The anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, in this extensive essay translated into Spanish for the first time, argues that the postcolonial archive cannot be reduced to a mere collection of subaltern voices; it must question the ontological and material conditions of what can be archived and how. In this vein, Povinelli introduces the concept of geontopower—a form of governance that organizes the distinction between life and non-life—to explore how Indigenous knowledge challenges modern logics of archiving, representation, and intellectual property

[Part I]

In 2008 some Karrabing members, who were traditional owners of a small, remote coastal point, and I, wearing the hat of an anthropological consultant, hovered in a small helicopter over a vast mangrove and reef complex. A few years before some of us had come by boat to this same area to hunt and fish and to visit the country so that it could experience directly our desire and attention. The journey to the coastal point is not easy if you have access to only limited funds and unreliable modes of transportation. The region is located at the far southwest edge of the coast on the other side of the vast Daly River. And a series of vast wetland swamps cut off overland access. So getting there and back to Belyuen, where most of the Karrabing live, is time- consuming and expensive; round trip is a six-hour truck ride and then a two- to four-hour boat ride, depending on the winds and tides, a significant financial expenditure for people with very low incomes. Nevertheless, Karrabing periodically make the trip. And on one such trip I stood at the edge of a mangrove swamp with three young female teenagers, looking around a tidal pool for crabs and stingrays to catch for lunch. One of the teenagers wanted to use my ninnin (thin wire pole) to spear some small stingrays. I was busy with it, trying to extract a mud crab. As we threw the ninnin back and forth across the tidal pool, we began to notice the shape of the area around which we were moving. Then it suddenly struck us. We stood along the edge of an old rock weir, a formation we’d heard had been used in this area long before colonial settlement and was associated with several saltwater fish Dreamings that composed the reef complex surrounding it. It was this rock weir and those reef fish Dreamings that we directed the helicopter toward. But as we flew above the area, the tide far out, we suddenly saw what we all had heard about from various older, now deceased relatives, another weir and then another and then another, until we realized the entire peninsula was a massive network of rock weirs dotted by various fish Dreamings.

The reason we were in a helicopter that day was simple from one perspective. The Northern Land Council (NLC) had hired the helicopter to help us conduct a land survey for potential mining exploration in this area. Or, more exactly, the mining company paid the NLC to hire the helicopter and to pay our upkeep and salaries, because the NLC could not afford to conduct the survey itself. Indeed, the finances of the NLC, the payment of staff salaries and support services, depend in large part on royalties from mining on Indigenous lands. The NLC receives a percentage of the royalties negotiated between the companies and the traditional owners. The NLC also requires an anthropological report as part of this massive kula ring. And the Karrabing (including me) decided that I would be the anthropological consultant and my fees would be redirected to other Karrabing projects, namely, a transmedia GPS/GIS-based augmented reality program, part digital library, part film exercise, and a potential alternative to generating resources from mining on the country. And this is why we were hovering high above the reefs and rock weirs. We were getting some coordinates for the transmedia project.

What better place to experience the tight space in which my friends operate in late liberal geontopower than in this helicopter hovering over this small coastal point. A bureaucracy set up to support traditional Aboriginal owners finds its finances parasitically attached to extractive capital as do those Indigenous men and women seeking to find an alternative way of generating income from their lands. What could come from such a paradoxical assemblage? The dramatic scope of the rock weir and reef system captured on our Samsung smartphones and iPhones and transposable onto GPS/GIS-based platforms exemplifies what Franco Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt describe as semiocapitalism (or informational capital)— the predominance of the technological mechanization of immaterial signs as the principal objects of contemporary capital production and appropriation. Negri, one of the central theorists of the autonomist movement, uses the concept of immaterial labor to refer to the informationalization of capital that came about when the service sector broke free of the service sector, reorganizing and resignifying the labor process as a whole. It is not that the labor of informationalization is immaterial. Rather the terms semiocapital and informational capital are meant to emphasize the increasing importance of cognitive and symbolic powers in the production, circulation, and use of commodities in semiocapital. Just as industrial labor exerted hegemony over other forms of production even when it was still a small fractio of global production, so “immaterial labour has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labour and society itself.” For Berardi, the affective-informational loops of capital, oriented toward the capture of different spheres of human knowledge and the immanent desires of subjects, have pushed capital beyond the creation and consumption of labor-power into the creation and consumption of soul-power—creating something we might call pneumaphagia. If the Left is to succeed in this new climate, Berardi argues that it must work to rewire the multitude of positions within the working assemblage of cognitive capital. The emergence of green technologies is a case in point. The goal of green technologies is to rewire semiocapital in such a way that green markets mitigate and perhaps even repair the worst effects of the Capitalocene. Some innovations are now old hat: solar panels, wind generators, algae farms. Others might border on science fiction, such as a future in which the state controls the global thermostat. But green technologies play the line between science and science fiction as a means of enticing funding. With backing from the CIA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences will begin reviewing various geoengineering projects from old techniques of cloud seeding with silver iodide to giant orbiting reflectors to vast underwater liquid CO2 containers.

