Geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism
Bibliography
Povinelli, E. A. (2016). Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Duke University Press.
Notes
Annotations
(4/25/2023, 3:50:20 PM)
Go to annotation“The task of human thought when encountering a manifestation was not to understand things in and of themselves but to understand how their variations within locations were an indication of a reformation—the alteration of some regional mode(s) of existence that mattered. And the purpose of understanding the tendencies, predilections, and orientations of any given part within a given formation was to keep that part oriented toward the given formation so that it could continue. Or, if one needed the formation to alter its perspective, the purpose was to lure, seduce, and “bait” a part of that world to reorient itself toward you in order to care for you. The alternative was that the world, as currently in sutu, turned away from your kind of existence and as a result you turned into another kind of existence. You become, not what you are not, but what you are in a different arrangement of existence.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 59)
Go to annotation“The answer to what a sudden, unexpected change in the arrangement of existence might mean depended on how much a person knew about things, the place, other things in the place, other places, et cetera. A manifestation might indicate an ongoing mutual orientation of existences (person, oyster, rock, wind, tide) in a place, a spurned orientation, or a mutual disorientation. But in all cases a manifestation was understood to be a sign that demanded to be heeded. Humans had to learn how to heed such manifestations, and they were assessed in their ability to provide cogent interpretations of them.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 59)
Go to annotation“But humans are hardly the only or most important existences engaged in these practices of materializing attention. Binbin and Bilawag knew that other forms of existence were also constantly assessing them—the weight of their and my feet in the thin, slippery mud hiding the razor edges of oysters makes the point well enough.2 The mud, the oyster, and the weight of my body dynamically interpret each other in such a way that they produce a specific effect.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 60)
Go to annotation“They knew that manifesting was a mode of showing care, of gathering in and securing the in sutu.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 62)
Go to annotation“And it isn’t merely fossils that manifest and in manifesting indicate something about the state of affairs in the current form and organization of existents. Everything from four-legged emus to waterholes to chemically contaminated swamps to human remains may signal that something about the coordination of existence needs heeding.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 68)
Go to annotation“White people would be too quick to remove them, too numb to feel a nonhuman aboutness, towardness, wantness. They would instead rapidly isolate them, disrupting the coordination, orientation, and obligation of existents that creates the in sutu. A double alienation threatened—in the sense of property law and of the affective attachments of existents.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 69)
Go to annotation“A fossil, a bone, a set of living, now recently deceased people—for my old friends, all are in the same time and same space of signifying material mutuality.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 69)
Go to annotation“Sara Ahmed has asked how the return to a focus on how to discern “it-like” things returns us to the necessity rather than the contingency of contemporary racial, gendered, and sexual formations.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 71)
Go to annotation“What kind of manifestation is Meillassoux? What are his obsessions, desires, and arguments an indication of ? What is he trying to make himself into by making others something else? To be blunt, if Bilawag, Binbin, their children and grandchildren, the durlgmö and the Dogs who once talked should attend to him, it is not because he is attending to them.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 74)
Go to annotation“because he is participating in crushing them along the pressure points of geontopower. When Meillassoux asks his reader, don’t we all agree that, at the minimum, science makes a true statement when it claims that archefossils existed prior to human existence, he then reminds his reader what she will become if she answers in the negative. She will find “herself dangerously close to contemporary creationists” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 75)
Go to annotation“The existential terror evoked but then directed by another equally terrifying prospect—if we do not allow human existents to be one entity on a temporal line of entities then we will become a creationist or maybe a primitivist, an Animist, an irrational buffoon—reinforces the radical outside of that which we touch here and in this place, and nowhere else. Bilawag, Binbin, and their children have had to attend closely to this terror given the role it has played in the governance of geontopower.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 76)
