Test1-14

Indigeneity, Posthumanism and
Nomad Thought

Transforming Colonial Ecologies

The Autochthon can hardly be distinguished from the stranger because the stranger becomes Autochthonous in the country of the other who is not, at the same time that the Autochthon becomes stranger to himself, his class, his nation, and his language. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1

Are the ‘new Humanities’ inclusive of Indigenous perspectives, and do they acknowledge the specificity of Indigenous experiences of human being? On the one hand, posthumanism describes features also at the heart of internationally shared Indigenous conceptualisations of their humanity as being constituted in inextricable relations with the nonhuman world. Such philosophies include a refusal of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism; a genealogical and constructivist account of identity; and an acknowledgement of species interdependence and consubstantial intersubjectivity in interactive ecologies shared by human and nonhuman beings. They convey an expressive and process-oriented ontology accompanied by an ecological understanding of the interconnected forces, including nonhuman agencies, operating formatively within a complex system; and an associated materialist and vitalist ethics of human responsibility, which registers an intimate and ontological connection of humanity with the ecological health of the environment that sustains life-forms and diversifies creative potential through rich networks of interconnectivity. These ‘more-than-human’ ways of knowing, being and acting have characterised Indigenous ontology, epistemology, axiology and ethology since time immemorial, and today they constitute a significant site of shared identification across the Indigenous world. And yet on the other hand, according to the terms of its emergence in the Western academy ‘after humanism’, Continental posthumanism appears to ignore the prior existence of Indigenous knowledge of this kind. In a solipsistic gesture 160long typical of Western imperialism, posthumanist theory at times risks the elision of Indigenous cultural and intellectual authority by remaining blind to the ancient presence and contemporary force of Indigenous concepts of human being. This exclusion allows Western philosophy to claim the ‘new Humanities’ as its current ‘discovery’ after modern humanism, but this apparently ‘new’ intellectual frontier in fact traces an ancient philosophical terrain already occupied by Indigenous epistemologies and associated modes of human experience.

By working together across our respective knowledge traditions as an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous scholar, we bring an Indigenous conceptualisation of ‘more-than-human’ being into alliance with notions of ‘posthumanity’ arising in Continental philosophy. Our aim in this chapter is to contribute to the ongoing task of intellectual decolonisation in postcolonial contexts.2 This is a crucial global duty, including in our home country Australia where Indigenous and settler peoples continue to struggle with and against the complex legacies of European cultural and territorial imperialism. Insofar as Western posthumanism has emerged strongly influenced by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, we enquire about the role of their philosophy in the continuing elision of Indigenous ontologies in the disciplines comprising the new Humanities. While we value the emphasis they place upon Indigenous conceptual frameworks, experiences and examples, we remain troubled by the expression indigeneity receives as a consequence of the cluster of associations Deleuze and Guattari create, as well as by the structuring or constructive role indigeneity plays in this assemblage. If, as Deleuze and Guattari insist, concepts should be evaluated pragmatically in light of the new possibilities they create, then our intention in this paper is to scrutinise, through a postcolonial and Indigenous lens, Deleuzian thought as ‘nomad’; especially because this concept informs the ‘new Humanities’ in an emerging paradigm of ‘posthumanism’. We ask: what is at stake politically when Indigenous ways are conceived erroneously as unstructured and deterritorialising, when (Western) subjectivities are constructed as ‘nomad’ but nomadism is no longer marked as a mode of existence special to Indigenous humanity, and when (Western) subjective transformation is construed as a process of ‘becoming-autochthonous’3 that erases the specificity of ‘the Autochthon’ and results in her self-alienation? Who benefits from this construction, and how?

We ultimately seek to explore how contemporary renditions of Deleuze’s philosophical nomadology, notably by Rosi Braidotti, are engaged in advancing a nonimperial posthumanism. We argue that posthumanism as the thought of a ‘nomad’ being (or becoming) is a valuable resistance to Eurocentric, modern (and imperial) formations of power, knowledge and subjectivity; but it can threaten to elide Indigenous realities or rewrite Indigenous 161ontologies even while Deleuze and Guattari appear to embrace them. The potential usefulness of ‘nomadic thought’ is, then, by no means unambiguous when viewed from a postcolonial perspective. It may indeed have multiple potentialities: some appear colonialist in effect, others decolonising or ‘excolonial’ in outcome; for this reason it is necessary to look again with critical postcolonial eyes at the intersection that Deleuzian philosophy forges between indigeneity, nomadology and the creative exercise of thought. This enables us to discern better how the idea of nomad thought might serve—or alternatively, obstruct—an alliance between Continental posthumanism and Indigenous thinking about colonialism and its contemporary transformation.