The idea of the Karrabing digital transmedia project lies squarely within the imaginary of a green market and immaterial labor. If it is ever built, the transmedia project would be composed of a digitalized archive in which media items are geotagged and remotely stored. Parts of the archive would be downloadable on a smartphone using the Karrabing app. The app would use the phone’s GPS tracker to monitor when the phone (user) was within some predetermined proximity to the location to which the media referred. A beep will signal the media was now available to be played. The pitch we presented for the project to potential donors and supporters went something like this:

Our project implements and investigates “mixed-reality technology” for re-storying the traditional country of families living on the quasi-remote southern side of the Anson Bay area at the mouth of the Daly River in the Northern Territory. More specifically, it would create a land-based “living library” by geotagging media files in such a way that media files are playable only within a certain proximity to a site. The idea is to develop software that creates three unique interfaces—for tourists, land management, and Indigenous families, the latter having management authority over the entire project and content— and provide a dynamic feedback loop for the input of new information and media. We believe that mixed-reality technology would provide the Indigenous partners with an opportunity to use new information technologies to their social and economic benefit without undermining their commitment to having the land speak its history and present in situ. Imagine someone preparing for a trip to far north Australia. While researching the area online, she discovers our website that highlights various points of interest. She then downloads either a free or premium application to her smartphone. Now imagine this same person in a boat, floating off the shore of a pristine beach in the remote Anson Bay. She activates her smartphone and opens the application and holds up her smartphone to see the video coming through her phone’s camera. As she moves the phone around, she sees various icons representing stories or videos available to her. She touches one of these icons with her finger and the story of the indigenous Dreaming Site where she finds herself appears; she can also look at archival photos or short animated clips based on archived media files. The archive is a living library insofar as one of its software functions allows new media files to be added, such as a video of people watching the videos of the place.

Rather than assuming that information technology will free my colleagues from the cramped space of the late liberal geontopower, this chapter explores the demanding environments that they and I continually confronted as we entered it more deeply. How does the Karrabing experimentation with informational capitalism intervene and iterate the increasing tension of geontopower in semiocapitalism?

 

A Postcolonial Interface

In the early twenty-first century, a wave of excitement greeted the radical possibilities of the digital technologies, especially for transforming colonial archives and the control and circulation of knowledge. If scholars, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, tried to understand the archive as a kind of power rather than a kind of thing, the digital postcolonial archive would be an antinormative normativity. Remember, for Derrida, “archontic power” is the name we give to the power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus wha a place has in the contemporary organization of a law that appears to rule without commanding. Archival power authorizes a specific form of the future by domiciling space and time, the here and now relative to the there and then: us as opposed to them. And it does so by continually concealing the history of the manipulation and management of the documents within existing archives. Cribbing from Foucault, power archives itself in the sense that the sedimentation of texts provides a hieroglyph and cartography of dominant and subjugated knowledges. But for Derrida, archival power is not merely a form of authorization and a way of domesticating space and time, and not merely a sedimentation of texts that can be read as an archaeology of power. It is also a kind of iteration, or drive. Archival power depends not only on an ability to shelter the memory of its own construction so as to appear as a form of rule without a command but also on a certain inexhaustible suspicion that somewhere another, fuller account of this rule exists. 

If an archive is a power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life, a postcolonial digital archive cannot be merely a collection of new artifacts reflecting a different, subjugated history. Instead, the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within—or distinct from—this form of power. In other words, the task of the postcolonial archivist is not merely to collect subaltern histories. It is also to investigate the compositional logics of the archive as such: the material conditions that allow something to be archived and archivable; the compulsions and desires that conjure the appearance and disappearance of objects, knowledges, and socialities within an archive; the cultures of circulation, manipulation, and management that allow an object to enter the archive and thus contribute to the endurance of specific social formations. The shaping of objects entering the archive presents a number of new questions. What kinds of managements—trainings and exercises of objects and subjects—are necessary for something to be archived? Does an object need to become “an object” within a certain theory of grammar before it can be locatable? What kinds of manipulations simply make the objects within the archive more usable but never touch their status as an archived collection, say, the way an archive is rearranged when moved from an office or home into a library, or, say, when the creation of a digital index mandates that the web-based document be marked with metadata? Rearranging the stacking and boxing; providing an index; providing metadata that allows search functions: why don’t, or how do, these acts of reassemblage touch the status of the archive? And at what moment or to what degree does the “manipulation” of an archive transform it from an archive into something else, such as a scholarly work that draws on an archive but is not itself an archive—or is not until that scholar’s entire work and conditions of work are themselves deemed archivable, turning something that used an archive into a second-order archive? The building of the postcolonial archive is not, in other words, engaged in the same kind of reading practice that defined the hermeneutic tradition of the book, but it is a different kind of interpretive framework that focuses on the generative matrix in which archival forms, practices, and artifacts carry out their routine ideological labor of constituting subjects who can be summoned in the name of a public or a people.

The dream is that, if done properly and with a rigorous and firm commitment, a postcolonial digital archive will create new forms of storage and preservation and new archival spaces and time, in which a social otherwise can endure and thus change existing social formations of power. The woman who suddenly walks through the wall into the honeycombed library will not merely find a place on the shelf but will build a new kind of shelf, maybe a digital shelf, not really a shelf at all, especially if the shelf appears and disappears according to where one is standing. Maybe this shelf will house a digital archive or itself be in the digital archive as a metadata standard. But then won’t her appearance initiate a new problem? And does this “new problem” signal an actual new problem or rather the old power of the archive? After all, what makes archival power such a difficult force to grapple with is that archival power is not in the archive, nor can it be contained to the archive, whether old or new media, brick and mortar or virtual library. As Derrida argues in Archive Fever, archival power works against every given archive. It produces—or is—a compulsion to dig deeper into and beyond every given archive, to dream of the person who will open a wall to an alcove that cannot be opened, so that some final document can be found hidden among the infinite library, a document that would decide fate or be the final arbiter of a power that claims to be outside given power and, at the same time, the final and most effective mask of given power. In this place, the archive is a kind of Lacanian desire, always dissatisfied with its object, always incessantly moving away from every textual artifact, the thrill of discovery quickly giving over to the anomie of lack, propelling the archivist into more and more collections. What a great engine for a local economy then—an endless archive drive enticing an infinite line of consumers who, in using the archive, protect the land as it enacts a specific local analytics of existents.