Where There Is No Time and Nothing Matters

ASIA--PACIFIC, 19 Nov 2012

Anthony Judge – TRANSCEND Media Service

Cognitive Challenges at the Edge of the World

This is a sequel to In Quest of Optimism Beyond the Edge — through avoidance of the answering process, highlighting and giving focus to various themes of that commentary in the light of travels in Tasmania during completion of its final version. Subsequent to that journey, this commentary was further informed by the publication of a new study by James Boyce (Van Diemen’s Land, 2008) and the historic apology on 13th February 2008 by the Government of Australia to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.

Introduction

Given the arguments of the initial paper, this exploration uses “Van Diemen’s Land” and “Tasmania” as metaphors through which to highlight the challenge of any complex, polarized, psychocultural dynamic. This is seen as applying both to collective memory and to the dilemmas of (negative) pessimism and (positive) optimism of collective strategic initiatives. The exploration endeavours to use information about those places to constitute a script that can be “read” in a different key, or as a key to a more general (meta) pattern of how we as humans tend to think and engage in relation to any complex and largely unknown “other”. The contrast is exemplified here by that between “White Man’s Dreaming” and “Black Man’s Dreaming” — also used here as metaphors. Van Diemen’s Land was used as a penal colony from 1803. It’s name was changed to Tasmania in 1856, some three years after the final convict ship arrived. Convicts and their children constituted the majority of the population for decades thereafter in contrast with anywhere else. It was a convict society.

“Tasmania”: In numerous respects modern Tasmania is an idyllic place (cf Richard Busch, Australia’s Best Kept Secret, National Geographic Traveler). It promotes itself as the “Natural State”, the “Island of Inspiration“, and the “Island of Rejuvenation” — owing to its large, and relatively unspoiled natural environment. Almost 37% of Tasmania is composed of state reserves, national parks and World Heritage Sites — ranking it fifth amongst the world’s eco destinations. As noted by Peter Hay: “no other polity has an equivalent proportion of its land surface on the World Heritage List” (The Politics of Tasmania’s World Heritage Area: contesting the democratic subject, ***). For Maria Tumarkin (‘Wishing You Weren’t Here …’: thinking about trauma, place and the Port Arthur massacre.2001):

You’d be hard pressed to find more heavenly, more uncorrupted island in the world. Tasmania is a cradle of Australia’s fighting-fit environmental movement, a refuge from the self-important major markets… You’d be hard pressed to find a warmer, more soulful and more humane place than Tasmania.

These optimistic, edenic images favoured by visitors may however conceal unresolved difficulties to which those of Aboriginal descent are sensitive, as noted by Greg Lehman (The Trouble with Paradise. Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies):

From the very beginnings of European encounter, there has been a perception, or a hope, that Tasmania might offer a new paradise. What was once ‘wilderness’ is today re-framed as ‘Eden’, where the travel-weary Westerner can purchase an opportunity to ‘return to nature’. However, the danger for Aborigines is that the authenticity of cultural tourism products is compromised, and Aborigines themselves are experiencing transformations in cultural identity.

Lehman’s exploration of the experience of contemporary tourism by Aborigines, with reference to the Biblical mythology of Eden and the expulsion of Man from that garden, offers a valuable metaphor for framing the quest for optimism at this time.

Tasmania thus offers a valuable frame through which to explore the implications of contemporary idealism. Tumarkin cites Tasmanian writers to make the points that:

• Tasmania is more than a place, it’s an idea, a potent one, since it presents certain fundamentally Australian themes in their most concentrated and focused form. (Martin Flanagan, The hunt for Tasmania’, in The Age, 14 August 1999, p 4)
• Tasmania is a place in which elements of Australian life become intensified, where tendencies move to inescapable consequences, battle-lines are more clearly drawn and the moderate or partial becomes extreme. (Margaret Scott, Uneasy Eden: Peace and Conflict in Rural Community, The Tasmanian Peace Trust, 1997)

The Tasmanian journey that is the theme of the annexes to this paper is therefore used to elicit a (meta) context and identify the complexities of the associated cognitive dynamics of Res extensa vs Res cogitans (as highlighted in the initial paper). The comments below with respect to the annexes briefly indicate the relevance of the details in the annexes to the argument but are primarily used to highlight the wider cognitive implications of the metaphors associated with “Van Diemen’s Land”.