Indigenous Being-More-Than-Human

The world’s Indigenous peoples are diverse and cannot be identified homogenously; however, many Indigenous Nations find they share significant commonalities associated with a philosophy of ‘being-more-than-human’ and a science based upon ‘natural laws of interdependence’.4 The first principle of the Treaty binding the United League of Indigenous Nations asserts:

The Creator has made us part of and inseparable from the natural world around us. This truth binds us together and gives rise to a shared commitment to care for, conserve and protect the land, air, water and animal life within our usual, customary and traditional territories.

This premise expresses general principles common in Indigenous worldviews and self-understandings: relationality, reciprocal generosity and respectful care. These key ontological-ethical concepts are articulated in various ways by Indigenous philosophies, which range from pantheism, to genealogical constructivism, to expressivism. For example, the Huuy-ay-aht people of Vancouver Island consider themselves governed by three core principles: Hishuk Tsa’walk (Everything is One, denoting the interconnected, interdependent and reciprocal relationship between the people, the land and the wider world(s) in a physical, spiritual and social sense); Uu-a-thluk (taking care of present and future generations and of the resources provided by the land and the natural world); and Iisaak (relational respect, entailing both personal and collective respect for the community and its people, traditional knowledge, the natural world, the metaphysical world and other peoples and communities).5 In the southern hemisphere, the Maori experience of existence as vibrant and affective matter is similarly

162 a relational view of the world, where we are called into being through our relationships, through the interaction with kin, genealogies, and events. Rocks, rivers, birds, plants, mountains, animals and oceans, all possess a genealogy, and the divine genealogical order of whakapapa extends through aeons to a common genealogical origin which is Io, the Creator of the Cosmos.6

Whakapapa means that everything is connected through shared networks and processes of creative becoming. Mauri, or striving to persevere in being, is the animating force of all being and becoming. This vitality continually grows and unfolds as reciprocal relationships become increasingly complex and rich in mana or dignity. However, ‘the mauri of a being can be affected by the way in which it is engaged with or treated. For example, the level of mauri contained by a river can be determined by its capacity to maintain and support life. Through ill-treatment (e.g., pollution), the mauri of the river can decline, which will in turn mean that its capacity to support life will decline’.7 Accordingly, Maori ethics involves the practice of mauri-enhancing positive relationships within human communities, and between humans and nonhuman entities:

For example, a positive relationship between humans and a river would be evidenced by human land management practices that enable a river to maintain and enhance its mauri, which would result in its life-generating capacities being maintained. In this way, the mauri of the river is grown or maintained through ensuring that its life-generating vibrancy is not diminished. Simultaneously, the mauri of people is maintained through the provision of food and other resources to the humans from the river.8

When key Maori values of kinship, reciprocity, hospitality and respect for life guide human behaviour, the mauri of both human and nonhuman life is more likely to be maintained and, in turn, the life-generating capacity and sustainability of these entities is enhanced.9 However, tino rangatiratanga is additionally required to put values into practice: ‘having the power to give effect to these values within a place—for example, having the power to guide land management practices according to relational values that maintain or enhance the mauri of the land, rivers, and coastal areas affected by those practices’.10 This power to materialise positive relational values for ecological benefit is how Aboriginal people typically understand their sovereignty. Writing from an Australian Indigenous perspective, Aileen Moreton-Robinson explains: ‘Our sovereignty is embodied … grounded within complex relations derived from the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land’.11

In Southern Australia, this understanding of sovereignty lies at the heart of the Ngarrindjeri peoples’ program of ‘Speaking as Country’, through which they manage contemporary political negotiations with settler-colonial 163powers. In the context of severe drought at the start of the new millennium, Ngarrindjeri leaders and Elders began a programme of Indigenous Nation rebuilding in order to better advocate for Country and protect their lands and waters and all associated life-forms from further injury. In 2007, they reconsolidated their political authority in a governing body, the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority. Identifying, organising and acting as an Indigenous Nation under a unified political authority enabled Ngarrindjeri to engage more effectively and consistently with federal Sea-Country planning processes, and so to express in an amplified voice their expectations for the protection of their Country and its well-being.12 The Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea-Country) Plan produced in 2007 explains to non-Indigenous policy-makers how the Ngarrindjeri Nation’s vision for its future is based upon a traditional philosophy of interconnectedness, Ruwe/Ruwar: ‘The land and waters is a living body. We the Ngarrindjeri people are a part of its existence’.13 In December 2014, Ngarrindjeri further developed their statement of position in a Ngarrindjeri Yannarumi (Speaking as Country) Deed. This explains in a more explicit fashion the deep interconnectedness between health of Country and health of people and cultural life: Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (lands, waters, body spirit and all living things) needs to be healthy for Ngarrindjeri to be healthy, and for this reason Ngarrindjeri care for, speak for and exercise cultural responsibility as Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar. This ontological statement of an ecological character description is attended by axiological concepts for the evaluation of activities affecting the health of Country and its interconnected lifeforms.

