Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and cultural studies by Stephen Muecke

Stephen Muecke’s Textual Spaces offers both new material and versions of some of the essays he has published on Aboriginal and cultural studies published through the 1980s. Many of these have already been very influential, but the welcome appearance of the book invites consideration of the continuities in Muecke’s arguments, the programme they suggest. ‘Postmodern’ is an increasingly useless term, I think, used mostly by its opponents to inflate the things they don’t like into an inescapable world-historical phenomenon. So it is with some reluctance that I characterise Muecke’s work as exemplary of a good, cautious, and ethical postmodernism – one that does not celebrate plurality and fragmentation but rather intellectual humility and the limited and local in knowledge. Muecke’s postmodernism always works to situate and relativise the contexts and assumptions of western knowledge. Muecke does not revel pointlessly in difference and multiplicity, seeking instead to understand the ‘historical necessity’ for some images to be produced rather than others (as he puts it early in the book), or the range of ‘available discourses’ present at a particular time, as it is more convincingly put a little later on. Muecke argues that there is a limited range of possible discourses about Aboriginal peoples available in the culture – the discourses of anthropology, romanticism, and racism. They ‘all position Aboriginals in the same way’, as objects of knowledge, spoken of in the third person, not as subjects or agents or discussants. Perhaps here there might have been a little more reflection on the conditions of possibility of Muecke’s own meta-discussion of possible discourses. It is only in the book’s last essay that we have some consideration of the institutional and personal location of his own inquiries. Knowledges are produced in discourse, Muecke argues. There is no big, real ‘history’ or ‘culture’ out there waiting to be recaptured. We should think less about the ‘correctness’ of representations and more about the ‘rhetoric’ of representation. Instead of asking, ‘Are Aboriginal people really like this?’, we should ask, ‘Do Aboriginal people want to be like this?’. This emphasis leads him to criticism of the conventional academic formations of both historical and literary studies, and the culture concept which has been central to both of them. The totalising concept of culture, Muecke argues provocatively, has been ‘the prison of twentieth-century Aborigines’. Historians, Muecke argues, have a tendency ‘to produce an untiring positivity, a series of assertions as to “what actually happened”’. Historians hence don’t tend to take responsibility for the third person narratives they write. The institutions of literature on the other hand tend to be blind to their ethnospecificity. The recovery of Aboriginal stories as literature is criticised throughout the book. Aboriginal ways of reading are contrasted to the western literary privileging of dense and plural interpretations, and expectations of the making of the self through engagement with texts. Aboriginal societies, Muecke argues, do not have a category ‘fiction’. The sort of discourse analysis that Muecke advocates asks questions similar to those he understands to be asked by Aboriginal readings. Performance is the most important thing, and performance is linked to custodianship, which ‘imposes a limited authority on those people who work in a culture and reproduce its materials’. The significance of a discourse lies in ‘the precise and limited conditions of its availability’. At times this discussion might seem to lead to yet another discovery that Aboriginal people have something that we want – in this case a more multicultural way of understanding cultural authority, a superior way of thinking about the creation of meaning in specific contexts and within specific boundaries, a travelling epistemology, an indigenous postmodernism that has already abandoned universal claims and understood the importance of limits. ‘So much thinking in the broader Australian culture is about setting such limits, for instance the logic of environmentalism and limited resources; industrial relations being organised through shared responsibility for work and its consequences; the limits and plurality of culture that is implied by multiculturalism … ’. Muecke is careful not to present Aboriginality simply as a resource from which ‘we’ can learn. But there is a residual anthropological voice running through some of the essays, particularly I think the more recent ones, less constrained by the literary formalism that preoccupied Muecke in the early 1980s. This is the voice that tells us that to think more Aboriginally would be to think ‘in terms of spatial orientations and directions, in terms of non human centred and collective speech, in terms of laughter rather than wealth’. This voice, perhaps inevitably, retains the authority of the metropolitan centre to explain contrasting world views, retains the tone of voice that has historically been that of the inventors of the idea of culture. The book ends with two essays about the question of the place of the non-Aboriginal researcher into Aboriginal cultures – the question, largely unspoken, sometimes surfacing in retold anecdotes, which inevitably haunts a book such as this. A fictional would-be graduate student is told in the concluding dialogue of the book that ‘desire in relation to the Other is perfectly okay’, but has to be scrutinised. We need to examine our own desire to know, our motives. Non-Aboriginal research into Aboriginality has to be consultative and reflexive. But in the end, Muecke is permissively postmodern about the possibilities of such collaboration. ‘Appropriation’ he optimistically asserts, need not mean robbery. There might be an ‘affirmative appropriation’ involving ‘respectful dialogue’ and ‘stylistic quotation’ across cultural boundaries. Here I wanted to read more examples of this happy process at work. This is an important and suggestive book which should be read by all those working in the fields of Aboriginal, Australian, and Cultural studies. Its questioning of concepts such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘culture’ may not be, partly thanks to the author of this book, big news in cultural studies, but the publication of Textual Spaces may help these important and provocative arguments reach a wider audience. It may even persuade more people that a political and ethical postmodernism is not a contradiction in terms.

David Goodman

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