“Edge of the World”: Tasmania is associated with (early) notions of the Edge of the World. However, as recently as 1994, Australia (of which it is a part) was famously described by its Prime Minister, Paul Keating, as the “arse-end of the world” — raising the question as to the metaphorical location of Tasmania at the present time. As an “edge” it is also explored here as a three-fold metaphor. It may be a leading or cutting edge where new insights and wisdom emerge, including responses to challenges (as implied by the The Edge Question of 2007 discussed in the initial paper). However it may also be “at the end of the road, beyond the last telephone pole”, or the ultimate edge over which untreatable and unassimilable products are dumped — the ultimate sink.

These different associations together call for a reframing of the spatio-temporal context for individual and collective identity. In terms of the implied spatio-temporal topology, the “Edge of the World” is then as much at the “Centre” as anywhere else.

Entanglement of fact and fantasy: The following argument is neither an exercise in objectivity nor in fantasy. Rather it is about the collective reality that emerges from the entanglement of fact and fantasy — and the nature of the collective significance that may emerge beyond such polarizations as the collective “imaginary”. It might be well-described by the titles of studies such as that of Christopher Bollas (The Shadow of the Object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known, 1987) or that of Adam Phillips (Side Effects, 2006). It might be read as a mix of art, artifice and artefact evoking a range of dramatic themes, roles (collective subpersonalities) and psychoactive processes by which the imagination is engaged as a context for action.

The relationships between Van Dieman’s Land and Tasmania discovered through that journey, and their implications, are articulated in the annexes. The insights and learnings triggered by that material are articulated in this document which builds on argument in the initial paper (In Quest of Optimism Beyond the Edge — through avoidance of the answering process). In using “Van Diemen’s Land” and “Tasmania” as metaphors to highlight the challenge of any polarized psychocultural dynamic, the three annexes focus on:

• Interweaving Demonic and Daimonic Associations in Collective Memory (Annex A): Use of Van Diemen’s Land as a metaphor to explore contrasting demonic and daimonic associations, repression of collective memory and refiguration of the other through fantasy, notably regarding its Aboriginal peoples.
• Memory Challenges at the Edge of the World (Annex B): Uses a symbolic journey through Tasmania to highlight issues of collective memory, amnesia and remembrance, notably of its Aboriginal peoples
• Importance of Nothingness and Emptiness through Happening and Mattering (Annex C): Clarifies a range of meanings and strategic implications for the phrase ‘where there is no time and nothing matters’. Relates ‘nothingness’, as central to alienation, with other philosophic and religious understandings, including meaninglessness, emptiness, insignificance, irrelevance and unimportance — whether from sociopolitical or spiritual perspectives.

Complementary “dreams”? The optimism embodied in modern Tasmania as superficially experienced might be understood as the fruit of “White Man’s Dreaming” — although appropriate perspective on it is perhaps only accessible in the complementary light of “Black Man’s Dreaming”. It is “White Man’s Dreaming” that is exemplified by the responses to The Edge question (discussed in the initial paper) and other studies (cf Patrick A van der Duin and Dap Hartmann, Young Dreamers: an explorative study on how techno-starters look to the future, Journal of Futures Studies, 12, 2, November 2007). The question is what exemplifies the “Black Man’s Dreaming” at this time? What is the significance of each to the other?

From such a perspective this exploration might be considered an exercise in mythosociology or mythopoiesis — as they function as precursors to autopoiesis and social transformation. At the time of writing, the relevance of myth has been dramatically highlighted by Serbian film director Emir Kusturica on the occasion of the massive protests in Belgrade on 21 February 2008 against the declared independence of Kosovo. He stated that he disagreed with the Hollywood-style myths cultivated about Kosovo, did not however object to other people living their chosen myths, but strongly argued for the right of Serbs to live their founding myth centered on Kosovo.

