts the visibility and viability of appropriation within a discourse of generosity and sharing. The sense that Indigenous people will be enabled through pedagogy to ‘share’ their spiritual ‘property,’ alongside terms such as ‘growth through love’ situates the appropriative public display as integral to ‘growth’ and ‘love.’ That disciplines of ‘cultural studies,’ here imagined as homogenous and always already attached to a specific conceptual viewpoint, is assumedly ‘hostile’ to this practice not only elides modes of religio-cultural, political and intellectual differences within cultural studies but also refuses the question of how institutions make and mark subjects and ‘religions.’ Here, politics and spirituality are fundamentally opposed in the project of white possession that participates in the unmarking of public institutions that produce and maintain limits and restrictions on bodily and subjective identities and practices.
Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman also offer some discussion of David Tacey’s spiritual discourse. Their suspicions of his discourse are based less on his appropriative strategies, although they do raise concern about the implications of constructing pre- political ‘spiritual’ Indigenous peoples, and more closely tuned to the valorisation of affect implied in Tacey’s ‘spiritual’ sensibility.
[C]laims that white Australians now have as close an affective bond with the land as the indigenous population is to further confound their qualitatively different statuses in the formation and sustenance of the state, implicitly reducing the question of political domination to a question of affective experience. If there is any logic whatsoever to these discourses of the sacred, it is: my unheard claims are justified because I feel them as deeply as you. (2004: 173 Original emphases)
Clemens and Pettman make an important point in emphasizing the power dynamics that produce and invisiblize an Aboriginality that functions in the interests of white, possessive anxieties about belonging to the land ‘spiritually.’ Indeed, this is the line of argument I have held throughout this chapter, particularly because of what I argue is a discourse of neo-colonial silencing through ‘spirituality’ evident in the language and mode of
122 representation within Tacey’s work. Indeed, I have suggested that through this discourse Christianity and whiteness are paradigmatically exalted and elevated, such that they are conflated with national identity and ‘values.’ I have further argued that this is reproduced and reinforced in the recent Tourism Australia campaign; hence suggesting that this mode of spirituality, in its inextricable link to national identity, elides multiplicities of voices and speaking positions. However, I would like to complicate these arguments through attention to the cultural politics of affect.
Clemens and Pettman’s implicit derision of ‘spirituality,’ within the rubric of affect forms the logic with which they cast suspicion upon this discourse. In this vein Clemens and Pettman dismiss Tacey’s concept of the spiritual as “irremediably obscure or utterly vapid” (2004: 209). Here, they can be seen to produce a structure of incommensurability between Tacey’s position and theirs, and between the ‘spiritual’ and ‘rational’ debate such that it would appear possible to dismiss Tacey’s argument because of its affective dimension. That is, there is a sense in which Clemens and Pettman ‘reduce’ ‘spirituality’ to an affective mode, which becomes proof of its obscurity. By extension, affect is personalized such that the question of ‘spirituality’ becomes the question of a gulf between a spiritual, affective, personal domain and a non-spiritual, rational, political domain. However, rather than constructing the individual or interested subject as the author of affect, it is productive to consider the ways in which affect circulates and is made psychically and socially (Ahmed Affective: 121). There is a suggestion in Clemens and Pettman’s statement that affect is somehow outside the political, or forms a parallel discourse. Yet by naming Tacey’s ‘spirituality’ as a narration of personal affect, Clemens and Pettman can be seen to obliquely legitimate a reading of the ‘spiritual’ that asserts its status outside politics and critique. Ironically, Tacey’s ‘spirituality’ narrates the elevation of the personal and private to broader Australian public identity by claiming continuity between these constructs through a whiteness that is putatively affective rather than political. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies,’ this privileging of affect suggests the importance of considering the relations and exchanges that make affective objects and bonds “saturated with affect,” such as Tacey’s spiritual Indigenous subject, whilst affect slides away from the white, vacuous object of spiritual lack (Ahmed Cultural Politics: 11). In this light, I turn now to a discussion of how these concerns are
123 subverted and narrated in Pat Dudgeon’s short story Four Kilometres, before then discussing the textuality of incommensurable differences in debates about the ‘spiritual.’
Writing back
Through prose fiction, author and academic Pat Dudgeon writes against the spiritualization of Indigenous subjectivity. Her short story Four Kilometres identifies the racism of ‘Australian spirituality’ by representing incongruence between a white imaginary that construes Indigenous subjectivity as profoundly and naturally ‘spiritual’ and the experience of the protagonist John, an Indigenous community development worker positioned ambivalently inside and outside Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The following passage sets in motion questions of ‘spiritual’ and affective identity counter to a dominant white imaginary.
Of course he’d never tell his friends and colleagues about that special feeling. The blacks would probably think he was cartwarrah [mad] and the whites would probably think he was getting in touch with his earthy side, his spirituality, his ‘indigenous self’. Actually it was too bad he couldn’t bottle the experience and sell it to those desperado whites who were always looking for ‘indigenous spirituality’ from blackfellas. Their culture had short- changed them and they wanted a quick fix from indigenous people. Their culture gave them the freedom to choose from a hundred different shampoos in the shopping centres but left them isolated and emptier inside. It had done worse for blackfellas, though. Those New Age types saw things differently. Having indigenous experiences and friends made them feel special and good, it proved their broadmindedness and ‘in-touch-with-the-global-scene- ness’. Could dye that big mutt Digger brown (bleach him?), say that he was an unusually big dingo, and slap loin cloths on my white followers and have them run for a couple of clicks in the moonlight. Campfire … tea and damper … a bit of didge playing after the run. Then a few short stories and meditations to get in touch with the earth, universe or whatever. They’d love it, silly bastards. I’d charge them like a wounded bull and be rich! Except, I can’t play the didge. Where would I take them? Along the South Perth foreshore? That’d look a sight. We’d all be arrested. And I’d feel like a bastard suckering them in even though they asked for it, always wanting your wisdom of the Indigenous Peoples, even
124 though you’re still trying to figure out where it is. Should go to the lost property office of Human Well-Being to get back my lost mystical Indigenality and I could divvy it up to give out to everyone. (2000: 278. Original parentheses and ellipses)
This passage contrasts starkly with the narrative of essential, intrinsic Indigenous spirituality that Tacey describes. Rather, white anxieties about ‘spirituality’ are parodied as a melancholic ‘desperado’ position. Here, the white subject and culture arguably becomes saturated with melancholic affect. Within object relations psychoanalysis, Melanie Klein (1935) postulates that melancholia arises from the failure to introject and negotiate the loss of a ‘good object’ at the level of phantasy, which is processually developed as the child negotiates the loss and rediscovery of the mother’s breast. Klein uses the breast as both a real object and metaphor for the good object which is frustrating for and loved by the infant, who develops phantasies of “controlling the breast” in order to resist the anguish of its loss (286-7). Here, “cannibalistic phantasies” of controlling external objects arise alongside uncontrollable hatred for the needed object both within and external to the ego, which produces fear of persecuting and hence losing the good object amidst the profound and irrevocable loss of melancholia (1935: 287). The putative melancholia that it is possible to read into Dudgeon’s construction of white subjectivity that is ‘empty inside’ can be tentatively and yet productively considered in relation to Klein’s modelling. John is comically sardonic about exploiting the imagined ‘lost mystical Indigenality,’ and the narrative of a lost ‘good’ object projected onto Indigenous peoples despite the realities and complexities that are at stake intersects strongly with Tacey’s thesis that an ‘indigenous archetype’ should be incorporated within the psyche of the white, Anglo-Celtic subject for broader social wellbeing. In this light, Tacey’s white subject can be read as a melancholic construction in which the obsession with controlling and cannibalising objects within a narrow domain is an expression of melancholic affect.
Whilst melancholic affect ‘sticks to’ the white subject in this narrative, modes of complexity and difference pervade the narrative construction of John’s position in relation to family and community. Within this passage, ‘cartwarrah,’ with its parenthetical English translation, perhaps forms the narrative remains of Indigenous languages that are oppressed in discourses of colonialism and within a national policy of monolingualism. Here, made palpable in the parenthetical symbols that can be seen to represent difference both outside
125 and within language, practices of translation between communities, between reader and author, and between language groups, is foregrounded such that the notion of a transparent language and ‘spirituality’ is complicated. Further, Dudgeon’s use of ‘mystical Indigenality’ suggests a satirical critique of the limiting of Indigenous peoples to a spiritualized identity associated with the land and cosmology, which is well illustrated here as an opposition to ‘white’, New Age and middle class cultures. That is, the constriction of Indigenous subjectivity and culture to ‘spirituality’ is constructed as the production of a white imaginary that is at odds with John’s experiences. Dudgeon’s construction of the ‘lost property office of Human Well-Being’ uses the language of melancholic possession and loss, which is ironised through the banality of bureaucracy. This image can be read as an index to the regime of loss and possession that pervades constructions of ‘indigenous spirituality,’ but which casts the search for a depoliticized ‘other-world’ comical and misguided, and perhaps phantastic given the elision of the realities of police surveillance, commodity cultures and urban space, rather than necessary to social cohesion and transformation.
Four Kilometres is published in the collection of prose and poems Those Who Remain Will Always Remember. Editors Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg suggest that Dudgeon’s short story blurs the boundaries between fiction and “life story” (2000: 10). This blurring of boundaries is perhaps echoed at the level of language and theme within the story. Intellectual debates are rendered problematic white fictions through the foregrounding of John’s experience and feeling. In the excerpt above, this was described as ‘that special feeling’ that appears to place John’s experience ambivalently outside and inside languages and communities. The white/Indigenous binary is destabilised by John’s anger at uses of theory by both Indigenous and white intellectuals:
The cast their throw-nets of theory onto your soul and all your thoughts and words are analyzed, sorted and categorized as they emerge, pinned like butterflies onto a mounting board; part of something else, someone else. Hah, what if he shouted out his frustration just once? What if he shouted out, ‘Fuck off! Just fucking listen to me! Stop moving everything. Stop making me into a reflection, a piece of evidence to support your fucking theories!’ What if he shouted and screamed instead of the usual objective, rational, intellectual debate? (2000: 284)
126
Within the context of intellectual debate, John appears to function as an alienated affective body. Here the language and framework of debate is construed as similar to museum curatorship and/or scientific study, given the simile of the butterfly collection. That is, through the language of theory, John finds dialogue to be absent from the exchange. The theory that deadens dialogue would arguably cannibalize and produce a static memorialization of his ideas, whilst raising the incommensurability of theoretical and affective speaking positions. This resembles the discourse of museum curatorship that has a history of decontextualizing and colonizing Indigenous artefacts, practices, and cultures, and which Ghassan Hage describes as the necrophilia of white multiculturalism (1998). John’s outrage negotiates and acknowledges this process, which renders language dead, or deadening, in comparison to his feeling body. Returning to Sara Ahmed’s attention to the social circulation of emotions, it is possible to suggest that anger ‘sticks to’ John in conversation with intellectual theories. That is, the discourse of intellectual debate produces an overwhelmingly affective subject. Hence, whilst affect appears to slide away from theory, it appears, in Ahmed’s terms, to “become sticky, or saturated with affect” at the site of John’s alienation and inability to speak and be heard (Cultural Politics: 11). John appears overwhelmingly angry, which is registered in his thoughts of an outburst that is inevitably held in, such that his apparent separateness is intensified. This occurs through the suggestion of movement: ‘Stop moving everything.’ Hence, his pain is narrated as a process of movement in which affect appears to ‘slide off’ intellectual debate. Here, the fantasy of screaming and shouting can be read as angry-speak that intensifies the representation of John as overwhelmingly angry and emotional through the context of intellectual theory and debate.
This rational/affective dichotomy resembles the division of public and private, secular and religious, rational and irrational that the ‘secular’ works through and which I have been arguing are co-constituted rather than discrete categories. Thus I would like to suggest that rational debate and affect are not diametrically opposed here but, as they are narrated, are co-constituted. The pain and anger of John’s alienation can thus be read as constituted not ‘naturally’ within John so much as through contextual relations. In this light it is useful to briefly turn to Talal Asad’s argument that the sociality of pain is made through the secularization of pain in Western modernity. For Asad, language and the body are 127 repeatedly produced in discourse as co-constitutive experiences of pain, and he suggests that different modes of pain including torture, sporting injuries, surgery, hunger, and the anguish of feeling slighted suggest, “there are different conditions in which pain is acceptable” (2006: 290). Thus, he argues that different pains can fulfil different social and ideological purposes within secular liberal societies. Contrary to the suggestion that the ‘truth’ of John’s pain is revealed by the third person narration that identifies his stifled anger, in the light of Ahmed’s and Asad’s attention to the sociality of pain, Four Kilometres can be read as a critique in which the repetitions of rational debate are enunciations through which pain and anger are also made. In this sense rationality and affect are textually interwoven and co-constituted, and perform political and social tasks of repeated oppressions, violence, and critique.
Imperative within Dudgeon’s story is the narrative of the elisions that ‘theory’ repeats and reproduces. Four Kilometres registers the pain and loss that takes place within the practices of white colonial ‘necrophilia.’ This textual moment also represents a point of intensification at which the practice of white possession and disavowal “sticks” to this thesis. By drawing from Dudgeon’s story to enact a point of departure from Tacey’s representation of the spiritual, and from Pettman’s and Clemens’ hesitant elision of affect, and hence enacting the framework of ‘rational’ debate, I repeat the violences so evocatively described in Dudgeon’s story – with a sense of panic. Panic, which is commonly associated with ‘attacks,’ as in ‘panic attacks’ suggests a kind of violence whereby the panic ‘came from nowhere’ and assailed the ‘victim.’ That is, there is a sense in which panic produces the victimhood of she who experiences it. Further, panic is strongly associated with fantasies of death produced both psychically and socially. A good example is the instruction often given to lifesavers to put their own lives before a panicking, sinking swimmer’s life, as panickers are capable of thoughtlessly drowning their rescuer. The panicking ‘victim’ therefore wields an extraordinary power. This irony makes it possible to suggest that the act of rescue can also be a murder of the panicker insofar as the panicker is wholly identified with panic. The scene of rescue is, in this sense, pervaded by the murderous. Hence, ‘don’t panic.’ What might a panicking scholar do? Quoting more theories, making more concessions, finding more interlocutors, identifying more provisions, noting more particularities can be read, within the context of panic, as enactments of scholarship that reinforce this victim-power relation. This point of intensity 128 or panic at not finding a ‘way out’ of this violence, and bearing the guilt of this (death)wish and its implications for other deaths, violences and disavowals, both signals opportunity for new engagements and remains complicit with the modes of violence that produce and make it exemplary of that which it critiques. These modes of complicity with white privilege and secular privilege are repeated and critiqued throughout this study, yet, perhaps repetitions of these arguments across differing contexts and modes of representation also offer points of departure and suggestions of different terrains that might fracture the modes of disavowal I am enacting and critiquing. With this in mind, I now turn to a reading of generic and textual representations of the ‘spiritual’ that I will suggest appear to offer a ‘way out’ of these debates, but that paradoxically preserve the status quo.
Textual spiritualities
Sociologist and theologist Gary Bouma has a long and prolific publishing career in Australia. His sociological research and critical commentary on secularism, ‘spirituality’ and ‘religious’ affiliation in Australia has included a report for the (former) Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia, which provides an overview of ‘religious’ participation and explanation of the practices of ‘faith’ communities in Australia (Religion 2004). The title of this work is suggestive of the ideological association of borders, containment of ‘religious’ difference, multiculturalism and national identity that form a nexus of anxiety that, as I argue, is not ameliorated but reinforced and intensified within the representations of the spiritual offered by Tacey, and as I now show, in a recent work of Bouma’s on national ‘spirituality.’ Bouma’s study of religion and spirituality in Australia, Australian Soul: Religion and spirituality in the twenty-first century constructs the “post-secular” (2006: 101) in a spiritual, nationalistic conceptualization that resembles Tacey’s similar extension of the ‘spiritual’ to national identity. By referring to historian Manning Clark’s evocative image of the Australian diggers of World War I as possessing “a shy hope in the heart” (7) Bouma broadens and elevates this romantic image to the level of a national spirituality.
129 Thus, through a departure to the ‘spiritual’ Bouma claims ‘Australians’ are not overtly ‘religious.’ But who are the Australians that are represented in this myth?
Bouma analyzes Census data gleaned from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.42 Through positivist, sociological analysis of this data, he finds that although church attendance has decreased since World War II and the number of Australians identifying as having ‘No religion’ has increased, this is because Australians have shifted from an institutionalised, hierarchized and ritualized ‘religious’ practice to a – ‘shy’ and reserved – ‘post-secular,’ spiritual way of life.43 However, to what extent can the results, or perceived gaps and silences in results of Census surveys, be converted into a claim about universalised, national ‘spiritual’ feeling and commitment? It is important to note here that Bouma’s poetic and mythological construction of Australian spirituality does not tolerate openly expressed religious practice: “Australians are wary of enthusiasm in religion” (Bouma 2006: 45). This suspicion of religious fervour reveals suspicion toward “new Australians”:
Whilst there has been a history of sectarian rivalry, it has always been decried and kept to rather low levels. The effect of the ecumenical movement among Christians in the twentieth century was to confirm the orientation and set the basis for its extension to interfaith religions in the twenty-first. Those who want newly arrived Australians to behave and think like ‘Australians’ seem more interested in wanting them to calm down, perhaps reduce the intensity of their religious commitments and be themselves, rather than enforcing a particular viewpoint. But then calming down and letting be is a viewpoint reflecting this commitment to tolerance. Australians are intolerant of the intolerant. (Bouma 2006: 47. My emphases)
42 This is a common mode of measuring secularization used by sociologists. See Bruce, Steve. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Bruce’s UK-based study develops the “secularization paradigm” to analyze data about religious belief and practice, concluding that there is “a long-term decline in the power, popularity and prestige of religious beliefs and rituals” (44). See also Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 43 In this way, Bouma represents activities as disparate as Anzac Day remembrance ceremonies (23), and going to the gym (25), as ‘spiritual’ activities: “The celebrations and remembrances on ANZAC Day are an excellent example of Australian spirituality. As Australians mark the losses incurred during World War I, they have created meaning, myth and ritual.” Bouma, Gary. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-first Century. Port Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. 23. 130 I have quoted Bouma at length to show the way he refers to Christian sectarian rivalry, which was arguably an organising social divide between Federation and World War II that intersected with class and ethnic differences epitomised by tensions between Irish Catholic and British Protestant Australians (Stratton 2004), as being kept at ‘rather’ low levels. This functions to develop an imagined, and yet stark, contrast to twenty-first century ‘Australians’ who are ‘intolerant’ of ‘the intolerant.’ In my reading, the ‘new Australians’ who display religious commitment openly, are constructed as essentially and fundamentally intolerant. This is produced by locating ‘sectarian rivalry’ within the time frame of the assimilationist White Australia Policy and adopting this as the condition through which tolerance is made and addressed within multiculturalism. Hence, it is possible to suggest that enacting ‘tolerance’ means conforming to assimilationist rhetoric in which it is necessary to be ‘shy’ rather than open about ‘religious’ identification and practice. Hence the practice of religious commitments becomes an act of opposition to ‘tolerance,’ which perhaps suggests the primacy of the ‘secular Ordinary’ Australian imaginary identified by Jennifer Sinclair (2004) at work here. Paradoxically, in this formation to be ‘religious’ is to be non-Christian, and not ‘being yourself:’ calm and even-handed. The generalised ‘you’ clearly demarcates the religious attitudes and persuasions of Bouma’s imagined Australian subject who is extrapolated to the nation. Thus, Bouma’s mention of ‘interfaith religions’ presupposes a Christian-centric model of tolerance, from which other religions and social groups are measured and fundamentally excluded.
In her keynote “Materializing Affects: Religious Feelings, Secular Feelings” (2008) Ann Pellegrini writes, “if we are to offer a history of the present, we need to analyze secularism as a structure of feeling that constructs and privileges particular forms of subjectivity, social belonging, and social knowledge.” Here, Pellegrini invokes Raymond William’s (1977) influential concept of ‘structures of feeling,’ which draws attention to the multiple registers, including affective and visceral intensities, which inform the enactment of cultural and social relations. Drawing from Williams Pellegrini asks, “So, what does secularism feel like? One of the things it feels like is ‘tolerance.’ How tolerance feels depends a lot on where you are positioned in relation to it” (2008). Pellegrini’s qualification of tolerance as partisan and interested rather than ‘neutral’ is crucial. Here, the placing of subjects within and through a discourse of tolerance can be seen as economies of ‘secular feeling’ that
131 intersect with identity politics. Pellegrini’s attention to the positionality of the subject is also interrogated by Wendy Brown in her study of tolerance. She writes,
The very invocation of tolerance […] indicates that something contaminating or dangerous is at hand, or something foreign is at issue, and the limits of tolerance are determined by how much of this toxicity can be accommodated without destroying the object, value, claim, or body. Tolerance appears, then, as a mode of incorporating and regulating the presence of the threatening Other within. (Brown 2006: 27)
Tolerance for Brown is not only an activity that regulates Otherness in order to preserve a specific hegemonic host, or centre. She argues further that tolerance “produces, organizes, and marks subjects” and includes the construction of “spatial” and “moral boundaries […] about what can and cannot be accommodated” (29). Thus, taken together Pellegrini’s and Brown’s readings of tolerance assert the positioning of the Other that fuels the preservation of an hegemonic centre. In this way it is possible to read Bouma’s narrative of ‘new Australian’ identity and religion as the construction of an intolerable Other imagined to belong outside the suburban, ‘secular’ ‘ordinary’ imaginary. Bouma’s concern with the feeling of ‘Australian soul’ as both shy and intolerant can perhaps be read as a slippage in terms that reveals the implicit manner in which an assimilationist regime is reasserted.
Indeed, another iteration of the importance of affect within Bouma’s study is the separation of ‘experiential’ elements of the spiritual from Census data. It is often through the fine, albeit easily overlooked, detail of stylistic choices that texts make meaning, and so I would like to pay some attention to the visual and generic development of Bouma’s argument for a vibrant ‘spiritual’ Australia. Each chapter is interspersed with anecdotes about spiritual and religious experiences by Australian people. These are readily identifiable to the reader, as they are enclosed in borders and printed in a sans serif font. These subjective, apparently more intimate and reflective sections, serve to delineate a crude difference between the imagined place of the experience of religion and spirituality, in relation to the intellectual discussion of these phenomena.
Stand at the entry to the Cabramatta Leagues Club and look out from the porte cochère. From that vantage point you will see at the street level a Vietnamese
132 Buddhist temple built in a Japanese architectural style. As your eye rises through a dense thicket of gum trees you will notice the minaret and dome of a Turkish mosque. Then, next to the dome, you will see a steeple topped with a cross rising from a Presbyterian church. Flying over the whole scene is a giant Australian flag maintained by a large nearby shopping centre. The fact that just around the corner are two more Buddhist temples and more churches only puts the final touches on this icon of twenty-first-century Australian religious and spiritual diversity. (2006: 56- 7)
The Cabramatta Leagues Club is at the centre of this aestheticized construction of religio- cultural diversity. Who is targeted by the generalised ‘you’ who views and consumes this scene as a display of religious variety, not unlike the “multicultural fair” that Ghassan Hage describes (1998: 118)? Bouma does not give an explanation or critique of this anecdote; rather, it stands alone as a vignette, and thus it might be possible to suggest that it unproblematically reflects a display of religious pluralism in the Australian suburbs. However, if we consider the semiotic of Bouma’s choice of site, it is not only a topographical ‘vantage point’. The ideological significance of a Rugby League Club, with connotations of exclusive membership, sport, males, Englishness and homoeroticism reproduces the dominant cultural myth of white Australian masculinity (Buchbinder 1994). Why might Bouma choose this location from which to author(ize) a narrative of religious pluralism? Ghassan Hage refers to the “White nation fantasy” as the myth through which non-White migrant cultures are assigned a “mode of existence” by the dominant Anglo- Celtic White culture, amounting to “enrichment” of the dominant culture (Hage 1998: 121). This sentiment is raised with respect to religious pluralism when Wilfred McClay makes the important observation that:
pluralism is not nearly so neutral or wide open as it pretends to be, since in practice it alters every available position to conform to its own image, thereby creating an unacknowledged criterion of public acceptability to which all other truth claims are discreetly subordinated. (McClay 2001: 57)
Bouma’s narrative is thus more informative of the ideological significance of the Cabramatta Leagues Club than it is able to provide a view of the cityscape that acknowledges difference. If we return to the language Bouma employs to represent 133 religious pluralism, the words ‘As your eyes rise,’ ‘dense thicket of gum trees’ and ‘Flying over the whole scene is a giant Australian flag’ invite the reader to adopt the position of the empowered witness of a mere, albeit gradually unfolding, picturesque scene; thus stripping the religio-cultural sites of unique and differentiated meanings. That is, these spaces and monuments are homogenised within the rhetoric of ‘religious,’ architectural and ethnic enrichment. I therefore argue that the white, male, imagined mainstream metaphorically represented by the Cabramatta Leagues Club signifies Bouma’s reinforcement of the naturalized centralisation of this position (Hage 1998: 140). In addition, the presentation of the anecdotes in borders and with a sans serif font – which is associable with informality, as opposed to serif fonts – works, when we consider their content in relation to Bouma’s sociological discussion, to construct personal experience as unproblematic ‘proof’ of the argument at hand, whilst removing these statements from the discourse of argument. This reinforces the dichotomy of private, individual and subjective religious/spiritual experience versus universalistic, objective, public reason. In this sense Bouma’s text reinforces the universalist, transcendentalist notion of Australian spirituality he advocates, which is premised upon a Christian-centric model of the ‘post-secular.’ In order to further demonstrate the importance of Tacey’s method of producing the ‘spiritual’ and ‘post- secular,’ I extrapolate from Susan Ritchie’s argument for self-reflexive methodologies. She argues that many self-reflexive interventions into analyzes of secularisms place their onus on declarations of ‘religious’ affiliations and investments on the part of the author without critical attention to the ‘religious’ histories and biases inherent in the methodologies used, and indeed taken for granted (Ritchie 2002: 444-5). Whilst Ritchie argues in favour of “our ability to be reflexive not about personal selves but about the situated and interested character of our knowledge production” (445), I suggest that both investments are productive in enabling consideration of the politics and limitations of particular constructed productions of the ‘spiritual.’ By noting the bisection of ‘Australian spirituality’ into analysis of Census figures and experiential testimonies, many of which are authored by Bouma (who is also an Anglican minister), the power dynamics inherent in representations of, in this instance, a spectacularisation of religious diversity are potentially elided. Thus, the structure, style, and content of Bouma’s work interweave to produce a text and textuality that represent and enact the hegemony of a white, Anglo-Celtic, Christian viewer and interpreter of religious plurality and ‘Australian soul.’ Of course, Bouma’s work is thoroughly researched and an important contribution to an understanding of ‘religion’ in 134 Australia and I do not wish to cast undue aspersions. Rather, what is at stake here is the critical and textual interface it provides for representing and paradoxically undermining the principle and fact of religio-cultural diversity and difference. This close textual analysis of the nuances inherent in textual representations forms a useful position to return to my critique of Tacey’s work. I now turn to a dispute between David Tacey and academic Mitchell Rolls in the Melbourne Journal of Politics in which the minutiae of word choice becomes critical in the flattening out of difference.
Insurmountable differences
David Tacey appears significantly uncomfortable with difference. Following the publication of Edge of the Sacred, Australian academic Mitchell Rolls critiqued the text in the Melbourne Journal of Politics, after which a debate with David Tacey ensued. Rolls communicates his concern about Tacey’s usage of a European, Jungian psychoanalytic model in relation to Indigenous peoples. He summarises the logic of Tacey’s argument:
Hence, prior to colonization, Aborigines were, in effect, in wait for a disrupting spirit that would enter their psyche and release them from their bonds, thereby enabling an uncertain and painful growth, but growth nevertheless. This transposition of Australia’s political and social history, and Aboriginal life pre- and post-European settlement, into a Jungian psychodrama results in a startling hypothesis: in archetypal terms the arrival of the colonists was a preordained and necessary event. (1998: 179)
Rolls’ reading of Tacey’s works is that Indigenous subjects and culture are constructed as dependent upon Jungian psychoanalysis and spiritualism, and thus a European model of subjectivity and change, in order for society to transform. What is important to my argument is the style of debate that took place within the journal. David Tacey refutes Rolls’ claims in the same volume of the journal. It is notable that Tacey draws attention to a gap between Rolls’ academic critique and his ‘spiritual’ position: a gap which is constructed as ‘almost insurmountable’:
135 The differences between my own intellectual position and his reductive or materialist worldview strike me as almost insurmountable. […] He asks how I can impose ‘alien’ archetypal structures upon Aboriginal culture, when the claim of archetypal theory is that it posits a universalising discourse in which no culture or time is alien to its theoretical structures. To materialists and social constructivists, my views appear antiquated, naïve, and out of touch. Rolls writes with the typically superior and higher position that is adopted by reductive thinkers who imagine themselves to be above the myth-making that they are attempting to deconstruct. Haven’t I heard that universals no longer exist, that archetypes are Eurocentric, that spirituality is a fraud, that essentials are out? Yes, I have heard these claims for many years now, over and over, and yet they do not appear convincing or valid to me. There is a traditional wisdom that is quite separate from our clever contemporary intellectualism. (1998: 189 My emphases)
Here, the spiritual is directly opposed to the material world. Interestingly, this is couched in an idea about Rolls’ academic position, which for Tacey connotes false superiority and a rejection of myth-making, ‘spirituality’ and ‘traditional wisdom.’ Rolls goes on to reject this assumption in the next edition of the journal. It seems that the difference of Rolls’ position is not able to be accommodated and validated by Tacey, and vice versa. Rather, the tone is condescending and irate, and here Rolls’ authority to speak on the subject is questioned. Significantly, Tacey identifies closely with the ‘traditional wisdom’ of universalist archetypal theory, while dismissing Rolls’ analysis as ‘contemporary.’ This signals a hierarchical positioning of a transcendent, cohesive narrative structure that is inclusive, pre-existent, eternal and stable, rather than fluctuant. As I will now discuss, the celebration of this narrative enables Tacey to suggest the dismantling of the secularism he associates with ‘intellectualism’ and rationality.
Tacey and Rolls’ debate does not conclude with Tacey’s refutation, as Rolls offered a rebuttal in the following edition of the Melbourne Journal of Politics. But the difficulty is not their differing perspectives. Rather, Tacey’s “spiritual” position, which is the outlook he uses to write about Australian society, is used to frame Rolls’ position as blinkered: “Apparently, it takes a spiritual awareness to see this spiritual process” (1998: 191). Indeed, I suggest that Tacey’s real concern is that Rolls’ critique appears to be, in opposition to the spiritual view, distastefully ‘secular.’
136 What is meant by the term ‘secular’ in this instance? The body of Tacey’s works on national transformation suggest that it is the apparent secularism of the Australian ‘national psyche’ to which he is opposed. He states: “It is only through […] risk and adventure that our culture can break out of the imprisoning secular mask that currently confines and limits it” (2000: 13). As I have stated, Tacey is not concerned with an overturning of Section 116 of the Constitution. Indeed, this political secularism nominally preserves the free exercise of any religion, and by extension ‘spirituality,’ without intervention by the State. Rather, Tacey’s secularism, which refers to a rational ‘national psyche’ that he argues needs to shift to a focus on myth and spirituality, also appears to involve the construction and subsequent silencing of ‘secular’ dissent, as we have seen in the debate with Rolls. As I discussed earlier with relation to Howard, current understandings of the Australian ‘psyche’ can be seen to valorise “ordinariness” and a retreat from “extra-ordinary” phenomena such as spirituality and religion (Sinclair 2004: 279). This ‘secular/ordinary’ national imaginary, to seize upon Sinclair’s demonstration of the complementarity of the terms, paradoxically includes the privileging and naturalization of a transcendent Judeo-Christian ‘monomorality,’ as I have demonstrated (Sinclair 2004:280). Ironically, then, Tacey’s secularism functions as both product and reinforcement of this imaginary, which is perhaps why he uses the metaphor of a mask in the quote above, suggesting that the spiritual/Judeo- Christian culture persists beneath a ‘secularism’ that is only a veneer. The ‘post-secular’ shift he desires is in this sense a functionary of the ‘secular ordinary’ national imaginary, which, as discussed earlier, mobilises the dominance of a Judeo-Christian monomorality and white, Anglo-Celtic culture. We can therefore understand that Rolls’ refusals to validate the ‘spiritual’ and to write from within that imaginary, but rather to comment on the sociopolitical implications of its construction, particularly with respect to Aboriginality, constitutes a site of ‘almost insurmountable’ difference.
Conclusion: Language, Politics and Spirituality
As we have seen in the case of Tacey’s work, other agendas can take place in the name of ‘spirituality,’ which may be viewed to have little to do with the benevolence and freedom the term connotes in contemporary associations with enrichment and reverence for life. In
137 her essay “The Politics of Spirituality: The Spirituality of Politics” Canadian cultural theorist Geraldine Finn discusses her reservations about the ways in which what she calls ‘postmodern spirituality’ is represented. She says that when ‘spirituality’ refers to an autonomous, benevolent realm that acts upon society, or the material realm, the results are politically conservative. This is because social agency is essentially removed from the sociopolitical sphere. She shows that this is the effect of a particular use of language:
I have always been uncomfortable with the language of spirituality and its tendency to ‘other-worldliness’ in particular; that is, with its presumption of and aspiration to a being- otherwise-than-being in and of the material world – to a being beyond ‘materialist interpretations’ […] The differentiation of ‘spirit’ from ‘matter’, for example, both mystifies and falsifies the complex reality of material being by splitting off from it its most creative and potentially subversive possibilities and effects and syphoning them off into and for some ‘transcendent’ space of other-worldliness, of the immaterial: of God, the soul and/or the human spirit. (1992: 159-60 Original emphases)
Finn’s discomfort is not with ‘spirituality’, however that might be configured, but with the language of spirituality that constructs an ‘other-world’ and thus eclipses the conditions that underpin its representation in the material world. Finn suggests that ‘spirituality’, when not seen as a product of the context in which it is produced, limits the agency and potential of life in the material realm. For Finn, the transplantation of material concerns into a discourse of ‘spirituality’ represents and reinforces the disempowerment of the sociopolitical sphere. Finn most particularly specifies ‘transcendence’ as the trope that effects the representation of the ‘spiritual’ as ‘other-worldly’ and thus outside of sociopolitical reality.
In this essay, Finn discusses the way in which ‘being’ is organised in modern culture as ‘being as’: this is an effect of categorical, sociopolitical identity features such as woman, man, Jew, Aboriginal. The subject cannot embody the categories of ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘white’ and so on fully, but only to a greater or lesser extent. For Finn, the experiences of excess and lack produced by the representations of ‘self’ that are offered by these categories are ineradicable, and indeed “the necessary and indispensable conditions of ec-stasy, creativity, change and critique” (163). Thus, rather than looking for an ‘other-world’ to
138 originate change, Finn situates agency in the space between text and context, personal and political, that is generated by experience of ‘being as.’ She refers to this as the ‘ethical space-between.’ Her ethics maintains space for transgression within the material context of cultural production. Finn shows that this enables an interrogation of the political status quo, which is not enabled by the transplantation of political concerns to an-other world that offers the illusion of “a better deal” but in effect reinforces the categories that are experienced as limiting in the material world (161).
Finn’s cogent argument is crucial to an understanding of the way in which Tacey’s representation of white, Anglo-Celtic people and culture as non-spiritual, and subsequent desire to remedy this through an abstracted notion of Indigenous ‘spirituality,’ can be read as unethical. This is because Tacey does not put whiteness and Aboriginality, as Geraldine Finn suggests, ‘into (the) question’ by historicizing and contextualizing – and in so doing particularizing – constructions of the spiritual. Hence, given Finn’s argument, Tacey’s work can be read as actively limiting identity and experience to these ‘categories’ and thereby enacting a neo-colonial position; whilst social agency is co-opted into the interests of spirituality, it is clear that a white, Anglo-Celtic subject is the beneficiary of the ‘spiritual revolution.’ By refusing to deconstruct and particularize these categories and the function of spirituality in relation to them, Tacey effectively closes off the ethical ‘space-between’ the socio-political category and its lived reality; and with it the opportunity for transgression and transformation that animates his argument. Here, national identity is staked on grounds that are fundamentally separate from the social and political reality of Australia’s ostensibly, and at least officially, multicultural and multifaith socius. This elision enables the privileging and naturalization of a white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity and imaginary which is asserted in spiritual terms by Tacey as a ‘grassroots value.’ The construction of this transcendent, hegemonic, unimpeachable realm or ‘other-world’ is central to the function of Australian secularism, which, in turn, is inextricably linked to the conflation of ‘ordinariness’ with a transcendent, white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity that is underpinned by a core Judeo-Christian monomorality.
Chapter Four also invokes the narrative of ‘spirituality’ in concert with the imagined, ‘secular ordinary’ nation and white Anglo-Celtic subject. Yet here I will draw on the spatialization of the ‘spiritual’ by offering a close analysis of Jane Campion’s Australian 139 film Holy Smoke (1999). This film was made at the end of the 1990s when a host of successful Australian features that represented the white, Anglo-Celtic family as kitsch, grotesque and stifling were released. Holy Smoke repeats this narrative, and yet is highly concerned with the place of religion/spirituality within the myth of suburban ordinariness and the mythology of the nation. It can also be seen to intersect with the narratives of the Australian desert that I discussed in relation to the Tourism Australia advertisement, in which the desert is produced as a space of ‘spirituality’ as well as loss, death and fear. The placing of the ‘spiritual’ within Holy Smoke intersects with the concerns I raised in Chapter Two about the differently ambivalent constructions of ‘religion’ as a foreign object in God on my Side and John Safran versus God, and the Gallipoli pilgrimage. In line with the arguments I made in Chapter Two, I suggest that in Holy Smoke spatial anxieties about ‘religion’ intersect with the imaginary of the ‘secular’ and ‘ordinary’ white, Anglo-Celtic subject. However, I am also focusing on narratives of grief and proleptic mourning, or anticipated grief, to suggest that Holy Smoke can be read as a text that sets in motion the question and ethical possibilities of ‘secular mourning.’ Here, constructions of space and patriarchy are central to the representation of negotiations of grief and loss within a ‘secular’ framework in which disruptions to the narrative of ‘secularism’ form significant disruptions to the structure of the ‘ordinary’ white, Anglo-Celtic nuclear family.
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141 - Interlude -
Figure 7: Watson, Jenny. House painting: Box Hill North (Small version) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1976. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 8: Watson, Jenny. House painting: Box Hill North (Large version) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1977. Reproduced with permission.