Go to annotation“Crucial to their analysis was not an indifferent world but an intensely interested one. By intensely interested, they meant that every region of the world was pressuring existing forms of existence and creating new ones—one specific form was the European settlers who wanted space and goods that could be transformed into market values and who claimed that Indigenous people were merely breathing fossils in the way of progress. Indigenous men and women could not be indifferent to these new forms of existence any more than they could be indifferent to manifestations like the durlgmö. What effect were these new forms of existence—settlers, cattle, pig, influenza, barbed wire—having on the given arrangement of their world? And how were other modes of existence in the landscape and the landscape itself reacting to these new modes and relations of existence? What were the manifestations that signaled these views and which ones should be heeded? As the tide of a vicious colonial assault turned toward them, these questions had to be asked, tested, and answered rapidly.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 77)
Go to annotation“Three aspects of manifestation were especially important at the time: a presupposition about the entanglements of substances; a hypothesis about the relationship between entangled substances and the manifestation of signs of mutual belonging; and a claim about the relationship between” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 77)
Go to annotation“truth and the entanglements of substance.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 78)
Go to annotation“The older generation insisted on this by teaching a form of mental mapping. In your mind put yourself in the place you once were but are not now. Look around. Where are you facing? In what direction are you moving? Re-create the entire path around the area. See the figure you have made as if you were working with a massive Etch A Sketch. What does it look like? Did this pattern look like anything that might be relevant to the people who were now inhabiting the area, say” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 78)
Go to annotation“the shape of a place and a family’s Dreaming, say the shape of a coastal point and a Dog’s nose? Or in using an area more and more, did one notice other things that might indicate a hospitable or inhospitable environment, say certain eagles which clustered around certain beaches who were the Dreaming of the family who always stayed there? Minds focused on certain manifestations or their lack even as feet pressed into mud, bent grass and branches, and followed pig, wallaby, and horse tracks. Visualization was a practice of the body in movement that, in turn, materially fashioned the mental life of moving bodies. How one entered or exited a mangrove, a mud plain, a woodlands, or a house: these actions were broad sensory affects, cognitive imprints, and material indentations. The significance of Gracie Binbin and Betty Bilawag’s discovery of the durlgmö when they were younger women carries more weight when placed in this context. This durlgmö manifested itself to link together the country on which Binbin and her relatives were interned and the country from which they were forcibly driven out.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 79)
Go to annotation“Prior to the mid-twentieth century, settler state and publics believed that these “arche-fossils” would slowly pass back into their proper time, the time before settler givenness.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 80)
Go to annotation“As he carefully investigated the pile with a thin branch from a tree nearby, he noted that the shells were evidence of his ancestors having lived in and sunk into the country and also that he too was pissing and sweating up the place, although his body contained substances theirs did not, for instance, high-blood-pressure medicines. Hyperobjects and hypo-objects; radically local and translocal networks and habitations; events occupying perceptual levels we could and could not perceive, on this trip and others, Trevor and his kin analyze how all levels and aspects of these substantial co-involvements and transformations contribute to the entanglements of substances that provide the basis for a manifestation. Each something might be, if we know enough about it, a comment on the coordination, orientation, and obligation of local existents.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 82)
Go to annotation“When they choose among the descriptions of these various schools, they tend to choose Shaviro’s approach, inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, that things are in and through each other. But, of course, these theorists do not come and engage my friends—nor do they seem to think they mustgiven that philosophical thought defines itself as a kind of thinking that can generate thought for all beings without engaging most; and all truths remain the same no matter where you perceive them. Does their disinterest matter?” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 85)
Go to annotation“Improvisation doesn’t merely refer to a performative style. It also articulates as an artistic style to an art of living. It pulls into the aesthetic register a mixture of fiction and fact, reality and realism, and a manifestation of reality (a realization) through this admixture. And thus the governance of existence and the aesthetics of representing existence cannot be unwound.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 86)
Go to annotation“This is not to make humans the center of the objectassemblage world, nor to make other things passive. Rather it is to make the forces that produce centers and passivities the name of the game. And part and parcel of this force is, of course, whose arguments about truth and persuasion and whose pressing questions and obsessions gain the power to set the norm: those who are careful to abide by the noncontradictory mandates of a certain mode of reason, those who abstract a universal equivalence among objects in reality in order to decenter human politics and social conditions, or those who attempt to experience truth through a maximal saturation of the possibility of what this thing here might indicate about what we are now within the unequal forces of its constitution?” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 91)