Where there are no islands

Abstract

Elaine Stratford, Philip Steinberg, Prayag Ray and Johannes Riquet have generously invited Decolonising Governance into a conversation with their work. They have with great patience and forbearance grappled with the ‘archipelagic’ range and distribution of topics and, with equal courtesy, pointed out shortcomings of my presentation that, in the context of sponsoring critical dialogue, risk an inhibiting insularity. The first thing to say, though, concerns the tone of their commentaries, which is characterized by a combination of good humour, occasionally inflected by a certain ironic exasperation (so interdisciplinary and, perhaps for this reason, so elusive), and careful seriousness. One of the elusive concepts deployed in Decolonising Governance is exchange, or rather the setting of exchange rates: the idea is that exchange can be likened to the translation between different metaphoric systems. If translation of this kind is to produce new, relational understandings of place able to generate decolonized forms of governance, an awareness of difference, even perhaps incommensurability, is critical to the enterprise. And how is this marked if not by humour, by the revelation in the translation of views that, when relativized, reveal their lack of grounding? The delirium of the interdisciplinary ironizes all forms of disciplinary landedness; as a mode of exposition, it is a kind of literary take on Michel Serres’s ‘living syrrhesis’, allowing back in the ‘ocean of noise’ that, Serres says, surrounds ‘the tiny island of reality’ called the ‘rational’. This is a risky strategy, one that risks not seeing the archipelago for the islands. But it points to another feature of the exposition, its performativity, which, while not amenable to step-by-step rationalization, encourages further improvisation, diversion and anecdotal extension. As a number of my interlocutors observe, the discursive outreach and drift of Archipelagic Thinking hardly lends itself to practical application: even leaving aside the utopianism implicit in the decolonizing project itself, what settlement could be reached (beyond certain tactical hints) using my analysis? Exchanges between more and less powerful agents have markedly contrasting purposes: if the former seeks to terminate the discussion (preparatory to colonization), the latter seeks by every means to keep the dialogue going; from this latter perspective, the performativity of the communication act exceeds (and indeed may nullify) any conceptual acquisition or exchange. In this conception of coexistence, the trope of walking side by side, frequent in Aboriginal rapprochement rhetoric, replaces the end-game of face-to-face appearance, confrontation and neutralization. Hence the deferral of a clear outcome, while it is likely to frustrate the colonial administration, feels from a performative perspective as if something at last is being recognized, a point developed in Meeting Place, where the call for a deeper