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143 CHAPTER FOUR
Secular Mourning: Spatial negotiations
I was born secular And inconsolable. I heard that he walked He walked the earth
God goes Where he wants And who knows Where he is not
Not in me - - - Jenny Lewis, “Born Secular”44
Jenny Watson is a contemporary Australian artist whose body of work is variously concerned with ideas of suburban orderliness and ordinariness. House Painting: Box Hill North (1976) and House Painting: Box Hill North (1977) are emblematic of this preoccupation. The paintings hang side by side in the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and are reproduced in the Interlude to this chapter. House Painting (1976) depicts an ‘ordinary’ suburban, 1950s styled home. The realism and suburban setting are qualified, and somewhat interrupted, by the self-referential words ‘103 Shannon Street Box Hill North’ painted across the middle. Arguably, the inclusion of the address affirms the house is one of many similar bungalows along a reasonably long ‘Shannon Street.’ Indeed, a second, equally neat, red tiled roof beside the main image suggests a street of similar homes. This reading is seductive because House Painting (1976) has a photograph-like verisimilitude established through the use of perspective and detailed brick chimney, tiled roofs, lush foliage and neat driveway. However, it is possible to
44 Lewis, Jenny. “Born Secular.” Rabbit Fur Coat. Team Love Records, 2006. 144 suggest that the neatness of the trimmed shrubs and precision of the clean, straight, white driveway hint at a myth of ‘perfection’ within the ‘suburban dream.’ Yet the verisimilitude is destabilized by the address emblazoned across the canvas, and by the second, much larger painting that renders the smaller, addressed image referential. The large, more abstract House Painting (1977), in its proximity but stylistic difference to House Painting (1976), renders both images a re-presentation rather than transparent reproduction of a ‘real’ house. In this way, the paintings’ shared title, House Painting, can be read as a descriptive verb that draws attention to the practice of artistic construction.
In its similarity and difference, House Painting (1977) invites a re-reading of the verisimilitude of House Painting (1976) such that it appears equally constructed and particular. House Painting (1977) is set across a grid, which in this reading acknowledges the practice of transposing an image. Rather than representing an execution of precise reproduction, the larger scale of House Painting (1977) blurs boundaries within the gridlines through ec-static continuities of colour and form. Here, gridlines paradoxically emphasize blurriness. The blocks of colour and lack of detail also produce an ironic sense of the singularity of the house in the image. This is intensified through an excess in representation that can be construed as a meditation on the excesses otherwise concealed in an ‘ordinary’ suburban imaginary. Thus House Painting (1977) appears a distortion that does not give a ‘closer’ look at the putative referent but perhaps unexpectedly suggests the futility and vanity of this reading practice. Yet this reading practice is not mistaken if we consider the levels of vraisemblance that render the smaller image referential, and which include the apparent precision of the smaller image, the nominal address, and for some viewers (and Google Streetviewers), knowledge that there is a Shannon Street, lined with mainly bungalows, in suburban Box Hill, Melbourne. However, I would like to suggest that meaning is made not between the lines, but at the lines. The gridlines signal the painterly geometry of re-production and re-presentation as gloriously artificial rather than an exercise in verisimilitude. Further, the line of the gallery wall between the images places them in parallel suggesting their incommensurability, despite their multiple points of convergence. In this way, the text forms the referent as a ruse.
Watson’s works are a productive starting point from which to begin discussion of Jane Campion’s multi-layered, jarring production of suburban Sydney life in her Australian film 145 Holy Smoke (1999). Images of suburban orderliness and an imaginary of ‘secular,’ ordinary banality constitute the narrative and visual imagery. Indeed, the film’s preoccupation with identifying the boundaries of narratives of nation, family, and mother-daughter relations sets in motion an interrogation of the distinctions between subjects through representations of space. However, the narrative diegesis is relatively straightforward. The film is focused on the journey of Ruth Barron, a young woman from Sydney, who travels to India and joins an ashram. Terrified at the loss of her daughter to ‘spiritual’ conversion, her mother Miriam travels to India to bring her home. Upon returning to Sydney, the project of ‘deprogramming’ Ruth from the cult takes place under the direction of a hired ‘cult exiter’ from America, P.J. Waters. The ‘deprogramming’ takes place in the Australian desert, where the norms of suburban, white, patriarchal heteronormativity are transgressed, and Ruth and P.J. engage in a sexual relationship. The climax of the film finds Ruth fleeing P.J. in the desert, and ends with her rescue, and Ruth and Miriam’s ameliorative relocation to India. I suggest that despite, indeed through, the film’s settings in India and the desert, Holy Smoke is preoccupied with the boundaries of the “secular ordinary Australian imaginary” (Sinclair 2004). This negotiation of boundaries between bodies and subjects in private and public spheres will animate the lines of debate in this chapter.
I will also discuss how the concept of mourning offers the possibility of reading Holy Smoke resistantly, and perhaps hesitantly, as a text preoccupied with the losses and violences that constitute the ‘secular,’ patriarchal heterosexual, procreative and biologically tied family. In her arresting analysis of links between mourning, politics and violence, Judith Butler argues that, “as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine” (2004: 26). This evocative description of relationality can be read as a concern that ‘haunts’ my analysis of Holy Smoke, in which I argue that images of space and characterization are inextricably linked such that boundaries between subjects are made processually, hesitantly and never completely. Further, by considering the effects of the ‘spiritual’ within the narrative diegesis, which intersects with grief within the mother- daughter relation, strong links between secularism, patriarchy and loss are thrown into sharp relief. Hence, contrary to an other-worldly ‘way out’ of political debates and responsibilities, I argue that the ‘spiritual’ mobilises a reading of a contingent politics of mourning that is underpinned by not knowing, and hence negotiating, the limits and boundaries of social and private spaces. I turn firstly to a discussion of the generic 146 boundaries Holy Smoke blurs and draws from, before situating my analysis within the rubric of spatial analysis and mourning.
Mourning genre
Holy Smoke crosses and draws from multiple genres, suggesting its “undecidability of tone” (Polan 2001: 128). It has been catalogued as a “grotesque comedy,” “familial grotesque,” and “landscape film” (Collins 2002; Collins & Davis 2004; Gillett 2000). 45 Perhaps it is because Holy Smoke crosses genres that it retains an undecidable quality, which is reflected in a range of broadly negative reviews and high praise from critics (Bruzzi 2000; Murphy 2000; Gritten 2000). Despite starring Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel, who are both well known actors and celebrities, it did not attract large audiences (Collins 2002; Hopgood 2002). In addition to its points of convergence with a range of genres, Holy Smoke portrays twin storylines that are collapsed together through setting. Many readings of Holy Smoke have focused on Ruth’s ‘spiritual’ journey (Collins 2002; Gillett 2000; McHugh 2007; Polan 2001; Murphy 2000) which is set within India and the Australian desert. Yet I suggest this storyline is complicated and undercut by the mother- daughter relation that pervades each of these settings and which animates the narrative diegesis. Indeed, Felicity Collins describes the mother-daughter relationship as a dyad “mostly overlooked” in Holy Smoke and in Australian women’s films generally (2002: 23). By highlighting this relation it is possible to cast suspicion on narratives of India and the desert as wholly and unproblematically ‘spiritual’ sites. That is, I suggest that the ‘spiritual’
45 A further available reading strategy for this text is within the genre of “literary cinema.” Ken Gelder offers a detailed analysis of the translation from literature to screen that shapes and intensifies meanings in The Piano, for instance. Certainly, Jane Campion’s oeuvre is highly literary: The Portrait of a Lady (1996) was based on Henry James’ novel, In The Cut (2003) was based on Susanna Moore’s crime thriller, and in what suggests an ongoing concern with literature both on and offscreen, Campion is currently making Bright Star, based on the life of poet John Keats. Holy Smoke was published as a novel by co-authors Jane and Anna Campion, who also wrote the film’s screenplay and so it perhaps lends itself to a generic reading of literary and cinematic intertextualities within this framework. However, the purpose for studying Holy Smoke in this study is its representation of cultural narratives of secularism, subjectivity and space, alongside grief and loss. Thus, the film sets in motion questions that are not effectively explored through an appended study of the novelistic version, for which there is not sufficient space within the limits of this analysis. For a reading of Campion’s “literary cinema,” see: Gelder, Ken. “Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema.” Adaptations: Novel to Cinema, Cinema to Novel. Eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. 157-71; Campion, Anna and Jane Campion. Holy Smoke: A Novel. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999. 147 functions as a trope that risks eclipsing the narratives of loss and mourning that are set in motion through disruption to the ‘secular,’ ‘ordinary’ white, Anglo-Celtic suburban patriarchal family.
Felicity Collins and Therese Davis describe Holy Smoke as a “suburban grotesque […] revived and transported to the outback” (2004: 77). Given the kitsch excesses, banality and xenophobia of the Barron family this is a compelling reading, but I would like to augment it to suggest that a suburban imaginary is projected onto rather than transported to the outback. Collins and Davis note, “it is as if the characters who journey into the outback are held captive by a secular modernity which allows the nation to continue to deny native title” (2004: 83). Extrapolating from Collins and Davis, I suggest the outback is constructed as a white possession the characters ‘freely’ access, and upon which a suburban, secular ordinary imaginary is projected that casts the outback as a ‘spiritual’ or ‘extraordinary’ space. Given the depoliticization of the spiritual I discussed in the previous chapter, it is possible that the denial of native title is enacted through the construction of the ‘spirituality’ of the space. This would imply the secular modernity of ‘ordinary’ suburbia and the metropolis is secured through opposition to an imagined, mythic, and dehistoricized outback. Within this context, Collins and Davis argue further that 1999 through to 2001 saw a dramatic increase in landscape, ‘Indigenous-settler films,’ in which they ambivalently include Holy Smoke:
For us, the landscape films of the 1990s provoke shocks of recognition of a continent which has been anything but the sublime void of European projections. Rather, there is now a popular awareness that the continent has been written over by Indigenous languages, songlines, dreaming stories and Law for 40 000 years or more. Since the Mabo decision at least, the image of the outback landscape in cinema provokes recognition of historical amnesia (rather than an unknowable, sublime, interior void) as the founding structure of settler Australia’s myths of belonging. (2004: 76 Original parentheses)
Holy Smoke stages its narrative progress in a dehistoricized outback, which perhaps references the historical amnesia to which Collins and Davis refer, but which also functions, problematically, as a spatial trope through which the mythology of the secular, suburban patriarchal family that imagines the desert as a ‘void’ is interrogated. As this
148 chapter progresses I will discuss how Holy Smoke’s desert functions as a site where the boundaries, limitations and conceits of a secular, white, ‘ordinary’ imaginary are opened to negotiation. It is possible to suggest that aftershock is registered here through a focus on the complicity of white women in a secularism and patriarchy that disavows Others. Thus whilst ‘aftershock’ refers to the emotional and political affects and effects of the influential 1992 Mabo vs Queensland decision, which was a political and legal landmark in recognizing the prior and ongoing ownership of the land by Indigenous peoples, the film both repeats the disavowal of Indigenous land and country and invokes critique of the gender politics of white possession.
Representations of the landscape and suspicion toward a dreadful, white Anglo-Celtic urban family were common themes in popular mainstream 1990s Australian cinema. Holy Smoke was released in 1999, toward the end of what might be described as a peak in the Australian film industry’s success both nationally and internationally when Strictly Ballroom (1992), Muriel’s Wedding (1994), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Babe (1995), and The Castle (1997) received a great deal of attention and praise. Despite the more recent successes of the postcolonialist drama Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and outback thriller Wolf Creek (2005), for instance, the broadly positive reception of the mainstream 1990s films has not been since repeated. As in Holy Smoke, each of the 1990s films similarly construct white, Anglo-Celtic Australian families as kitsch, grotesque and somewhat comical. In her study of representations of suburbia in Australian cinema, Rochelle Siemienowicz describes this construction of the family as, “critical, dismissive of the family, and sceptical of the ability for happiness to be found in the ordinariness of suburban existence” (1999: 50). This can certainly be seen to be the case in Holy Smoke given the closure that happily unites the mother and daughter and that leaves the family structure irrevocably broken. This theme is repeated flamboyantly in Priscilla. Although Priscilla involves the travels of a trio of drag queens from Sydney through country New South Wales and the desert to Alice Springs, its plot is arguably driven by anxiety and mourning for the losses associated with the hegemonic reach of the suburban family myth, which is produced in a flashback that haunts the narrative’s progress. That is, conformity to the patriarchal, procreative and biologically tied heterosexual suburban family forms a spectral insistence through grief and loss. Muriel’s Wedding is focused upon a desire for marriage constructed as comical and horrific. Here, marriage can be read as a repeated, 149 ghastly artifice that is always already hopeless, and shaped by infidelities and suicide. In The Castle, which also includes a marriage, the simple-minded family is represented as obsessively delighted by mass culture, kitsch objects bought on sale and half-baked home renovations. In kind with this theme, Holy Smoke also includes a wedding scene. However, the wedded couple is depicted in the background, out of focus, and external to the action and somewhat out of place at Sydney’s international airport. They are unremarked upon. This inclusion sets the scene for the film’s spatial and narratival critique of patriarchy, and might also be seen as a subversive nod to the obsession with weddings and family in mainline 1990s Australian cinema.
It is possible to suggest that the family in Holy Smoke is held captive by both the ‘secular modernity’ Collins and Davis describe but that they also represent and enact a fear of loss that underpins the mother-daughter relation in particular. Here, loss is mostly imagined and anticipated, and a source of panic. The prospect of ‘losing’ Ruth to the ashram provokes a panic in Miriam which is manifested in her concoction of a strategic lie to tell Ruth (Kate Winslet) that her father, Gilbert, is dying of a stroke and wants to see her. Thus, in panic at the idea of losing Ruth, Miriam plans to stage the impending loss of her husband. Imagined losses mount up as Miriam attempts to avoid loss of the child she calls her “golden girl” and secure Ruth’s place within the secular imaginary and space of Australia that she appears to have exited. That is, Miriam appears desperate for the maintenance of suburban patriarchal ‘secular’ ordinariness. Yet, Miriam’s lie doesn’t succeed in enticing Ruth back to India. In anger she snaps at Ruth, “You do exactly as you please. Don’t let our deaths inconvenience you!” The inclusive possessive pronoun suggests a radial nexus of imagined losses that include the pretended death of Gilbert and the possible death of the family. It is perhaps plausible that the use of the possessive suggests a panicked sensation that the family has come to ‘own’ and thus experience death, and is possessed by the promise of deaths. Judith Butler suggests that fear of grief can be animated through disavowal of loss.
When grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse of resolving it too quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly (2004: 29-30).
150
Miriam’s battle against the loss of Ruth, and the associated compensatory loss of Gilbert, can be seen as violences that attempt to restore the former order of the family’s ‘ordinary’ identity. Importantly, and as Butler highlights, this putative ordinariness is also a fantasy that imposes orderliness on the past from a position of fear in the present. The grief-stricken ruse of orderliness can be paralleled with the unlikely cleanliness and neatness of the white driveway that draws the viewer’s eyes past trim, orderly shrubbery in Jenny Watson’s critique of suburban ordinariness in House Painting (1976). Miriam’s plan to ensnare Ruth, and anger that Ruth is not motivated to visit her father before he dies intensifies Miriam’s panic. However, during before an opportunity to meet Ruth’s guru, Baba, Miriam comes close to death by a severe asthma attack. The attack causes Ruth to accompany her home to Sydney. In this reading, Miriam’s asthma attack signals her anxiety about Otherness. This is signalled when she arrives in Delhi wearing a white handkerchief over her mouth, tries not to touch anything, and voices fears about sanitation. She drinks water with the handkerchief between her lips and the bottle, and uses her asthma spray frequently. Through the asthma attack, the dissolution of her resolutely patrolled corporeal boundaries enables her to avoid meeting Baba and return to Australia with Ruth. When the two women board the plane Miriam whispers from the stretcher, “Thank God it’s Qantas,” to which Ruth rolls her eyes. Here, gratitude and devotion to Australian things, and it is perhaps worthwhile mentioning that Qantas airline’s advertising slogan is The Spirit of Australia (2009), ironically emphasizes Miriam’s extraordinary commitment to the fantasy of a ‘secular,’ ordinary, Australian order of things.
In her study of mourning and cinema, Alessia Ricciardi identifies the genre of ‘spectral cinema.’ Ricciardi describes a process of cinematic mourning that is not an aspect of story resolved at closure, but inherent to structure and hence enigmatic, almost unnameable, and suspicious of closure (2003). I draw from this suggestive modelling of genre to suggest that the mother-daughter relationship central to Holy Smoke’s diegesis and closure forms a spectral presence which enacts processes of mourning and hence refuses to privilege the text’s closure as a site of ‘resolution.’ This invites analysis of spatial tropes and structure rather than story and sets in motion questions about the processual negotiation of relationality. In order to destabilise the dominant understanding of mourning as that which follows loss, I also draw from Tanya Dalziell’s insistence upon an ethics of “proleptic 151 mourning” that acknowledges loss both before and after the event (2005: 53). Here, negotiations of loss form vitalising agencies, tensions and alterities in relationships produced through imagined and actual losses (2005: 53). Hence, rather than focusing on linear narratives of loss followed by mourning, drawing from Dalziell and Ricciardi I suggest spectral cinema allows consideration of how settings and narrative framing wrest with mourning as a negotiated facet of relationality. In this way, it is possible to suggest that Holy Smoke is a mediation and meditation on the subjective negotiation of loss.
Although the anticipated losses in Holy Smoke are revealed as threats and ruses, they work to refocus the question of boundaries between ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ spaces through attention to identity and subjectivity. Hence, I argue for a broader, structural loss around which the anticipated narrative losses pivot. Rather than imagining the characters as fully resolved entities and identities simply travelling through ‘space’ and ‘place,’ there is a sense in which they are made through the particularities of place, and that this process destabilises concepts of resolved intersubjective and spatial borders and boundaries, and perhaps accounts for anxiety about gaps and losses so palpably expressed by Miriam. Secular mourning forms a concept with which to explore this rich and complicated nexus, and a point of departure from narratives of ‘secularism’ that are attached to essentialist notions of ‘religion’ or ‘neutrality.’ Rather, secular mourning signals a mode of critique that draws together representations of spirituality/religion, subjective and cultural space, identity, and familial relationality to draw attention to the need to address modes of ‘secular’ conceit obliquely, through contingencies that furnish and invisiblize secular privilege. This evades the presupposition of transcendent, consensual realities from which the ‘secular’ might be imagined and represented and complicates monolithic constructions of ‘secularism,’ ‘religion,’ and/or ‘the spiritual.’ I will firstly place these arguments within a broader discussion of the spatial narratives that set in motion the text’s conceptions of loss, which I will expand in the latter half of the chapter. I now contextualize the narrative of the spiritual as a trope that situates and emphasizes the apparent ‘ordinariness’ of imagined white, Anglo-Celtic suburban everyday life.
152 Locating spirituality
In Sans Souci, as the place was called, they said the people were as rough as grass. - - - Dionne Brand46
Despite its preoccupations with familial relationships and representations of national, suburban and outback space Holy Smoke appears at first blush to be a film about spirituality. It is therefore useful to consider more closely the representations of the spiritual that I will later argue form tropes that enable critique of dominant, secular ordinary, patriarchal, white Anglo-Celtic subjectivities and conceits. The film’s prologue is set in Delhi, India, where Ruth is on holiday with a neighbour from Sydney, Prue. The ‘spiritual’ conversion situates Ruth in a group of chanting Western tourists where she is approached and touched by Baba. The touching becomes a magic realist profusion of pink and yellow butterflies and lotus flowers swirling around her body and her awakened, blinking third eye, which sheds a single, diamond tear. This luscious and kitsch moment, or in Stella Bruzzi’s terms, “garish, hypnotic Pierre et Gillesesque sequence” (Bruzzi 2000), is interrupted by Prue’s thick Australian accent protesting in vain, “No thanks mate, no, no mate, no thanks mate,” and occurs just after Neil Diamond’s pop ballad Holly Holy has finished playing. These interruptions arguably emphasize the Western touristic context of the ‘spiritual’ conversion. This reading is supported by representations of Baba within a late capitalist commodification of the ‘spiritual’ in Western tourist markets. Outside the ashram kitsch ‘Baba’ souvenirs are available for sale, including small make-up mirrors with his image on the back. Nearby, tourists pay to pose with a stand-in “fake holy man” for photographs. The placing of the guru within the discourse of tourism is emphasized when Prue explains to Ruth’s parents Miriam and Gilbert back in suburban Sydney, “We were just like everyone else travelling through India. We wanted to see a live guru.” The banality of this desire is further emphasized in a close-up of the iconic Lonely Planet guidebook Ruth and Prue read as they approach the ashram, which suggests they are following a generic tourist trail. Kathleen McHugh describes this structuring of spiritual experience as
46 Brand, Dionne. Sans Souci and other stories by Dionne Brand. Stratford, Ontario: Williams-Wallace, 1988. p. 1. 153 “[c]ombining the comic with the cosmic” (2007: 112). However, the comedy darkens when Prue explains that Ruth burned her return ticket to Sydney, and in her panic Miriam plots to ensnare Ruth home. At this point mundane, ‘secular’ suburban family life, marked by “tastelessness” and “triviality,” (Polan 2001: 148) is constructed as fundamentally threatened by the imposition of the ‘extraordinary.’ Here, the narrative and setting strongly resonate with Judith Kapferer’s description of dominant Australian ideology in which “the suburbs, haunts of women and children, are both trivial (or trivialized) and banal” (1996: 102 Original parentheses). Indeed, the ‘spiritual’ functions to fracture both the banality of ‘secular’ suburban life and the patriarchal structure that secures Ruth and Miriam’s places within it.
‘Spiritual’ tropes and motifs in Holy Smoke emphasize the tensions of a constructed ‘secular’ ordinary imaginary that reifies and essentializes ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ as extraordinary threats to dominant myths of the suburban, subjective, and national. This is established early in the film when the white, middle class, Anglo-Celtic Australian Barron family are depicted at home in the suburb of Sans Souci. Incidentally, ‘Sans Souci’ translates to ‘without care,’ which is ironic given that although the Barron family frequently appear ‘laid back’ in summer clothes, drinking beer and making sarcastic jokes, their anxieties, which are perhaps registered in these repetitive activities, become palpable in the progress of the film. Their home is visually represented in what might be described as a cinematic analogue to the work of Watson’s paintings. A high shot over the neighbourhood reveals a row of houses with whitewash walls in 1950s brick-and-tile style. Before the camera zooms down into the Barron’s home, the linearity of the street is established through this high, wide shot. The orderliness of this “monotonous grid of shadowless streets and identical, ticky-tacky houses” (Murphy 2000: 33) is further established by the equidistant driveways and rows of similar houses and lawns, divided by a neat footpath mirrored on each side of the street. Each house is red roofed, not unlike House Painting, and has a wheelie bin placed on the nature strip. Despite the actual heterogeneity that does comprise suburban metropolises in Australia, I suggest that these images emphasize the broad scope of a hegemonic ‘secular’ ordinary imaginary aligned with and mapped onto the white, Anglo-Celtic subject and patriarchy, which makes and excludes Others. Indeed, we find the orderliness and ordinariness of this setting are exaggerated and undermined as we
154 take a ‘closer look’ and find the family anxious, xenophobic, and aggressive toward modes of difference.
The alterity of the ‘spiritual’ is represented and linked with narratives of whiteness and nation when Prue arrives at the Barron’s home with a photograph of Ruth in a sari. Gilbert, who is depicted as an aging, large bellied body, wears only a Speedo bathing suit and drinks beer by the mantle piece, which perhaps supports a reading of the film within the genre of the familial grotesque. He does not recognise Ruth in the image. Miriam takes the photograph and, also blank faced, asks, “What am I looking at here Prue?” Prue urgently tells them, “Ruth! It’s Ruth!” to which Gilbert replies, “Oh, yes I can see that now. She’s wearing the national dress.” Here, the sari is established as a garment that signals nation, and that signals Otherness not readily legible to the ‘Australian’ (white, Anglo-Celtic) reader. Here, the sari is constructed as a referent to an-Other space that seems so radically different the wearer is unrecognisable as a member of the white, secular, suburban family, and, presumably, of Australian society. Here, the constructed difference of the sari can be read as a refusal to acknowledge the multicultural heterogeneity that comprises Australian culture, society, communities and families, which is elided in the assumption of a self- same, homogenous white, Anglo-Celtic imaginary. In their fear of difference, and of the ‘spiritual’ conversion Prue describes, the Barron family appear to represent “a staunchly secular view of Australian interiority” (Collins & Davis 2004: 87). ‘Australian interiority’ arguably refers here to both white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity construed as spiritually ‘lacking’ in the way in which David Tacey describes and which I critiqued in the previous chapter, and constructions of white ‘Australian-ness’ in concert with a ‘secular’ ordinary national imaginary. A connection between ‘secular’ ordinariness and whiteness is emphasized when Ruth suggests that racist xenophobia caused her parents’ lack of acceptance of her place in the ashram. She says her mother, “thinks I’m going to live in India, marry Baba and commit group suicide. She and Dad hate Indians. You know; dark people.” Here, the whiteness associated with imagined ‘ordinary’ suburban life is made through a reified and racist elision and suspicion of non-white identities.
In comparison to the mundanity and uniformity of constructed ‘white,’ ‘secular’ suburbia, the desert where Ruth is exiled with P.J. during the ‘deprogramming’ is rich with colour and appears vast in scope. Indeed, the desert cinematography has been described as 155 mythic, divine and sensual: “Campion paints her exteriors with great sweeps of hurtfully blue sky and red-ocher earth, drowning all in palpable, pure light; you feel you’ve been transported to some great offworld stage where gods might clash or mate” (Murphy 2000: 35). This reading of divinity and sensuality is echoed by reviewer Janet Maslin who describes the scenery as “bathed in divine light” with “a sensual allure” (Maslin 1999). Importantly, Murphy describes this setting as ‘offworld,’ suggesting an-other realm divorced from the realities, banalities and politics of the social and material, whilst also suggesting an embodied, sensual register. Jane Campion reinforces this reading of a ‘spiritual,’ mythic and sensual quality to the desert in an interview about Holy Smoke:
Australia’s desert thing is, well, the centre of Australia is [the] spiritual, mystical heart of Australia, and I think anybody knows that, anybody senses that, that somewhere out there deep behind them is their spiritual metaphorical self. That big, deep, red heart that one day they may need to go up there and claim it. (1999)
Here, the metaphor of the heart as an emotional and spiritual centre is coupled with geographic placements and journeying, as well as embodied sensuality. This echoes David Tacey’s construction of a spiritual archetype in the expression of a metaphorical “self” or essence that awaits claim. Campion’s reference to a ‘mystical heart’ is reinforced by Anne McGrath’s study of outback mythology, in which she characterizes Uluru as “Australia’s geographic and spiritual or emotional centre” (1991: 115). This is also suggested by Roslynn Haynes’ aptly named study Seeking The Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film in which Uluru is described as having multiple ‘spiritual’ significances in a diversity of international, national, and local Indigenous and non- Indigenous communities (1998: 261-80). I am interested, however, not in the specific qualities of the desert and its formations that might animate and motivate desire for the ‘red centre’ or ‘desert heart,’ but instead the conditions and cultural politics that produce this question of an outback mystical void at/as the heart of the (white) subject. This heart is narrated by Campion in the language of ownership: a metaphorical heart claim resonant with a land claim. Hence, there is a sense in which the projection of the ‘spiritual’ onto the desert performs ideological work that construes the outback as a lost mythic white possession.
156 Not long before Holy Smoke was made, film studies academic Ross Gibson argued that, “mainstream film-makers, audiences and critics in Australia are currently under the spell of some spirit of the land” (1993: 210). He links this ‘spell’ with whiteness:
To white sensibility most of Australia is empty space, devoid of inhabitants, architecture, artefacts. It hasn’t been incorporated into the symbolic order, except as a signifier of emptiness, a cultural tabula rasa, a sublime structuring void louring over all Australian culture. (210-1)
This expansive imaginary possesses ‘all’ Australian culture and space. Here, the notion of a cohesive, core culture organised through the politics of hegemonic whiteness is constructed and reinforced. A tabula rasa or ‘blank slate’ resonates strongly with the colonial ideology of terra nullius, or empty land. Gibson’s article discusses trends in Australian landscape cinema that he argues asserts the land as a protagonist with diagetic agency, rather than as a ‘mere’ backdrop to human character development. He links this practice, in stark contrast to Felicity Collins’ and Therese Davis’ post-Mabo analysis, to the persistence of a ‘sublime’ dehistoricized desert space and imaginary. Hence, Gibson both reinforces and questions the asociality rather than sociality of the desert. Through Gibson’s detailing of the imagined absence of inhabitants, architecture and artefacts, the desert is produced as timeless space. In this light, it is useful to consider Maureen Perkins’ important book The Reform of Time, which argues that figurations of the outback as timeless were and are continuous with constructions of Indigenous culture as timeless and outside history in colonial ideologies invested in the appropriation of Indigenous lands (2001: 94-100). Perkins argues that, by contrast, narratives of progress are associated with the urban metropolis and whiteness (96). Hence timelessness is closely linked with disavowal figured as an unnameable void, whilst time and progress are linked to the city and whiteness. In order to bring a further layer of complexity to this iteration of space-time, I would like to return briefly to Chapter One of this study where I noted Benedict Anderson’s use of Walter Benjamin’s concept of imagined “homogenous empty time” associated with progress, and in opposition to eternity (Anderson 2006: 70-1). If I can risk a creative misreading, it is possible to suggest that “homogenous empty time” erases histories of imposed timelessness from the narrative history of the secular. That is, in binding the secular to time, time-spaces of disavowal and erasure are simultaneously enacted and
157 potentially foreclosed from critique. Yet at the same time, ‘homogenous empty time’ might be read in light of Perkins’ critique and Gibson’s invocation of the desert void as a secular haunting in which timelessness-emptiness is represented semantically within the possessive logic of science, orderliness, and cataloguing that makes coloniality. Hence, ‘homogenous empty time’ can be read in this historicized and ideological sense as an oxymoronic reflexion of possessive violence.
I raise the subject, or in this case spectre, of time in my reading of Gibson to draw attention to the (erasure of) sociality and historicity of space in his description of the desert. This attention to temporality resists arguments that spaces are essentially ‘timeless’ or defined by narratives of their contents. Gibson is clear that the timelessness of the void signals its sublimity. Given that Collins and Davis suggest Holy Smoke both repeats and evades a representation of the desert as a sublime ‘void,’ it is instructive to briefly devote some attention to the concept of sublimity. Lynn Poland offers a useful critical and semiotic reading of the sublime in which she narrates the mutually constitutive intertwining of affect with rationality.47 She argues that the terror of imagined imminent dissolution of the self in the production of sublime feeling effectively reinforces the centrality and agency of the (white European middle class heterosexual male) rational subject.
There is, in other words, something gratuitous about the scene of the sublime: a fantasy of injury, an imagined terror, so that the existence and nature of the transcendent order that one already knows can be affectively confirmed. It is as though the crisis has been staged so that Reason can arrive in aid; it provides Reason an occasion for its self-recognition. (1992: 180)
47 There is a wealth of writing on the sublime, including the ‘standard’ texts written by Longinus, British Enlightenment scholar Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, as well as recent critiques by Terry Eagleton, John Jervis, and Peter de Bolla that situate the sublime within discourses of theology, and feminist re-readings of sublimity and monstrosity such as Joanna Zylinska’s On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared. I offer Lynn Poland’s cogent critique of the sublime, which she links to discourses of affect and the divine, as a point of entry into these debates that is useful to situate the masculinist conceits attendant to the dominant discourse of the sublime, as well as Poland’s attention to the centrality of affect given the interests of this thesis. Selected key texts that theorise the sublime include: Longinus. On The Sublime. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964; Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Garland, 1971; Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987; de Bolla, Peter. The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; Jervis, John. Exploring the Modern: Patterns of western culture and civilization. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998; Zylinska, Joanna. On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The feminine and the sublime. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001; Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Ideas of Otherness. London; New York: Routledge, 2003; Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 158
For Poland, a self-justifying regime of rationality requires imagined terrors and fantasies of the obliterated self. Poland’s reading of the sublime supports the suggestion that sublime terror is not a ‘natural’ or ‘innate’ response to wide open spaces, great heights, or conceptual vastness, but a social relation to space in accordance with hegemonic norms. Here, the privileging of reason is repetitively risked and rewarded through fantasies of terror that are not reducible to the ‘real’ site of enunciation but to culturally constructed narratives of what makes unreason overwhelming. If we transpose this formulation of the sublime to Gibson’s discussion of the Australian desert, figured as an uninhabited cultural vacuum or ‘sublime structuring void,’ it is perhaps the crisis of timelessness that is momentarily sacrificed and then regained. That is, by bringing the colonial ideology Perkins identifies to bear on Gibson’s description of the desert, in concert with Poland’s affective and imaginative reading of sublimity, the sublime desert can be read as a trope that repeatedly stages the desert as erasure in order to reassert progress, whiteness, and possession. Hence sublimity, terror, and spaces of erasure can be situated historically and politically. Thus I am suggesting that there are significant possibilities in resisting readings of space concerned with its apparent phenomenological ‘contents’ and that cultural constructions of spatiality enable critique of ideological appropriations and disavowals. In this way, the production of the ‘sublime’ desert can be interpreted within the terms of a specific cultural and geopolitical imaginary. By extrapolation, it is possible to suggest that Jane Campion’s construction of a ‘spiritual’ ‘offworld’ desert is inextricably linked to the secular, ordinary banality of the white, Anglo-Celtic, ‘lacking’ subject represented and mythologised within the text. With this in mind, I would now like to consider the construction of India in Holy Smoke.
Spiritualizing India
‘The spiritual’ is projected onto an image of touristic India in Holy Smoke, and, not unlike the desert I have just described, this reified image can be read as emblematic of constructions of Australian ‘secular’ national space and identity made through the production of a religious/spiritual Other. The ‘spirituality’ of India, and I emphasize that this is a narrative effect rather than a ‘fact’ of Indian sociality, is reinforced most explicitly 159 through the narrative framing of Holy Smoke. Delhi and Jaipur form the film’s respective prologue and epilogue. They are positioned outside character development and instead function as points of origin and closure. This petrification is reinforced by the use of tacky ‘spiritual’ motifs and commodities in the prologue, whilst the epilogue emphasizes an apparent resolution to the mother-daughter nexus of loss rather than the ‘spiritual,’ which I will discuss further as the chapter progresses. These depictions of India are produced through vivid imagery. Kathleen Murphy notes, “Campion plunges you into a Westerner’s passage through an India so alive with color, movement, aromas, food, smoke and flesh that you feel you’ve been dropped into some earthly paradise” (2000: 32). For Murphy, this constructed ‘paradise is unmistakeably self-referential in its connections with Western-ness. Indeed, the imagery lasts as long as the live version of Diamond’s Holly Holy.
This visceral, visual and aural representation of an exalted spiritual ‘India’ can be read in terms of Edward Said’s famous thesis that the West conceives of ‘the East’ through colonizing, Orientalist lenses that exoticize ‘Eastern’ cultures, societies, subjects and practices and, further, moulding the colonized within a self-same, self-serving image (1978). Said makes the crucial argument that Orientalism organises Western self-definition through reification, rather than an ‘objective’ description of what might constitute ‘the East.’ By constructing ‘India’ as a reified ‘spiritual’ origin and destination, in contrast to the complicated negotiations and intimacies of suburban Sydney and the mythic desert, Holy Smoke arguably repeats the West/East binary structurally and thematically. However, through its production of embodied subjective experience and self-reflective, ironic pop music, props and imagery within these representations, it is possible that this binary is repeated, re-presented and ironised. That is, the representation of the ashram is sent up as a Western fetishistic imaginary through the reflexive images of the women’s Lonely Planet guidebook and Neil Diamond song. This suggests a porosity of boundaries in which reified narratives of Western-ness are transposed on to an equally reified East such that the conceits of national identity and cohesion are ironised. Although she situates her study of Holy Smoke in terms of Ruth’s personal journey, Sue Gillett’s argument that the film “actively deconstructs the concepts of both home and nation” (Gillett 2000: 3) is a particularly useful summary of this construction.
160 This porosity of boundaries is perhaps paradoxically echoed in a recent critique of Said’s analysis of Orientalist discourse. Harry Oldmeadow argues that Said enacts the seepage of ‘religion’ into analysis through his Protestant background (Oldmeadow 2005). For Oldmeadow, Said’s views are staunchly ‘secular’ yet are informed by an understated Protestantism and are therefore ill equipped to attend to the vicissitudes of non-Christian religions and engagements between religious communities and doctrines (2005). Certainly, in his work “Secular Criticism” Said states,
For the critic, the challenge of this secular world is that it is not reducible to an explanatory or originating theory, much less to a collection of cultural generalities. There are instead a small number of perhaps unexpected characteristics of worldliness that play a role in making sense of textual experience, among them filiation and affiliation, the body and the senses of sight and hearing, repetition, and the sheer heterogeneity of detail. (Said 1983: 27)
Said resists an overarching, transcendent theory with which to conduct cultural and textual criticism, which can be seen to include static, essentialist conceptions of religion. Indeed, his secularism appears to refer to a production of ‘worldliness’ and particularity in contradistinction to the extra-worldly and extra-corporeal. Oldmeadow’s research reveals a strong interest and background in transnational religious dialogue, but I will suggest that he tends to presuppose a chasm between secular and religious positions:
Scholars committed to an essentially modem, Western, a-religious world view (which, with respect to religion itself, might be hostile, indifferent or vaguely ‘tolerant’ but which, from a religious viewpoint, will necessarily be reductionistic) are thereby disqualified from the deepest understanding of the spiritual impulses which motivate men and women who immerse themselves in the doctrines and practices of alien religious traditions. (Oldmeadow 2005: 141 Original emphasis and parentheses)
Oldmeadow’s, of course, can be read as a reductionist positioning of secularism. By constructing ‘reductionist’ secularism as essentially a-religious and Western, heterogeneity is marginalized in favour of an imagined, cohesive, ‘Western’ non-religious position. I would also like to point out that Oldmeadow’s logic might be described as cum hoc ergo propter hoc in his suggestion that a ‘secular’ position automatically produces a specific result in cultural criticism; this assumes continuities between positions rather than 161 heterogeneity and thus multiple, different, perhaps embodied secularisms.48 The tension Oldmeadow establishes between his view and Said’s secularism are productive for considerations of the alterity and incommensurability of positions, however I argue that this needs to be approached through a nuanced position that takes contingencies into account and allows for heterogeneity. Thus, whilst Said’s secular criticism can be taken further to consider the co-constitutive function of the religious-secular ‘binary’ in specific contexts, it is important to note that Said is clear about the importance of acknowledging bodies, sensoriality, and “the sheer heterogeneity of detail” (Said 1983: 27). This arguably maintains attention to the alterity embedded in and dynamic within criticism, which impacts upon the ways in which iterations of the religious and secular are imagined and produced.
