Elisabeth Povinelli
Geontologies a requiem to late liberalism
Duke University press
We globally are organizing in a relation to a rapidly spreading virus that confronts occident to its social organization in late capitalism, as we protect ourselves, from what we consider an exterior attack to our biosecurity, we risk losing essential values and freedom that make life worth living. This crisis is an occasion to asses values and more importantly it could bring us to unfold our thoughts to what we consider to be life in our societies. The Virus is not concerned by the life/non-life division it is a terrorist it is also the recognition of internal political other. In this context, reading Elisabeth Povinelli’s Geontology is enlighting, as she explains geontopower, the idea that what we call alive is defined by the power structures that we built and live under. Elisabeth Povinelli asks in Geontologies who decides what is considered life or not, she adresses the question from her position as part of an Aborigens group in Northern Australia, and does so through their movements in relation to late capitalism manifestations.
Humans did not create the actual capitalist relation to the world, rather it is certain forms of humanity that created it, but as Povinelli notes, as the future of humanity is put under pressure, it seems that ontology has reemerged as a prominent question. However the issue is not to state the relation between humans and non humans, but to include the power structures that manifest in this world.
Geontopower is a power of differentiation and control. Biopolitics has been a source of important critical thinking as Dona Haraway has stated the place of biopolitics in the formation of Postmodern bodies, Achille Mbembe explained Necropolitcs in colonialist control of bodies; today it late global capitalism and global organization are not adequate to protect physical and psychological needs of citizens, and the return to sovereignty does not appear as an option to understand late liberal power. Povinelli explains that the biopolitical management of indigenous is less compelling to her then the management of existence life birth etc… She pursues saying that our adhesion to the biopolitical is revealing a formation of geontological power.
Doing so she fosters 3 figures: The Desert The Animist and The virus all three situate the existence of a culture by asking what is at stake, and who determines the organization of a territory. We need to give up a universal rule for fair scheme and focus on local.
The limits of the conception of individual life now appear clearly, rather then limited body we could consider ourselves as nests of interrelated bacterias, and furthermore we are deeply related to non biological elements. Relational models are ecological by nature. However, the carbon imaginary is definitely what unites natural and social sciences into considering life, and triggers a fascination in the contemplation of it emergence. In reconsidering the difference between life and non-life, Povinelli asks if the source of life could be non-life that has the possibility to either bond to life or not.
It is not clear who decides of geontolongy and what are the conditions, even among aborigens themselves, and the way to get to an understanding of this situation is to is to set up a true intersectionality that allows to formulate problematics out from the existing scheme. The question is whether “Two Women Sitting Down” a sacred rock in northern Australia can be considered as a person, or if it is only a way to let aborigens be victim of an exploitation relation with capitalism, where aborigens can get a little immediate benefice while capitalism gets consolidated and long term benefice.
To aborigens and dreamers the relation to the inanimate world is active and made of permanent signs and manifestations, the task of humans who encounter manifestations (those can be any signs in the surroundings or in dreams) is not to understand the manifestations themselves but the relations. Understand how their variations within a location are an alteration of some regional mode, an existence that matters.
The purpose of understanding an arrangement is to seduce it bait it so that it continues to take care of the form arrangement that you (human) are in, if not you risk to turn into another kind of existence. Manifesting is a mode of care and securing the “sutu”, the relation.
Humans are rarely the only or most important existence engaged.
Current iterations of the ontological turn: speculative realism and materialism or object oriented ontology, frequently and aggressively drive towards the occlusion of the dynamics of social relation within a subsequent de-suturing of objects. The consequence of this is an unloosing of the socius from historical time accelerating into sheer prospective of cataclysm.
Furthermore, the understanding of the traditional is that it shouldn’t move in time it stays as it was in the past, but reality of existing animist practices is actual, it is a lively culture that exists and transforms itself throughout our shared history and in the actual.
While aborigens continue to live, use their relational landmarks and to interpret the world through dreams and traces, they are under attack from colonialists (virus, alcohol, extermination, police); in 1976 the indigenous land act was promulgated. In order to claim their rights they must prove that they are still natives, “archefossils”, frozen traces of the past with a certain type of totemic imagination, proving that they are indeed archaic a trace of something prior to the colonialism of settlement.
However the situation is that aborigens have adapted transform and resisted settler colonialism by observing interpreting and assimilating their forms of life.