Every dominant group has a “Kosovo” with which its sense of identity is intimately (and “unreasonably”) associated — although others may see it to have been misappropriated, ignoring the significance of their own claims.

Experimental structure: The document, with its annexes, is also an experiment in presentation (cf Forms of Presentation and the Future of Comprehension, 1984).

This overview document is used primarily to highlight cognitive implications and learnings to be drawn from a concrete situation at an edge (as articulated in Annexes A, B and C) — namely from a geographical journey thereby used as a means of anchoring the significance of a pattern of cognitive relationships. The geographical journey is thus used to hold, “re-cognize” and “re-member” a cognitive “pattern that connects” (as advocated by Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, 1979). This may be understood both as painting or projecting a cognitive pattern onto the canvas of a geographical journey and as discovering an emergent pattern through the process of that journey — if only as an indicative fantasy through which to embody the insights of the initial paper of which this is a sequel.

The approach is in sympathy with the arguments of Michael Schiltz (Form and Medium: a mathematical reconstruction, Image [&] Narrative, 6, 2003) who challenges the adequacy of argument presented on the planar surface of conventional text. He argues in favour of writing in a space that connects the level of first-order (operand) and second-order (operator) observations, namely a torus. Operationally, distinctions written on a torus can subvert their boundaries and re-enter the space they distinguish, turning up in their own form [more] (see discussion in Beyond the plane: form and medium in terms of the calculus of indications, 2006). Hence the merit of reflecting on the temporal topology appropriate to re-presenting optimism in time in the light of memory and various forms of dreaming.

This concern with the adequacy of form is echoed in that of Mudrooroo (aka Colin Johnson and Mudrooroo Narogin) who holds the Chair of Aboriginal Studies at Murdech University (Perth). With respect to a genre, such as “academic study” or “fantasy”, Mudrooroo (Writing from the Fringe, 1990) notes that genres:

… have developed as a European way of categorising works of literature. In themselves, they are ways of manipulating the text so that the reader is led from an intuitive to a logical response to the work. Not only this, but the Aboriginal writer is led to believe that there are fixed categories of literature to which he or she must conform. If we as writers accept this we, in effect, dilute the Aboriginality of our work.

Arguably this is true of the “orginality” of any work — thereby endangering the requisite degree of “craziness” recognized as necessary in the much-quoted statement by physicist Niels Bohr in response to Wolfgang Pauli: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.” (Freeman Dyson, Innovation in Physics, Scientific American, 199, No. 3, September 1958).

With respect to Mudrooroo’s approach, Gerry Turcotte (Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations. 2003) explains:

The texts, therefore, are redolent with contradiction – they are contra/dictions: against utterance. Similarly, the project of Empire has been both explicit and indirect, admitting to its totalitarian vision of colonisation, and yet simultaneously couching this desire/design within a rhetoric of, dare one say, missionary purpose, of colonising for the good of the colonised. This double vision is expressed through many of the narratives which Mudrooroo invokes in his novel. In The Undying Mudrooroo reveals the hidden, he enacts the unperformed, he declares the unspoken.

Of Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1991), Turcotte says “the novel resonates with the rhythms of a different Australia and a different mental universe.” (as discussed in Annex B).

Such considerations are assumed here to be at least potentially relevant to unconventional understandings of time within “White Man’s Dreaming” (as with the temporal topology discussed in the initial paper) and within “Black Man’s Dreaming” exemplified by the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

The question here is whether “Van Diemen’s Land” and “Tasmania” can now be read as a kind of musical score with two staves. It raises the question of how patterns of information are selected and highlights the challenge of cultural groupthink (Groupthink: the Search for Archaeoraptor as a Metaphoric Tale, 2002). As with “Tasmania” and “optimism”, the argument may not be what it seems — as with Shakespeare’s famous comedy Much Ado About Nothing (1600).

PLEASE CONTINUE READING THE PAPER IN THE ORIGINAL – laetusinpraesens.org

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 19 Nov 2012.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Where There Is No Time and Nothing Matters, is included. Thank you.

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