Oldmeadow’s critique of Saidian Orientalism helps us draw attention to the meta- theoretical and sociopolitical implications of assuming a position within debates about secularisms. This is reinforced more recently by Vincent Pecora, who argues that ‘secular’ critics and societies paradoxically reinforce and utilise ‘Judeo-Christian’ moral codes and assumptions (Pecora 2006: 1-2). Hence, Pecora argues it is impossible to stand outside the conceits of the secular, given that language is not ‘neutral’ but interested and historically linked to modes of religiosity (1). He writes,
secularism, in constantly redefining and reenergizing itself by reference to outworn religious traditions, is finally a way of preserving, at a more rarified and rationally persuasive level of awareness, precisely what it seeks to destroy. (20)
Yet what is signified by ‘it’ in this compelling description of secularism’s tragedy? Pecora’s secularism resembles a failed attempt to obliterate that which is defined as religion
48 By way of example, it is useful to note here the differences of Indian secularism to the Australian construction and narrative I have been outlining. Devleena Ghosh describes Indian secularism as a mode of “principled distance” in which “respectful hostility” between religious communities is negotiated. Here, “religions are allowed public space” and this is reinforced structurally by the inclusion of a range of religious public holidays observed across the nation. Ghosh, Devleena. “Secularism and its Discontents: The Shah Bono case.” Not Another Hijab Row: New conversations on gender, race, religion and the making of communities. Unpublished conference paper. 9-10 Dec 2006. University of Technology Sydney: Sydney. See also Ashis Nandy’s discussion of the need for new concepts and possibilities in conceptions of secularism and the public sphere in India for further analysis of the particularities of Indian secularisms. Nandy, Ashis. “Closing the Debate on Secularism: A Personal Statement.” The Crisis of Secularism in India. Eds. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. Eds. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 107-17. 162 from modes of sociality, language, embodiment, imagination and space. However, within the logic of his argument the obliteration of religion would also enact the obliteration of the secular, given the secular preserves and hence depends upon the religious. The violence of erasure appears to be disavowed through appeal to an essentially ‘secular’ quality in contradistinction to ‘outworn religious tradition.’ Perhaps it is instructive to link this concern to Pecora’s critique of Said. Pecora argues that secularization, figured as the hegemonic imposition of Western modernization, is implicated in practices of Orientalism (2006: 33). Yet he argues that Said’s language ‘retains’ a ‘doctrinal’ quality that undermines its putative secularity (4-5). This reading of religious essences as the endpoint of the possibility of secularism, or secularization, arguably imposes the erasure of specific linguistic registers as a condition of ‘secularism.’ Oldmeadow and Pecora can be seen to perform similar styles of critique, in that Oldmeadow identifies Said’s biographical links with Protestantism and Pecora identifies the doctrinal, “pseudo-sacred” (2006: 5) remains in Said’s expression. This process of the petrification of the religious within Said’s ‘body of work’ can be read as an essentialist construction of the religious and secular. However, together Oldmeadow’s and Pecora’s critiques lend themselves to awareness of the multiple registers through which ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ are mediated and detected as remains of ‘doctrine,’ hauntings of ‘religious’ pasts and spectral ruses of language in which avoiding ‘religious’ speech is akin to taking a vow of silence. In my reading, these multiple registers are the possibility of an opening up of reading strategies and potentialities of different, situated secularisms. In order to situate these narratives of space and the flux of the borders that make spaces, I turn now to a broader theoretical discussion of social spatiality in Holy Smoke.
Embodying space
The desert in Holy Smoke situates most of the action, yet I suggest it is productively read as a spatial trope. In this reading, the desert as a putative “offworld stage” (Murphy 2000: 35) functions to open conceptual space for critique of the limits and norms of the imagined dominant configuration of heteronormative, patriarchal, ‘secular’ white Anglo-Celtic relations. Yet simultaneously, the sanctioned period of limbo the characters must undergo
163 in the desert perhaps also intersects with religious (Biblical and Qur’anic) themes of desert exile, which adds more layers of potential meaning to the circumscribed space, suggesting an unsettled rather than final meaning. The Barrons first arrive in the desert at a family- owned emu farm called Mt Emu Farm in Wee Waa, in country New South Wales. However, P.J. (Harvey Keitel), hired by Miriam to ‘deprogramme’ Ruth from the reaches of the ‘spiritual’ conversion, feels he cannot successfully ‘deprogramme’ Ruth if the family members are nearby. Hence, P.J. and Ruth travel to a small, whitewash homestead further in the desert called Halfway Hut. Whilst the emu farm appears significantly remote, the Halfway Hut is more distant and obscure in both name and imagery. The two locations are connected by a single-lane bitumen road, which is represented in high-shots as a vein-like thread between low-lying desert scrub, with a majestic, blue mountain range in the distance. The location emphasizes the arbitrary naming of the Halfway Hut, which suggests a temporal and spatial limbo between locations suggesting movement rather than stasis. Yet I will suggest that mobility is constructed in relational boundaries as well as travel within and to the desert. I will firstly locate Holy Smoke’s representations of embodied sensoriality within the desert space, and then contextualize these constructions in terms of embodied spatiality.
Ruth and P.J. spend a prescribed three days participating in the ‘spiritual’ ‘deprogramming’ in the Halfway Hut. It begins according to the plan P.J. has described to the Barrons upon his arrival in Sydney. Indeed, the moment of his arrival can be seen to suggest his masculinity and agency. He strides through the airport confidently in snakeskin boots, black shirt and jeans to the tune of Neil Diamond’s instructive ballad, I Am … I Said. Here, he proceeds to explain to the Barrons that ‘deprogramming’ is a precision activity in which his expertise is unparalleled in the U.S. and the U.K., which also suggests the ‘Western-ness’ of this activity. He describes the programme as a rational, dependable sequence of events.
Step One. Isolate her, get her attention and respect. When she’s listening well I start to crush her. The heat goes on. […] It’s very traumatic for the subject, which it’s supposed to be. Step Two. I remove all her props. Her books, her sari she wears … is she wearing one?
164 The heat does go on in the Halfway Hut, yet on the first day this is perhaps ironically represented through images of P.J. lighting the gas stove, striking a match, and burning a candle to make cups of tea, cook, and sit at the kitchen table. The material domesticity of the ‘heat’ is disrupted when P.J. describes Ruth’s soul as a ‘spark’ that illuminates her path. However, he demonstrates this by striking a match and lighting a candle at the kitchen table. The mundane uses of the spark, or ‘heat’ within the Hut’s kitchen can be seen to reference the interpellative strategy of the ‘deprogramming’ as a project fixated on (re)turn to domestic orderliness. Here, the setting of the kitchen and the Halfway Hut can be viewed as signifiers for patriarchal norms to which Ruth is invited and compelled to conform through P.J.’s direction, arrogance and masculine agency.
P.J. removes Ruth’s sari as she sleeps and ties it to a tree outside the Hut where it sails in the breeze. However, in the trauma of the deprogramming, Ruth appropriates the matches and the heat and sets the garment alight. Under the flames of the sari, crying, Ruth says, “This is heart surgery. It’s gone. The love is gone.” She pisses down her legs as she advances to P.J., pleading him to kiss her. P.J. is soon seduced, but he is depicted as a perfunctory sex partner who does not know how to please Ruth. This significantly undercuts his potency and virility. The following morning Ruth’s family, led by her brothers Robbie and Timmy, come to the Hut despite their prohibition from the space and invite Ruth and P.J. to a night at a pub. After P.J.’s ineffectual protest Ruth accepts the invitation on his behalf, suggesting the erosion of P.J.’s masculine control. In the pub, P.J. is figured as a jealous lover. He watches Ruth passionately kissing and dancing with a woman, which is represented as lingering and synchronous in comparison to the perfunctory sex with P.J., and which Ruth later cruelly describes as “interesting, historically,” but, “a bit revolting.” Also at the pub, Ruth’s sister-in-law Yvonne dances and flirts with P.J. Here, desire can be seen as ambient rather than unidirectional, in modes that marginalize and destabilise normative monogamous heterosexual pairings.
The masculinity of the pub, which is filled with men and women in cowboy gear, is established through a live performance of The Angels’ 1977 Australian pub rock anthem Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again (2006), to which the crowd chant in response, “No way! Get fucked! Fuck off!” This is intensified outside the pub, where P.J. finds Ruth outside being assaulted by two men. In a parallel to P.J.’s removal of her sari, the men are 165 trying to remove her red shirt and knickers. One asks, “Are you her Dad or something” as P.J. punches him away and carries Ruth to the car. Here, the ‘heart surgery’ of deprogramming through the removal of her sari intersects with the violence of assault, and P.J. is constructed as a protective patriarch. However, when they return to the Hut and discuss kissing and sex, P.J. exclaims, “I know how to do it,” to which Ruth replies, “Not so I like it.” Within this inter-generational sexual relation, Ruth assumes authority in naming and enacting her pleasure and P.J. acquiesces to direction. Further, and as part of their sexual relation, Ruth accuses P.J. of his narcissistic preference for young attractive women, and dresses him in a sleeveless, red, tight-fitting shift with a scarf tied in a bow on his head, and lipstick on his lips. She says bluntly, “Fuck yourself! But you wouldn’t, would you?” The drag arguably implies the performative making of identity through sexual relations, as well as gender and generational norms. Indeed, Judith Butler’s highly influential concept of gender performativity uses drag as an exemplar of the ways in which gender norms are produced through repeatedly performed acts (1990). In drag, P.J. is chastised by Ruth for his age, vanity, and narcissistic proclivity to date “little Barbie dolls,” emblematized by Yvonne, instead of “big Mummies your own age.” Here, the combination of drag and inverted gender roles, along with the multiple modes of desire constructed in the pub, arguably compose a critique of the cult of patriarchy, which is performed and undercut through sexual representations of ambient desire that crosses and disrupts normative borders. Here, the space of the desert functions to refigure desire and sexual relations outside and yet in concert with the violences of imagined normative, monogamous heterosexuality. These relations and tropes are useful points from which to consider theoretical links between space, embodiment and sociality, which I will now draw together theoretically.
Many theorists of spatiality including Gillian Rose (1993), Doreen Massey (1994) and Michel Foucault (1986) argue that cultural sites are produced through the intersection of sets of social relations rather than their ‘contents.’ Space, as I have been arguing, is therefore a social product and engagement. Further, “place” can be read as “a particular articulation” (Massey 1994: 5) of flows of historically and ideologically constructed narratives and subjectivities, rather than a bounded and discrete enclosure of space (169). Hence, the production of spaces and places is strongly linked to cultural narratives that construe how spaces and places are inhabited and made. This argument is supported by 166 Talal Asad’s argument that social spheres are negotiated by embodied subjects, including affective and sensorial capacities through which bodies are co-constituted (2005). The dominant narrative of secularism as the separation of public and private spheres therefore becomes complicated if we consider their sociality rather than imagining discrete subjective impositions on ‘blank’ or ‘neutral’ space. That is, the production of the public sphere as a site of rational debate is exhausted by the perpetual negotiation and porosity of boundaries made through passages and constructions of bodies. In this way the ‘secular’ makes bodies and spaces, which reciprocally make and inform narratives of what the secular might mean (Asad: 2005). This insight can be extrapolated to the making of the desert in Holy Smoke as a space in which sexuality and desire are amplified and renegotiated as points of intensity that suggest the importance of regulatory heterosexuality within the ‘secular ordinary imaginary’ associated with the ‘secular’ metropolis. Indeed, as I discussed in Chapter One, this sentiment is echoed by Robert J. Baird, who suggests, “we see and feel” the co- constitution of the religious and secular in “domains seemingly removed from those of religion” (2000: 134). Baird uses the language of spatiality in his argument that the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are ubiquitous terms, by referring to a transformed ‘cognitive landscape’ and attendant ‘domains’ of enquiry. It is perhaps therefore particularly apt to take up this mode of oblique secular critique, in which sexuality and heteronormativity are emphasized, in the somewhat unexpected domain of spatiality. Yet whilst Baird draws attention to a ‘cognitive’ landscape I will now draw together considerations of how gender, embodiment and space can be linked to consider the cultural politics of living and inhabiting space.
Alison Bartlett’s study of Australian women authors’ narrative representations of the desert identifies the outback as a space of desire (2001: 119-23). Bartlett maps personal issues and relationships that are processually established and transformed through travel to the desert, and argues that white, Anglo-Celtic Australian women’s narratives of desert travel resist the dominant heroic, masculine ‘explorer’ theme and instead imagine “a place of potential, a place in which social relations might be remade” (2001: 121). Far from an empty void, this desert is a potent and sanctioned space for negotiating relationships. Importantly, Bartlett asserts that in these narratives it is white, coastal city-dwelling characters who undertake travels to the outback; usually to resolve an oppressive and/or repressive father-daughter relation, which may not be ‘redeemed,’ but instead reworked in 167 kind with the fluctuant “shifting sands” of the desert landscape (120-1). Using Bartlett’s analysis as a suggestive model for the journey to the desert in Holy Smoke, I propose that a reading of the desert as a space for negotiating mother-daughter relationships is equally significant and compelling, given that Miriam’s terrible fear of ‘losing’ Ruth places her in the Halfway Hut with P.J. Further, it is productive to consider whether it is not that city- dwellers are imagined as non-spiritual because of geographical placement outside the desert (and touristic India), but instead that the anxious preoccupation of specific suburban city- dwellers with the ‘spiritual’ is also the production of metaphorical ‘space’ to work through other related and dominant oppositions, including self/society, secular/religious, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, masculine/feminine. To return to Campion’s construction of a metaphoric desert heart, the generic spiritual searcher can be seen as a trope that normalizes and generalises the construction of (white) non-spiritual, suburban subjects whose ‘soul’ or centre is projected onto the outback. The spatial splitting of this imagined, hegemonic subject echoes the spatialized separation of ‘religious’ private and ‘secular’ public spaces within a secular sociopolitical imaginary. That is, the excision of ‘the religious’ from debate and representation within the public sphere is repeated at the level of the imagined, dominant subject. At/as the metaphorical heart of this structure, ‘the desert’ arguably suggests lifelessness at the centre of secular, suburban, white Anglo- Australian everyday life, which, as I am suggesting in the case of the desires, anxieties, fears and griefs of the characters in Holy Smoke, proves an untenable proposition.
In Chapter One I engaged the concept of ‘chora’ to contextualize spatial representations of the Oxford English Dictionary. I drew from Elizabeth Grosz’s (1995) feminist production of the term as feminine, and associated with nurturing. Chora would appear to be especially applicable in the figurations of the desert I have been describing. Given that the cinematic desert is figured as an ostensible void, the ground for this figure arguably disappears at its invocation. Chora, aptly in this case, refers to the possibility of ‘place’ without regard to materiality and a locale. This is a useful model for considering the production of the desert as a site of potentiality and ambient desire rather than a resolved destination or ‘place.’ Indeed, the nominally ambivalent location of the Halfway Hut would appear to affirm this reading. Grosz notes that in addition to the tension between space and place, chora is associated with a nurturing, mothering ethos. In this sense, it can be seen as synonymous to the ‘spiritual’ desert / ‘secular’ suburbia, mother-daughter dyad I will 168 expand upon shortly. Importantly, Grosz draws attention to the embodied practice of taking up and ordering space in her discussion of chora and the phallocentrism of Western architecture. This concern for the socio-politics of embodied relations to space is also elucidated in Kathleen Kirby’s astute critique of Frederic Jameson’s influential concept of “Cognitive Mapping” (1999). Jameson develops this mode of cultural critique through a productive analogue of urban studies, to extrapolate “spatial analysis to the realm of the social structure” (1999: 163). Kirby is particularly concerned with the everyday way in which boundaries are traversed with psychosexual, gendered effects and affects, which she notes Jameson finds uncomfortable:
One feature of [Jameson’s] spatial anxiety may be the way this space makes his body become conscious to him, an occurrence that is unusual, as he is accustomed – far more than the early explorers, no doubt – to forget the body, to use orienting principles that allow him to erase his physicality. This ‘forgetfulness’ is, for women in the West, much less available (and a real relief when it does occur). (Kirby 1996: 52-3 Original emphasis and parentheses)
Kirby’s critique of Jameson’s practiced disembodiment asserts the privilege of disembodied consciousness. This is perhaps also alluded to by feminist cultural geographer Doreen Massey: “Jameson calls for cognitive mapping, expressing a longing to get his bearings, to orientate himself in what are clearly for him and others disorienting times, to reassert some feeling of a control which seems to have been lost” (1994: 162). By drawing Kirby’s and Massey’s critiques together, it is productive to read ‘disorientation’ as the crisis that embodied experience in the public sphere brings to the privileged, ‘neutral’ subject-witness who ‘maps’ cultural logic. Here, embodied sensibility appears to signal loss. This concern is differently, but perhaps not unrelatedly, invoked in Simon Ryan’s The Cartographic Eye, in which he describes the colonial explorer’s gaze as one which does not acknowledge complicity with the making of the social scene but instead “witnesses” (1996: 6). From the disembodied position of the ‘witness,’ experience of the limits, boundaries, and vicissitudes of affective embodiment would form an extraordinary imposition.
Kirby’s description of the prospect of relief at ‘forgetting’ the body is instructive. A welcome forgetting arguably signals the metaphorical and physical weight of experiencing
169 the embodied self in relational space. Here, the social milieu is perhaps potentially violent, and so loss, figured as mere ‘forgetfulness,’ becomes seductive. Thus, the loss of the body is a relief until ‘it’ reasserts ‘its’ presence through relations with other objects, spaces and subjects. The relation between disembodiment and space, in which ‘nothing’ is desired to be felt by the imagined disembodied social actor, arguably speaks to the vulnerabilities attendant to embodied relationality, and constructs the sense of a disembodied ‘better deal.’ In her study of embodiment in cinema, Vivian Sobchack concurs with this point and yet urges the importance of “bodies not merely objectively beheld but also subjectively lived” (Sobchack 2004: 187). Sobchack suggests that bodies can arrest and disrupt the violence of ‘forgetting’ and reinforce the sensuous and fleshly qualities of social experience and hence multiple potentialities for connection and awareness. This ‘fleshing’ of bodies can be read in concert with the compelling claims for the structuring capacities and cultural politics of embodiment in negotiations of space made by Grosz, Jameson, Kirby and Ryan. Indeed, these concerns are also brought together by Linda McDowell, who argues that the “sense of oneself as a certain sort of woman, defined by class, ‘race’, religion, age and so forth, is given meaning by the actualities of everyday experience” (McDowell 1996: 41). In my reading, ‘actualities’ signals the sensorial registers of desire and relationality that make embodiment and space. Here, embodied relationality is inextricably linked to negotiations of the cultural politics and particularities of spaces. This reinforces, as I established in Chapter Three, that a putatively ‘neutral,’ ‘secular,’ disembodied, privileged social actor is in itself a particular position within (and constitutive of) this milieu. Further, these arguments emphasize that the desert in Holy Smoke can be seen to be made through narratives particular to the suburban, ‘ordinary’ imaginary rather than in terms of the essential qualities of an ‘offworld stage’ or metaphorical heart. With this attention to spatiality in mind I would like to return to Holy Smoke’s Halfway Hut and examine the importance of this site as a point of intensification that highlights the conceits and limitations of the imagined, ‘secular’ ordinary, white Anglo-Celtic metropolis.
170 Desert Heterotopia
The Halfway Hut within the desert can be seen as a nominally “placeless place” (Foucault 1986: 24). By staking key spatial representations in Holy Smoke, it is possible to explore the ways in which the exnomination of the ‘spiritual/religious,’ and the ‘lost soul’ onto the desert simultaneously asserts the hegemony of the dominant cultural narrative of ‘ordinary’ white, secular suburbia and enacts its fragmentation. Indeed, the Halfway Hut can be productively explored as a heterotopia. Heterotopia is a useful heuristic device with which to conceive of socially sanctioned spaces that are shaped through cultural anxieties and myths. Foucault writes:
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time, and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (1986: 23)
Through the lens of Foucault’s heterotopia, the myth of the desert as an-Other space can be interrogated and reimagined in terms of its relations with the norms and mythology that make its necessity. Rather than a space of pure absence, I have been arguing in line with Bartlett (2001), that the desert is a productive site of potentiality for interpersonal relationships. Foucault writes that heterotopias, “create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory” (1986: 27). This suggests a mirroring effect, or more precisely, a re-presentation and re-membering of both the heterotopic site/space and its broader context of sites and spaces as they are made in terms of cultural norms. Indeed, Foucault terms “heterotopias of deviation,” such as prisons and nursing homes for the elderly, as those circumscribed spaces in which subjects that transgress social norms (criminal law, youth-oriented ideology in these cases) are compulsorily dis-placed. These heterotopias “always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (1986: 26). Thus, subjects must perform specific culturally sanctioned actions
171 in order to be admitted into the heterotopic space, which simultaneously affirms the status quo by excising and thus making cultural space. Heterotopia, then, affirms the specificity of a site culturally, rather than geographically, by bringing these modes of imagining space together.
The Halfway Hut can be read as a site that emphasizes the boundaries of ‘ordinariness’ through the gender and sexual norms that are transgressed there. Supplementary to the ‘spiritual deprogramming,’ P.J. and Ruth’s sexual relationship is formed within and limited to this space. However, the sex scenes are brief in comparison to long takes of committed conversation. Discussion of relationships, age difference, and the enactment of inter- generational sex in the Halfway Hut can be seen as an exploration of the limits of sexual relationships in the patriarchal society at stake within the text. Ruth mocks this by quipping, “I know what you want from me. You want a youthful pussy transfusion, preferably one you can take home to show the menfolk what a beautiful post you got to piss on.” Yet at another moment she is open rather than combative, and says to P.J. in the style of a secret: “Don’t tell anyone, but, despite my strong feelings, I’m heartless.” P.J. listens attentively. These exchanges can be seen as iterations of a discourse of intimacy, figured as revelations of secrets and ‘private’ fears. I also suggest that this intimacy is particular to the Halfway Hut. Here, the desert can be seen as a sanctioning device that establishes, and in doing so destabilizes, the normativity of relationships ‘outside’ its bounds.
Foucault mentions that certain acts must be performed in the making of a heterotopic site. The structure of sex and conversation, which I have construed as a discourse of intimacy, is affirmed and set in motion when Yvonne visits the Hut. Yvonne enters the site to leave clothing for Ruth after P.J. has stripped her of the sari, and meets P.J. out the front. She describes her loneliness to him, and says that she writes love letters to herself. She also describes the dissatisfactory sex she has with her husband Robbie, during which she customarily imagines she is having sex with male Hollywood celebrities: “I imagine that Robbie’s arms and legs are theirs. Sometimes I get confused because I can’t remember who it is, who is making love to me.” Rather than always-already engaged and visceral, the heterotopia produces Yvonne’s desire as that which takes place in an imagined realm of magazine cut-outs, and in which Robbie’s and Yvonne’s bodies are differently prosthetic to different gratifications. Having divulged her sexual practice to P.J., Yvonne has trouble 172 breathing (not unlike the text’s other patriarchal wife, Miriam who suffers frequent asthmatic episodes). P.J. instructs her to breathe slowly, and as she does so, they kiss. She then gives him a blowjob whilst he whispers rhythmically, “Keep breathing.” Yvonne’s apparent air-headedness and lustful breathiness come together in an exquisite and comically reflexive production of the blowjob, which renders enactments of remediation and P.J.’s sexual gratification indistinguishable. Here, talking and sex outside the moral boundaries of patriarchal structures forms the discourse of the heterotopia. Thus, in this reading, the heterotopic site works to reflexively construct sex and intimacy as staged, performative, spatial constructions that are strongly linked to the limits and norms of patriarchal familial relationships and associated alienations. Whilst Ruth and P.J.’s exile in the desert establishes a chaotic sequence of sex, desire, and the transgression of normative moral limits, this ends with Ruth’s moral escape and return to her mother. I now turn to a discussion of this overarching, structural relation.
Mother-Daughter Relations
If I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. - - - Judith Butler49
It is often the marginal characters in texts that reveal finer details of its broader sociopolitical context and assumptions. Edward Said’s attention to the heterogeneity of details, alongside Foucault’s and Grosz’s sensitivities to the relational productions of space and cultural sites, form a useful conceptual impetus with which to explore the meanings made through the marginal character of the mother in Holy Smoke. Yet, as Felicity Collins mentions, it is the mother who undergoes significant ‘transformation’ in the film (2002). She is represented as a harried housewife working from home as a dog groomer amidst visceral fear of grief and alterity, to apparent happiness when she returns to India with Ruth and words as the veterinarian in an animal refuge. Collins suggests that the ‘rejuvenated’
49 Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. 49. 173 mother emphasizes that the text’s patriarchs, embodied by Gilbert, Baba and P.J., are exempt (2002: 22). However attention to this is undermined by the relatively little screen time she is given. Also, she is almost always portrayed among other family members rather than alone. Indeed, the only time Miriam is depicted alone is in her travel to India, which is perhaps recuperated in her purpose of ensnaring Ruth. This is also suggested when Miriam answers Ruth’s existential question, “Why are you here,” with, “To save you.” The significance of Miriam’s physical and psychical transformation in the text is briefly signalled by Kathleen Murphy who refers to her as “redeemable” (2000: 31), although this claim is made as a concession in a critique of the buffoon-like family members. I posit that it is through the mother’s travel across the boundaries of each of the film’s spaces, bar the Halfway Hut, that the particularity of her character is established relationally, and through Ruth. Here, characters are understood as networks of identity traits, norms and ideals that processually reinforce and subvert the social, political and cultural conditions they co- constitute. Thus, it is productive to explore the mutually constitutive relations of mother- daughter, in terms of the porous boundaries between them that are represented spatially within the text, in order to consider the limits, conceits, and intensities of representations of ‘secular’ subjective space.
In the first scene at Mt Emu Farm, Ruth speeds through the desert in an old car, having just returned from India. She travels down the single-lane bitumen highway amidst the characteristic red dirt, toward her mother and aunt who stand by a fence in front of the homestead. She is coming to visit her father, having assisted her mother’s return to Australia, and expects to say goodbye to him before his death and her return to India. She is not aware that P.J. will be at the farm, waiting to take her to the Halfway Hut. Ruth wears a white sari, sandals, bindi, and headphones. Her Walkman plays Canadian artist Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know and Ruth sings enthusiastically. This choice of song is interesting, and, as I will argue, not accidental. You Oughta Know describes betrayal within relationship, and given the deceptions and losses that underpin the narrative diegesis of Holy Smoke, it is a telling choice. I will quote You Oughta Know at length:
You seem very well, things look peaceful I'm not quite as well, I thought you should know Did you forget about me Mr. Duplicity
174 I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?
'Cause the love that you gave that we made wasn't able To make it enough for you to be open wide, no And every time you speak her name Does she know how you told me you'd hold me Until you died, till you died But you're still alive
And I'm here to remind you Of the mess you left when you went away It's not fair to deny me Of the cross I bear that you gave to me You, you, you oughta know (Morissette 1995)
The song’s attention to appearances, in the phrase ‘things look peaceful,’ might, recalling my reading of House Painting, register the ruse of superficial appearances; particularly given the betrayal that forms the narrative of the song. Also, the song arguably invokes middle class modes of politeness by mentioning ‘the middle of dinner,’ which further suggests the moral code at stake, as well as the banality and ordinariness of the loss and betrayal along with strong feelings of hurt and despair. The ruse of appearances is also referenced in the question, ‘Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?’ suggesting the ways in which losses and histories are reinvoked, relived and re-enlivened imaginatively and relationally through exchange and encounter, instead of relegated to a forgotten past. In this light, there is a sense in which the song’s reference to a cross can be read as a burden of memory, and of the weight of living with the potentiality and actuality of artifice, secrets and lies. Importantly You Oughta Know is a song about loss as well as betrayal. Given the song’s emphatic ‘But you’re still alive’ in the chorus, it can be read that the loss of the relationship is experienced as a kind of death. Indeed, in the case of Holy Smoke, Ruth may very well regret that the father is still alive, given the loss of freedom that his health entails for her, and the secrets and lies that comprise the family narrative, and which I will now expand upon.
175
When Ruth arrives at the farm she gets out of the car, Walkman in hand, singing and dancing to You Oughta Know on the dirt. Her sari forms a stark visual contrast to what appears a vast landscape of blue sky and red ochre. Indeed, the vast skyscape and richness of colour in this scene, among other impressive vistas of the desert, was enhanced, according to special effects artist Zareh Nalbandian, “to bring [the environment] into the context of the story and the soundtrack that goes over it” (Maddox 2000: 39). This included digitally replacing a grey sky with a rich, red sunset. Here, the layering of meanings produced by the interconnections of music, visual imagery, and narrative are emphasized as lush, sensual and textured, (as well as technically artificial). However at this moment I would like to dwell a little longer on the diagetic function of the soundtrack. Miriam and Ruth’s aunt, Puss, stand by a fence in front of the house, smiling and bopping along as Ruth dances, obviously enjoying her singing and vivacity. This registers Miriam’s “visible delight in the pagan abandon with which her daughter solo-dances” (Murphy 2000: 31). At first glance, the lyrics of the Alanis Morissette track may seem ill-placed at this moment of women’s togetherness: Ruth has been cheated but not in the terms suggested by the song, and You Oughta Know communicates anger and despair within a heterosexual relationship embroiled in an affair and abandonment. However, it is perhaps instructive that Miriam’s face is shown in close up, smiling amenably, as Ruth sings and dances. Notably, Ruth dances with a Walkman in hand and headphones plugged in, and so her mother assumedly cannot hear the music. That is, although the audience hears Ruth’s voice and the original track, within the logic of the use of the Walkman, it is probable that the mother and aunt cannot hear it, and are thus fully appreciating Ruth’s singing and enrapture rather than the music itself. Thus, the women of the Barron family are depicted together, away from the men and children, absorbed in music and dance of anger, despair and deception, centred on Ruth. What might it mean that Ruth appears to be enraptured in, and perhaps identifies with, this song? Further, what might it mean that Miriam is associatively enraptured? In its loud insistence and rasping vocals, You Oughta Know can be read as an explication of the desire to be heard and acknowledged. Indeed, the song is in a sense an enactment of acknowledgment in its loudness, direct address to the ex-lover, and popularity; it won Morissette two Grammy Awards in 1996 for Best Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. Its relevance is revealed, in the first instance, moments after it finishes. Ruth discovers that her family lied to her in order to entice her back to Australia. The duplicity of 176 her parents is shocking and traumatic for Ruth. However, just prior to this revelation, she sings and dances passionately to this song, and Miriam appears to identify closely with Ruth’s cathartic enactment of it. It is possible then, that the song is significant beyond its resonances with the lie that renders her parents duplicitous.
Before I return to the secrets and lies that shape the family in the text, I would like to briefly draw attention to the iconic Walkman. What is the significance of this prop, given Ruth could just as easily have been depicted playing the song on the car stereo? Paul Du Gay’s well-known study of the cultural significance of the Sony Walkman – or, rather, its usefulness as a cultural artefact that localises processes of accruing social and cultural meanings beyond the object’s function – is instructive here:
[The Sony Walkman] is associated with certain kinds of people (young people, for example, or music-lovers); with certain places (the city, the open air, walking around a museum) – because it has been given or acquired a social profile or identity. (Du Gay 1997: 10 Original emphases and parentheses)
Given the current iPod and mp3 mobile technologies that render Walkmans almost obsolete, the use of the Walkman in Holy Smoke appears retro and a little comic, though it may not have been at the time of the film’s making. Its anachronism is intensified when Ruth presses the clunky ‘stop’ button to talk with and kiss her mother and aunt. However, the strength of Du Gay’s point is in the ways in which an item acquires, or is attributed, specific qualities and cultural narratives independent of its mechanical or instrumental functionality. That is, its meaning is not reducible to its instrumentality but rather, as a personalized and portable device, localises and mediates specific, and fluctuating, social roles and cultural meanings. If, following Du Gay’s reading, the Walkman represents youth, the city, and the relative ‘freedom’ of the open air, it can be seen to intersect with the plotline and dominant narrative of Ruth’s self-exploration in the diegesis of Holy Smoke. Ruth travelled to India with a friend (outside her family) and appears to value her independence from her family. She enjoys popular music and dancing. In this scene, it is possible to place Ruth as a woman who is urban, young, and given her taste in music, possibly empathetic to anger, loss and betrayal. Importantly, the Walkman, as a connotation of urban-ness, contrasts with the naturalistic imagery of the desert. Thus, Ruth’s identity as
177 urban, Western, enmeshed in fast-paced technological changes and independent is established through the iconic Walkman, which both connects her with her mother and aunt and seals them outside the sound that animates her dance. Here, the importance of boundaries and their im/permeability is suggested.
When Ruth arrives at the emu farm and enters the house, which is empty, she finds Gilbert in good health, playing golf at the back of the house with the other men of the family. Horrified and screaming, she accuses her father, rather than her mother, of the lie: “You liar! Liar! I thought you were dying!” She is then encircled by the men of the family, who stand with their arms outstretched in the performance of a veritable cage. The men tell Ruth they have hired P.J. to “straighten you out,” and, “he is really experienced, in religion and stuff.” They also repeatedly say, “We love you.” Ruth asks for her mother, who stands on the verandah gripping her gut, perhaps ill at the sight of Ruth’s distress. However, Miriam does not go to Ruth’s aid. Gilbert replies, “Want your Mummy now, do you? Not so tough, eh?” Here, professions of love are made at the moment of ensnarement and mockery of Ruth’s wrongheadedness and dependence on her mother. Positioned as a trapped child, both visually and through Gilbert’s belittling tone, it would appear Ruth suffers a separation anxiety from a motherly source figured as nourishing and supportive in comparison to the men. As she tries to run to Miriam, Gilbert takes hold of Ruth’s sari, which, as I have suggested, functions as a spiritual prosthesis and a representation of racialized foreign-ness within the text. He unravels it from her body. Ruth turns and, in a comic repetition of unravelling, pulls the toupee from his head. The toupee can be read also as a prosthetic virility, and together these costumes suggest the importance of artifice in the making of ‘spiritual,’ sexual, racialized and gendered identity politics. Of course, these unravellings are repeated with P.J. in the Halfway Hut, suggesting the re-staging and unravelling of patriarchy that takes place there. However, the circle of men can be seen to visually represent the threat of violence and containment associated with breaking bonds with the mother within a white, patriarchal, secular framework, and, given the premise of Ruth’s spiritual conversion, breaching the normative practices of white, secular, suburban female identity. That is, spiritual conversion is constructed as a familial, gendered, sexualized and racialized breach of (exclusionary) norms. Here, the implicit modes of exclusion indexical to ‘secular’ identity can be explored obliquely, through the represented norms and practices of patriarchal containment and transgression. 178
By contrast to her conflict with the men, when Ruth is given permission by P.J. to enter the house and talk to her mother, Ruth embraces Miriam warmly, and keenly. She kneels in front of Miriam in a childlike pose, and vomits into a bucket whilst Miriam supports her. Indeed, the vomit might be seen as a sympathetic flow between the characters, such that boundaries are embodied and porous: Miriam is shown touching her own gut as she watches Ruth’s distressed screaming when encircled and chastised by the men. The intimacy with which they hold one another contrasts starkly with the way in which Ruth responds to her father’s part in the lie. Ruth repeats “Why? Why? Why?” The repetition of words suggests an emotional outburst rather than a direct question, and can also be understood as a profusion that, in its enactment, has its (lack of an) answer. That is, Miriam and Ruth speak from different discourses at this moment. Miriam says, “I think you’ve been manipulated, maybe even drugged. I think you’re manipulating me right now.” Ruth says, “No! I’m the only one of my friends who doesn’t take drugs.” ‘Spirituality’ for Miriam is here figured in terms of an artificially produced alter-reality. The difference in their assumptions and realities is not ameliorated verbally. Simultaneously, however, the women are entwined physically and share in an affective economy of relationship. Indeed, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject from her seminal text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection is highly useful in understanding this economy. Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic concept of the abject locates the making of bodily borders and vulnerabilities through excretions. Vomit, shit, pus, piss and so on are signifiers of the abject, which Kristeva claims are greeted with disgust and reminding of the possibility of death and pollution (Kristeva 1982: 108). Barbara Creed, who re-reads Kristeva’s concept of the abject in her study of horror cinema, summarises this negotiation of subjectivity by noting, “The place of the abject is […] the place where ‘I” am not” (2002: 69). Thus, the abject is a useful term for conceptualizing the porosity and making of corporeal and subjective boundaries, through the material signifiers of bodily fluids. Miriam and Ruth’s connection can be seen as dyadic in this way, given that no consensual speech act, as in a declarative ‘I,’ can be established in this moment, whilst the dyadic nature of this interaction – as opposed to their mutual alienation – is paradoxically produced physically, viscerally and abjectly. Creed makes conceptual space for the affective pleasure of this connection: “the representation of bodily wastes may invoke pleasure […] in returning to that time when the mother-child relationship was marked by an untrammelled pleasure in ‘playing’ with the body and its 179 wastes” (Creed 2002: 74). Whilst this may be critiqued as an idealistic reading, and indeed Creed, in turn, is suspicious of Kristeva’s elision of gender politics in her concept of mother-child relations, the sense that the body, through the mother-daughter nexus, is produced as a site that is contested, negotiated, and ‘played with,’ reinforces the sense of an affective economy of relationality.
Importantly, it is Miriam who organises to spirit Ruth back to Australia. She hires P.J., and she assures sceptical Gilbert that their lie will work: “She’ll come. When she knows you’re dying, she’ll come.” He replies sarcastically, “Sure,” and leaves the room. That is, Miriam anticipates a strong connection between Gilbert and Ruth. In the first instance, she is incorrect. Ruth refuses to come home for Gilbert’s death, but returns for her mother’s near fatal episode. It is possible to read this disjuncture as evidence of the extent of Ruth’s radical conversion, yet this reading is somewhat undermined by her return to Australia for her mother. I suggest that, whilst Miriam’s incorrect estimation of Ruth’s proclivities may be seen to reference her relative unknowing of her daughter, it is equally possible that the boundaries between them, as I have just established in terms of dance and abjection, are porous such that Miriam cannot imagine Ruth’s separation from herself or by extension the patriarchal family, and thus from Miriam’s own estimation of affairs.
Gilbert and Ruth’s intimacy, in the discursive form of secret-sharing, is soon evidenced. As she leaves the emu farm with P.J., Ruth storms past the gathered family. I reproduce the dialogue here as it is useful to my discussion of the film’s construction of the family as a set of relations made through secrets and lies, and because it highlights the secret shared by Ruth and her father.
Ruth: Fuck off all of you. Gilbert: You madam, watch yourself with your mother. Ruth: You can talk, you hypocrite. Where’s your little love bomb? Miriam: Don’t engage with her. Ruth: Where’s my half-sister Dad? You know, your secretary’s secret little love bomb! Miriam: What love bomb?
180 Here, the relevance of the preoccupation with the structural secrecy and emotional hurt of affairs in You Oughta Know is made emphatically clear. Not only is it clear that Gilbert has had an affair that can be construed as a fracturing of the myth of the family unit (which is realized in the film’s epilogue) but it is clear Ruth knows of it. Here, a relation is set out in which Ruth apparently knows more about the condition of her parent’s marriage than the mother, and has seemingly borne the secret of the affair until this moment. Ruth’s awareness of the birth of the child, as well as partial knowledge of the woman’s and child’s identities, suggests this is concrete rather than speculative. This raises the question of how she might have come to know. Moreover, it also suggests her prior decision not to share the knowledge with her mother, until this angry moment. Here, an intimacy between Ruth and Gilbert is gestured toward, whilst at the same time, the tie of secrecy arguably maintains the patriarchal family structure and thus Ruth effectively negotiates her mother’s place within the family. This reading of Ruth’s and Miriam’s interdependent familial positioning may appear overly speculative, however, in the film’s epilogue when they are shown happily working together at the animal refuge, Ruth narrates, “Dad finally did go off with his secretary.” Thus, the daughter arguably occupies a central position within the marriage, through an affective economy of connection with the mother, and secrecy with/for the father. Felicity Collins links an incestuous structuring relationship to grotesque comedy:
The daughter's assault on the incestuous palace of childhood (built by the father and maintained by the compliant mother) is a central image in the grotesque comedies. It involves not only an assault on the father's power but the rebirth of the mother. (Collins 2002: 20 Original parentheses)
Thus, it would appear that Ruth is implicated in the downfall of the family, figured as the ‘incestuous palace of childhood.’ Notably, Collins uses a spatial metaphor to situate this triangulation. It is perhaps also worth noting, as Collins does, that Campion’s other contemporary Australian film, Sweetie (1989) centres on the breakdown of relationships within a patriarchal, suburban family. A short scene in which the protagonist and mentally unstable daughter Sweetie is depicted bathing her father can be seen as the suggestion of an incestuous relation. This structure is arguably repeated and displaced spatially through heterotopic sites, and symbolically through repetitions with other patriarchs, in Holy Smoke. However, the structure of the relation at stake in Holy Smoke, whereby Ruth presumably
181 knows about the sexual activity of her father before and for her mother, arguably produces an incestuous structuring. If we return to the strong identification between Ruth and her mother, which is represented palpably by Miriam’s sympathetic participation in Ruth’s cathartic dance to You Oughta Know, theirs can be read as a symbiotic relation in which boundaries are unclear, in flux, and constantly negotiated in terms of losses, returns, physical and psychical proximities, amidst a broader affective economy.
I have made several references to artifice in my discussion of characterizations in Holy Smoke, in terms of the prosthetic and iconographic qualities of the Walkman, sari and toupee. I would like to dwell on these more directly in order to further elucidate the emotional and affective economy that structures the mother-daughter relationship. P.J. is shown frequently spraying breath freshener in his mouth, whilst Miriam repeatedly uses her asthma spray at moments of anxiety. These artificial breathing devices, which can be seen as vain in P.J.’s case, and medical in the case of Miriam, furnish the sense of corporeal sensitivity and boundaries. Indeed, in a further layer of meaning, it is perhaps not stretching the metaphor too far to mention that ‘spirit’ is linked etymologically to the Greek ‘pneuma,’ meaning ‘breath’ (OED 1989). Both these characters patrol the limits of the spiritual as it relates to subjective experience, and in the light of this reading, their use of artificial breath enhancers suggests their anxieties about controlling the place, corporeality, and affective experience of ‘spirit.’ Indeed, it is also an image of breath, in the form of breathlessness, that P.J. instructs Yvonne how to ‘keep breathing.’ Through Yvonne the importance of artificial props in support of a sustaining psychical imaginary is also referenced: she describes the cut-outs of celebrities she has glued to her bedside drawer to look at during sex with Robbie, and which emblematize her imaginary affairs. Props, then, negotiate and signal the crossing of boundaries and the norms that instantiate these crossings. Instead of suggesting depthlessness or superficiality, artifice perhaps represents the ‘spiritual’ lack that invokes complex and rich imaginary lives and intensely experienced anxiety, loneliness and desire amongst the women characters within an affective economy of relationality. In addition to these personal items, I would like to address the more public displays of artifice at stake in the text, which for my purposes further elucidate the spatial, subjective and embodied negotiation of the secular.
182 The arrival of P.J.’s girlfriend Carol from America, played by blaxploitation film icon Pam Grier, sets in motion Ruth’s desire to flee the Hut. Robbie takes Carol to the Hut to assist P.J. in the deprogramming, and both are upset and disgusted to find Ruth naked inside the hut and P.J. outside showering. After they leave, Ruth decides to flee the Hut, describing her relationship with P.J. as “all defilement.” He follows her and punches her unconscious, and bundles her into the boot of the family’s car, which is curiously decorated with reindeer horns made of tinsel. Indeed, not unlike the car, the homestead at the farm is curiously adorned with tacky tinsel, Rudolph figurines and a plastic Christmas wreath attached to the screen door, as well as a Christmas tree with flashing lights. However, Christmas is never mentioned in the dialogue, and no Christmas celebrations are held. When Ruth manages to escape the car and again runs away from P.J. further into the desert, Tommie Connor’s chipper, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus plays in the background. At this moment P.J. screams to Ruth he will take her back to the ashram, and that he loves her, before vomiting, and collapsing on the ground still in the red dress and wearing only one boot.50 Here, he hallucinates a large, beautiful image of Ruth looming on the horizon in the form of a Goddess Kali, wearing a gold sari with six flailing arms and emanating golden light. In quasi-repetition of Ruth’s pop conversion, The Shirelles’ cover of the Burt Bacharach song Baby It’s You plays in the background. P.J. lies on the dirt with his hands in prayer, appearing to worship the image until it dissolves in air and he falls unconscious. Here, the spiritual can be read as a trick of light that registers P.J.’s fascination with Ruth, and yet lines are blurred between worshipping Ruth, an imaginary figment, the desert space, or a Hindu goddess. The magic realist production of pop-spirituality does not resolve the question of ‘what happened’ but perhaps instead asks after the conditions and assumptions of the question.
Whilst P.J. hallucinates, the spectral return of the spiritual/religious is simultaneously constructed at the farm. Miriam, Puss, and Carol sit together in the kitchen fearing the pair is lost. Amidst the tacky Christmas decorations, Puss says in a serious tone, “I think we
50 The significance of the naming of the “Mt Emu Farm” is perhaps also worthy of note. Emus, which surround the homestead at the farm in Wee Waa and which are described by Yvonne as having “got to” P.J. when he collapses in the desert, are iconic Australian flightless birds. Emus copulate daily for up to a week whilst they nest, after which the males occupy the nest and females go on to take multiple ‘partners.’ Males continue to care for the nest and raise the brood of chicks. At the closure of the film, after P.J. is rescued from his hallucinatory collapse, he is shown to have married his partner Carol, and is depicted with twin babies strapped to both his front and back. Having been ‘emu pecked’ in the desert he becomes father of a brood of his own whilst Ruth continues to explore her sexuality. 183 should say the Lord’s Prayer.” She places a large, austere-looking wooden crucifix with a cast-iron Christ on the kitchen bench. As they begin the prayer, Miriam uses her asthma spray, and then asks, “Is the valley of death in this?” Puss replies, “No, it’s the daily bread.” As Puss and Miriam artlessly rehearse the words, which Miriam recalls only in part, Carol’s voice sings the prayer artfully and beautifully. In this moment Carol is represented as familiar with Christian praxis in comparison to the Barron women. Her voice is superimposed on an image of Ruth walking alone through the desert, suggesting she is or can be ‘found.’ Importantly, this second key moment of anticipatory loss forges a connection between women, although this time it is expanded beyond the Miriam-Ruth dyad. Here, a nexus of possible and actual losses is set in motion, which includes the loss of Ruth in the desert, loss of control, loss of the secret of the father’s affair, loss of P.J., and, paradoxically, loss of Ruth’s ‘spirituality’ which arguably brought the family together to discipline her. The preoccupation with anticipated losses and death are articulated through the character of Miriam, this time in her concern that the prayer might include the Valley of Death, suggesting Christian last rites. Also, through its relative foreignness to Miriam in terms of her forgetting, and the ‘foreignness’ of Carol as an African American woman familiar with prayer, the enactment of prayer reflexively emphasizes both the elision and yet underpinning importance of Christian praxis in their regular ‘secular’ suburban existence.
Rather than suggesting the Christian prayer and Kali hallucination form intrinsically ‘religious’ moments in which faithful Christian prayer comes through as the ‘answer,’ I suggest that here the boundaries of ‘secular’ ordinariness are called into question. P.J.’s desire can be read as a projection within a scene of hopeless desire. Further, the relationship forged between the women, through shared words and a common registering of potential loss, enables a point of connection not reducible to symbiosis with Ruth but the hint of other possible, albeit fleeting, connections. Hence, in this reading of ‘Christian’ praxis I do not automatically suggest that the ‘authenticity’ of prayer resolves the conflict, or that Christmas iconography is a tacky substitute for ‘authentic’ Christian iconography. Rather, the Christmas decorations can be seen as prostheses for familial bonds. Indeed, Elizabeth H. Pleck refers to Christmas as a “family ritual” (2000: 2). Also, in the Introduction to the highly suggestive collection Unwrapping Christmas, Daniel Miller writes emphatically, “All interpretations of Christmas acknowledge the central image of the family in its 184 celebrations” (1993: 11). Here, the family functions as, “an idiom for wider sociality” (12). This is echoed by Mary Searle-Chatterjee, who argues Christmas,
is a ritual in the sense that it consists of widely shared and predictable routines, is a time of heightened emotion, focuses on culturally prescribed activities that idealize and sanctify a key social institution, the three-generational family and its social networks. (1993: 182)
Whilst Pleck, Miller and Searle-Chatterjee remain emphatic about the centrality of family to Christmas, they also debate its relations to Judaism, Christianity, and pagan rituals. Thus, as a festival of the family that intersects with quasi-religious ritual and commodification. In this way, it is possible to read P.J.’s bundling of Ruth into the car decorated with reindeer horns as a more violent repetition of his usage of heat and light in the kitchen to solicit her into a patriarchal familial structure. In this way, Christmas is perhaps an apt analogue to the conceits and ruses of Holy Smoke’s desert space, in which the norms of patriarchal secularism are negotiated and remade. Here, Christian prayer forms an unexpected line of flight from a closed white, patriarchal familial network. Moreover, Carol’s centrality to this scene can be read as a characterization that reflects back upon and interrogates the constructed hegemonic whiteness of patriarchal secularism and elided Christianity that arguably shapes the ‘secular’ ordinary imaginary associated with white, Anglo-Celtic dominance. I now turn to a discussion of how these concerns might be drawn together in the concept of secular mourning.
Secular Mourning
The weight of our history with others is both burden and buoy as we struggle to carve out more social space to be different and do ourselves differently. - - - Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen51
51 Jakobsen, Janet and Ann Pellegrini. “Melancholy Hope and Other Psychic Remainders: Afterthoughts on Love the Sin.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 6.4 (2005): 423-440.
185
When Miriam finds Ruth in Delhi, she hears her daughter addressed as Nazni by another sanyassin. Miriam asks, “Who is Nazni?” to which ‘Ruth’ replies, “Would you mind calling me Nazni, it’s my name now.” Miriam grips her daughter’s shoulders and says, “Ruth, Ruth, can you speak for you?” This moment can be read as a panicked moment of loss, whereby Miriam cannot find her daughter in the language and body to which she is accustomed. Whilst this moment is a point of intensity within the text that demonstrates the panic Miriam experiences at the prospect of loss, it is useful to consider the political and agential possibilities of mourning that are not reducible to loss itself but that I will argue can be seen to structure particular modes of relationality. I turn now to a consideration of accounts of the opportunities and potentialities suggested by critical mourning before returning to analysis of how these possibilities are set in motion in Holy Smoke.
In her study of Gail Jones’ novel Black Mirror, Tanya Dalziell (2005) offers an ‘ethics of mourning’ by arguing for the importance of the recognition of alterity between subjects both before and after loss. Dalziell describes the way in which Jones’ text emphasizes the impossibility of ‘really knowing’ an-other both before and after death, and uses this construction to develop an ethical awareness of difference. Here, mourning is acknowledged and enacted relationally. That is, in this reading, mourning can be described as an ethical relational model and not a symptomatic response to death. Dalziell’s ethical mourning also forms a counterpoint to dominant Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytic models of mourning that, as Dalziell writes, pathologize loss and psychically “cannibalize” the deceased.
With an obligation to let live the alterity of the lost friend, that friend is carried hesitantly, rather than cannibalistically, in the living friend as memory (which itself runs the ‘risk’ of loss, of vanishing), while the dead, as an inspired body, envelop the living – a haunting, unsettling and persistent presence. (2005: 57 Original parentheses)
Here we see loss as a practice that doesn’t ‘go away’ with time or with the deaths of friends and relatives. In The Work of Mourning, Jacques Derrida maintains close attention to the productivity and intensity of Otherness in mourning. He writes that death is accommodated and acknowledged proleptically “in the undeniable anticipation of mourning that constitutes
186 friendship” (2001: 159). Here, mourning and loss are anticipated and lived prior to and after death. Indeed, for Derrida, the alterity of the individual who has died is infinite, and intensified, rather than lost or ameliorated, in mourning (158-61). This suggests that deaths are perpetually lived with as modes and sites of alterity that hold resonances of other realities and vitalities. In closer proximity to object relations psychoanalytic theory, David Eng and David Kazanjian offer a rich discussion of the productivity to be made in a focus not on loss per se, but rather on “what remains” after loss (2003: 2). Hence, Eng and Kazanjian configure “a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic” (2003: 2). Here, again, is an impetus to consider the living of mourning as an affective, relational practice. Indeed, Anne Anlin Cheng develops this focus in her important study of racial grief, in which mourning and melancholia form structures for understanding the lived cultural politics of racialization (2001). These works open potential for conceptualising the affective practice and promise of mourning as a critical framework in which interrelational dynamics, as well as affective excesses, can be seen as productive and affective rather than pathological.
Psychoanalytic constructions of melancholia, particularly the influential model developed by Freud and later re-read and re-worked by Melanie Klein within object relations psychoanalytic theory and praxis, describe melancholia as the psychical fixation on a lost object, which cannot be named or acknowledged as lost (Klein 1975). That is, the melancholic subject remains structurally attached to a lost object through phantasy, and henceforth rejects the ‘reality’ that serves as a traumatic reminder of a confounding loss. However, David Eng and David Kazanjian resist this pathologisation by noting slippage between Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” in which melancholia is imagined as pathological in comparison to mourning which effects closure, and “The Ego and the Id,” which they argue implicitly acknowledges that “mourning remains becomes possible through melancholia’s continued engagements with the various and ongoing forms of loss” (2003: 4-5). Given this sense of the structural importance of melancholia to mourning, such that they cannot be separated as discrete activities, I suggest it is also possible to place anticipatory grief within this framework. Indeed, Alessia Ricciardi acknowledges that whilst in Freud’s work melancholia can be seen as a “response to an ideal loss, not to an actual death” (2003: 23) in contrast to mourning, bringing these terms together is 187 productive in acknowledging the porosity of boundaries between the worlds of loss and their psychical construction and modes of ‘living with.’ This also opens space for considering the conditions, or world, from which mourning is enacted. That is, I suggest that experiences of grief destabilize the notion of a transcendent, self-same, unchanged ‘world’ or ‘reality’ from which losses occur and are perceived.
There is a sense in which, in mourning, “the singular shock of what we must bear [has] altered the very medium in which it was to be registered” (Brault & Naas 2003: 5). This forms a highly evocative and paradoxical point, in which acknowledging the alterity of subjects in friendship and loss, through mourning, acknowledges the alterity between the ‘worlds’ in which loss is recognized to take place. In a further complication, Judith Butler notes that in loss, “On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well” (2004:22). The relationality of mourning through the interdependence of vulnerable, social bodies produces a politics of uncertainty, in which multiple registers of subjective identity and ‘reality’ are called into question. That is, relational mourning arguably destabilizes the sense of a consensual reality that would remain ‘the same’ after, and perhaps in anticipation of, loss. Following Derrida, to deny such change would arguably deny the alterity of the (potentially) deceased. Mourning, then, would include the im/possibility of living multiple worlds, and thus multiple realities, encoded by acknowledging the alterity of these worlds. In this sense, the three reality-spaces of Holy Smoke, which are produced inter-relationally and which mediate different bodily postures, boundaries and political engagements, can be read side by side as a spatialization of anticipated loss in which Miriam, differently and abjectly figured in relation to Ruth, negotiates an uncertain identity politics. Hence, the threat of the thwarted secular, white, patriarchal nuclear family forms a spectral uncertainty that cannot be assuaged but in which she finds unexpected connection with Puss and Carol, and with Ruth. In order to further contextualize these possibilities, it is useful to draw from Ana Dopico’s concept of ‘secular mourning.’
‘Secular mourning’ is offered as a descriptive model by Ana Dopico in her reading of Edward Said’s works on criticism and repetition. She writes:
188 Connecting Said to wider cultural discourses about mourning and melancholia as cultural symptoms, I am nevertheless pointing to a crucial difference: to the usefulness of the work of mourning not as forgetting or the finality of peace, nor as ‘closure’ of narrative or the ‘resolution’ of law, but as a disciplined practice of memory. And Saidian mourning, like Palestinian nationhood, is always driven to commemorate loss beyond the state’s territory, beyond the grave site, beyond the limits of the individual subject: onto other sites, utopias both real and invisible, in exile. (Dopico 2006: 112)
The notion of mourning as a practice of memory that is therefore culturally and politically engaged and enacted is useful in destabilizing a pathological or ‘solipsistic’ conceptualization of the practice. However, I would like to take Dopico’s concept beyond the ‘placeless place’ of utopia to heterotopia, with attention to the spectral presence of death that Dalziell notes and Derrida associates with friendship. Rather than as a “practice of memory” that might be seen to occur after loss rather than in anticipation, I draw from Dalziell, Derrida, and Eng and Kazanjian to expand secular mourning to include proleptic mourning: that is, mourning potential losses that structure friendship and relationality and that make the future and past in the present. Here, I draw from Dopico’s highly useful concept of secular mourning in its address of losses and cultural mourning beyond the specificity of the subject and as a broader cultural project with a multiplicity of experiential deployments and modes of ‘living with’ the spectres of not what is lost, but what is elided in representation. Within her study of secular mourning in Said’s body of work, however, Dopico can be seen to employ a discourse of pathology, associated with melancholia for which ‘successful’ mourning is a ‘cure’:
Repetition cures, assuages, gives coordinates to those places of erasure, displacement, or abjection and offers a practice, a space of work that inaugurates, evokes, and educates the possibility of return. It thus battles the finality of a practice of mourning and resettlement (whether of the self, the nation, or the libido), resists the abject places and morose silence of melancholia, and with a manic and directed energy refuses the limits of exhaustion. (Dopico 2006: 112 Original parentheses)
Dopico’s diction, including the words ‘cures,’ ‘morose silence’ and ‘exhaustion’ can be seen within a discourse of psychoanalytic pathologization that associates melancholia with psychical paralysis and stasis, and mourning with finality rather than presence and futurity.
189 I do not wish to suggest that a psychopathology of mourning and melancholia is wrongheaded. However, if every action can be construed as a communication, then the refusal to mourn, to ‘live with’ loss, can also be seen as the active sustaining of a particular reality, which can be seen as repetitious. Thus, the effort of melancholic mourning might also be seen to refuse ‘the limits of exhaustion.’ However, in addition to this perspective, it is perhaps useful to consider the affective agency and potentiality of Dopico’s terms of analysis. Each of the terms I listed refers to bodily postures and intensities, and visceral experience, suggesting the intensities associated with mourning and melancholia. Indeed, in my reading of affective intensities in the mother-daughter relation in Holy Smoke, which were produced relationally through the porosity of boundaries and abjection, an affective economy was central to cultural and political critique. That is, terms such as ‘morose’ and ‘exhaustion’ acknowledge embodied, visceral registers of communication. Dopico also uses spatial terminology by mentioning ‘coordinates,’ ‘displacement’ and ‘space of work.’ Thus, in this reading, for Dopico secular mourning is arguably linked with affective embodied modes of inhabiting space within a broader cultural politics of possibility and change. This resonates with Rose’s readings of the cultural politics of ‘lived’ space, which I linked with Foucault’s heterotopia and the production of secular patriarchal familial dynamics in this chapter.
Rather than offering a model or template for thinking secular mourning, I would like to draw attention to how the concept of a consensual reality from which losses are registered might be destabilized through a reading of the cultural and affective politics of loss in Holy Smoke. This takes into account that the concept of repetition is both fraught and evocative, given that the notion of a transcendent consensual reality supporting and producing such repetitions paradoxically runs the risk of eliding the alterity of that which was lost. Hence, by way of extrapolating from these positions, I would like to offer a concept of ‘secular mourning’ in a highly specific way, which I will tie to my reading of Holy Smoke as the text offers representations that I argue offer compelling ways of imagining the secular in terms of relational, affective, proleptic mourning. This attention to alterity opens and maintains psychic and sociopolitical capacities for inhabiting and making social space differently. This resonates with Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen’s description of their work on affect and tolerance, in which they agitate for social space for enacting difference:
190 Call us hopeful melancholics, but we think that a depathologized and politicized melancholia offers resources for surviving into the future precisely because of melancholia’s greedy (and heartstretching) conservation of loss. (2005: 439 Original parentheses and emphases)
Indeed, ‘hopeful’ melancholia, with its focus on the future not unlike the fusion of mourning and melancholia I have described above, suggests an affective ‘heartstreching’ economy at stake in the imagining and ‘doing’ of difference within social spheres and realities. Here, conceptual space is opened for linking affective economies with social space and difference. I will now draw together these concerns by offering a reading of Holy Smoke’s enactment of secular mourning.
As part of her negotiation of this loss, an affective economy and productivity of mourning can be read in Miriam’s corporeal anxiety and development of lies to spirit Ruth home. That is, just as melancholic agency might refer to the sustained refusal of an-other world without the lost object, the process of mourning may also include the creative modes of avoidance and panic that form a response to anticipated loss. In a further layering of losses within the text, the loss of Ruth to the heterotopic ashram is arguably tied to the constructed structural ‘loss’ at the heart of the white, Anglo-Australian secular subject, which Ruth ‘loses.’ Paradoxically, in losing her ‘lost soul,’ Ruth inspires grief in her mother. Not only this, but in the activity of Miriam’s mourning, which arguably includes travelling to India, hiring P.J., and taking Ruth to the desert, the secrets and limitations of the secular, patriarchal family are emphasized and irrevocably fractured. Here, the viscerality and affective economy of mourning cannot be decoupled from the cultural politics and spatiality of its enactment. That is, given the porous boundaries between Miriam and Ruth, which are represented palpably in Ruth’s cathartic dance sequence and at their moment of abject embrace, it is possible that in the loss of Ruth, Miriam’s reality also fractures, and this of course includes her familial relations. That is, secular mourning cannot be thought independently of the affective and familial economies that mutually constitute the mourning subject at a specific time and place, and I emphasize that the porosity and relationality of boundaries between subjects complicates and informs the particularity of the enactment of mourning.
191 In acknowledging porous boundaries, modes of alterity can be seen as paradoxically emphasized, since, through anticipated and actual losses, and despite the appearance of intimacy, proleptic mourning arguably compels subjects to live multiple worlds simultaneously. It is possible to extend this claim further and suggest that the production of the boundaries of white, secular, patriarchal suburban mythology through the heterotopic sites of the Halfway Hut, desert, and ashram, in addition to registering critique of the privileged, normative, disembodied patriarchal subject, also produces a spatial representation of mourning. That is, the anticipation of loss animates a productive practice of mourning that includes the re-negotiation of cultural and subjective boundaries. Indeed, before Ruth flees P.J. and the Hut, she tells him, “I’m lost, I’m lost.” In his grief at potentially losing her to the desert, he violently chases her and then hallucinates her image as a goddess. Simultaneously, the women are gathered at the emu farm and utter the Lord’s Prayer for Ruth’s safe return. Representations of the spiritual and religious, in both ritual practice and kitsch pop-imagery, are not only spatialized, but also linked with P.J.’s abjection and the porosity of boundaries between the women through shared voices, which can be seen to vitalize and intensify the affective economy of mourning. The desert, then, functions as a psychical and sociopolitical site with which to think the opening up of relationality to scrutiny, and finding new potentialities within and through relationship.
In its potential openness to social, familial and psychical change through mourning, Holy Smoke can be seen as a film that both refuses and repeats nostalgia for the dominant myth of secular, suburban, patriarchy. Here, I recall Alessia Ricciardi’s category of the “spectral film” (2003: 9) which she offers as a mode of cinematic language and representation that enacts mourning. As I mentioned earlier, for Ricciardi this does not refer to a linear, triumphalist narrative of loss and replacement. Rather, in a radical “openness to different levels and components of loss,” spectral cinema “relentlessly rephrases the question of mourning not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a call to reinterpretation and thus to change” (2003: 9). As I have described in this chapter, Holy Smoke arguably repeats and satirizes nostalgia for the patriarchal secular family dynamic through representations of the secrets and artifice that form and reflexively deconstruct its making. Indeed, its comedy can be founded in what Gillian Rose describes as misrecognition, where “aims and outcomes constantly mismatch each other” (1996: 72) given that anticipated losses are met with further losses and potentialities, and the exposure of previous losses, betrayals and 192 ‘spectres’ of mourning. In a creative misreading, I would like to consider this generic strategy, or reflexive awareness of the “resources” (Pellegrini & Jakobsen 2005: 439) of losses, in terms of Judith Butler’s evocative, metaphorical account of mourning.
[Walter] Benjamin writes: ‘Comedy – or more precisely: the pure joke – is the essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt’ (The Origins of Tragic Drama). Like the lining of a dress at the hem or the lapel – mourning thus likened to the material of clothing, the material that is mostly hidden, that is suddenly, even unexpectedly, felt against the flesh, the leg or the neck, and so mourning is staged here as a certain encounter between a commodified material and the limb that knows it only on occasion. Mourning is likened to an “interior” region of clothing that is suddenly, and perhaps with some embarrassment, exposed, not to the public eye, but to the flesh itself. This is a presence, a proximity, that undoes what appears, that is counter to the effect of appearance, but is also part of the realm of appearance itself: mourning emerges as the lining of the dress, where the dress is as it were, laughing. It tinges the appearance; it suggests an ‘underneath,’ but it is still part of appearance, its frame, its artifice, its suggestiveness and potential undoing. And mourning is, ineluctably, an encounter with sensuousness, but not a ‘natural’ one, one that is conditioned by the proximity of the artifact to flesh. That mourning is subjected to a metaphorical identification with the artifice that brings the body into view suggests the very process by which mourning works. It displays, and it displays the body in a certain sensuousness, without purpose, without direction, but not, therefore, without movement. (Butler 2003: 470)
Here, comedy is closely associated with mourning animated through corporeal proximities and artifice. Whilst the sense of an ‘underneath,’ or a ‘mostly hidden’ pervading reality beneath the artifice that enacts and signals mourning might be desired, its alterity and exposure fractures this supposition. Holy Smoke is a film preoccupied with the prosthetic capacities of artifice, in the representation of the sari, toupee, Walkman, Christmas decorations, celebrity pin-ups and so on, that inasmuch as they variously form humorous moments, elude a straightforward reading as objects in and of themselves. Rather, through the relationality of proximity to flesh, and to corporeal and affective modes of relationality, they arguably enact a process of mourning located in an affective economy of connection. Thus, by refraining from a linear and teleological search for the ‘underneath,’ be it the
193 quality of the ‘lost soul,’ a deeper knowledge of the ‘spirituality’ of the desert, or a trust in a transcendent reality unaffected by losses and spectres, Butler’s mourning can be seen to maintain modes of alterity through relationality, mediated by ‘sensuousness.’ In this way, a linear narrative of progression is decoupled from the work of mourning. Secular mourning, then, can be seen as a creative nexus of affective, spatialized and unique encounters in which private modes of grief intersect with the cultural conditions and contexts that figure connection and loss, and in so doing produce sites not for forgetting but for proximally imagining and enacting new economies of relationality and difference.
Conclusion: Unmourned spaces
In her article “Affective Economies” Sara Ahmed refers to unmourned, stateless bodies construed as objects of fear and whose deaths remain unacknowledged (Affective: 136). She argues that fear “sticks to” these bodies in the making of national borders and securitization, and in the denial of their deaths. Ahmed gives the example of the Tampa incident, which took place on August 26th 2001 (Affective: 136) when 438 mainly Afghan asylum seekers onboard the Palapa 1 were stranded near Christmas Island off Australia’s west coast in the Indian Ocean, and were rescued by a Norwegian carrier, Tampa.52 The Tampa was only licensed to carry 40 persons, and had inadequate life jackets and medical facilities to aid the asylum seekers, who included a heavily pregnant woman and several passengers requiring intravenous intervention (Brennan 2003: 41-2). However, the Australian federal government refused admission to the asylum seekers against international law, and instead produced ‘the Pacific Solution.’ Amidst considerable national
52 A broad popular and academic literature has emerged in the aftermath of the Tampa incident that is strongly critical of the government’s usage of (now defunct) Temporary Protection Visas as an alternative to granting asylum, the detention of asylum seekers in the desert, the ‘Pacific Solution’ that involved the redrawing of Australia’s migration zone in order to reduce responsibilities toward asylum seekers, and the racist xenophobia that shaped these debates in the media. Key texts include: Everitt, Jacquie. The Bitter Shore: An Iranian family’s escape to Australia and the hell they found at the border of paradise. Sydney: Macmillan, 2008; Bolzan, Natalie, Michael Darcy and Jan Mason. Eds. Fenced Out Fenced In: Border Protection, Asylum and Detention in Australia. Altona: Common Ground, 2006; Neumann, Klaus. Refuge Australia. Australia’s Humanitarian Record. Sydney: U NSW P, 2004; Brennan, Frank. Tampering with Asylum: A universal humanitarian problem. St Lucia: U Queensland P, 2003; Crock, Mary and Ben Saul. Future Seekers: Refugees and the Law in Australia. Annandale: Federation, 2002; Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa. Sydney: U NSW P, 2002. 194 and international publicity and condemnation, and more than eight days since their rescue by the Tampa, some asylum seekers were taken to New Zealand, and others to the Pacific island nation of Nauru where they were detained under Australian instruction and management (Mares 2001: 139-41). That is, the geopolitical space of Australia was reconfigured in order to fearfully construct it as inaccessible.
Despite the strong implications of the Tampa for constructions of Australian identity, which include a tightening rather than porosity of boundaries, Maria Giannacopoulos argues that it has quickly receded from the dominant cultural memory. In her description of the “violence in this act of forgetting” (2007: 45) Giannacopoulos quotes a letter that some of the rescued asylum seekers gave to the Norwegian ambassador whilst onboard. It reads in part: “And in the case of rejection due to not having anywhere to live on earth and every moment death is threatening us” (2007: 45). The overwhelming anticipation of death can be seen to be repeated violently and spectrally in the Australian government’s refusal to accept the asylum seekers within Australian geopolitical space. Giannacopoulos’ argument is concerned with the white patriarchal sovereignty of Australian land and nation, however I would like to suggest that her essay becomes an enactment of mourning through attention to the reality of death (and its erasure) and forgetting that she engages. She writes, drawing from lawyer Irene Watson, that the refusal of entry to refugees repeats and is premised upon the concept of terra nullius (2007: 56-7). Giannacopoulos notes that the ‘myth of emptiness’ that enabled the legitimation of colonization is inverted so Australia is constructed as “full and unable to embrace refugees” (2007: 53). Here, “Australian law is implicated in a project of producing racial violence” (2007: 58). Giannacopoulos’ work presences, remembers and recognises simultaneous erasures and alterities that are presenced and enacted through seemingly disparate and unrelated events and histories, and which perhaps obliquely invokes a sense of the possible futures thwarted and yet implicit in the re-making of boundaries.
These ideas are useful in consideration of the Port Hedland Detention Centre in Western Australia’s northern Pilbara region where asylum seekers were detained for ‘processing’ during the 1990s until 2003. Although Port Hedland is not in the desert, it can be described as an outback site due to its remote location. The Detention Centre attracted media attention in 2001 for riots and arson. It was reported that one riot started when a young boy was 195 assaulted by staff (Nolan 2001). The administration building was then stormed by 150 detainees, in which police attacked with tear gas (Nolan 2001). Following this, 170 armed police and Detention Centre staff conducted a “dawn raid” (Nolan 2001). Detainees were shown in many media reports during this time on hunger strikes, some with their lips sewn together, to protest the poor medical facilities in the centre after a detainee died after he transfer to Perth for medical treatment (Weber 2001). Furthermore, a family were forcibly separated, with a six and eleven year old children removed from their parents (Sales 2001). As I will now demonstrate, these controversies, as Maria Giannacopoulos describes, have also slipped away from the dominant imaginary.
In 2008 the Detention Centre re-opened as a beachside motel called Beachfront Village. On the website, tourists and guests are offered 24-hour security, cable television, en suite accommodations and restaurant quality food. The front page of the website erases the site’s immediate history by focusing on the acknowledgment of Port Hedland’s and the Pilbara’s settler-colonial and Indigenous histories:
So come and explore our resource rich industry, the Indian Ocean from our doorstep, the rugged Pilbara, the interesting blend of lifestyles or the unique pioneering and indigenous history. (Beachfront 2008)
By situating the site within a broader narrative of Australian ‘lifestyles’ which appears to include mining and natural resources, ‘history’ is constructed as an-other tourist option. That is, whilst the qualification ‘or’ suggests history’s difference from ‘everyday’ pursuits, the list of activities also implies the reification of ‘history’ as an object for consumption. The centre’s history of violence toward refugees, and the erasure of refugees’ rights and dignities, is profoundly marginalized. However, a tab titled ‘The Transition’ in the homepage’s menu is linked to a page that reads:
The newly opened Beachfront Village – the former Port Hedland Detention Centre – is an innovative solution to the large demand for accommodation in Port Hedland for not only the resource sector but also for tourists and other visitors to the town. The development by Auzcorp Pty Ltd, a major hospitality and catering provider to the resources industry in the Pilbara, has made available over 400 fully serviced rooms –
196 ranging from new double, single and disabled ensuite rooms to refurbished single and double rooms with shared bathroom facilities. Auzcorp is committed to the Port Hedland Community, and as such employs locally. The Company has an indigenous employment policy which seeks to ensure a minimum 5% of their workforce is of indigenous heritage. The brief to develop Beachfront has posed a unique challenge to Auzcorp. It’s [sic] well known reputation to never see problems, only solutions, can be seen as soon as you arrive at Beachfront. The high perimeter fence, once a symbol of keeping people in, is now a major attraction to clients seeking security in their accommodation options. Aware of its previous history as a Detention Centre, the company set out to integrate and acknowledge its historic past but to give it a fresh new life which sees it as an important part of the Port Hedland community. (Beachfront 2008)
The words ‘refugees,’ and ‘immigration,’ are not mentioned. As a consequence, a visitor may imagine the site was a juvenile or adult gaol, rather than a site that represents Australia’s refusal to comply with international law and humanely grant asylum to those in need. This elision is co-opted into a narrative of economic progress: ‘innovation’ in response to the high demand for accommodation as a result of the resource industry for which Port Hedland is a hub. With a focus on innovation, development, and progress, indeed the word ‘new’ is referenced three times, the erasure of this history is constructed through the language of perspectival positivity: ‘never see problems, only solutions.’ What are the problems here? It would seem that the ‘problem’ is not that which took place, but the fact of the memory of what took place. This ‘problem’ memory is resolved aesthetically, through refurbishment in the guise of a ‘regular’ hotel or motel. Here, the ‘high perimeter fence’ becomes what it is: a symbol of keeping people out. That is, the message that Australia is full (and can’t accept refugees), and that the Detention Centre was full (and needed to prevent escapes), and that Port Hedland is full (and guests need secure accommodation), is literalized by reference to the security fence, and suggests that, through this fence, there is no place for unmentionable, unrepresentable refugees in Australia. Here, the fence is framed as the luxury of peace of mind for mine workers and tourists in the form of the twinning of erasure and securitization. Thus, following Giannacopoulos, the resort can be seen as a secured, patrolled zone built upon the erasure of racial violence and Indigenous populations, and secured through the racial violence that polices and
197 invisiblizes refugees, whilst constructing them as objects of fear. In this economy of fear borders are not only redrawn, but symbolically reimagined such that the perimeter wall symbolizes comfort and peace of mind for consumers of history, and of the flat screens and cable television the website cheerily describes. Sara Ahmed writes that the Tampa refugees from Afghanistan, within the Howard government’s xenophobic economy of fear, “could be linked to Osama bin Laden” (Affective: 136). Here, fears of terrorists are generalised to ‘Islam’ and projected onto Muslims. A paradoxically fearful border security is therefore made through violence toward racialized religious Others. Here, the disavowal of ‘religious’ Others re-enacts the disavowal of (Christian) ‘religion’ as an ongoing narrative and ideology within the dominant Australian imaginary.
In August 2008 Four Corners broadcast a report entitled “The Money Pit” (Carney 2008). The programme investigated the lack of accommodation in Port Hedland due to the resource industry boom. At this time the Detention Centre housed mine workers. Overwhelmingly, the text’s narrative centred on people who came to the town to ‘make their luck’ mining, and these people were depicted camped in caravans and in tents because the price of renting was too expensive. Mine workers, some of whom were accommodated in the former Detention Centre, were described as part of the reason for the community’s apparent dysfunction. That is, as a population of fly-in, fly-out workers from the capital cities including Perth and Melbourne, the men were described as having little commitment to the community. They were shown as ‘larrikins’ who drank beer at the pub in large groups, were violent, and paid for women strippers as their entertainment. Here, Australia’s mining ‘heritage,’ alongside the cultural myths of mateship, masculine homosociality, and larrikinism are fused with a site of unacknowledged, unmourned, unrepresentable losses. In an interview one of the young white miners, nineteen year old Anthony Parks, described his success: “I've just recently bought a house. I've just sort of got a new entertainment system and lounges and all that in there. I've got sort of my toy car. I've got the (inaudible) boat, all that sort of toys and that” (Carney 2008 Original parentheses). His ability to consume, acquire property and engage in the discourse of white mateship and erasure is literalised through artifice. The boat, entertainment system and lounges are precisely the things, as well as the myths, that the refugees are defined against – as those who threaten these things and values – and which are later literally placed within Beachside Village. In this way, as Judith Butler describes, the nation is “purified of its heterogeneity” (Butler 2007: 32). Here, 198 it can be read that the asylum seekers represent, or presence, what is feared is potentially lost: the national, masculinist, mining, mateship, materialist, homogenous, secular white culture. Secular mourning conceptually opens up a space for perceiving these losses by refusing to disengage from affective economies of relationality and by interrogating the processes and cultural politics of boundary-making. In this way, secular mourning is the opening up of discourse to non-dominant embodiments through acknowledgment of heterogeneous modes of relating between social and private spheres, and the suggestion that these losses are made interrelationally rather than discretely and alienably.
199
- Interlude -
Figure 9: Todd Julie and Jesse Ewles. “Secular Confession Booth: Cheaper than a shrink with no possibility of damnation.” Nuit Blanche, Toronto. 2007. Reproduced with permission.
200
201 CODA
(Confessing to) Reading Canadian secularisms
An important consideration in the comparison of texts, communities, and nations, among other selections of comparative sites, is that the act of selecting ‘objects’ of comparison produces them as comparative sites. That is, in selecting Australian and Canadian texts and contexts for comparison, I participate in the act of drawing together potentially incommensurable texts and contexts and hence risk the assumption they could be unproblematically brought together. Further, this leaves the question of selecting one cultural site over others. I have argued throughout this thesis that ‘neutral ground’ is a highly fraught concept closely bound with ‘secular’ conceits about objectivity. Yet comparative study can presuppose an ‘objective’ observational position. Given that I am highly critical of the notion of finding sufficient ‘distance from’ the apparent dogma, or foggy lenses, of ‘religion,’ emotion, and embodied affect in studies of representation, how might I propose to perform a comparative study?
Within the framework of this thesis understood as a textual ‘whole,’ a point of departure to a reading of Canadian ‘secularisms’ in relevant texts and contexts is an act of violence. Gerry Turcotte notes that language is a mechanism of violence: “When I first discovered ‘violence,’ in a dictionary, and read that it meant the use of force, I knew it had to do with words. I realized that language was a sword, with two sharp edges, that cut the killer and the killed” (Turcotte 2004: 29). The words selected here enact violence and loss, not only in their selection but in what has been left unsaid and unexplored. Violence is constituted, then, in the play of both avowal and disavowal. In drawing together Canadian and Australian texts and contexts for comparison, and thus enacting an avowal of their viability for such practice, I simultaneously imprint my own assumptions and narratives of similarity, difference, commensurability and incommensurability in ways that repeat the violence of re-presentation. However, it is also a repetition that engages with the histories and practices of Australian-Canadian studies; hence, the ‘difference’ of this intervention potentially opens critical spaces in both this and other works. I would like to dwell a
202 moment longer on the practice of critique in order to engage more thoughtfully with the kinds of possibilities that a provisional comparison might offer. Judith Butler writes,
To offer a critique is to interrupt and contravene law-preserving power, to withdraw one’s compliance from the law, to occupy a provisional criminality that fails to preserve the law and thus undertakes its destruction. (Butler 2006: 219)
The violence of words that perform critique is constituted in power relations invested in constructing normative compliance. Critique, then, can be construed as the opening of a lacuna for potentially reformulating dominant ideas. Elsewhere Butler reinforces this point: “to question a form of activity or a conceptual terrain is not to banish or censor it; it is, for the duration, to suspend its ordinary play in order to ask after its constitution” (Butler 2000: 264). Duration and provisionality are two key terms that arise out of these claims. A provisional criminality can be read as one that is constituted in direct relation to specificities that are not imagined as transcendental. Questioning, which premises critique, is temporally limited to its enunciation and thus, again, does not announce a generality. Another aspect at stake, however, is the uniqueness of critique. In its provisionality, critique (per)forms a specific embodiment: that of criminality. Hence offering critique, insomuch as it signals a withdrawal from compliance also signifies the enactment of a specific, quasi-sanctioned role (no matter what specific action is taken outside the law, the criminal is still recognizable as outside). Here, the context of enunciation is crucial: what constitutes a provisional criminality is highly volatile, and the usefulness of formulating questions through bringing together particular texts, concepts and ideas, is a volatility that risks the violences of censoring, silencing, and erasure that are sought to be interrupted. What might then, be useful about producing a reading of Canadian secularisms, which might therefore be construed as a point of comparison?
By way of addressing this question, which seeks a confession of intentionality, I begin instead by offering a reading of two confession spaces, the Secular Confession Booth (2007) in Toronto, Canada, and The Booth (2008) in Perth, Australia. By reading these texts and thus perhaps playfully confessing to comparing Canadian and Australian secularisms, I enact a provisional critique that resists ‘general’ questions about the problems with comparative study, whilst retaining awareness of these important concerns.
203 However, the confessionals I describe are perhaps useful sites to begin questions about what makes and underpins debates about ‘secularism’ in Canada, in light of the arguments I have made about Australia. I then turn to a close reading of the language of debate about secularism as it intersects with the production of a liberal pluralist national imaginary in Ontario news media reports during the Ontario provincial elections in 2007. These are in turn contextualized with a close reading of contemporary debates in Québec about the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of religious minorities which resulted in a policy of ‘open secularism.’ Finally, Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) provides an imaginative and evocative textual site for further unpacking the limits and conceits of a secular national imaginary, through the construction of a near-future Toronto evacuated by the middle class and economic power bases, and peopled with grief, loss, languages and embodiments that are disavowed by this imaginary. Thus, in this Coda, or tail-piece, I provisionally imagine Canada as a heterotopic site within the confines of this thesis. This suggests a textual strategy that reflects back upon and hence re-presents the argument I have been making for the importance of embodiment and national identity in the making of secularisms. In this way, comparative study is a Saidian act of repeating arguments and claims in the invocation of an-other context, rather than ‘leaving behind’ the Australian texts and contexts I have discussed, so as to vitalize debates about secularisms. Hence, beginning from a position of not quite comparing and critiquing Canadian secularisms, but not quite not comparing and critiquing Canadian secularisms, I also enact a provisional blurring of boundaries as a problem, and potentiality, of critical secularisms.
Confession Space
In October 2007 I visited Todd Julie and Jesse Ewles’ Secular Confession Booth at the second annual Nuit Blanche exhibition in Toronto, Canada. Nuit Blanche is an all-night art exhibition, the concept of which was borrowed from a similar Parisian event, and which involves the installation of participatory and visual art and film in cafes, restaurants, churches, parkland, roadsides, squares, courtyards, and a disused subway in the downtown precinct. A popular attraction was the Secular Confession Booth, which had a long queue down the block in which it was situated. Installed in the Heliconian Club – a converted
204 church – the Secular Confession Booth drew media attention preceding Nuit Blanche which perhaps contributed to its popularity (Schechter 2007, 21). Essentially, it functioned as a confessional, which was qualified by the slogan, “cheaper than a shrink with no possibility of damnation” (Julie & Ewles 2007). Participants lined up to sit in the booth and share their story with an obscured attendant, who appeared as a shadow and was deemed to be a “mature,” charitable person who would listen and/or give advice free of charge. That is, the Secular Confession Booth functioned in much the same way that a Roman Catholic confessional would reputedly function in the sharing of individual concerns, however, this was destabilised by its public context as participatory art rather than Catholic ritual.
What kind of secularism is produced here? The Secular Confession Booth is almost like psychotherapy but not quite; almost like Catholic confession but not quite; almost in a church space but not quite. The ‘charity’ of the attendant arguably resonates with the institution of the church, further suggesting its resonances with church praxis. It can therefore be read as an installation that blurs boundaries between the oppositions that secularisms work through. Given its installation as participatory art, the Secular Confession Booth makes space for the act of attendance and testimony, and for the community to bear witness to this whilst waiting in the queue. In the queue, participating in watching people enter and exit the Secular Confession Booth, some spending longer in the booth than others, the question of the discourse of the space potentially forms a kind of frisson that can’t be settled. This raises the question of what makes the secularity of the Secular Confession Booth. Given the avowal and disavowal of Christianity in the booth’s slogan and site, Catholic moral concepts of sin are arguably both avowed and disavowed. That is, in this blurring of boundaries, what counts as something worth confessing? What moral code might be at stake? Here, it would appear that the question of the religious is resurrected through art, in the form of unanswerable questions.
A useful approach to this question of confession is to consider the broader context of confession. Michel Foucault argues that when modern societies, “consigned sex to a shadow existence, […] they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (1978: 35 Original emphases). Foucault maps the confessional subject from the Middle Ages in Europe through the Counter-Reformation and into the eighteenth century to argue that the ‘incitement to discourse’ on sex co-founded 205 confessional subjects (1978: 17-35). Indeed, confessional subjects reveal sexual practices, desires, and identity through speech acts that are implicated in religious practice, moral obligations, notions of sin, and ‘secular’ psychoanalytic modes of divulgence, within churches, psychoanalysts’ rooms, or on talk shows and in everyday life (May & Bohman (1997: 139). Confession, then, is part of normative Western discourse. It is possible that the Secular Confession Booth ironizes this mode of social praxis, by re-presenting it in a confined time and space. However, Dorothea von Mücke suggests strong generic resonances between the confession and the ‘profession’ of faith:
Thus today the profession of faith – if understood apart from its official religious context as the sincere expression of an individual’s set of beliefs – appears in the immediate vicinity of, if not entirely exchangeable with, the genre of the confession. It is from the confession that it seems to have borrowed a certain valorization of an individualized, hidden self that reveals itself. (2003: 257)
In this light, the Secular Confession Booth can be read precisely as a confessional that professes its secularism. And yet, given its situation in a former church and the ritualistic mode of confession practiced, forms a profession that, regardless of the lack of an ‘official religious context’ repeats and reinforces the notion of a ‘hidden self’ in revelation. The edict, ‘cheaper than a shrink with no possibility of damnation’ acknowledges the salience of economic, psychoanalytic and religious discourses of the self within the speech act, rather than outside it. A profession of secular revelation, then, can be read as a confession that avows a particular subjectivity: the secret self. Von Mücke goes on to describe a secularized confessional as that which involves “a psychotherapist/friend” who supports and enables confession “by virtue of [their] generosity and nonjudgmental way of listening” (2003: 265). This falls within the terrain of Julie and Ewles’ slogan. The confessional part of the Secular Confession Booth, in this reading, must therefore be unremarkable within the context of normative praxis. What, then, might explain the long queue for admission to the booth, and thus the desire to publicly enact this display of ritualistic, everyday confession?
A point of entry to considering the question of the desire to enact a public display of entering a small booth for the performance of confession, regardless of the contents of what is confessed, is a reading of a similar installation in Perth, Western Australia. The Booth
206 was exhibited at the 2008 Silver Artrage Festival by artist Jen Jamieson, who first exhibited the installation six years beforehand. The premise is structurally similar to the Secular Confession Booth. Jamieson’s Booth, also in the style of a confessional, invites participants to sit inside a small demountable booth to share an emotional exchange. However, Jamieson’s description of The Booth differs considerably in tone and premise to that of Julie and Ewles.
Enter The Booth, a dark tactile space where frankincense is burning and the golden walls will hold you tight. Your priest and her video camera are there for you. Enter and confess as often as you need, make offerings, be heard, be absolved, perhaps find solace? The priest is kind, flirtatious, serious, angry. Sometimes she weeps. Mostly she listens. (Jamieson 2008)
The affective economy of The Booth is formed in the display, valorization and performance of an emotional exchange within a quasi-public forum. The Booth structurally re-affirms a Catholic ritual, but the confessional mode is replaced with a shared emotional exchange. Importantly, here the focus is on the exchange – not the confessor or the ‘nature’ of the confession. Thus, a profession of ‘faith’ is not at stake. That is, we are given a sense of the priest’s emotional subjectivity rather than disembodied authority or charitable listening. It is useful here to draw from Sara Ahmed’s construction of emotions as circulated socially, rather than located within particular subjects, objects or texts (Ahmed Cultural Politics: 12- 3). The Booth arguably re-presents the relational construction of emotions that is elided in the Secular Confession Booth’s focus on the confessor, which is achieved by placing the attendant in shadow. Further, the Secular Confession Booth’s slogan assumes the confessor may be afraid of damnation (‘no possibility’ of damnation also signals that its possibility is fearsome or to be avoided), and assumes that the expense of psychoanalysis is a deterrent – thus conjuring an image of a confessor who has limited avenues for sharing secrets. Jamieson’s website, which describes The Booth, offers an intriguing invitation: ‘come in away from out there.’ This begs the question of what is ‘out there’ that participants might desire to be ‘away from,’ and also suggests the solicitous, warm quality of the installation.
The Booth promises a shared performative experience that is didactically constructed as emotional and affective; the ‘outside’ is made through contrast to the sensuality of the enclosure. Here, the public sphere can be seen as a disembodied, rational space, in contrast
207 to The Booth. However, participants are filmed. Whilst the Secular Confession Booth draws distinctions between psychotherapy and Catholicism and blurs these boundaries, the inclusion of the video camera emphasizes that this is not a therapeutic space, but rather a site of performative reflexivity. Jamieson’s priest is clearly coded female due to the use of the feminine pronoun in the installation’s description. The artist who films the exchange is characterized as a priest. Here, the collapse of Catholicism onto the art installation is clear, and parodic of gender oppression: in the Roman Catholic praxis that The Booth gestures toward, women priests are not permitted. Whilst the participatory, embodied action of the Secular Confession Booth reinforces and elevates, perhaps exalts notions of care, listening, speech, privacy, testimony and charity through its close historical and geographical location in a church, The Booth implicitly professes and performs critique of these conditions by ironising the gender politics and oppressions of Catholicism. Further, the apparent losses and inadequacies of an imagined ‘secular,’ disembodied, alienating public sphere are also reflexively ironised. Neither a Catholic site nor a ‘secular’ site, The Booth blurs boundaries through the representation of the cultural salience of gendered subjectivity and emotional relationality as inextricably linked and performed. Given that the confession is elicited through performative exchange with the emotional subjectivity of the priest, the notion of confession as the profession of a secret self is undermined. The Booth, in its sensuality and emotionality, reflexively admits the loss of privacy and the erasure of the private to the public ‘eye,’ whilst reinforcing that the apparent intimacy of revealing the ‘secret self’ is itself socially constructed and performed rather than an unmediated expression of feelings residing ‘within.’ It is intriguing that within a relatively short period of time, these Canadian and Australian artists produced strikingly similar secularisms, and so I now turn to a contextual and critical reading of the politics and possibilities of reading Australian and Canadian secularisms together.
Australian – Canadian Connections
Australia and Canada have been drawn together for comparison in a variety of ways. Both are secular, liberal democracies. Both Australia and Canada are settler-nations with colonial histories that continue to debate colonialism, neo-colonialism and post-coloniality (Brydon
208 & Tiffin 1987; Gunew 2004). In 2008 the Rudd government in Australia offered a formal apology to the Stolen Generations for the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families.53 Also in 2008, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to the First Nations peoples who were forced to live in (mostly Christian) Residential Schools under a policy of assimilation (CBC 2008). This suggests the ongoing negotiations of histories, memories, grief and loss that underpin the political regimes of these settler-invader nations. Both nations have histories of slavery in the form of indentured labour; in Canada the domestic workers scheme imported slaves from the Caribbean and in Australia Pacific Islanders were imported for labour in the sugar cane fields in Queensland. Canada and Australia can also be described as “middle powers” (Cooper et al 1993) given the cultural imperialism of the U.S.A. and Britain, as well as nations with economies similarly supported by the exploitation of natural resources (for example, oil sands in Western Canada and natural gas and minerals in Western Australia and Queensland). Furthermore, Australia and Canada both have officially multicultural polities – Australian multiculturalism was modelled on the Canadian policy that was adopted in 1971 (Lopez 2000: 164-5). Australian and Canadian multiculturalisms are similar in that, unlike the United States for example, the policy is “part of the rhetoric of the nation” with a similar “‘top-down’ imposition of state policies” (Gunew 1999: 16). However, important differences must also be addressed. Under Howard, the term ‘multiculturalism’ was evaded in rhetoric and ministry: the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs was nominally changed to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration because of Howard’s distaste for “multiculturalism’s” connotation of diversity rather than “integration” (Topsfield 2007; Longley 1999). James Jupp argues that this distinction is crucial, given that in Canada the multiculturalism Act passed unanimously, whereas in Australia the term has attracted hostility within government not only recently but also in the late 1980s and 1990s (Jupp 2002: 91-2). This view is shared by Kateryna Longley, who argues that although there are anxieties in Canada about multiculturalism, in Australia the “language of diversity is hijacked” in favour of a “commonsense” “fair go” to “ordinary”
53 In Australia in 1997 the Bringing Them Home report was released to government, which detailed the testimonies and histories of children and families split apart, institutionalised and often abused due to a government policy of separating children from their families. The Stolen Generations were not extended an apology by the contemporary Prime Minister Howard however when current Prime Minister Rudd came to office an official apology was given on 13 February 2008. See: Australia. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Bringing Them Home: report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997. 209 Australians, in which “multiculturalism” is imagined as a “threat to national identity” (Longley 1999: 77). Further, Australia does not have a Bill or Charter of Rights, unlike the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which became law in 1982. Also, Canada is officially bilingual, with debates about Québec nationalism ongoing in Anglophone and Francophone Canada, along with debates about First Nations lands and heritages. However, Canada’s embrace of diversity suggests “heightened government awareness of, and engagement with, the diversity of its national population that does not yet seem to prevail in Australia” (Khoo 2003: 35). Australia remains officially monolingual, although land rights and Indigenous sovereignty along with the elision of Indigenous nations, form ongoing debates and oppressions. Thus, although many scholars have brought Canada and Australia together for structural similarities, key differences remain in perceptions of how diversity is lived and made in language.
In both Canada and Australia strikingly similar Census data suggests religion has waned as a public concern since the 1950s (Martin 2000, 23). Indeed, Canada’s 2001 Census revealed an increase in those identifying as having ‘No Religion’ to comprise sixteen per cent of Canadians, within the context of decreased nominated affiliation with the major Protestant and Catholic churches (Statistics Canada 2003).54 Australia’s 2006 Census revealed similar figures, with sixteen per cent of Australians identifying as having “No Religion,” and reduced affiliation with the major churches (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Given that in Australia’s case the ‘religion question’ is optional on Census forms, and in Canada it is asked only every second Census, it can be read that religion is situated, at least structurally and hence ideologically, as extraneous to the core concerns of the Census project. However, as prominent Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby finds, Catholicism and Anglicanism remain strong in terms of affiliation and identification. He argues that despite the suggestion of ‘diversity’ implied in the metaphorical multicultural ‘mosaic,’ Christianity remains dominant and performs assimilatory functions (2000: 239). Further, these figures risk eliding the sociocultural histories that include the ‘shadow-‘ or ‘quasi- establishment’ of Christian religions in both countries (Anglican and Roman Catholic in Canada, and Anglican in Australia), which produce national ideologies and systems of
54 This data is current at the time of writing given that the Canadian Census requests information about religious affiliation only every ten years. Genest, Daniel. Statistics Canada. “Re. Census data – Religious Affiliation Query.” Email to the author. 27 May 2008. 210 privilege (Egerton 2000: 92; Lyon 2000:4). This is suggested by both nations’ decisions to include reference to God in the preambles to their Constitutions, which continues a privileging of Christianity despite the multifaith premise of official multiculturalism (Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, Preamble; Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Preamble).55 Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau commented, during debates about the inclusion of God in the Preamble to the Charter of Rights, that it was “strange, so long after the Middle Ages that some politicians felt obliged to mention God in a constitution which is, after all, a secular and not a spiritual document” (Gray 1981, 12. My emphasis). Here, the suggestion that religion/the spiritual is indexical to the (European) premodern era reinforces the assumption that the secular is a sign, and artefact, of modernity and of the nonreligious. As I will argue, the strangeness of this inclusion is not that what Trudeau described as an antiquated dogma was imported into a ‘secular’ document, but rather that the persistence of a privileged Christian signifier can be constructed as both integral to the document, and a ‘stranger’ from an-other time and place. The relegation of the religious to the strange, and as ambivalently ‘outside,’ simultaneously makes and defines the religious as always potentially outside, despite its evidential centrality to concerns about how the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be framed and represented.56 Thus, as I have argued is the case in Australia, the marginalisation of the religion question in the Census need not suggest that religion remains extraneous to Canadian society at an ideological level, despite its apparent demographic sidelining.
55 The complexities surrounding political motivations and the privileging of Christianity implied by the inclusion of “Almighty God” in the Australian Preamble and “the supremacy of God” in the Canadian Preamble are thoughtfully discussed in the following studies: Maddox, Marion. “'With hope in god': religion, the preamble debate and public values in Australia.” Australian Religion Studies Review 13.2 (2000): 5-22; Maddox, Marion. For God and Country: Religious dynamics in Australian federal politics. Canberra: Department of the Parliamentary Library, 2001; Egerton, George. “Trudeau, God, and the Canadian Constitution: Religion, Human Rights, and Government Authority in the Making of the 1982 Constitution.” Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die. Eds. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2000. 90-112. 56 Sara Ahmed provides cogent analysis of the production of the ‘stranger’ as a relational process whereby the figure of the stranger is embodied, and welcomed (or not) according to political and social processes. Here, the otherness of the stranger is made by proximity, however some strangers remain more ‘other’ than ‘other’ strangers. In the light of Trudeau’s comments, it is possible to argue that whereas Christianity, associated with premodern European Christianity in this case, may seem ‘strange,’ an embodied religious subject is construed as a stranger. However, given the privileging of Christianity in Canada at the structural and ideological level at the least, other others, that is, other religious embodiments including Muslims, Sikhs and Jews, for instance, are constructed as stranger still. Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied others in post- coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000. 2-6. 211 There is a large body of literature that critiques the ways in which both Canadian and Australian cultural politics entrench modes of privilege. Despite Canada’s Charter of Rights, systemic inequalities are reinforced as access to these rights is not shared equally (Monture 2007: 198-9). Sunera Thobani argues that whiteness is ‘exalted’ and strongly associated with Anglo-Canadian settler subjects coded white. It happens that Thobani borrows from Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s study of the entrenchment of the white, Anglo-Celtic subject in her discussion of white privilege in Canada to make her case (Thobani 2007). The entrenchment of white privilege is discussed by Himani Bannerji at the level of the language of representation. Bannerji makes clear that in the Canadian case, the language of diversity constructs an imagined “power-neutral plurality” and homogenous Canadian identity which is “a coping mechanism for dealing with actually conflicting heterogeneity” (Bannerji 2000: 36-7, 51). This signals the complex interweaving of moral codes and ideologies that are organized and coded through narratives of a cohesive multicultural Canadian identity.57 Indeed, in her influential and nuanced study of Canadian cultural politics within the context of multiculturalism, Eva Mackey writes, “In the Canadian context, the state did not seek to erase difference but rather attempted to institutionalise, constitute, shape, manage, and control difference” (2002: 70). She argues that the policy of multiculturalism reflects attempts to control Québec separatism, and to define ‘tolerance’ in terms of its contingencies with the project of nation- building (70). Further to this, Mackey notes through reflections on interviews conducted in Southern Ontario, the construction of a ‘Canada first’ mentality, in which minorities are required to be ‘Canadian’ above other identity categories of ‘difference.’ She writes, “People, therefore, did not see cultural difference per se as the problem, only specific forms
57 Canadian scholars Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka have developed an authoritative body of work on Canadian multiculturalism and identity. For instance, Kymlicka argues that new modes of political representation need to be instituted such as “group representation” to encourage a diversity of voices and views. Charles Taylor’s concept of “deep diversity” within a “politics of recognition” which precedes Kymlicka, also argues for respect for diversity. However, in this reading both scholars suggest that difference can be lived with through what are best described as “good-faith negotiations” (Kymlicka 1998: 104) that whilst suggestive of potential models for increasing access to representation for minorities, does not address the hegemonic constructions that arguably produce some subjects and identities with the power to grant, withhold, manage, and tolerate this access. There is not sufficient space to offer a detailed analysis of these arguments in the confines of this study, however key texts include: Kymlicka, Will. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998; Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford UP; Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001; Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007; Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition.’ Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. I discuss Taylor’s most recent book A Secular Age in Chapter One of this study. 212 of difference that threaten the unity of the nation” (2002: 150 Original emphases). Here, the management and tolerance of difference is bound up with the ideal of a Canadian unity, despite the injustices that render some subjects more ‘different’ and thus intolerable than others. This has strong resonances with the Australian imaginary of unity I have described, however, interestingly both Mackey and Thobani cite Ghassan Hage’s critique of the hegemonic, white, Anglo-Celtic subject as dominant in Australian nationalist rhetoric, and hence position the Australian context as similar, whilst Canadian diversity is again defined in comparison to that of Australia. This repeats a trend in which Canada is imagined as cosmopolitan through its imagined and established differences to the United States and Britain, and in this case, Australia. Here, national identity is again staked through differences that make Canada an ironically cosmopolitan unity. In this sense, comparative study of Australia and Canada might be particularly useful in repeating this structure as a kind of ‘Canadianism’ that signals the negotiation of difference and unity in a complex cultural politics of national identity. I now turn to a series of media debates in Ontario centred on Canadian ‘secular’ national identity, along with a similar, and in line with the trends I have discussed, more pejorative and violent mode of debating ‘religious’ difference, in Australia.
Secularism makes the news
Print news media has a strong influence on the ways in which political agendas and public discourses are constructed in Canada as ‘the national interest,’ among questions about the decline of media autonomy since the late 1990s (Thobani 2007: 223). Thobani offers a nuanced reading of the making of anti-Muslim xenophobia in the Canadian media since 9/11 (217-47), however I would like to offer a close reading of a localised and yet related, ‘telling’ issue of the provincial funding of religious schools in Ontario, in which fear of Muslims is also invoked. During Ontario’s provincial election campaign in September and October 2007, the question of whether government funding should be extended beyond Catholic schools to other faith-based schools was raised by the Progressive Conservative
213 party leader John Tory.58 This was not a new issue. In 1999, Ontarian lawyer Professor Anne Bayefsky took the issue of government funding of exclusively Catholic schools to the United Nations, which deemed it discriminatory (CBC News 1999). Despite this history, John Tory’s plan to extend funding to non-Catholic religious schools was widely contested and, by many accounts, remains the reason for his party’s loss at the October election; The Globe and Mail reported that “it was his contentious promise to extend government funding to faith-based schools that dogged his campaign” (Laghi & Howlett 2007). The preoccupation with secularism that underpins what The Globe and Mail described as a “furore,” (21 September 2007) was unpacked in a light-hearted critique also published in The Globe and Mail during the campaign:
We may seem quaint or even backward to the rest of the world, but we are a deeply secular people who have placed all our faith in civic institutions, especially our public schools. Upholding them is a sacred duty, and the slightest threat to them is apt to provoke a hysterical response. (Laghi & Howlett 2007)
It appears from this passage that Ontarians have shifted their faith from religious institutions to civic institutions; namely schools. Further, the televised advertising campaign led by Liberal Dalton McGuinty attested to the importance of educating children of all faiths in public schools, dubbing the associated inclusivity “the Ontario way.” Yet this excerpt can also be read for its associations. Recalling Trudeau’s comments, the religious is here constructed and displaced historically as an element of the pre- or non- modern. Thus, the terms ‘quaint’ and ‘backward’ arguably refer ironically to ‘religion,’ which is signified through the terms ‘sacred duty’ and, given the commonplace opposition of ‘religion’ to the rationality of the public sphere, perhaps also ‘hysterical.’59 However, by implying that secularism functions as a kind of ‘religious’ commitment, and that Ontarians, as an homogenous, ‘deeply secular people,’ are perhaps dogmatically ‘secular,’ the
58 There is considerable diversity across the provinces in the ways in which schools are funded by public moneys. Indeed, there appears to be a coastal divide in the ways in which schools are funded such that the Western provinces tend to fund religious schools whilst the Atlantic provinces do not. However, a broad analysis of the various funding strategies is beyond the scope of this study. The example of Ontario offers a close reading of the ways in which anxieties about secularism are mediated, rather than a comprehensive examination of the implications of school funding policies. 59 As I described earlier, the Secular Confession Booth makes connections between religion and psychoanalysis explicit in its slogan, “Cheaper than a shrink with no possibility of damnation.” In the light of this collapsing together of religious and psychoanalytic discourses through the secular as sign, hysteria might refer to psychoanalytic or religious discourse interchangeably. 214 ‘religious’ is construed as an essence displaced onto civic institutions. Thus, it would seem that the one institution is interchangeable with the other.60 This simplistic construction of a core Canadian culture can also function, following Bannerji, to eclipse modes of difference through imagined homogeneity, in which ‘religious’ groups are parodied and construed as outside or Other to the dominant ‘secular’ society, where ‘outside’ suggests a tolerated, patrolled position guaranteed by constructed ‘religious’ Otherness.
In exploring the question of provincial funding for Catholic schools in Ontario, the 2007 pre-election debate was accompanied by general discussions in print news media about the place of ‘religion’ in Canadian culture. The Guelph Mercury stated:
What Canadians commonly think is what Conservatives are hearing at Ontario doors. Schools should be inclusive, not exclusive, and their mandate should be education, not religion. (Travers 2007)
At first blush, this comment might appear to be a progressive account of the importance of diversity in Canadian culture, particularly within educational institutions. However, a close reading reveals a number of slippages. In the first instance, ‘What Canadians commonly think’ is aligned with Ontarians. Here a provincial imaginary is extended to a national imaginary with the suggestion not only that there is Ontarian cohesion, but also that there is a broader national cohesion closely related to this homogeneity. This is implicitly opposed to the Conservative position (and by implication the policy of funding non-Catholic religious schools), hence suggesting that Canadians, and thus Canada, is fundamentally liberal. Thus, to be non-Canadian is to occupy a conservative position. Sunera Thobani (2007) raises concern about the ‘exalted’ status of Canadian liberalism, by identifying systemic inequalities that function to produce a racialized, feminised Other against and through which a liberal-pluralist position produces dominant, white Canadian subjects (27- 9). She argues that, constructed as “the international cosmopolitan,” Canadian multicultural whiteness is produced as tolerant of diversity, and “uncontaminated by its previous racist history” through the language of pluralism, tolerance and diversity (2007: 153-4). Here,
60 Talal Asad offers an important critique of an essentialist construction of interchangeability, arguing that this model does not offer points of departure from which to view the particularities of secularism and discontinuities in meanings attributed to ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ over time and space. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.189. 215 recalling Bannerji, the language of diversity eclipses actual heterogeneity and systemic inequality through the production of imagined coherence. In this light, the apparently inclusive construction of a core, nationalistic commonsensical position in the excerpt above can be read as a privileging of homogeneity over difference. It happens that this idea is represented in a contemporary report that, “Two-thirds of Ontarians support the Liberal assertion that faith-based funding would hurt the public system and encourage segregation” (Thomson 2007 My emphases). This suggests that the current condition is not segregation, despite the concurrent funding of Catholic schools by the province. What is important for my purposes, however, is that through the use of the prescriptive term ‘should,’ the former excerpt’s implication is that inclusivity is valued over exclusivity, and, by analogy, that (nonreligious) ‘education’ is valued over ‘religion.’ And, following the logic of this line of argument, an imagined Canadian (Ontarian) culture or mindset is constructed as intrinsically liberal and ‘secular.’61
In Ontario, the focus and ultimately the electorate’s preference was for the maintenance of funding to Catholic schools but not others.62 This was expressed as a desire to ensure the diversity and inclusivity of public schools. By contrast, the Australian federal government funds public and private schools, including religious schools.63 More recently, controversies about a proposed Islamic school in Camden, New South Wales on land owned by the Qur’anic Society for a school that would accommodate non-Muslim students,
61 This is reinforced in a Canada Day article by journalist Lynda Hurst, who offers seven patriotic “Commandments” in a parody of (Christian) religious observance. Hume writes, “Thou shalt try to be all things to all people and fail, but do better at it than just about anywhere else” which, in the context of her article, refers to Canada’s official multicultural policy and implementation of a Charter of Rights. Hurst, Lynda. “Canadianism A-Z(ed).” The Star. 30 June 2007. Accessed 24 May 2008 from, http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/231019. 62 It needs to be noted that this funding arrangement is also historically situated within the rubric of diversity. Ontarian provincial funding of Catholic schools reflects the appeasement of the oppression of French Catholic settler subjects and culture in Canada by the British Protestant settler majority. 63 The federal Australian Labor Party’s election loss in 2004 under Opposition Leader Mark Latham occurred after heated debates about the party’s policy to reduce payments to expensive private (often religious) schools. Latham defended this position as a desire to reduce class segregation, rather than religious segregation. Yaxley, Louise. “Latham defends schools policy.” PM ABC Online. 15 Sept 2004. Accessed 12 Jan 2008 from, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2004/s1199993.htm. However, in his published memoir The Latham Diaries Latham clearly signals his anti-religious position, particularly with his default derogatory description of Catholics as “kiddie fiddlers.” He writes: “Organised religion: just another form of conservative command and control in our society” p. 114. Latham, Mark. The Latham Diaries. Carlton: U Melbourne P, 2005. By contrast his more popular predecessor Kevin Rudd publicly claims his committed Anglican practice, suggesting the political and religio-cultural salience of (Christian) religious identification and praxis. See: Rudd, Kevin. “Faith in Politics.” The Monthly. Oct 2006. 17. Accessed 12 April 2008. http://www.themonthly.com.au/tm/node/300; “Kevin Rudd: The God Factor.” Compass ABC TV. 8 May 2005. Transcript. Accessed 12 April 2008 from, http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1362997.htm. 216 as well as offer non-Muslim religious instruction, were expressed in terms of the equality of all schools and education, amidst clear anti-Muslim xenophobia. The violence of the Camden community’s reaction to the proposal was expressed by community protests requiring riot police protection (MP defending 2007; Frew 2007).64 Petitions against the school were held by local businesses, and two pigs’ heads were staked at the proposed site attached to an Australian flag, along with a crucifix (Kruger 2007). In order to gain critical purchase on this event, I would like to focus on the ways in which it was represented in the media. An editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald stated:
Schools of all kinds play a vital role in assimilating new arrivals into the Australian mainstream. Today, Muslims [as opposed to Irish Catholics] are the ones who get the Australian flag brandished at them. It is why religious schools remain as important as ever. They provide a possibly marginalized immigrant group with education which is both sympathetic to minority concerns, and mainstream in orientation. (Editorial 2008)
The assimilationist rhetoric of this passage is couched in terms that appear to be concerned with diversity, given the phrase, ‘sympathetic to minority concerns.’ However, the concept of the ‘mainstream,’ which is made clear as Anglo-Australian in this piece, represents the construction of an entrenched, white, Protestant, core Australian culture in diametric opposition to those identified as Muslim. Here, the anxiety appears to be that some Muslims would not assimilate, the violence of which is reflected in the matter-of-fact way in which having the flag ‘brandished’ is constructed as a minority rite of passage. The Education Minister Julia Gillard, reflecting on the issue of government funding for Islamic schools stated,
My concern is that parents get to make a choice. But every Australian child, no matter what school they are learning in, gets a high class education. And that’s what we are absolutely focused on delivering. (Gillard 2008)
Gillard focuses on practical technologies for learning and resources rather than concerns about social cohesion, inclusion, and diversity. She referred to the unanimous rejection of
64 There is footage of the Camden protests posted on YouTube. For example, see: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=68WPG-TLMJM&feature=PlayList&p=580F972B4486AB3C&index=41; http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GxooABFsBlY&NR=1. 217 the planned Camden school as ‘a traffic issue’ and did not comment on the xenophobic protests and events (Karvelas 2008). The Quranic Society’s spokesman Issam Obeid who stated, “We’ve got one nation, one flag – let’s all work together” (Muslims respond 2008). Here, the politics of homogeneity mentioned by Bannerji as symptomatic of Canadian state ‘neutrality’ with respect to diversity, and which Ghassan Hage (1998) draws attention to in his study of the entrenched whiteness of Australian official multiculturalism, is harnessed in an avowal of sameness through the icons that have been used against the proposed Muslim school and society through codes of privileged whiteness and Christianity. This hegemonic impetus for religio-cultural and nationalistic homogeneity here functions to offer assimilation, rather than diversity, as the trope that implies the possibility of ‘harmony.’
Absent from the Australian debates about this issue was justification for the rejection of the school based on the principle of secularism.65 Rather, choice is constructed as the goal of diversity, suggesting a neo-liberal focus on individual preferences made through purchasing power. Here, religion is paralleled with choice. This arguably implies that that one decides to be religious, and thus selects a school based on this logic. Here, it is equitable to fund all schools. Yet, extrapolating from this logic, it also suggests that all religious and nonreligious subjects are essentially the same, bar the ‘choice’ they have made. This forms the premise of the imagined ‘strangeness’ of ‘religion.’ Similarly, during the Canadian school funding debates, the following excerpt from The Globe and Mail stated:
It sounds like such a simple, inarguable principle: Religion is a private matter, for the edification of those individuals who happen to value it, to be practised freely and without restriction in their homes and places of worship. Outside those places, in the public sphere, religion has no place at all, and there things should be neutral and secular. (Saunders 2008)
Here, an idealistic distillation of the ‘religious’ from the public sphere is imagined and privileged. As a ‘private matter’ it is again imagined that religion is perhaps not a choice,
65 In the simplest sense, this absence could be justified on the basis of school funding policies inherited from the previous conservative government that guarantee federal funding for religious schools, however the absence of broader conceptual and rhetorical debate within the Australian media on this issue remains significant. 218 but can be selectively ‘displayed’ or erased during the passage between spheres. This emphatic avowal of secularism as exclusion of a ‘religious’ essence that does not belong within the public sphere appears to be reinforced by Ontarian Premier Dalton McGuinty during the schools debate:
‘As premier, I have made decisions that defy the beliefs of my own religion,’ Mr. McGuinty said, citing his support for same-sex marriage and abortion. ‘My Catholicism, my private faith, does not determine my position.’ (Agrell 2007)
Here, the differentiation of private from public, and its corollary of religious belief differentiated from ‘neutral’ reasoning, comprises McGuinty’s neatly spliced position as Catholic / Premier of Ontario.66 These statements form stark contrast to the construction of Islam as an un/assimilable Other in the Australian case. However, the notion of a religion that is selectively worn and discarded, that is, a ‘religion’ under individual control and will, that is represented in both contexts. Here, the threat of uncontrollable ‘religion,’ would thus form its Other. I will return to this concern shortly. However, if we return to the former passage from The Globe and Mail, ‘religion,’ and those who ‘happen to value’ religion, are simultaneously constructed as outside and yet threatening to the ‘neutral,’ assumedly liberal, nonreligious ideology. That is, the production of a segregated society in which religion is a private issue divisible from everyday life in the public sphere produces a particular notion of Canadian culture that is at once indifferent to religious belief and yet simultaneously dependent on the presence of religion as an Other through which the secular state is imagined. The Canadian case can therefore be seen as a more subtle instance of the pejorative Othering exhibited in the Australian example; however, both can be read in terms of a disavowal of religio-cultural heterogeneity within the framework of official multiculturalism.
66 This is perhaps also expressed in his more recent decision to remove the Lord’s Prayer from Parliamentary practice in order to reflect a more inclusive ethos. The Canadian Press. “Ontario starts consultations on Lord’s Prayer in legislature.” CBC News Online. Accessed 28 May 2008 from, http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/04/10/lords-prayer.html; Sekar, Radhika. “Ask the Religion Experts: Question: Do you think Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is right to ban the Lord's Prayer from the beginning of the legislature each day? Should there be a moment of silence so everyone can say the prayers of their own faith instead?” Ottawa Citizen. 17 May 2008. Accessed 18 May 2008 from, http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/religion/story.html?id=64da3d59-b5cb-4d58-918f-abf5ed207e15. 219 Sunera Thobani argues that since 9/11, the Canadian media has increasingly used the discourse of terrorism to produce images of a “terrorized and innocent west and the hateful Muslim who threatens its destruction” (Thobani 2007: 222). In a similar vein, the Guelph Mercury’s coverage of the school funding debate makes tendentious links between fears of Islam in Canada with fears about funding for religious schools:
More precisely, it's fear that immigration trends now skewing heavily to Muslim countries, combined with schools preaching that God's domain is indivisible from man's, will nurture Islam's virulent mutant strain. (Travers 2007)
Here, the threat of a terrorized west is produced in terms of a ‘virulent’ Other to dominant Canadian education systems and broader culture. The arbitrary term ‘Muslim countries,’ alongside the phrase ‘virulent mutant strain’ – each word of which functions alone as a signified for a virus, and which together produce the semiotic of viral infection – suggests that Canada needs protection. However, the threat is only nominally situated outside Canadian borders given the imprecise reference to ‘Muslim countries’ and thus more convincingly refers to a generalized construction of Muslims as Others/Outsiders. I aver that it is possible to take this line of argument further and suggest that the terms ‘Muslim countries’ and ‘immigration trends’ – striking in their vagueness – refer not to actual Canadian borders, sovereignty, and immigration policy but rather function to construct and essentialize religious minorities as Outsiders within (and without) a resolutely, albeit anxiously, ‘secular’ Canadian culture. Here, the agency of those constructed as ‘religious’ outsiders is reduced and yet paradoxically placed upon the individual/minority group who thus appears to wilfully refuse integration, despite the overdetermined status of ‘outsider’ that reduces possibilities for agential participation in the public sphere.
Within the context of concern about threats to an imagined secular, core culture in both Australia and Canada, it is useful to consider that religion, as an embodied practice and subjective identity, cannot be easily separated by embodied religious subjects from the politics of the public sphere in which society engages on an everyday basis (Asad 2005). Of course, the ‘value’ of the equality of men and women is often invoked as a justification for suspicions about Islam in both Australia and Canada, thus highlighting the ways in which ‘religion,’ secularism, and the control of bodies are correlated (Carastathis 2007; Randell-
220 Moon 2007). The following excerpt from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, with respect to the treatment of religious groups highlights an emotional connection between ‘religion,’ embodiment, and emotion:
If your religion is a topic that's dear to your heart, you've probably been tempted to throw a brick at your TV set or to rip up a newspaper from time to time. There's a gut feeling among many religious Canadians that they and their particular faiths are treated unfairly by the secular news media. (Petricevic 2007)
Here, ‘news media,’ which, from the context of the article, assumedly refers to the mainline daily publications, broadcasts and online media including the Canadian Broadcasting Service, National Post and Globe and Mail is homogenised as a secular institution, Other to the religious readers emphatically described and distanced as ‘you.’67 This contrasts heavily with the quote with which I began this discussion, in which secular Canadians are addressed through the inclusive pronoun ‘we.’ But equally crucial here is the way in which the construction of religious consumers of the news occurs through references to viscerality. The heart, emotions, and guts are constructed as affective, responsive organs attuned to the machinations of the apparent violence of the ‘secular’ Othering of the ‘religious.’ Part of the discourse of segregation, then, involves the affective and subjective construction of essential, fixed religious subject-bodies ‘within’ which ‘religion’ resides, opposed to the disciplining strategies of a ‘secular’ culture that relationally makes ‘religious’ subjects.
In the 2007 Ontario election debates and the Camden School furore also in 2007, different structural funding policies are at stake, yet both articulate national imaginaries that
67 It is important to mention that there are of course a range of publications and media services for religious consumers in Canada. The pay-TV channel “Salt and Light” is a Catholic broadcasting body established in 2002 after the Catholic pilgrimage, World Youth Day, was hosted in Toronto, and which I discussed in Chapter Two in regard to the Sydney pilgrimage in July 2008. Muslim Girl Magazine is sold in bookstores and at Wal-Mart, with a wide North American distribution. Geez: Holy mischief in an age of fast faith, an award-winning, Winnipeg-based Christian magazine critiques and satirises consumer culture and advocates grass-roots campaigns, such as the “Buy Nothing Christmas” which opposes the commodification of Christmas in favour of church-based celebration. See: Heinrich, Jeff. “Magazines Spread the Word.” The Montreal Gazette. 26 April 2008. Accessed 27 May 2008 from, http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/saturdayextra/story.html?id=40607e4f-8a95-4066-9d7f- 9a5479159abb. However, these marginal media reinforce the theme I am describing, where the religious is construed as intrinsically outside mainline media, and by extension the homogenous ‘Canadian,’ (Anglo- Canadian and Christian) national imaginary. 221 imagine a cohesive, Anglocentric identity. In the Australian example I have offered the violence is explicit. However, the Camden school proposal was dismissed by the local government on account of anticipated increases to traffic flow to the town. Insofar as town planning is ideologically invested and thus not an ‘objective’ discipline, the semiotic of “traffic” needs to be contextualized in terms of the debates themselves, which were aggressively anti-Muslim. The sense of ‘extra’ traffic can be read as fear of new flows not only of people – specifically Muslim people – but as flows that represent the imaginary of white Anglo-Celtic Christian normativity as in flux rather than static. Flows of traffic therefore represent a threat to the fantasy of homogeneity and stasis. The violence of the ‘objective’ language of ‘traffic flow’ however, is its disavowal of the vitriolic anti-Muslim religious racism that shaped the debates. This disavowal reinforces that the homogenous imaginary is repetitiously avowed rather than a priori; and violently defended so as to remain seemingly static.
On the other hand, it is precisely the language of defending secularism that the Ontario debates use to refute the public funding of religious schools (although this is an ironic secularism, given the entrenched funding of Catholic schools). These are of course different debates, however read side by side there are some interesting invocations of a static national imaginary that bears further consideration. A reading of secular mourning offers some useful insights. One commonality to both the Canadian and Australian examples I have included is the repetition of calls to national identity and coherence. The imagined loss, which might be construed as proleptic, of this imagined unity, arguably launches not only actual policies and decisions in defense of this loss, but also produces rhetorical secularisms that reinforce sameness over difference. Here, a national body is constructed that obsessively and repetitively reasserts its fragility and potential lack of coherence, in direct relation to religious minorities. The signification of viral Islam I described renders the body metaphor particularly salient, given the connotations of infection, attack, immunity, and healing associated with viruses. More particularly, viruses are difficult to control and thus can be conflated with the fear of ‘uncontrollable’ religious subjects. To be identified as ‘religious’ and non-Christian in this construction, is to be outside the national body, and thus figured internally as the national body’s frailty and ‘infection.’ Essentially, ‘religious’ subjects are construed as unwelcome outsiders within. Here, the ‘threat’ may cause sickness, or death, to the national body. Subjects repetitively constructed as always- 222 already outside the narrative of the national body, and hence its threat, are in this way associated with death. In his influential work White Nation Ghassan Hage argues, “spaces of fantasy, in so far as they are spaces of total control, cannot be other than spaces of social death” (Hage 1998: 163). That is, insofar as fantasies of white hegemonic subjectivity and culture produce Others for self-definition and as objects controlled, patrolled, and silenced to deathliness, the death of this imaginary is repetitively displaced. In this sense, the self- same national imaginary cannibalizes Others in a self-sacrificial securing of their perpetual resurrection as outsiders. Here, national cohesion is a haunting made through language that divests the imagined national subject of embodied, visceral enunciation, and of the capacity to live alongside difference. This argument for secular mourning may be read as a desire to bring ‘more’ religion into the public sphere, or to urge for the dismissal of reasoned debate. Yet Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen suggestively write of the desire to “have our secular cake and eat it too” through “openness to both secular and religious discourses” in a “field of possibility” (2008: 28). This suggests hope for more modes of relationality in the flux of what counts as the public sphere through recognizing the blurring of public and private and the multiple modes of difference that vitalise and haunt social praxis. With this in mind, I now turn to a discussion of the debates in Québec in 2007, during which the Bouchard- Taylor Commission tabled its report on religious minorities. In the case of Québec, the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of religious minorities, both through language and practice, organises bodies such that public displays of non-Christian religious iconography and praxis are arguably excised visually, and from Québec’s historical self-definition.
Reasonable Accommodation
In order to bring the issue of secularism and the production of Others/outsiders in to sharper relief, I will briefly touch on the event and findings of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, which became known as the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. The Commission reported in May 2008 on anxieties about the “reasonable accommodation” of religious minorities in Québec. During 2007 a host of news media reports described behaviours of Orthodox Jews and Muslims as conflicting with Québecois ‘secular’ values within the public sphere. Bouchard and Taylor note that for
223 many Québecers, this raised the question of defending “social order and our most basic values” (Building 2008: 13). In response to a veritable panic about the fragmentation of Québec’s national identity, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission travelled to towns throughout the province, and listened to community members’ concerns in order to review “interculturalism, immigration, secularism and the theme of Québec identity” (Building 2008: 8-9). As a nation within Canada, and with a Québec Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1975), as well as an historically Catholic ‘shadow establishment’ in contrast to the Protestant hegemony historically associated with the other Canadian provinces, Québec ruptures ideas of an imagined homogeneous Canadian nation, accounting not least for Canada’s officially bilingual status (Lyon 2000, 5). It was reported that the Commissioners, Québecers and academics Charles Taylor, whose significant work A Secular Age was published in 2007, and Gérard Bouchard, believed that anxieties about the accommodation of religious minority groups, particularly Muslims and Jews, were “largely fuelled by misinformation. If there was a crisis, it was ‘a crisis of perception’” (Hamilton 2008). Bouchard and Taylor state that they found “nothing that confirms that the overall situation might be uncontrollable” (Building 2008: 13). Further, the Report makes clear that among contextual issues such as post-9/11 suspicion of Muslims, the concerns in Québec resulted from media-driven misinformation. Bouchard and Taylor claim that fifteen of the twenty- one news stories credited with causing anxiety and sparking the perceived need for the Commission were misinformed and/or misleading, such that minority groups were (mis)represented in terms of xenophobic stereotypes. However, for my purposes I would like to consider the implications of the word ‘(un)controllable.’ Who might be ‘in control’ of ‘controlling’ religious difference and thus administering ‘reasonable accommodation’?
A significant recommendation of the Commission is that Québec should embrace ‘open secularism’ in order to ameliorate social disquiet. The term is defined: “A form of secularism aimed at banishing religion from State institutions while allowing certain religious expression, e.g. in schools and hospitals, among students or patients” (Gouvernement du Québec). The state’s granting of some groups tacit permission to exercise religious commitments suggests a significant imposition of control over representations of the ‘religious’ in the public sphere. Notably, and within the context of a concern about control, it appears that it is those subjects who are somewhat subjugated by authority who are permitted ‘religious’ expression, according to the logic of the example 224 offered in the definition of the term. I suggest this is not simply a benign or happenstance example, but rather functions as exemplary of the assumptions that underpin this form of secularism, and that is figured in the express request among the Commission’s recommendations that ‘authority’ figures such as police do not wear iconographic ‘religious’ items or garments in the public sphere. Here, the disciplinary function of this form of secularism is unmistakeably clear. A sharp division is drawn along lines that are not simply public and private, but accord to the logic of a paternalistic power relation. Hence, students and patients are permitted their religious (in)discretions according to the will and limits of a paternalistic state that is coded ‘secular.’
The Report (2008) offers an historical narrative to qualify this recommendation. I will quote it at length:
Catholicism has left an indelible mark on Québec’s history. Traces of it are all around us. Under the principle of the neutrality of the State, religious displays linked to the functioning of public institutions should be abandoned. Thus, we do not believe that the crucifix in the National Assembly and the prayers that precede municipal council meetings have their place in a secular State. In both instances, public institutions are associated with a single religious affiliation rather than addressing themselves to all citizens. That being the case, it would be absurd to want to extend this rule of neutrality to all historic signs that no longer fulfil an obvious religious function, e.g. the cross on Mont-Royal or the crosses on old buildings converted to secular uses. The same is true of Québec toponymy, which is largely inspired by the calendar of the saints. Québecers’ common sense will surely prevail in this respect. (49)
Here, an historical context that privileges notions of continuing cultural heritage whilst signalling a time when Catholicism was privileged in Québec, justifies the acceptable status of exclusively Catholic icons in the public sphere. Notably, the recommendation for the crucifix to be removed from the National Assembly was rejected by the Premier (Séguin 2008). Here, the interweaving of cultural history with religion cannot be separated; its indelibility is registered in everyday concerns such as names of towns and streets, which cannot thus be unbound from religio-political heritage. The desire for “neutrality” therefore appears an idealist position rather than a fact of Québec’s society, architecture and culture. However, under “open secularism” Christian iconography is permissible as a historical
225 narrative that does not include non-Catholic and non-Christian icons. Bouchard and Taylor concede,
French-Canadian Québecers have unpleasant memories of the period when the clergy wielded excessive power over institutions and individuals. However, this hypersensitive memory may be a poor reference in respect of secularism. The danger lies in directing against all religions a feeling of hostility about the Catholic past, at the cost of marginalizing certain groups of citizens and fragmenting our society (Gouvernement du Québec 2008: 86).
Although ‘open secularism’ clearly addresses diversity, the Catholic dominant is reinforced. Here, it is memory of dogmatic religion that appears to justify the erasure of ‘religion’ from the public sphere, with concessions made to national history. ‘Hypersensitive’ memory, ‘danger’ and ‘hostility’ suggest the emotional volatility and violence associated with ‘religion,’ and the Report indicates that restricting representations of religious faith in the public sphere will cause these anxieties to flair – however ‘out of perspective’ these feelings might be. What does appear to be the case is that a religious haunting takes place, whereby the memories of Catholic hegemony are displaced onto ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ subjects, who must then endure the violence of conducting themselves in the public sphere in such a way as not to incite memory. Here, feelings about the past pervade the present and, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, “become sticky” (Cultural Politics: 11) at the site of some (religious) subjects who are duly constructed as objects that produce painful rememberings. I will suggest here that there is a similarity, in the note that Québecers should refrain from fragmenting the society through religious difference, that not only is religion seen as a fragmentary force in need of control, but that ‘Québecers’ are essentially the same. That is, it is possible to be identified as Québecois, or ‘religious.’
It is interesting that Bouchard and Taylor defer to ‘Québecers’ common sense’ in their judgments about the selection of iconography and structural procedures to be retained under open secularism. What kind of ‘common sense’ might prevail in a society that the Commission arguably represents as devoutly suspicious of non-Catholic religious iconography and subjectivities, and (hesitantly) grieving for the violences of excessive religious authority? Raymond Williams’ description of hegemony is instructive. He argues
226 that in hegemonic configurations of power, a ‘saturation’ of the experience and process of everyday life occurs to the point that “a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem[s] to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense” (Williams 1977: 110 My emphasis). In this reading, ‘common sense’ can be seen not for its content, but as a concept inextricably linked to modes of power. Hence, it is possible to question the digression to Québecers’ common sense on the issue of religious iconography by considering the modes of privilege that underpin it. A key element of privilege in the Report is the construction of Catholic religious iconography and identity as Québec’s ‘heritage,’ and thus as a narrative and emblem of that which evades the edicts of “open secularism” that non-Christian religions must observe.68 Here, the heritages of First Nations and Inuit and other communities are elided. Thus, grieving for the injustices of Catholic hegemony appears to reassert the violences that are described as causing an excessively ‘sensitive’ memory and aversion to remembering. That is, not remembering is made by not recognizing the iconography and identities of religious minorities. The nation can thus be seen as constructed, through the Commission’s Report, as a body of feeling that perpetually reasserts the pain of remembering through disavowal of ‘religious’ (non- Catholic) subjects.
By drawing debates in Québec and Ontario together I do not suggest I am offering a well-rounded critique of Canadian secularisms. Instead, in bringing these particular and discrete examples together it is possible to make critical space for the question of secularisms within Canadian nationalisms. For instance, strong debates continue to animate Québec’s history of oppression within North America and secessionist agendas within Canada. However, in both cases a national imaginary is produced through narratives of secularism. Whereas in Québec this narrative is associated with a negotiation of grief, in Ontario it is coterminous to ‘the Ontario way.’ That is, an imagined cohesive national and provincial identity is collapsed together onto the putatively ‘secular’ subject – who tolerates ‘Muslims,’ for instance. ‘Religious’ outsiders, who are so clearly physically placed ‘outside’ in the Australian example, thus produce, and are in turn produced by, a secularism that can be described as grief-stricken. That is, the secular national imaginary
68 In a not dissimilar train of analysis, Catherine Belsey relates common sense to ideology. She argues that because the subject ‘lives in’ ideology, the invocation of common sense reinforces an empiricist-idealist humanism that reinforces the ideologically loaded experiences of the commonsensical subject. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. 5-7. 227 that eclipses the heterogeneity and flow of populations, is repetitiously produced as suffering a loss which cannot be lived with. Within the broader context of the Australian and Canadian examples I have offered, a structural pattern appears to be repeated: at a conceptual and symbolic level, the homogeneity of secular nationalism cannot be unbound from the religious, and is implicated in the production of religious Others/outsiders who are duly constructed as intrinsically ‘religious.’ This makes ‘religious’ subjects who are both traumatic reminders of religious ‘heritage’ but also always-already divested of a place within the nation’s (exclusionary) heritage. However the Canadian examples, with their repetitive invocation of the concept of the ‘secular,’ and use of the term, form a point of difference to the Australian examples I have offered here and throughout this study. Given the strong resonances of secularism with nationalism, it is perhaps possible that relations between Canada and Québec, in which questions of identity are negotiated repeatedly on a number of levels, form part of this difference. That is, modes of debate and questions of diversity can also be seen as integral to the language of Canadian secular nationalism. Indeed, through language, and narratives of Black matriarchal Afro-Caribbean embodied relationality, Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction novel Brown Girl in the Ring destabilizes the ‘secular’ national imaginary. Given that speculative fiction draws from the cultural context of its construction, this novel’s evocative exclusion of the white, middle class secular hegemony from near-future, downtown Toronto spatially interrogates the notion that ‘religion’ is located ‘elsewhere’ and ‘outside’ by inextricably linking the city with the ‘spiritual.’
Looking forward to the post-secular city
In his edited collection Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, Canadian theorist Rinaldo Walcott argues,
[T]o consider gender within the contexts of national formation is to unsettle the nation: when gender is raced, the disruption is massive. When it is a Black woman we must consider, national formation is thrown into chaos. (2000: 38)
228 Brown Girl in the Ring’s protagonist, Ti-Jeanne, is a young Black Canadian ‘seer’ woman whose identity is produced through relations with the women of her family, constructions of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and lore, and intertextual resonances with Derek Walcott’s play Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1985). Brown Girl is an unsettling narrative. It is set in a downtown Toronto of the near future, after an economic crisis has resulted in the middle class relocating to the suburbs. The crisis was accompanied by ‘the Riots,’ after which the army was called in but eventually also abandoned the city. Now, access points to the suburbs are sealed from the downtown area known as the ‘Burn,’ and access is only via helicopter to ‘The Strip,’ a nightclub precinct on Yonge Street where the suburban middle classes come “to feel decadent” in the dangerous, spirit-filled city “without ever setting foot on its streets” (176-7). In the absence of normative law and order, as well as capitalist economic bases, characters barter for goods and services. Despite multiple abandonments, central Toronto, described as a “doughnut-hole” (10) is not a vacuous centre. Rather, communities and practices previously marginalized by the implicitly white, Anglo- Canadian middle class are foregrounded and vitalized. Here, the ‘global city’ overlaps with diaspora, exile, Black Canadian, urban Canadian and global discourses through language (Brydon 2001: 80-2). Ti-Jeanne and her grandmother run an herbal medicine clinic on a barter system: “Among Caribbean people, bush medicine used to be something private, but living in the Burn changed all the rules” (14). The narrative remakes the normative boundaries of the public sphere, as well as that of speculative fiction, through the use of Caribbean folklore, Jamaican and Trinidadian Creoles, Canadian English and Québecois Rom in dialogue, which destabilizes the ‘standard’ English of the text’s third-person narrator (Rutledge 1999; Nelson 2002). Further, a ‘spiritual’ reality animates and forms the narrative diegesis. This is held and narrated within and through the embodiments of Ti- Jeanne and her family in a matriarchy of healing, seer women. Here, the chaos of major economic, political, social and geographical upheavals in Toronto foregrounds new possibilities for imagining how ‘religion,’ embodiment and identity are made relationally, alongside the violence of disavowal.
The crisis that frames this novel is developed through a marginal character. Premier Uttley, who is a white, middle class woman located in Ottawa, requires a heart transplant. In a cynical, populist political tactic, she orders a human heart on ‘humanitarian’ grounds rather than an organ from the pig organ donor farms that have replaced voluntary donation. 229 As no hearts are available, a hospital worker travels to the Burn, tellingly wearing a flak jacket, to ask Rudy, who is a murderous gang leader who runs the city and lives in the iconic CN Tower, to source a suitable heart. Rudy, it turns out, is Ti-Jeanne’s grandfather, and a vengeful practitioner of black magic, with the capacity to will a duppie (the spirit of his daughter and Ti-Jeanne’s mother, Mi-Jeanne) to carry out murders at his request. Here, the ‘spiritual’ diegesis takes place, and yet rather than ethereal, the ‘spiritual’ here is closely situated culturally and geographically in downtown Toronto through the novel’s rich descriptions of the setting, and through intertextual weavings with Caribbean folk tale and oral traditions, as well as Walcott’s Ti-Jean. Thus, the spiritual narrative is made contextually and textually, and centres diagetically on the conflict between Rudy and Ti- Jeanne, as well as Ti-Jeanne’s Baby. The birth of Baby sets in motion a string of events whereby Baby, whose soul, we find out, is trapped by Rudy, longs for Rudy to be killed such that the negative use of obeah, responsible for many murders and disappearances in the city, may be stopped by the spiritual abilities of the seer women. Normative calendar time is destabilized through premonitions (Ti-Jeanne’s mother dreamt of the Riots before Toronto was evacuated and the Riots began) and hauntings of memory and past violences symbolized through the embodiment of Baby. It is framed as Ti-Jeanne’s spiritual role and moral rite to kill Rudy: he has ordered the killing of her grandmother Gros-Jeanne, because Gros-Jeanne’s heart is a match for Uttley’s body. The novel, then, centres on ‘spiritual’ praxis, violence and loss. Not only is the normative infrastructure and law lost, but Ti- Jeanne suffers the loss of her grandmother who supports and teaches her healing methods and medicine. Further, Ti-Jeanne’s boyfriend Tony, under contract to Rudy, carries out the murder of Gros-Jeanne, such that Ti-Jeanne suffers the loss of her boyfriend as well as her love for him, her independence after birthing Baby, and her willfulness and fear, in taking up the duty to kill Rudy. The setting is evocatively situated within downtown Toronto: landmarks such as the CN Tower, the Eaton Centre mall, and the grid of streets including Yonge, Dundas and College are mapped for the reader in levels of vraisemblance that render the defamiliarizing textual production of spiritual warfare and justice strongly situated within a familiar cultural site. Further, characters such as Paula and Pavel, who are professors from the University of Toronto, populate the text with a sense of continuity between pre-Riot, contemporary Toronto and the Toronto of the near-future setting. These significant connections with contemporary Toronto can be extrapolated to a comment on
230 the heterogeneity and multiple registers of being, knowing, and doing that are elided in dominant imaginaries of secular urban society.
Ti-Jeanne and Gros-Jeanne’s relationship is conflicted. Until her grandmother’s death Ti-Jeanne is hesitant and often resentful about the ‘strange’ medicinal and spiritual practices and lore of which Gros-Jeanne is a leader in the community. Ti-Jeanne’s body and identity crosses boundaries through her ability to ‘see’ a spirit realm in dream and trance- like states. This trait is shared with her mother and grandmother, and instils Ti-Jeanne with shame, embarrassment and fears of ‘going mad.’ Further, Ti-Jeanne has a thorough knowledge of traditional Caribbean medicinal herbs and practices, despite her suspicion of their utility. Here, Ti-Jeanne can be read as an embodiment of the limits, or more precisely, the blurred boundaries, that a secular imaginary elides. In order to help Ti-Jeanne understand her capacity as a seer, Gros-Jeanne explains that secrecy about Caribbean lore and ‘spiritual’ praxis is contextually made in response to violence:
From since slavery days we people get in the habit of hiding we business from we own children even, in case a child open he mouth and tell some body story and get them in trouble. Secrecy was survival, oui? Is a hard habit to break. (50)
It is hard for Gros-Jeanne to break the habit of secrecy, yet this is enabled through the collapse of specific structures including the patriarchal family, economic power bases, and the excision of the white middle classes. Thus, it would appear that “slavery days” continue within the psyche and through the cultural and familial making and maintenance of secrets, which are only now able to be lived more openly. Slavery, here, could refer to the domestic workers policy in Canada, which enslaved women from the Caribbean; however, it would appear that this is a traumatic history that lives in the making of relationships within the self, family and the broader community. This is also referenced through language: Gros- Jeanne uses a Caribbean Creole within her family, but Canadian English with the white streetkids who are afraid of her ‘strange’ medicine and think she is a witch. Here, the switch of linguistic registers enables an easing of the streetkids’ fears. Thus, spectres of slavery, and of secular rationality, pervade the social scene. In this reading, the politics of relationality are forged linguistically, through embodiment, and through histories of trauma
231 and secrecy, and are able to be reflectively re-negotiated within the register of healing after the demise of the ‘secular’ hegemony.
To further consider the ways in which identity is made through embodiment, language and healing, I would like to focus briefly on the marginal character whose ailing heart frames the text. When semi-conscious after Gros-Jeanne’s heart has been placed in her body, Uttley experiences a change in perspective:
She had realized that she was being invaded in some way, taken over. The heart’s rhythm felt wrong, not her own. It had leapt and battered against her chest as though it were determined to break out. Uttley had been stern at first. ‘Stop that. You’re here to help me. Just settle down and do your job.’ The heart’s frenzied buffeting had slowed to a more regular pace, but then Uttley began to feel a numbness spreading out from her chest with each beat of the heart: down her arms, through her trunk and legs. Bit by bit, she was losing the ability to control her own body. The heart was taking it over. Uttley became alarmed, had tried talking to the alien organ. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘This is my body. You can’t take it away from me.’ But the creeping numbness spread up her neck. She was now completely paralyzed. All she could do was wait for it to reach her brain. She had known that when that happened, she would no longer be herself. Unable to move, unable to save herself, she had felt her brain cells being given up one by one. Then blackness. Nothing.
And then she was herself again. Her dream body and brain were hers once more, but with a difference. The heart – her heart – was dancing joyfully between her ribs. When she looked down at herself, she could see the blood moving through her body to its beat. In every artery, every vein, every capillary: two distinct streams, intertwined. She had worried for nothing. She was healed, a new woman now. ‘Stupidness,’ she said, chiding herself for her unnecessary fears. (1998: 236-7 Original emphases)
In a state of dream-like consciousness, which could be aligned with fantasy, the heart appears to metonymically hold the character of Gros-Jeanne. A literal anatomical heart is enmeshed with the ‘fabric’ of the soul, referenced through language: Uttley utters ‘stupidness,’ a term frequently used by Gros-Jeanne. Further, Uttley sees her own blood moving, as Gros-Jeanne was able to do in her healing work. But I would like to read this passage in terms of the anxieties about ‘secular’ Anglo-Canadian nationalism I have
232 identified thus far. Here, Uttley’s white, Anglo-Canadian body is ‘invaded’ by a ‘foreign’ heart that appears to change her completely. She is ‘unable to save herself’ in this state of paralysed fantasy. Yet the inclusion and difference of the new heart substantiates the drawing together of ‘two distinct streams, intertwined.’ The difference is made palpable: the heart is not a cannibalized outsider but carries with it a distinct voice and history. This results in Uttley’s political decision to “rejuvenate” Toronto compassionately by recognizing and assisting its small businesses. Here, the representation of a fantastical white body animated by a murdered, Black seer woman’s heart both violently repeats the elision and dependence upon Black bodies for labour in Canadian history, and also ironizes this construction through the persistence and importance of different languages and memories.
Gros-Jeanne / Uttley’s decision to help build the communities living in Toronto comes about through the character of Ti-Jeanne. Importantly, Ti-Jeanne is constructed in a similar role to Walcott’s male protagonist, Ti-Jean, who must overcome the Devil, in that Ti- Jeanne must overcome Rudy. However, Ti-Jean’s task is to trick the Devil into feeling. This narrative can be seen to be displaced onto Gros-Jeanne and Ti-Jeanne in this text, whose identities are made relationally. That is, it is in grief for the loss of her grandmother that Ti- Jeanne finds the courage to stand up to Rudy, with the help of her grandmother’s spirit. The novel’s closure finds Gros-Jeanne’s heart ‘tricking’ Uttley into feeling compassion for Torontonians in place of political pragmatism. Here, a new mode of relating to ‘Toronto’ and its inhabitants is opened up through the gesture toward an affective economy in which feeling is foregrounded in the making of communities. This near-future Toronto need not be seen as an example, or prescient modeling of what a ‘post-secular’ city might look like; rather, in this reading, reimagining the secular city forms a ‘post-secularism’ that reflects back on and re-presents the limits and conceits of a secular imaginary. Here, modes of embodied, situated subjectivities that are made through grief, loss, and memory, are foregrounded in relation to the violences of an exclusionary, disembodied secular imaginary. Here, the setting of the spiritual and religious within downtown Toronto spatially re-presents the violences of the ‘secular’ ‘forgetting’ of ‘religious’ bodies and identities by metaphorically refusing their displacement.
233 Conclusion
Brown Girl in the Ring forms a useful point of contrast to Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, in which the ‘spiritual’ anxieties of a suburban, ‘secular’ imaginary are spatially projected onto the desert. However, in both texts embodied, emotional relationality, made through the exchanges between woman characters, forms a destabilizing of ‘secular’ economies of spatialization and disembodied ‘neutrality.’ Thus, recalling Turcotte’s awareness of language and violence, in this intervention into Canadian secularisms I perform the violence of constructing the Canadian context as a conceptual heterotopic site in view of the Australian narratives I have developed in the context of this thesis. Given the trope of space that pervades constructions of the religious as ‘outside’ in John Safran versus God and God on my Side, and which is figured in terms of subjective space in David Tacey’s works, and in Holy Smoke, offering a heterotopic reading of Canadian secularisms signals its position outside the Australian context, and also its proximity. By considering how discrete concerns about the place of ‘religion,’ and ‘religious’ subjects, are mediated through the language of national identity and homogeneity, I have argued that the violence of the nationalist rhetoric of secularisms forms ‘religious’ subjects who are reified as ‘outsiders’ who harbour ‘religion’ within. The making of national history, as we saw explicitly in the case of Québec’s open secularism, is therefore enacted through the paradoxical construction and elision of ‘religious’ subjects who inspire grief to the nation. Brown Girl, however, is evocative in its insistence on the importance of grieving and remembering; in mourning the secular, new opportunities for living with difference are gestured toward.
234
235
CONCLUSION
Happy Mourning
Australian cultural commentator and ethicist Clive Hamilton’s latest book The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics was published in 2008. Hamilton uses European moral philosophy to argue that ‘freedom’ must be cultivated within the individual. That is, he is suspicious of claims that ‘freedom’ can be found or exercised through commodity and consumer cultures, or through religious or sexual freedoms, unless these are augured by the moral justification of an inner, transcendent consciousness and thoughtfulness (29-33). Essentially, Hamilton invites his reader to act in a considered, compassionate mode not driven by anger, lust, or, above all, depression (3, 4). Rather, we must resist ‘negative’ emotions and actions we may later regret. What is his rationale for this disciplined freedom?
Happiness. The first sentence of Hamilton’s text reads as follows.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, citizens of rich countries confront a perplexing fact: despite decades of sustained economic growth, which have seen the real incomes of most people rise to three or for times the levels enjoyed by their parents and grandparents in the 1950s, people are no happier. (Hamilton 2008: 3 My emphasis)
Hamilton describes attainment of happiness as the purpose behind instituting a moral arbiter within the self (15-8). Ameliorating unhappiness means eschewing prostheses such as money, casual sex, drugs and ‘negative’ emotions to experience a sense of happiness and freedom in repudiation. Freedom, then, for Hamilton is not quite Protestant orderliness and self-denial exacted for later reward, and not quite a repression of feeling, though it appears to resonate closely with these. Rather, ‘freedom’ is founded in the happiness he claims results from choosing and enacting moral goodness. A significant problem with Hamilton’s thesis is his alignment of immorality with attachment to objects and bodies outside the self.
236 Choosing acts of kindness and compassion, as he advises, is of course an ethical practice, yet the erasure of connections between the self and society, politics, and affective economies of relationality that posit and animate differences, potentials and trajectories not limited to the attainment of happiness render this moral code problematic.
Hamilton’s book can be seen to intersect with what Sara Ahmed has recently described “the happiness turn,” in which, “it is taken for granted that there is something called happiness; that happiness is good; that happiness can be known and measured; and that the task of government is to maximise happiness” (2008: 2). Here Ahmed questions the moral compulsion to ‘happiness,’ hence exposing its assumed goodness. Hamilton’s thesis mirrors this assumption, however he does not seek government intervention in the making of happiness; rather, he suggests that the freedoms and rights governments legislate, and violate, are already won (2008: 5). Hamilton argues further that an easy elasticity of freedoms since the liberation movements of the 1960s has resulted in paradoxical malaise in the West and hence undermined ‘happiness.’ This argument can be read in parallel with the claims of the ‘happiness turn,’ given that Ahmed cites a body of literature in the U.K. concerned with national happiness, and which construes happiness as a mode of reconciliation amidst melancholia and racism associated with multiculturalism. She argues further that “happiness can function as a moral economy, a way of making what is good into things that can circulate as goods” (2008: 11). Ahmed itemises the melancholic migrant, the feminist killjoy, the angry Black woman, and the unhappy queer amongst national happiness detractors (1, 6). Perhaps it is instructive to again draw Hamilton’s text close to Ahmed’s critique, and suggest that for Hamilton an apparent excess in liberations is associated with an excess of affective bodies that upset a moral economy, which cannot tolerate unredeemed happiness. Indeed, within the context of Australian multiculturalism, it is perhaps productive to suggest that these affective bodies threaten the putative happiness of the ‘tolerant,’ moral, “good white nationalist” (Hage 1998: 78-104). Hence, when Hamilton argues, “For the first time the ordinary individual in the West has the opportunity to make a true choice” (2008: 5), he arguably uses the moral compulsion to ‘happiness’ to reaffirm the hegemony of the ‘secular’ ordinary imaginary, Judeo-Christian monomorality, and complicit white, Anglo-Celtic subject of secular privilege that I have critiqued throughout this thesis.
237 ‘Happiness’ is a term with strong positive connotations, not unlike ‘spirituality’ and ‘neutrality.’ I have argued that the ‘spiritual’ and ‘neutral’ can be seen to form narratives, or secularisms, that work to eclipse and evade the violences and differences that affirm secular privilege. By focusing attention on narratives and representations of the ‘secular’ that may appear ‘objective’ or ‘positive’ rather than aggressive or oppressive, and yet by drawing on cultural representations that complicate dominant conceptions of the ‘secular’ as a guarantor of freedom and nonviolence, it is possible to call seemingly benign or assumedly ‘positive’ narratives of secularism into question. The broad scope of genres and texts I have included in this study attests to the ubiquity and ‘everydayness’ of these narratives. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary that informs Chapter 1 is often relied upon or deferred to unflinchingly in everyday life. Yet by considering how representations of the OED intersect with constructions of space, embodiment and violence through exclusionary language and histories of colonialism, the narrative of ‘secular neutrality’ as even-handed impartiality cannot be sustained. These concerns were revisited in the cultural politics of embodiment and national space in Chapter Two, where I compared and contrasted the performativity of ‘neutrality’ in God on my Side and John Safran versus God. The positioning of ‘religion’ outside the nation, which is thrown into sharp relief through narratives of national identity staked through pilgrimage to Gallipoli, are crucial to the constructed performativity of white, secular privilege in concert with the exaltation of Judeo-Christian monomorality and national values. Here, a focus on affective embodiment in negotiations of the boundaries of ‘religion’ and ‘nation’ impels consideration of the conceits that restrict ‘neutrality’ from subjects and spaces constructed as ‘religious’ or partisan.
Although at first blush ‘spirituality’ and ‘neutrality’ may seem to have little in common, throughout Chapters Three and Four I have repeated and revisited readings of spatiality, embodiment and affective economies in order to offer nuanced analysis of the exaltation of whiteness and Christianity implicit within narratives of ‘Australian spirituality’ that project fantasies of the ‘spiritual’ onto the desert and Indigenous subjects. I suggest there that the regime of representation that reinforces anxiety about a lost, subjective interiority associated with white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity affirms narratives of secular ‘ordinariness’ and hence reproduces and reinforces erasures of subjective difference and multiplicities of realities, moral codes and affective registers. This is exquisitely constructed in Holy 238 Smoke’s negotiation of the spatial limits and codes of regulatory patriarchal relationality that I argue implies strong links between the dominant, white, heteronormative, monogamous family and secular ‘ordinariness.’ Whilst I contextualize these representations of the ‘secular’ in terms of loss and ‘secular mourning,’ perhaps the repetition of spatial tropes, affective embodiment, and whiteness that comprise this study can also be read as practices of mourning. That is, awareness of the projection of imagined, fearful concepts of identity onto subjects and spaces despite modes of incommensurability and simultaneous realities and differences, which in an important sense are repeated through my secular privilege and white privilege, need to be tested and made again and again in disparate and similar contexts to resist erasure and invisiblization. This practice acknowledges that fractured, multiple realities, spectral histories and anticipated losses are the structural conditions of living and writing through relationships and connections. In this sense, the Coda can be read as an exercise in hesitancy that seeks to retain and signal difference whilst acknowledging the audacity and vanity that fulfils its purpose.
Judith Butler warns that the work of mourning cannot be organised according to a Protestant ethic that includes deciding how grieving will be done, where, for how long, and to what end (2004: 21). She describes a sense of aimlessness in grief that exceeds control and depends upon uncertainty. For Butler, in the blurred boundaries between self and other, the nature of what has been lost cannot be certain, but opening to loss and vulnerability acknowledges the relational living of boundaries that make and sense self (2004: 19-49). Butler’s ethics of relationality can be read as a promise against the forgetting or replacement of losses by maintaining open questions rather than resolutions. In this light the arguments I have made for the importance of secular mourning can be understood as the persistence of the question and potentiality of finding ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ vulnerable and fluctuant uncertainties, rather than constructed means of regulatory control, erasure of sovereignties, and possessive violence. Here, the conceits mobilized through representations of secular ‘neutrality,’ ‘spirituality,’ and ‘mere ordinariness’ also signal the persistence of spectres and losses inextricably linked to actual deaths, lost dignities, petrified ‘religious’ bodies and forgotten histories repetitiously made in the spatializations, embodiments, and language of Australian cultural politics.
239 By drawing attention to the politics and practices of loss through attention to embodied relational structures of identity within the rubric of secular mourning, this thesis has invited new questions about the potential of secularism as a regulatory regime that, as Spivak describes, might ordinarily be viewed as “a mechanism to avoid violence” (2004: 106). I have desisted from offering complete answers or attending to the problem of whether Australia is really ‘secular,’ and instead insisted on calling attention to a silence within contemporary Australian cultural studies. My consideration of this ‘silence’ involves the capacity for perceiving secularisms in cultural production that complicate commonplace understandings of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ and their associations with identity politics. Hence, this dissertation represents the possibility of traversing new ground by shaping questions about the discourse of secularism that informs and animates anxieties about secularism in contemporary Australian media and cultural politics. It therefore remains distinct from sociological debates about secularization gleaned from demographic analysis, and instead asks broader questions about regimes of representation that insist upon clear categories. The most cogent outcome of this research is not a statement of ‘fact’ about secularism, but a model with which to think through the boundaries and conceits of secular identity, which I have described as ‘secular mourning.’ It is possible that this concept offers new ways of understanding the problem and potentiality of embodied, affective identity positions and practices in religio-cultural context, whilst also maintaining suggestive connections with practices of remembrance and grief that attend to the losses associated with living secularisms, without assuming their resolution. It is a provisional but non- exhaustive model that, as I have described in the case of Canada, could be used to consider the losses and burdens of ‘secular’ regimes in contexts beyond that of Australia, and that might also supplement current theorizations of the secular that do not attend to embodied, affective modes of relationality that shape everyday life. Indeed, secular mourning finds a rich alternative to the contemporary incitement to happiness, and, I hope, to the happy ending.
240
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269 APPENDIX 1
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NEUTRALIZING SECULARISMS Representations of the secular in John Safran Versus God and God on My Side
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The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2&3, April 2009, 201-20.
Sophie Sunderland
The Neutral is this irreducible No: a No so to speak suspended in front of the hardenings of both faith and certitude and incorruptible by either one. Roland Barthes69
I’ve been all around the world [. . .] and pretty much no-one is like secular Australia. Just everyone from people I’m sure your audience would hate, maybe George W. Bush, to people your audience might love, like East Timorese Freedom Fighters, to them religion is just so important. John Safran70
At the 2008 Perth Writers’ Festival in Western Australia, I attended a panel session entitled ‘‘The Politics of Faith’’ that featured three Australian authors. Prominent lawyer and academic Waleed Aly opened his presentation by commenting that the panel was ‘‘two thirds Muslim’’ and thus ‘‘hardly representative of faith in our society’’ (Aly 2008).71 Before beginning the formal part of his presentation, Aly described his discomfort with being constructed as ‘‘a representative of Islam’’ in public conversation, because ‘‘every word and every action is informed by [notions of my] Muslimness’’ (Aly 2008). In this aside, Aly identified the disproportionate attention on Islam and Muslim subjects in debates about religion in dominant Australian culture, which was mirrored and reinforced by the overrepresentation of Muslim speakers on the panel. Further, he called attention to an overdetermined link between Islam and politics; in particular the perceived fusion of religious praxis with subjective identity. Indeed, the rise in influence of the religious Right in government and attention on Islam has become a preoccupation of mainstream
69 Barthes, R. (2005). The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978). Trans. R. E. Krauss and D. Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press, 14. 70 Safran, J. (2004, September 12). John Safran vs The Spirit of Things. The Spirit of Things with Rachel Kohn. Interview. Australia: Radio National. 71 Waleed Aly often features in the Australian media discussing religion, secularism, and Islam, as well as on Salam Café, the comedic talk show he cohosts on Australian television. See also: Aly, W. (2007). People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West. Sydney: Picador; Salam Café. (2008). Television program. Australia: SBS Independent. May 7–July 9. 270 Australian media, since 9/11 in particular.72 The panel session can thus be seen as a telling instance from which to begin considerations not only of Australia’s status as a secular nation, but also of the ways in which this form of secularism produces particular conceptions of subjects and religion. It raises the question of how, in an apparently secular society, some subjects are produced and interpreted in terms of faith, while others occupy an equally constructed, and yet nominally neutral, position.
Not unlike other liberal secular democracies such as Canada, the United States, France, and Britain, Australian public culture is founded upon the principle of the separation of religion from state, and the concomitant normalization of the public sphere as a space for rational debate. This principle presupposes opposition to the establishment of any particular faith as the state’s official religion.73 The state therefore presents itself as fundamentally disinterested in religious hegemony through its public position of neutrality in relation to religion. However, in order to produce a neutral approach, the religious needs to be understood as an aspect of identity that can be selectively disentangled from the vicissitudes of public life to remain within the private sphere. This marks important questions about subjectivity, space, and embodiment. Indeed, there is a burgeoning scholarship in studies of secularisms across a range of disciplines including political science, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, theology, performance studies, and history. The breadth of scholarship suggests the interest in and need for a variety of critical approaches to these issues.74 Indeed the secular cannot feasibly be reduced to a transhistorical, transdisciplinary, or causal essence but is more productively used to articulate a multiplicity of culturally contingent narratives (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008, 13–14). In the 1960s renowned sociologist Peter Berger felt able to write of the West as secularized, implying that religion had lost its cultural salience. Yet he and others have since revised and rejected this position to acknowledge sustained, if not growing interest in
72 Marion Maddox’s study of the rise of the Christian Right was published in 2005, after the conservative Christian party Family First attained success at the 2004 federal election. Indeed, during the latter five years of the former conservative liberal government, the Australian media paid close attention to the activities of former Health Minister Tony Abbott’s meetings with Catholic Archbishop George Pell and his decision to contract Catholic counseling organizations for pregnancy information services, as well as advocacy for the placement of chaplains rather than psychologists in schools. Also during this time, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Treasurer Peter Costello were criticized for attending the conservative Pentecostal Church, Hillsong, in Sydney. Since his election in 2007, current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has also made public statements about the importance of his Christian faith. His statements have therefore given cause for continued, considerable media attention to the importance of Christianity in Australian government and broader society. A selection of readings on these issues include Maddox, M. (2005) God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics. Sydney: Allen and Unwin; Rudd, K. (2006). Faith in Politics. The Monthly, 17. http://www.themonthly.com.au/tm/node/300. (accessed April 12, 2008). 73 This is complex in the case of secular Britain, whose head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, is also the head of the Church of England. This peculiarity in turn marks further complexities for members of the Commonwealth such as Canada and Australia, who share Britain’s head of church and state. This apparent anomaly betrays the disjuncture between secular principle and its culturally contingent iterations. For elaboration of related theoretical and doctrinal issues, Talal Asad offers a subtly nuanced discussion: Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 74 Some key texts include Asad, T. (2003). op. cit., Connolly, W. E. (1999). Why I Am not a Secularist. Minneapolis U.S.A.: University of Michigan Press; Jakobsen, J. R. and Pellegrini, A. (2008). (Eds.) Secularisms. Durham; London: Duke University Press; Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge; London: Belknap, Harvard University Press. 271 religions and faiths, and in further exploring what the secular might mean (Berger 1967, 1999; Bouma 2006).75
This article is not intended to wrest with the quantification of perceived increases in religious fervor, nor is it an argument for a more aggressive secularism as has shaped recent debates over religious iconography in the public sphere in France and Quebec.76 Instead, I argue for attention to the cultural politics of representations of the secular, in order to identify how a neutral stance in relation to representations of faith in the public sphere can ironically produce emphatically religious subjects. This is because secular neutrality functions subtly—and therefore powerfully—through naturalized modes of encounter and social engagement that are difficult to discern, and that render hegemonic Judaeo-Christian monomorality almost invisible. By contrasting the ways in which the popular Australian documentary film God on My Side (2006) and award-winning Australian television series John Safran Versus God (2004) represent encounters with religion, this article explores and identifies secular neutrality as a mode of social performance that obscures the imbrication of secularism with faith. Here, the performativity of secular impartiality makes and shapes notions of religion. Both God on My Side and John Safran Versus God adopt a secular position through their hosts’ embodied, subjective performances of neutrality, impartiality, and in the case of John Safran Versus God, ec- stasy. By way of addressing these representations of embodied secular participation I argue for a reflexive cultural politics of the secular as a point of departure from normative, neutral secular cultural politics.
Andrew Denton, who wrote, directed, and produced God on My Side, is an Australian comedian and journalist who gained popularity in Australia in the 1990s as host of several television variety and talk shows including The Money or the Gun (1989), Live and Sweaty (1991), and Denton (1994). He adopted a more serious tone, however, in his exploration of the evangelical Christian Right in God on My Side (2006). John Safran, also a comedian, came to notoriety in the 1990s in primarily noncommercial Australian television media as a highly popular amateur documentarian in Race Around The World (1997). This was followed by the comedic variety shows John Safran’s Music Jamboree (2002), John Safran Versus God (2004), and Speaking in Tongues (2005). Both Denton and Safran are well- known for their humor, and Safran is particularly infamous for his willingness to expose the
75 It is under these conditions that the neologism postsecular is most often used, as in the work of Gary Bouma and David Tacey. See Bouma, G. (2006). Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press; Tacey, David. ReEnchantment: The New Australian Spirituality. Pymble: HarperCollins. However, Roland Boer makes a useful distinction between the postsecular as that which denotes an epoch after secularism and as a signal for critiques of the secular. The latter usage is more convincing as it enables further elaboration of secular discourses and resists relegating ‘the secular’ to an imagined past. See Boer, Roland. (2005). Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 7. http://www.uiowa. Edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm. (accessed May 30, 2008). 76 For a discussion of laicité following debates about the hijab in France, see Asad, T. (2005). Reflections on Laicité and the Public Sphere. Social Science Research Council Items and Ideas, 5(3). http://publications.ssrc.org/items/v5n3/index.html. (accessed May 31, 2007). A detailed discussion of the principle of ‘open secularism,’ which advocates the removal of religious symbols from the public sphere in Quebec, Canada highlights the problems of distinguishing between Catholic heritage and religious iconography. See Bouchard, G. and Taylor, C. (2008). Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Abridged Report. Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux differénces culturelles. Gouvernement du Québec. http://www.accommodements.qc.ca/documentation/rapports/rapport- final-abrege-en.pdf. (accessed May 30, 2008). 272 boundaries and hypocrisies of dominant Australian cultural myths and values. It is curious that within a short time frame both figures chose to make features that deal explicitly with the more serious topic of religion, and both chose to make the Christian Right the explicit focus of their programs (indeed in Denton’s case it is the exclusive focus). Further, and perhaps more strikingly, both texts locate the Christian Right in the United States despite the prominence and influence of the Christian Right not only in Australian society but also at the level of the federal government.77 When examined together, these texts intersect to offer a nuanced reading of how religious identity is constructed as outside an imagined white, Judaeo-Christian Australian nation, enabling a critique of the conceits of secularism in contemporary Australian culture. Before discussing these texts in detail, I turn next to a broader discussion of the workings of secularism in Australia.
CONCEPTUALIZING AUSTRALIAN SECULARISM
Australia’s reputation for its entrenched privileging of and preoccupation with whiteness has gained more recent critical attention than its ongoing and related concerns with secularism.78 Yet, in the acknowledgments page of his book, Why I Am not a Secularist, political scientist William E. Connolly (1999) categorically defines Australia as a ‘‘most secular country’’ (ix). Certainly, Section 116 of the Constitution clearly opposes the establishment of any religion or use of religious tests in attaining public office. Regardless of this overarching narrative, the Christian missionary project is significant in Australia’s colonial history, and sectarianism shaped Australian politics and society in the form of conflicts between British Protestantism and Irish Catholicism both before Federation in 1901 and until at least the 1950s (Brett 2003).79 Although the White Australia Policy was officially abandoned in the early 1970s to be succeeded by the policy of multiculturalism and its presupposition of a multifaith polity, religion has continued to shape the politics and identity struggles of everyday life throughout the nation.80 The diversity of religions and
77 See earlier note regarding this issue. 78 Ghassan Hage’s influential text White Nation argues that official multiculturalism entrenches a White, Anglo-Celtic ‘center.’ See Hage, G. (1998). White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. (Annandale: Pluto), 118. However, Hage’s analysis gives minimal attention to the place of Christianity in this structural privileging. More recently, some convincing arguments for strong links among secularism, Christianity, and whiteness under official multiculturalism have been made. See Imtoual, A. (2004). Whiteness Studies, Christianity and Religious Racism in ’Secular’ Australia. Placing Race and Localising Whiteness. In S. Schech and B. Wadham. (Eds.), Adelaide: Flinders University Press, 82–98; Randell-Moon, H. (2007). Secularism, Feminism and Race in Representations of Australianness. Trans/forming Cultures ejournal, 2(1). http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/TfC. (accessed March 6, 2008). 79 In her study of religion in Australian federal politics, Marion Maddox notes the privileging of monotheistic religions in the process of defining religion, where Indigenous religions, rites, and spiritualities are subsumed and marginalized under the terms spirituality and culture, which arguably are denied the cultural salience and significance attributed to institutionalized religion. See Maddox, M. (2001). For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics. Canberra: Department of the Parliamentary Library. 80 Judith Brett offers a useful reading of the importance of religion to Australian politics and culture by discussing the importance of the historical privileging of Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism at Federation in 1901 until World War II. She argues that religious pluralization occurred as a result of postwar immigration; however, this dismisses the plethora of Indigenous religions, as well as the religions of non- Anglo-Celtic groups who have a long history in Australia such as Chinese communities and South Asians (commonly, and mistakenly, referred to as Afghans). Brett, J. (2003). Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 273 religious practitioners that preexisted colonization have continued in various forms until the present time, yet Protestant Christianity is privileged in both structural and ideological terms at the level of the state in the form of a ‘‘shadow establishment’’ (Lyon 2000, 4). The effects of this shadow establishment are founded in the ideological privileging of the white, Anglo-Celtic subject that is imagined as mainstream and a hegemonic “Judaeo-Christian monomorality” that betrays the irony of official multiculturalism (Stratton 1999, 181). Fiona Nicoll (2001) is clear that this creates an exclusionary culture. She writes, “Detached from the sphere of difference, within which ’others’ are confined, Anglo-Celtic-Australian culture becomes associated with the ‘neutrality’ of the liberal state” (115). Alongside the privileging of Protestant Christianity, whiteness, and Judaeo-Christian monomorality in the Australian public sphere and imaginary, neutrality toward religion and religious subjects endures as a functional, albeit exclusionary narrative of this “most secular country.”
For Talal Asad, the idea of the secular as an ideal that garners a neutral public sphere for rational debate is inherently problematic. He argues that, ironically, it is the state that determines and manages the place of religion within the social milieu, such that the boundaries between them are not clear-cut (Asad 2002, 2003, 79).81 More crucially, he acknowledges the importance of embodiment, which concerns visceral and affective modes of “being-in-the-world” beyond intellectual communication, along with sociopolitical identity categories and associated disciplinary functions (Csordas 1999, 143). For Asad, embodied social participation forms an impasse at which rational debate, and thus the neutrality of the public sphere, is forestalled:
[T]he public sphere in secular societies (whether in Europe or in the Middle East) is more than a space of communication and debate, [. . .] it is inhabited by embodied subjects for whom politics and religion cannot always be easily separated. Perhaps that is why the liberal state finds itself having to try and impose on its citizens the disciplines and limitations that it calls secularism (Asad 2005, 5).
By highlighting the significance of embodied representation in the public sphere, Asad (2003) also argues that the state asserts its power through real, implied, and=or symbolic violence, and that not all constituents have equal access to the public sphere and to regimes of representation (4–7). For the purposes of this essay, it is significant that Asad raises the issue of power in relation to secularism and its corollary: neutrality toward religion. This is because neutrality, as a position, can also be read as a device that indicates the mobilization of hierarchical power relations that work to privilege the white, secular, male, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual subject (Kopelson 2003, 122). That is, these privileged subject- bodies are produced as disinterested or neutral, in comparison to the imagined self-interest of those who do not fit these criteria. In addressing this issue, William E. Connolly (1999), who also valorizes the body in his argument for a shared, affective and embodied ‘‘visceral register of subjectivity and intersubjectivity’’ under a refashioned secularism, advocates the
81 The blurred lines between church and state are made explicit in the Australian context because of the “Scientology Case.” During 1982–1983, the Church of Scientology was declared a religion in a case fought against the Commissioner of Pay-Roll Tax in Victoria. A ‘‘four-point religious test’’ was established for use in Australian courts to define religion and thus settle disputes about pay-roll tax, from which religions are exempted. See Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Pay-Roll Tax. (1983). Victoria. http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi- bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/HCA/1983/40.html?query=Church%20of%20the%20New%20Faith%20v%20Com missioner%20of%20Pay-Roll. (accessed March 14, 2008). 274 minoritization of Christianity in the (American) public sphere so as to recognize the violence of Christian hegemony (3). In effect, close attention to representations of embodiment invites a remapping of secular neutrality by highlighting the contingency of the encounter as it intersects with cultural politics and power.
Further to its connections with the privileged white, male, middle class, heterosexual, secular, able-bodied subject, the Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines neutrality as ‘‘indifference, impartiality, dispassionateness,’’ suggesting a fair, even-handed approach toward a given social actor or event. But on whose terms is this apparently disinterested approach imagined? In the case of Australia as we have seen, the secular is produced through language that imagines a “mainstream” and “ordinary” national culture in opposition to religious and/or spiritual expression (Sinclair 2004). Within this structure, subjects who are seen to bring their faith into the public sphere through iconography or praxis are construed as differentiating, and thus threatening, the secular ideal. A mainstreamed white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity along with notions of the secular as neutral, ordinary, or mainstream therefore needs to be approached with some suspicion. Indeed, Alia Imtoual argues that an embedded Christian, white (Anglo-Celtic) nationalism is crucial to secularism in Australia, such that non-Christian religious expression is produced by a racist and xenophobic cultural imaginary as that which is outside and Other to the nation (Imtoual 2004, 82–88). By extension, and in this context, neutrality needs to be understood as exclusionary rather than impartial. Sonia Tascón (2004) further illuminates this issue by arguing that in contemporary Australian cultural politics, ‘‘[w]hiteness exists as an invisible force, yet powerfully present’’ and, ‘‘race and whiteness do not stand as mere descriptors; they are not neutral’’ (241). Tascón’s argument for the invested, exclusionary action of white, Anglo-Celtic privilege and hegemony is established through critique of the language and principle of neutrality. Here, power is structurally and ideologically linked to invisiblization through the appearance of impartiality.
GOD ON MY SIDE: PERFORMING SECULAR NEUTRALITY
In 2006 the documentary film God on My Side was released nationally in Australian cinemas; a considerable feat in a nation where documentary films are usually made for television (as this was) and rarely achieve a cinematic release (MacDougall 1998, 227– 228). The film is a compilation of interviews Denton conducted in 2006 at the Texas Gaylord Convention Center in the United States during the sixty-third National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention, which is a forum for commodified, evangelical Christianity. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Denton refers to his approach to the subject matter and interviewees as “secular,” and states that he endeavored to be “respectful” of others’ beliefs by appearing “neutral” (June 14, 2006). Instead of locating my analysis on Denton’s depiction of Christianity here, which might ask for an evaluation of the fairness, or even- handedness of his approach and thus reproduce and reinforce the normative discourse of neutrality, I would like to consider the careful construction and enactment of a neutral appearance. Notably, Denton claims to find the fusion of religion with politics “confronting” (Kroenert 2006). Indeed, through inviting subjects to “speak for themselves,” he admits, “I did feel that there was bigotry and prejudice and hate, wrapped up in this blanket of Christian love” (Ghandour 2006). His desire to appear neutral therefore implies two assumptions: that religion can be distilled and represented without mediation, and that
275 there is a risk of betraying affect or emotion in this situation. Here, the neutral functions in the manner of a mask.
Denton distances religion not only by a neutral masking of affect but also logistically and geopolitically, by locating the subject of his analysis in the United States. His film points to the political implications of the believers he interviews by including a clip of U.S. President George W. Bush endorsing the convention, and by drawing attention to the absolutism of some subjects’ views in his voiceovers. This is established at the beginning of the film, when Denton states in a voiceover during a montage of images of Osama bin Laden and agitated Muslim protesters who are assumedly in the Middle East:
If there really is a clash of civilisations, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at our side. It’s easy to look at the ’other’ and to question where faith can take people. Yet, I wonder, if the telescope was turned around, what might we look like? (Denton 2006)
By reinforcing and reproducing Samuel Huntington’s (1993) famous “clash of civilisations” thesis, Denton reifies the “us” versus “other” dichotomy and its concomitant establishment of an opposition between the other as Islam and the Middle East, and us as Christianity and the United States. Denton positions Australia ambivalently within this dichotomy by geographically locating the conflict in the United States and Middle East, while ideologically and nominally aligning Australia with the U.S. (and evangelical) Christianity. The neutral position is here enacted through the construction of an offshore religious Other, which refers, in a complex layering, to representations of both radical Islam and Christianity, and both the Middle East and the United States. The United States is paradoxically linked to Australia through the term us to form an understanding of the secular West as somehow linked through a shared Christianity.
Despite this structure, Denton is clear about the importance of his ability to remain neutral and secular in his interviewing technique. As the film progresses, he appears to be an interested and friendly consumer, who is personally unaffected by his interactions. The film uses the style of cinéma vérité to conduct a repetitive performance of unobtrusiveness that is evidenced through the similarity between the questions he asks his subjects, and his poker-faced response when receiving answers. Despite one knowing glance to the camera when encouraged by a Christian vendor to look for traces of the Holy Spirit twinkling on his fingertips, Denton elsewhere agrees to have his name inserted as the personal pronoun in a Bible at the “Personal Promise Bible” store and to the Noah’s Ark Replica vendor’s idea to sail to Australia. However, analysis of the structure of the interview process raises questions about the ways in which meaning is made. It is useful to consider Trinh Minh-ha’s (1999) criticism of the conservative effects of cinéma vérité in interviews:
Such a strategy [...] denotes a politically and creatively weak stance (as it remains unaware of its own formation and politics in its desire to pass for neutral, unbiased information). Although multivocal in its appearance, the final product as a whole lacks a voice of its own, and ultimately what you have is simply a noncommittal stance, more preoccupied with correct formulas than with social inquiry. The politics of the interviewer are not absent here. They are quite evident in the way the mesh of questions and answers is constituted; but this is usually not engaged with, and hence the work remains caught in the binary machine that governs the programming of information in the media (248 original parentheses). 276
This means that Denton’s politics—including his social positioning— are marginalized and reduced to a liberal tolerance of Other religious people. In light of Trinh’s suggestion, Denton’s choice to interview subjects away from the noise and brightness of the convention center floor in private, darkened rooms raises questions about meaning-making. The secluded, private environment of the interview space, established through close-ups and soft lighting, suggests that Denton relates more intimately with these subjects, who duly share their experiences and views regarding rapture, abortion, homelessness, homosexuality, and personal salvation. Indeed, contrary to the production of neutral space, it is possible to suggest that the subjects are placed to perform within a confessional environment; represented by the mise en scène as much as the subject matter.
In maintaining neutrality, Denton’s interview style appears unobtrusive; the focus is instead on his interviewees’ comparative lack of neutrality, given the politicized Christianity at issue. However, if we consider Trinh’s (1991) statement that “To deny the reality of film in claiming (to capture) reality is to stay ‘in ideology’—that is, to indulge in the (deliberate or not) confusion of filmic with phenomenal reality” (43 original emphases and parentheses), then Denton is implicated in and through his ideological and cultural positioning. Thus, further to Denton’s presence as interviewer and voiceover, and following Trinh, how might we understand his politics? Denton’s maleness, heterosexuality, status as a married father, white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity, and middle class position place him within the imagined Australian mainstream, and thus a privileged member of the “us” he explicates at the beginning of his film.82 While the expressly political content of the text is evidenced by footage of President Bush’s endorsement of the convention and some interviewees’ Zionist views of Israel, there is a subtle register of editorial decisions, embodied postures, and interviewee selection that also informs the text’s politics. These decisions and inclusions, without movement to self-reflexivity about Denton’s interests and those he represents, work to produce a version of neutrality in which meaning is made through the production of an Other. In this sense, it is not possible for Denton to present a point of departure from the us/them, secular/religious dichotomy that his documentary reinforces. As a result, popular understandings of resurgent religion as an upset to neutral secularism are reproduced. Further, the idea of a reassuringly unimpeachable secularism is figured through the representation of an Australian everyman maintaining neutrality in relationship to fundamentalist religion.
JOHN SAFRAN VERSUS GOD: EXORCISING SECULAR NEUTRALITY
John Safran Versus God was a popular television series that won two Australian Film Institute Awards and aired in Australia in 2004, in Finland and Sweden in 2005, and in the United States in 2007. In contrast to Denton’s studied neutrality, Safran’s engagement with the religious is embodied through rituals such as drinking mead in a Viking ceremony, trying peyote in the Arizona desert and through reflexive acknowledgment of his Jewish identity. Indeed, Jewishness functions as a shifting signifier that is linked variously to
82 For a useful analysis of the politics of us and them in contemporary Australian politics and ideologies, see Maddox, M. (2005) God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 277 whiteness, religion, and difference. His decisions, in varying contexts, to identify or not as Jewish forms a critical intersection at which religious faith, whiteness, and the politics of embodiment are foregrounded. In this way, the series functions to critique the impartiality of the participant-observer. However, rather than focusing exclusively on the ways in which Safran’s performance of Jewishness forms and localizes his religious encounters, I will pay close attention to the generic structure of the show, and to the ways in which Safran’s exorcism is represented in the final episode of the series. This dénouement functions as a critical lacuna, where religious identity is destabilized in such a way that it becomes inseparable from its mode of representation. That is, the constructed, performative quality of the exorcism opens up a space from which it is possible to reflect further upon the performativity of secular neutrality that formed the principled basis of Denton’s disembodied, comparatively conservative approach.
In each episode, Safran travels to various parts of the world to explore, in irreverent style, a given religion. As in God on My Side, John Safran Versus God positions faith, for the most part, as geographically external to the Australian nation, despite the clear presence of religions at the levels of government, media, educational institutions, and everyday life in Australian society. Indeed Safran notes, “I only had to walk up the street for Catholicism,” thus reproducing the dominant narrative of Australia as a primarily Christian nation (Maddox 2001; Brett 2003). It would seem, then, that Safran’s show works within prescribed cultural myths about the neutrality of the Australian public sphere through an imagined contrast between external, exoticized religious spaces and the invisiblization of Christian hegemony. Indeed, the show is structured such that each episode offers a ‘religious road test’ of a specific faith, prefaced by Safran’s question: “Just say, I’m following the wrong religion?” In these segments, Safran travels between different nations, cultures and religions to ‘test out’ various faiths. During each road test, Safran’s performance of Jewishness functions in an ambivalent mode of avowal that forms the punch line of his meeting with a Grand Dragon from the Ku Klux Klan, but remains unacknowledged in, for example, the footage of his stay at a Buddhist Zendo in Japan. While there is no space here to explore the complexities of Jewishness, embodiment, and whiteness, it is important to note that this performative engagement with religious identity undermines the secular ideal that assumes faith can be distilled from the utterance and/or event. This resonates with the trope of ambivalence that historically shapes representations of Jewishness in Australia. Here, white, Anglo-Celtic ethnocentrism simultaneously and paradoxically invisiblizes Jewishness through the exalted whiteness and Judaeo-Christian monomorality of the imagined mainstream, while differentiating and ethnicizing Jews (Stratton 2000, 220–250). Safran’s identification with Jewishness functions to undermine and subvert the assumed neutrality of the interviewer, since this identification is critical to some road tests, and because the audience is positioned to view Safran as Jewish. In comparison to Denton’s disembodied avowal of secular neutrality, here religious identity is constantly articulated in relation to power and the cultural politics of whiteness that are stirred through the physicality and conditions of the road test.
Each episode of the series begins with an image of a barren, rocky landscape beneath a lightning sky, with heavy metal music in the background and a deep, austere, male voice quoting Revelation 20:7: “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison.” A pale hand breaks through the rocks and Safran emerges, thin and spectacled, in a black dinner suit. Comically playing the devil, he strides out from the earth and glares defiantly into the heavens, while straightening his tie. The suggestion of a Christian moral 278 dimension to the show is evident in this opening sequence. It is thus not surprising that the series ends with Safran’s exorcism, performed in the United States by evangelical Christian pastor, Father Bob Larson. Safran’s decision to place the exorcism at the end of the series was made in consultation with Father Bob during preparations for the program, with the understanding that its impact would be strongest after he had experienced a spectrum of religious road tests. The inclusion of this dramatic event also reinforces Safran’s apparent willingness to engage the religious encounter through embodied praxis. The exorcism occurs firstly in a small office, and then in front of an audience of Christians at a convention in Oklahoma. Father Bob places a Bible on Safran’s forehead and prays as Safran alternately convulses and moans, growls, and smiles vacantly. Father Bob commands ‘the demons’ to leave Safran’s body, repeatedly touching the Bible to Safran’s head, who cowers, and hits Father Bob. Father Bob says, “You’ve become a breeding ground for the devil,” and “You’re a prize Satan wants.” During this event, Safran appears unable to steady himself physically, and loses his narrative voice. In comparison to previous road tests there is no voiceover, and Safran appears shaken. His inability to address the camera and relate to the audience during the exorcism is reinforced by a cut to production crew member, Roland Kapferer, who expresses his concern: “I’ve never seen John look like that before. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was something in the room, the whole room was different.” In the last moments of exorcism, Safran is shown to thank Father Bob and agree to preach the gospel with him should he come to Australia, after which the show, and the series, abruptly ends.
During the exorcism scene, no explanation of what occurred from Safran’s rational, observational point of view is offered, and it is precisely this apparent, albeit constructed, lack of certainty that disrupts the secular, neutral paradigm. Father Bob refers to Jewishness as an inherited trauma that impedes the completion of the exorcism—which most emphatically portrays the political investments and implications of the event—yet Safran appears to continue with the practice, thus reinforcing an ambivalent relation with Jewishness. The exorcism was discussed in the Australian media as a strange, unsettling event, and in interviews Safran maintained his bewilderment and lack of memory as to what took place (Bragge 2004; Howland 2004; Safran 2004). In an interview on the national broadcaster Radio National, he said it was “strange,” and, “I guess something happened [. . .] there’s no way I can act that well.” He said in the same exchange that the experience was “true” for him, but didn’t mean he needed to convert to Christianity (Safran 2004).83 What is strange and unsettling here? At the end of each episode throughout the series, Safran customarily sits in a red velvet armchair by a fireplace dressed in the devil dinner suit and addresses the camera with a short monologue on an aspect of religion before ending with the quip, “Until next time, go to hell.” This scene did not appear after the exorcism at the series’ end. Instead, Safran and Father Bob shake hands and utter “Amen.” The replacement of the program’s dependable and irreverent closure with prayer disrupts audience expectations, which are further disturbed by Safran’s bodily appearance onscreen as ec-static, nonrational, and distanced from his Jewish identification. Also, and in contrast to other segments of the show, the exorcism is filmed in a long take,
83 Interestingly, in the DVD outtakes Safran is shown to have adopted Christianity under the direction of Father Bob. This is not the first time Safran has converted to Christianity in the making of a television show. During the reality-documentary series Race Around The World (1997) Safran was baptized in Uganda after which he referred to himself as “a black Protestant” and “not Jewish any more.” Arguably, this advances a stronger argument for reading the exorcism as a performative moment that draws attention to embodiment and subjectivity, rather than an unmediated, transparent event. 279 and the focus on embodied experience is heightened by the absence of Safran’s customary voiceover. Kapferer’s puzzled, anxious response further emphasizes the fracturing of the neutral participant-observer role. Here, the loss of the dependability of the objective narrator creates disquiet, but more crucially indicates the contrastingly rational, neutral mode of engagement that has shaped representations of encounters with faith in previous episodes of the program. Thus, insofar as the final episode represents a generic rupture, it is experienced as unsettling.
In comparison to the reassurance of an unimpeachable secularism represented by Denton’s performance of objectivity, embodied performance in John Safran Versus God signals a major break with the assumption of a neutral position. If we return to Trinh’s argument that the interview in the style of cinéma vérité risks a conservative and noncommittal stance, the exorcism scene foregrounds the interviewer’s body and subjectivity such that the question of dis/embodied representation within the paradigm of secular neutrality is raised and contested. In comparison to Denton’s unacknowledged and yet constitutive subjectivity, Safran’s affective body and performance of an ambivalent identification with Jewishness obviates the normativity of invisiblization. Simultaneously, the coding of this embodied, ec-static experience as strange and unsettling signifies the limits of representing sociopolitical identity and embodiment in relation to an activated (Christian) spiritual realm.84 Whether approached from the point of view of performative excess and generic rupture, or from an imaginary that essentializes the exorcism as an authentication of spiritual realities, this critical event enacts symbolic and actual violence that fractures the dominant narrative of secular neutrality. Whereas Denton is able to reproduce a generic interview style, this privilege is not shared by Safran whose embodied performance highlights the centrality of subjective embodiment to meaning-making. Further, attempts at understanding what took place during the exorcism are exhausted by a tension between the apparent reality of a transformative spiritual realm and the clear disruption of the text’s generic strategy through the lack of customary closure and the cessation of the host’s engagement with the audience. Safran’s effusive description of the event in media interviews further disperses any unilateral resolution. In sum, this rich, multivalent moment destabilizes a straightforward, essentialist reading of the truth of religion vis-à-vis the spirit realm and instead pulls the identity politics of embodiment and its embroilment in religiosity through performativity—as well as the performativity of neutrality—into sharp focus. Further, the strangeness of the event is compounded by the dissolution of the neutral, unaffected participant-observer. Thus, rather than transcending the limits of the visceral, embodied subject, it unsettles and reflexively interweaves narratival, religious, and secular norms to reveal them as coimplicated and coconstitutive. In effect, the naturalization of disembodied mainstream secular neutrality, which is, as we have seen, coded white, Anglo-Celtic, and Judaeo-Christian, is fractured through this enactment of embodied, visceral subjectivity.
84 For an excellent analysis of the conservative politics that can be reinforced when the spiritual is constructed as an other-world separable from the politics of the material socius, see Finn, G. (1992). The Politics of Spirituality: The Spirituality of Politics. Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion. In P. Berry and A. Wernick. (Eds.), London: Routledge.2
280 SAFRAN VERSUS DENTON: OUTPLAYING SECULAR NEUTRALITY
In his lecture series The Neutral, Roland Barthes differentiates neutrality from “the Neutral,” which refers to the baffling of established paradigms:
My definition of the Neutral remains structural. By which I mean that for me, the Neutral doesn’t refer to ‘impressions’ of grayness, of ‘neutrality,’ of indifference. The Neutral—my Neutral—can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. ‘To outplay the paradigm’ is an ardent, burning activity (Barthes 2005, 7).
Given its intensity, it might be possible to construe the exorcism scene in John Safran Versus God as an exemplar of Barthes’ version of “the Neutral.” However, in my reading, this is not what he describes. Rather, Barthes offers a conceptual strategy or figure, termed “the Neutral,” to refer to the action or process of undoing and expanding established dichotomies. Given the secular paradigm that includes a politics of us/them, secular/religious, rational/affective, and so on, the placement of Denton and Safran side by side in this analysis works to unravel the assumptions of secular neutrality through an explicit focus on the embodied enactment of participation with the religious. This line of flight, in concert with Barthes’ concept, represents a refusal to reinforce a dichotomous politics that relies upon the certitudes offered by the politics of us/them, which is perhaps what Trinh Minh-Ha (1999) perceives as “stuck in the binary machine” (248). The fracturing of this structure can be seen as a point of intensity from which new possibilities for viewing secularism emerge. Thus, through establishing the coimplication of modes of representation, performativity, the spiritual, religious ritual, representation, and neutrality, I have argued for a rereading of the secular as a narrative that is coopted through modes of privilege associated with white, Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Christian hegemony. By linking Denton’s comparatively rational engagement with evangelical Christianity and Safran’s enactment of embodied, reflexive subjectivity, we can more clearly identify the performativity of secular neutrality. This enables a disruption of the dominant myth of secular neutrality as a causal agent of social harmony. More precisely, it offers space for reflexive engagement with narratives that elevate the white, Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Christian subject to invisibility through the construction of expressly religious Others.
AUTHOR NOTE
The Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand and the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia generously funded a research trip to Canada in 2007 that enabled me to participate in the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference in Edmonton, where I presented an earlier version of this essay. Kindest of thanks to Jamie Scott and Emily Gilbert for hosting me in Toronto during my stay in Canada. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Anne Whitelaw and Alison Bartlett for their thoughtful and helpful responses to earlier versions of this essay, as well as the anonymous referees.
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285 APPENDIX 2
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POST-SECULAR NATION; or how “Australian spirituality” privileges a secular, white, Judaeo-Christian culture
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Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 2 No 1, November 2007 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/TfC
Sophie Sunderland
I think an Australian value is that we are a secular society in the correct meaning of that term, which is that we don't have an established religion but not secular in the sense that our culture is not influenced by the Judaic-Christian ethic; it plainly is1. Prime Minister John Howard
There is no doubt that Australia is a secular nation. Section 116 of the Australian Constitution guarantees that the state cannot legally establish a religion; nor can it impose religious observance. Although the vast majority of current Members of Parliament are Christian, Section 116 also states that a religious test cannot be required for individuals applying for public office. In this sense, church and state are separated in Australia by law. It follows that Australia cannot be called a Christian nation. But how does this relate to the Australian people, or everyday life? Census figures have consistently shown that although the majority of Australian citizens identify as Christian, this figure has waned significantly since World War Two along with declines in congregational participation (Bouma 2006: 53,78-9). Although Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion, it accounts for only 1.91% of the population (53). This paints a picture of a nation that is, as political scientist William E Connolly remarked in Why I Am Not A Secularist, a “most secular country” not only legally safeguarded against religious domination, but also characterized, in the most general sense, by a lack of religious feeling and fervour (Connolly 1999: ix).
However, secularism is not necessarily reducible to Census figures or Constitutional law. Indeed, anthropologist Talal Asad complicates the dominant understanding of secularism offered above by claiming that it is invariably the state that defines the place of religion within the nation; thus suggesting that the lines between church and state are irrevocably blurred (2002: 16). This is a case in point, as the separation of church and state in Australia has been tested legally and consequently critiqued, such that it is possible to argue that 286 church and state are not legally separated in Australia (Frame 2006; Wallace 2005). Moreover, Asad’s rigorous and innovative study Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity finds that secularism functions differently in different nations, and that the meanings and assumptions that shape secularisms consequently also vary (2003: 5). It is therefore quite possible that Australia can be considered “secular,” whilst the precise meaning of this rather elastic term remains unclear. In this paper I do not attempt to arrive at a cohesive understanding of what the secular really means. Instead, I argue that in its current usage in the Australian context, “the secular” includes the elevation of the “Judaic- Christian ethic” to the level of national culture.
Prominent within this paradigm is Spirituality Studies academic David Tacey, whose strong publication record includes television and radio appearances, articles and monographs dealing with Australian spirituality and religion, which have been broadly received and steadily produced since Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia appeared in 1995. Tacey consistently claims that Australian culture is becoming less “secular,” in the dominant understanding of the term, and more spiritualized; a shift he claims baulks at the traditional channels of institutionalised religious ritual. Rather, ‘spiritual transformation’ refers to new, “post-secular,” symbolic and mythical connections with the land and claims for the agency of indigenous peoples. Tacey admits that “spirituality” is difficult to define, but suggests that it is not organised and institutionalised like “religion,” but “a desire for connectedness, which often expresses itself as an emotional relationship with an invisible sacred presence” (2000: 17).85 His concern is that white, Anglo-Celtic Australians are far removed from spirituality, myth and symbolism, and it is from here that Tacey advances the need for a cohesive, national unity based on the validation of the spiritual. He therefore advocates a shift from the current, secularized “national psyche”, into a post-secular paradigm that embraces spirituality as an important facet of everyday Australian life: an ‘Australian value’, as it were. But on what premises might a national spirituality be founded in a multicultural, multifaith society? In this paper I endeavour to show that Tacey’s spiritual realm is in fact unmistakably coded Christian, and by extension “Judaeo- Christian”. Furthermore, this constructed realm cites a white, Anglo-Celtic subject associated with settler history as most in need of spiritual salvation. I argue that in effect, and instead of offering new alternatives for social change, Tacey’s version of spirituality functions to reinforce and reproduce a transcendent narrative of the dominance of Judaeo- Christianity and white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity in Australian culture.
National identity and ‘Australian values’
In order to clearly understand the significance of Tacey’s spiritualized national identity, I’d now like to consider the broader context of anxieties about national identity. As part of his ongoing focus on national identity, Prime Minister John Howard’s leadership from 1996 to present has been pervaded by his understanding that Australia has a cohesive, Australian “core culture” punctuated by “a core set of values” (2006). One of the main “Australian values”, for Howard, along with secularism, is the “Judaeo-Christian influence”:
85 Tacey’s definition relates closely in content to that of religious studies scholar Marion Maddox. She recounts common definitions of the spiritual as “individualised, internal, eclectic, dynamic, anti-institutional and free form,” opposed to religion, which is “organised, external, inherited, formulaic, regulated and traditional” (Maddox 2005:161). These definitions will suffice for the purposes of this paper. 287
I […] regard the Judaeo-Christian influence on Australia as the single greatest influence for good in the Australian community. But I do respect the secular tradition of Australia […] My belief in the centrality of the family, my very strong belief in private business enterprise, my very strong belief in the I think the stabilising influence of the Judaeo- Christian ethic in this country. Those beliefs haven’t changed at all. And you can find at every point of my time as Prime Minister a re-affirmation of those things. (2004)
Here, Howard is careful to show that his value system does not involve the establishment of religion, but he simultaneously asserts that Judaeo-Christianity comprises the moral underpinnings of Australian society. This links notions of socio-political stability with Judaeo-Christianity in a moral form that effectively constructs a singular moral system or code within Australia’s ostensibly multicultural and multifaith society. This is then constructed as commonsensical or “ordinary” (Sinclair 2004:279). Although he does not refer to Howard’s position on Judaeo-Christianity, Ghassan Hage makes an important point about the implications of Howard’s transcendent “Australian values”:
This is the belief that these values are a trans-historical core which is almost automatically espoused by good nationals and is responsible for giving society its enduring character amidst all the changes it can experience. (2003:71)
Hage is suspicious of the “causal essence” implied in “national values” that, as he remarks, dismisses the changes in Australian immigration patterns and fluctuating constructions of whiteness.86 In this instance, it is useful to consider Hage’s comments in the light of Marion Maddox’s more recent book God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics, which asserts that under Howard’s rule Australian secularism has been undermined by, among other practices, the coalition’s espousing of Judaeo-Christian ethics and morals (2005). Maddox argues that events such as the emergence of the Family First party in federal politics at the 2004 election, and increased attention on the religious convictions of Members of Parliament, as well as Christian prayer meetings and forums, are results of shifts that have occurred during the first ten years of Coalition Prime Minister Howard’s rule.87 This means that under Howard, politicians are increasingly mobilised to launch conservative social policies in an effort to reinforce Judeo-Christian morality (Maddox 2005:166-227). Given that Howard cites secularism and Judaeo-Christian morality as transcendent values, we can see that, following Hage, these values are constructed as the incontestable, pre-existing bedrock of Australian society. In contrast to this, it is important to remember that “Judaeo-Christianity” is indeed a relatively recent term that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), is traceable to only 1899.88 Further, through its representation of two linked traditions, the term arguably refers to an
86 Jon Stratton discusses this type of nationalism, which he calls “post-nationalism” in his 1998 book Race Daze: Australian in identity crisis, Annandale, Pluto. For Stratton, 1990s nationalist rhetoric favours cohesion, symbolism and myth over aggressive nationalist fervour, and is comprised of transcendent narratives that reinforce the hegemony of white, Anglo-Celtic Australians and culture. This issue of pre- existent white, Anglo-Celtic culture is also raised in Ghassan Hage’s Against Paranoid Nationalism. 87 For development and theorisation of this theme, see also: Randell-Moon, Holly. “Creating Pope John Paul II: Religion, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Politics of Discourses of Howardage.” borderlands 5.3 (2006): 40 paras. 88 The term does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) as a headword. Instead, it is included in the set of examples grouped under the prefix “Judaeo,” with the earliest entry of “Judaeo-Christianity” occurring in 1899. This, arguably, has the effect of rendering the term in a considerable state of flux as the meaning is not fixed with the authority of an etymology or general usage. 288 assimilationist reduction of religious diversity in which Judaism may be constructed as only an historical antecedent to Christianity (Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2000: 13-4; Stratton 1998a:228). Thus, the current prominence of Christianity of which Maddox writes, and which is framed by Howard as an enduring Judaeo-Christian moral code, represents the imagined, natural expression among “good nationals” of the “ordinary,” and yet exclusionary, Australian character in which secularism is inextricably linked to Judaeo- Christianity (Imtoual 2004).
Maddox provides compelling evidence to stake her claim, but Howard’s conflation of national identity with the “core value” of Judaeo-Christian ethics and morals is also symptomatic of more generalised debates about national identity that are not reducible to his leadership. Indeed, the importance of national identity has a history that emerged in the 1970s with the Whitlam government and was instrumental to debates during the 1990s over multiculturalism and the republic: during this time politicians from the left and right, embodied by Prime Ministers Keating and Howard respectively, in different ways, imagined Australian identity as multicultural, with an Anglo-Celtic core (Stratton 1998b:105-33). Jon Stratton argues that it is the official policy of multiculturalism itself that triggers “significant anxiety within the population about the cohesiveness of the Australian nation” (39). In this cultural and political context, it is no surprise that David Tacey’s works, which are pre-occupied with cultural unity and a cohesive national identity under the banner of an implicitly Christian spiritual realm, were produced and popularised. Indeed, Edge of the Sacred was released in 1995, and has since been reprinted at least four times. It is rumoured to have been listed by then Prime Minister Paul Keating as recommended reading for his Cabinet (Gelder & Jacobs 1998:9). This may or may not have occurred, but given the context I have just described, it is certainly not implausible that a government and populus mired in concern over national identity would be interested in a text that advocates a universalist solution to cultural fragmentation.
Indeed, a broad literature has emerged since 9/11 and the Tampa crisis in 2001 that discusses how issues of social cohesion and concomitant concerns about multiculturalism and national identity are highlighted and expressed through the production of anxieties about asylum seekers, Muslims and terrorists.89 Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss and develop these issues, it would appear that the privileging and naturalization of Judaeo-Christianity which I am identifying can be seen to be mobilised in the active marginalisation of particular groups within Australian society and ideology; thus emphasizing the multiple exclusions that underpin the structure and function of the “secular” in this instance.
89 For development and discussion of these issues, see: Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa. Sydney: UNSWP, 2002; Perera, Suvendrini. (ed.) Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001. Perth: Network, 2007; Mason, Victoria. “Strangers Within in the ‘Lucky Country’: Arab-Australians after September 11.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24.1 (2004): 233-43. 289 Whiteness and spiritual emptiness
Tacey works in the fields of spirituality studies, literary studies and Jungian psychoanalysis, and has published six books and one edited collection since 1995, with titles including ReEnchantment: The New Australian Spirituality and The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (2000; 2003). Tacey’s thesis is that the “Australian psyche” needs to be healed. Due to the processes of secular modernity and the legacy of rationality from the European Enlightenment, he argues that the “national psyche” has become too secular and rationalistic. But in advocating a cultural shift to the post-secular, Tacey is not suggesting amendment of Section 116 of the Constitution. As we have seen, the secularism outlined in the Constitution ably co-exists with a transcendent and arguably hegemonic Judaeo-Christian moral code. Instead, Tacey’s post-secularism signals a shift to a cultural embrace of a symbolic, mythical outlook and appreciation for the Australian landscape and indigenous cultures, which hence constitutes the spiritual.
Tacey constructs a causal link between “white Australians” and the condition of Australian society:
The gnawing emptiness that many white Australians feel at the centre of their lives is spiritual in nature. Many try to fill this emptiness with compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddism, cults, ideologies, substance abuse and various other kinds of escapism. Our symptomatic behaviour gives us no sense of enduring meaning and the inner emptiness always returns. The so-called ‘identity crisis’ of white Australians is itself a spiritual crisis; it is a sense of disconnection from ourselves, from the land, from history and from the world. […] Only by way of reconciliation with the land and its indigenous people can we achieve that belonging, connectedness, identity, purpose we seem to lack. These are the spiritual values driving a grassroots movement that will transform this country. (2000:128)
Firstly, given the use of the generalised pronoun ‘we’, Tacey’s assumed reader is obviously “white.”90 This implies that non-“white,” Australians are exempted from spiritual transformation. I will discuss Tacey’s usage of the term “white’ more closely in a moment. Secondly, the homogenisation of indigenous peoples as a spiritually rich or complete group is implied through their construction as of the land, in opposition to “white” Australians’ imagined emptiness and disconnection from this same land. Within the logic of this excerpt this works to exclude indigenous peoples from the economic consumption, mass media and so on that Tacey cites to characterize “white” contemporary Australian life. In this way, indigenous peoples and cultures are aligned with an idealised, post-secular spiritual realm that is beyond the reach of “white Australians.” Aboriginality and “the spiritual” are thus positioned as always already outside the implicitly white, capitalist and modern sociopolitical realm. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, it is perhaps this understanding that causes Tacey to code the sacred as an “invisible” presence that is also “indigenous.” Hence, Tacey does not address non-“white”, non-indigenous Australians and thus the complexities of a multicultural society are further evaded. We can see here the previously discussed narrative of an Australian national identity that is underpinned by an imagined “white” core playing out in Tacey’s work, which I will now suggest functions as a naturalization of white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity and culture.
90 The broader context of Edge of the Sacred particularizes the term “white” to indicate a dominant, white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity linked to Australia’s settler history. 290
For Tacey, the imposition of a monolithic, transcendental spiritual ‘other-world’ on the Australian sociopolitical, or material sphere, provides the key to transformation of the “white” condition, which can be seen as morally depraved, if we consider his citation of faddism, cults and escapism through drug use as chief social problems. This ‘other-world’, or realm, is narrativised as trans-historical and always already existent:
First we had spirituality (largely encased in religious tradition), then we had no spirituality (during the triumph of scientific materialism), and now we have spirituality again (looking for a new home, but not sure where it can be found). This little three-part story could describe the history of Western culture, with its dramatic shift from the premodern religious worldview, through secular humanism and reductive materialism, to contemporary postmodern science, with its renewed interest in the sacred potentials of matter in particular and human experience more generally. This narrative is also the story of my own life, from childhood religious belief, through intellectual enlightenment and disbelief, to present eclectic and pluralist spirituality. And this three-fold pattern is the history of Australia, from traditional Aboriginal animism, through white Australian sceptical materialism, to the present postcolonial and postmodern era where so many of us are talking about the ‘spirit’ of place, earth spirit, ancestral spirit, and even the spirit of things. After a relatively brief period of cultural exile, spirit has come back to haunt us, and it looks like being back to stay. (2000:33)
Here, the “spiritual” is constructed as autonomous, and so it can be read that Tacey imbues the spiritual realm with an agency that the material world is therefore denied. Also, Tacey’s notion of the post-secular is framed here as the “postcolonial and postmodern era,” in which the spiritual, constructed through an historical narrative as ever-present even during its apparent “exile” in “white”, secular modernity, has seemingly returned. This amounts to “a post-secular enlightenment, where religion and spirituality will return to centre stage and where secular materialism will appear out of date and anachronistic” (7). However, if we return to the extensive quote above, it is of note that the apparent agency of a pre-existing “spirit”, which can be read here as the force that animates the norms and values of society at a particular time, is what enables Tacey to compose such a history. Again, we see that in the “post-secular enlightenment” he advocates, modernity and secularism are coded “white.” To what or whom might this refer?
If we consider Stratton’s claim that the official multiculturalism of the 1990s depends upon an “Anglo-Celtic core”, it could be supposed that the “white” people and culture referred to by Tacey are representatives of an imagined pre-existing, dominant group linked to colonial times and practices. Indeed, Tacey makes this clear himself when he explicitly indicates that his term “white” refers to Anglo-Celtic subjects linked to Australia’s colonial history (1995). This functions as an enduring, historical fantasy about a “white” Australian “core” identity. Jan Larbalestier states:
Appeals to a collectivity of ‘white’ Australians are a means of constituting the historical and social space of a ‘white’ Australian culture and its subjects. Notions of whiteness then signal the idea of a continuing and essential homogeneity of a core Australian identity. Constructions of such an identity, among other things, serve to elide both the cultural diversity of Australia’s population since 1788 and the contested and contradictory aspects of its construction. (1999:146)
291 Thus “white” cannot be considered a stable, enduring category but rather signals the imposition of an ideological, homogenous culture. I would like to further expand this point because I will later argue that it is through this generalised “white” narrative that Tacey links an imagined core, white, Anglo-Celtic culture with a transcendent Judaeo-Christian moral code, which is then nevertheless constructed as “spiritual” renewal or transformation. Jon Stratton argues in “Multiculturalism and the Whitening Machine, or How Australians Become White” that in Australia the dominance of Christianity and Anglo-Celtic subjectivity are “entrenched” by official multiculturalism (1999:163). He states: “Whiteness has not disappeared in Australia as a key category in the construction of the nation. Rather, it has become abstracted into a general moral system, and ex-nominated, coded through terminology that identifies certain people as Anglo-Celtic and mainstream” (180). This “general moral system” of the Anglo-Celtic “mainstream” is a Judaeo- Christian “monomorality” that Stratton neatly describes as “the preservation of Christian, European, indeed Anglo-Celtic white morality as the only legitimate moral system in Australia” (181). The imagined “monomorality” is, as we have seen, “Judaeo-Christian.” Indeed, Tacey states:
The notion that Christianity could be swept aside saddens and alarms me, because I then have to ask: But if individualistic and feel-good [New Age] spirituality is to replace it, from whence will the moral dimension and ethical aspect of human civilisation arise? (2001a:5)
Tacey’s spiritually empty white, Anglo-Celtic subject, then, is the representation of an anxiety about the centrality and transcendence of a Judaeo-Christian monomorality under multiculturalism.
Why is the white, Anglo-Celtic subject so important to Tacey’s thesis about the return of spirituality? Tacey uses a Jungian psychoanalytic model based on archetypes in his argument that reconciliation cannot be achieved until white, Anglo-Celtic Australians encounter and validate an “aboriginal” archetype within the collective unconscious. As I have argued, this constitutes an imagined “core culture.” Tacey is careful to point out that this archetypal awareness is not the same as borrowing from an Aboriginal person or cultural product. For this reason he designates a capital “A” for Aboriginality, as opposed to a small “a” for the Jungian archetype, which is alternatively named the “archaic dreaming soul” (1995:11-2). Through this distinction Tacey is careful to state that he does not advocate the appropriation of indigenous peoples and culture, but rather refers to a mythical and symbolic, psychic transformation that signifies a shift to a post-secular national identity. But as has been noted elsewhere, Tacey does indeed blur distinctions between the small ‘a’ aboriginal archetype and Australian Aboriginal peoples not only by his reference to the Dreaming, but also by his reference to the archetype as “50 000 years old”: a figure that undoubtedly indicates the history of indigenous cultures in Australia (1995:137).91 Further, this Jungian model configures social change as the activity of the core culture of white, Anglo-Celtic subjects with access to sociopolitical agency. Indigenous cultures are relegated to both spiritual and premodern, “archaic” realms; racially marginalized through a transcendent, archetypal spirituality that is white, Anglo-Celtic and
91 See also: Gelder, Ken and Jane Jacobs (1998) Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Carlton South, Melbourne UP; Rolls, Mitchell. (1998) “The Jungian Quest for the Aborigine Within: A Close Reading of David Tacey’s Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia.” Melbourne Journal of Politics 25: 171-87.
292 Judaeo-Christian; and further “spiritually” marginalized in this construction of archetypal spiritual plenitude in opposition to the imagined vacuity of white, Anglo-Celtic subjects.
The anthropologist Andrew Lattas has argued that the vacant, empty interiorised space that is imagined in contemporary, popular representations of non-Aboriginal subjectivity, and which is accounted for as a lack of spirituality, is indeed a “space of power” (1992:51). He argues that this expropriation of subjective space for spiritual ‘lack’ operates as a locus through which panic about a waning ‘national identity’ can be expressed. Lattas is concerned that the creation of inner emptiness and concurrent extension of psychoanalysis to a national psyche produces ‘empty’ white people as victims of colonial history. He argues:
In this discourse Australians are instructed that they can overcome their inner nothingness by overcoming the haunting emptiness of the landscape; and that this is most likely to be attained through discovering the unique spiritual meanings which Aborigines read into the land, and by making these the basis of interiority. (1992:52)
Further, Lattas states:
In this psychoanalytic nationalist discourse the Aborigine also becomes a Christ-like figure inside our national psyches, and so in place of the killing of Christ we now have the killing of our (aboriginal) unconscious, reconstituted as the site of our sense of the sacred. […] Here, the suffering of Aborigines is internalised and appropriated by whites. The nation’s slaughter of Aborigines is reduced to the sacrificial loss of its own spiritual identity, as though the real loss was the killing of a psychic portion of itself. Such narratives, with the focus on the existential side of suffering, allow whites to emerge as the ‘true’ sufferers of history, for it is they who have lost their souls and consequently wander soul-less. (57)
Lattas’ work, written in 1992 and thus three years before Tacey’s Edge of the Sacred, succinctly identifies the psychoanalytic, nationalist paradigm that Tacey’s work reproduces and reinforces. Lattas makes very clear that this works in the interests of the white, Anglo- Celtic subject and ideology. However, who is implied in Lattas’ usage of our national psyches, and our sense of the sacred? The appropriation of Aboriginal suffering “by whites” is then equated with “the nation’s […] spiritual identity.” Here, Lattas repeats the structure I have been pointing to, in which an imagined, core, white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity is established as coterminous to national identity. Tacey’s positioning of Aboriginal people as responsible for the spiritual “salvation” of non-Aboriginal Australians, and by extension to reinforce the white, Anglo-Celtic subject as synonymous to Australian identity, is further developed in the following claim: “It is by rediscovering the presence of the spirit in creation with the help of indigenous religions that Christianity can recover the expansive dimension of the sacred” (Tacey 2000:103 My emphasis). Following the logic of Tacey’s argument about social transformation, Christianity is clearly linked to the problem of the spiritually vacuous white, Anglo-Celtic subject here. Further, due to a racially constructed spiritual identity, Aboriginal Australians are here constructed as spiritual relics and providers of social/spiritual change, as the imagined Christian, Anglo- Celtic “mainstream” is reinforced.
Tacey describes Edge of the Sacred as a “brainstorming source-book, containing many embryonic themes” of the ideas he later deepens and develops in ReEnchantment and then in The Spiritual Revolution (2000:12). The fact of the publication of these books, as well as
293 Tacey’s numerous appearances on television programs such as ABCTV’s Compass and on Radio National’s Religion Report and The Spirit of Things indicates a considerable level of popularity and consumer interest.92 It is therefore important that we take seriously his advocacy of an Australian spirituality. I would like to dwell a little further on his construction of Aboriginality:
It is an appalling irony that, in tertiary education at least, Aboriginals will not discover an environment in which their spiritual culture can be shared and their gifts received. In ‘cultural studies’ programmes, they will meet a radical, elitist, subversive culture based on Marx and Foucault that will want to turn them into radicals and victims. The studies will be based on power, resistance and revolution, not accommodation or growth through love. They will meet a hardened materialist culture that regards sacredness as “cultural property”, and such property, they will be told, ought to be withheld and protected, not shared. The Aboriginal way, however, works in reverse: to withhold spiritual knowledge is to destroy it; only in sharing it is it strengthened and renewed. (2000:160)
This passage, particularly in the light of Lattas’ comments, renders Tacey’s claim that he is not advocating appropriation rather weak. The ideological narrative that functions here is not only that all Aboriginal people are spiritual, but that all Aboriginal people, by virtue of racial identification, have a gift of spirituality that they are compelled to give. The sense that Aboriginal people will be taught to “share” their “sacredness”, alongside terms such as “growth through love” can be read as subtleties that stand in for the more pejorative “appropriation”. Thus, difference is erased, marking Aboriginal people as primordial spiritual relics, whose “sacredness”, a term which Tacey uses interchangeably with “spirituality,” is ably shared with and disclosed to the white, Anglo-Celtic, spiritually “empty” core culture. Notably, this is framed as “the Aboriginal way”, which suggests a convenient, homogenous, trans-historical cultural reality. Spiritual transformation in Australia then, marginalizes indigenous peoples even in their apparent – mythic – centrality to the process.
Insurmountable differences It is useful now to discuss the discourses of writing about the sacred, which are highlighted by a reading of Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs’ Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation in which they explore the ways that Aboriginal sacredness impacts upon and shapes modernity in Australia. They acknowledge levels of incommensurability between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia, alongside points of contact as part of the postcolonial condition which they define as follows.
The impulse is […] towards reconciliation at one moment, and division at another: ‘one nation’ and a ‘divided nation’. It is the ceaseless movement back and forth between these positions which is precisely postcolonial. (1998:24)
92 Following are several examples of Tacey’s media appointments, of which there are many more: (2004) “Mysticism and Rationalism”, Transcript, 11 January, Compass ABCTV, Australia, viewed 15 April 2007,
Tacey privileges the ‘psychological’: he has nothing to say […] about Aboriginal people and politics. Indeed his refusal to speak about Aboriginal people politically is precisely what enables him to do away with that capital ‘A’. He has empowered them spiritually so that they may transform ‘all of us’; after putting them to use in this way, all Tacey appears able to do is leave them behind. (13)
And further:
Aboriginal sacredness is also a fact of the modern, bureaucratic life: worldly, rather than other-worldly. It is continually being dealt with by governments, businesses, mining companies and mediators. (1-2)
Gelder and Jacobs clearly disapprove of Tacey’s archetypal discourse; most particularly because of its ultimate marginalisation of indigenous peoples and cultures and concomitant glossing over of everyday life in the sociopolitical milieu. Within the logic of Gelder and Jacobs’ postcolonialism, Tacey’s work falls outside of the postcolonial paradigm because, for Gelder and Jacobs, Tacey has absorbed Aboriginal people into a spiritual other-world, for the purposes of transforming the imagined spiritual vacuity of the nation. Although not specified by Gelder and Jacobs, for Tacey, “the nation” is a white, Anglo-Celtic totality; in his work he makes little mention of other ethnic groups and the historicity of these categories. It is also important to remember here that the spiritual realm, represented by the Otherness of a Jungian-inspired notion of indigenous spirituality, is nonetheless a Judaeo- Christian, white, Anglo-Celtic construction, as discussed earlier. Thus it can be seen that this ‘spirituality’, which is projected onto the Aboriginal people and culture, need not have any relevance to the religions and spiritualities of many indigenous peoples and cultures.93 What I am trying to make clear is that regardless of what realities there might be about the spiritual practices of Aboriginal, as well as non-Aboriginal people, a universalistic, Eurocentric and Judaeo-Christian model is imposed as “the spiritual.” This eclipses the possibility for fluctuating, intersubjective and interfaith dialogue and moral codes, and thus does not perform the postcolonial relation mentioned in Uncanny Australia, where we can see that the levels of incommensurability between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures are acknowledged.
93 Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman conduct, through engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s work on sacrifice and the state, a reading of the Aboriginal sacred that is careful to recognize cultural incommensurability. They state, “the seductive myth of the Aboriginal sacred is a white man’s mythology” and describe Tacey’s notion of spiritual exchange between Australian “Europeans and Aboriginals” as “utterly vapid” (2004) Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object, Amsterdam, Amsterdam UP: 175, 209. 295 Tacey is significantly uncomfortable with difference. Following the publication of Edge of the Sacred, Australian academic Mitchell Rolls critiqued the text in the Melbourne Journal of Politics, after which a debate with David Tacey ensued. In his article, Rolls communicates his concern about Tacey’s usage of a European, Jungian psychoanalytic model in relation to indigenous peoples. He summarises the logic of Tacey’s argument:
Hence, prior to colonization, Aborigines were, in effect, in wait for a disrupting spirit that would enter their psyche and release them from their bonds, thereby enabling an uncertain and painful growth, but growth nevertheless. This transposition of Australia’s political and social history, and Aboriginal life pre- and post-European settlement, into a Jungian psychodrama results in a startling hypothesis: in archetypal terms the arrival of the colonists was a preordained and necessary event. (1998:179)
Rolls’ reading of Tacey’s works is that indigenous peoples and culture are constructed as dependent upon Jungian psychoanalysis and spiritualism, and thus a European model of subjectivity and change, in order to transform. What is important to my argument is the style of debate that took place within the journal. David Tacey refutes Rolls’ claims in the same volume of the journal. It is notable that Tacey draws attention to a gap between Rolls’ academic critique and his “spiritual” position: a gap which is constructed as almost insurmountable:
The differences between my own intellectual position and his reductive or materialist worldview strike me as almost insurmountable. […] He asks how I can impose “alien” archetypal structures upon Aboriginal culture, when the claim of archetypal theory is that it posits a universalising discourse in which no culture or time is alien to its theoretical structures. To materialists and social constructivists, my views appear antiquated, naïve, and out of touch. Rolls writes with the typically superior and higher position that is adopted by reductive thinkers who imagine themselves to be above the myth-making that they are attempting to deconstruct. Haven’t I heard that universals no longer exist, that archetypes are Eurocentric, that spirituality is a fraud, that essentials are out? Yes, I have heard these claims for many years now, over and over, and yet they do not appear convincing or valid to me. There is a traditional wisdom that is quite separate from our clever contemporary intellectualism. (1998:189 My emphases)
Here, the spiritual is directly opposed to the material world. Interestingly, this is couched in an idea about Rolls’ academic position, which for Tacey connotes false superiority and a rejection of myth-making, spirituality and traditional wisdom. Rolls goes on to reject this assumption in the next edition of the journal. It seems that the difference of Rolls’ position is not able to be accommodated and validated by Tacey, and vice versa. Rather, the tone is condescending and irate, and here Rolls’ authority to speak on the subject is questioned. Significantly, Tacey identifies closely with the “traditional wisdom” of universalist archetypal theory, while dismissing Rolls’ analysis as merely “contemporary.” Here we can see the preference is for a transcendent, cohesive narrative structure that is inclusive, pre- existent, eternal and stable, rather than fluctuant. As I will now discuss, the celebration of this narrative enables Tacey to suggest the dismantling of the secularism he associates with “intellectualism” and rationality.
Tacey and Rolls’ debate does not conclude with Tacey’s refutation, as Rolls offered a rebuttal in the following edition of the Melbourne Journal of Politics. But the difficulty is not their differing perspectives. Rather, Tacey’s “spiritual” position, which is the outlook
296 he uses to write about Australian society, is used to frame Rolls’ position as somewhat blinded: “Apparently, it takes a spiritual awareness to see this spiritual process” (1998:191). Indeed, I suggest that Tacey’s real concern is that Rolls’ critique appears to be, in opposition to the spiritual view, distastefully secular.
What is meant by the term “secular” in this instance? The body of Tacey’s works on national transformation suggest that it is the apparent secularism of the Australian “national psyche” to which he is opposed. He states: “It is only through […] risk and adventure that our culture can break out of the imprisoning secular mask that currently confines and limits it” (2000:13). As I have mentioned, Tacey is not concerned with an overturning of Section 116 of the Constitution. Indeed, this political secularism preserves the free exercise of any religion, and by extension spirituality, without intervention by the state (Bouma 2006:8-9). Rather, Tacey’s secularism, which refers to a rational “national psyche” that he argues needs to shift to a focus on myth and spirituality, also appears to involve the construction and subsequent silencing of “secular” dissent, as we have seen in the debate with Rolls. As I discussed earlier with relation to Howard, current understandings of the Australian “national psyche” can be seen to valorise “ordinariness” and a retreat from “extra-ordinary” phenomena such as spirituality and religion (Sinclair 2004:279).94 This “secular/ordinary” national imaginary, to use Jennifer Sinclair’s demonstration of the interchangeable nature of the terms, paradoxically includes the privileging and naturalization of a transcendent Judaeo-Christian “monomorality,” as I have demonstrated (Sinclair 2004:280). Ironically, then, Tacey’s secularism functions as both product and reinforcement of this imaginary, which is perhaps why he uses the metaphor of a mask in the quote above, suggesting that the spiritual/Judaeo-Christian culture persists beneath a “secularism” that is only a veneer. The post-secular shift he desires is therefore a functionary of the secular/ordinary national imaginary, which, as discussed earlier, mobilises the dominance of a Judaeo-Christian monomorality and white, Anglo-Celtic culture. We can therefore understand that Rolls’ and Gelder and Jacobs’ refusals to validate the “spiritual” and to write from within that imaginary, but rather to comment on the sociopolitical implications of its construction, particularly with respect to Aboriginality, constitutes a site of “almost insurmountable” difference for Tacey.
Language, Politics and Spirituality
“Spirituality” is a broad, perhaps ubiquitous term that is often loosely defined as a privatised version of religious faith or connection (Bouma 2006:6-16; Heelas 1996:2). But, as we have seen in the case of Tacey’s work, other agendas can take place in its name. In “The Politics of Spirituality: The Spirituality of Politics” Canadian theorist Geraldine Finn discusses her reservations about the ways in which what she calls “postmodern spirituality” is represented. She says that when “spirituality” refers to an autonomous, benevolent realm that acts upon society, or the material realm, the results are politically conservative. This is because social agency is essentially removed from the sociopolitical sphere. She shows that this is the effect of a particular use of language:
94 This view is arguably shared by Gary Bouma, for whom Australian spirituality is an expression of the sentiments that underpin the Anzac legend, which he describes as “a shy hope in the heart” and “laid back” (2006: 27-8, 35). 297 I have always been uncomfortable with the language of spirituality and its tendency to ‘other-worldliness’ in particular; that is, with its presumption of and aspiration to a being- otherwise-than-being in and of the material world – to a being beyond ‘materialist interpretations’ […] The differentiation of ‘spirit’ from ‘matter’, for example, both mystifies and falsifies the complex reality of material being by splitting off from it its most creative and potentially subversive possibilities and effects and syphoning them off into and for some ‘transcendent’ space of other-worldliness, of the immaterial: of God, the soul and/or the human spirit. (1992:159-60)
Finn’s discomfort is not with ‘spirituality’, however that might be configured, but with the language of spirituality that constructs an ‘other-world’ and thus eclipses the conditions that underpin its representation in the material world. What Finn is reminding us of, is that ‘spirituality’, when not seen as a product of the context in which it is produced, limits the agency and potential of life in the material realm. For Finn, the transplantation of material concerns into a discourse of ‘spirituality’ represents and reinforces the disempowerment of the sociopolitical sphere. Finn most particularly specifies ‘transcendence’ as the trope that effects the representation of the spiritual as “other-worldly” and thus outside of sociopolitical reality.
In this essay, Finn discusses the way in which ‘being’ is organised in modern culture as ‘being as’: this is an effect of categorical, sociopolitical identity features such as woman, man, Jew, Aboriginal. The subject cannot embody the categories of ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘white’ and so on fully, but only to a greater or lesser extent. For Finn, the experiences of excess and lack produced by the representations of ‘self’ that are offered by these categories are ineradicable, and indeed “the necessary and indispensable conditions of ec-stasy, creativity, change and critique” (163). Thus, rather than looking for an ‘other-world’ to originate change, Finn situates agency in the space between text and context, personal and political, that is generated by experience of “being as”. She refers to this simply as the “ethical space-between”. Her ethics maintains space for transgression within the material context of cultural production. Finn shows that this enables an interrogation of the political status quo, which is however not enabled by the transplantation of political concerns to an- other world that offers the illusion of “a better deal” but in effect reinforces the categories that are experienced as limiting in the material world (161).
This is crucial to an understanding of the way in which Tacey’s representation of white, Anglo-Celtic people and culture as non-spiritual, and subsequent desire to remedy this through an abstracted notion of Aboriginal spirituality, can be read as unethical. This is because Tacey does not put whiteness and Aboriginality, as Geraldine Finn suggests, “into (the) question” by historicizing and contextualizing – and in so doing particularizing – his ideas. Hence, given Finn’s argument, Tacey’s work can be read as actively limiting these ‘categories’ and thereby enacting a neo-colonial position; whilst apparently social agency is co-opted into the interests of spirituality, it is clear that Tacey’s white, Anglo-Celtic subject is the beneficiary of the spiritual “revolution”. By refusing to deconstruct and particularize these categories and the function of spirituality in relation to them, Tacey effectively closes off the “ethical” “space-between” the socio-political category and its lived reality; and with it the opportunity for transgression and transformation he so desires.
298 Conclusion
Although “spirituality” might seem an innocuous, personal, perhaps “warm and fuzzy” term, and although it is clear from David Tacey’s work that he hopes for beneficial changes to Australia’s social problems through acknowledgement of deeper meanings and connections between individuals, nature and society, the implications of his usage of this term are cause for concern. As I have explained, the post-secularism Tacey constructs involves the privileging of a Judaeo-Christian monomorality, which is reproduced and reinforced through the mainstreaming of white Anglo-Celtic subjectivity, and which is already in place as an “Australian value,” as is celebrated in the political sphere by Howard. Here, national identity is staked on grounds that are fundamentally separate from the social and political reality of Australia’s ostensibly, and at least officially, multicultural and multifaith socius. This elision enables the privileging and naturalization of a white, Anglo- Celtic, Christian Australia which is asserted in spiritual terms by Tacey as a “grassroots value.” The construction of this transcendent, hegemonic, unimpeachable realm or “other- world” is central to the function of Australian secularism, which, in turn, is inextricably linked to the ideology of Howard’s conflation of “ordinariness” with a transcendent, white, Anglo-Celtic subjectivity that is underpinned by a “core” Judaeo-Christian morality.
Biographical note
Sophie Sunderland is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Australia within the discipline of English and Cultural Studies. Her thesis analyzes representations of the secular, spiritual and sacred in Australian and Canadian popular cultures, with attention to the importance of religion and whiteness to these secular, multicultural nations.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tanja Dreher and Chris Ho for co-ordinating the postgraduate publications support process, which I found to be an excellent, useful addition to the Not Another Hijab Row conference program. I am also particularly grateful to Alison Bartlett for her practical guidance with the writing of this article, and of course to my supervisor Gail Jones and the anonymous referees.
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