The Ngarrindjeri ontology of Being as ‘more-than-human’ vital matter is now included in formal legal agreements, and its associated ecological principles for guiding the art of living well—through relations that strive for kartjeri (the beauty of universal health)—are beginning to shape environmental practice and policy. Political negotiation and agreement-making based on Ngarrindjeri Yannarumi is an initiative that prioritises an Indigenous understanding of the intrinsically connected agencies defining complex ecologies. Employing principles of contract law, the negotiation regime initiated by Ngarrindjeri is geared towards the creation of legally binding accords, through which all parties agree to Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan, ‘listen to Ngarrindjeri people speaking as Country’.14 This allows Ngarrindjeri to speak with cultural specificity and authority as their Country; and at the same time provides a basis for building positive intercultural partnerships that recognise Indigenous rights, are mutually respectful, and enable common and ecological benefits through ongoing and comprehensive negotiation of the practical terms of coexistence. The agreements allow all parties to recognise how Ngarrindjeri are rightfully entitled to a practical exercise of governance over all matters affecting the Country and its life-forms in their Nation’s 164jurisdiction, even where these matters now register coexisting interests as a consequence of colonial settlement. Ngarrindjeri have negotiated a number of such contracts. For example, in 2009 the State Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources entered into an agreement with Ngarrindjeri regarding a comprehensive program of co-management of Country. The common aim of the partnership is to work together towards the future health of the regions of Southern Australia comprising wetlands recognised as internationally significant and protected under an international Ramsar Treaty; however the respectful and ‘listening’ terms of the agreement necessarily also require partners to pay new attention to social and cultural elements capable of realigning actor networks by transforming colonial habits and relations of power.15

One of these elements concerns processes of responsible knowledge-formation on Ngarrindjeri Country. When research is conducted under the auspices of a Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan agreement, it no longer simply extracts ‘expert’ knowledge from research ‘on the environment’ and ‘on people’. It takes place instead according to an Indigenous epistemological and methodological paradigm of connected interdependence, organised by

the fundamental belief that knowledge is relational. Knowledge is shared with all creation. … It is with the cosmos; it is with the animals, with the plants, with the earth that we share this knowledge … you are answerable to all your relations when you are doing research.16

Although the few Indigenous perspectives we have presented here in no way reflect the rich diversity evident across native philosophies, we consider these examples are indicative of how core ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies and ethical understandings are shared across Indigenous ecological worldviews. Aboriginal philosophies typically include a refusal of human exceptionalism; a constructivist and relational view of natural and cultural network creativity; an expressive process ontology based upon an ecological understanding of the interconnected forces that combine to produce emergent forms; and an associated materialist and vitalist ethics of human responsibility towards all life-forms, which diversifies creative potential and shapes environmental outcomes by directing engagements in complex networks through methods of positive reciprocity. We think these notions share much in common with the Continental posthumanism that similarly conceives of humanity as being constituted in inextricable relations with the nonhuman world. In particular, they resonate strongly with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘eccentric’ model ‘of becoming and heterogeneity’, in which ‘flux is reality itself, or consistency’ and the model is ‘problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered from the viewpoint of the affections that befall 165them’. This kind of system ‘operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things’.17 For us, these congruencies evidence the contemporary contribution that Indigenous philosophies can make to global efforts currently underway to imagine a ‘new Humanities’.

Continental Posthumanism

Meditating on the academic profession defining the progressive work of the university as the free expression of truth, Jacques Derrida portends a new direction for the ‘Humanities of tomorrow’. He asserts:

this immense question of truth and of light, of the Enlightenment—Aufklarung, Lumieres, Illuminismo—has always been linked to the question of man, to a concept of that which is proper to man, on which concept were founded both Humanism and the historical idea of the Humanities. … The concept of man, of what is proper to man, of human rights, of crimes against the humanity of man, we know organizes … a mondialisation or worldwide-ization. This worldwide-ization wishes to be a humanization. If this concept of man seems both indispensable and always problematic, well … it can be discussed or reelaborated, as such and without conditions, without presuppositions, only within the space of the new Humanities.18

The ‘new Humanities’ to which Derrida refers, and for which he provides some framing content, have since begun to consolidate around an emerging paradigm of ‘posthumanism’. In fact, however, the ‘new Humanities’ are best considered less as a current break with European modernism and its humanist tradition of progressive Enlightenment; and more as a continuation and elaboration of an alternative contemporaneous thread evident within the modern period of Western philosophical thinking about the nature of humanity and of human knowledge. This alternative strand within Western philosophy has been expressed momentarily, debated over time, and rearticulated variously by figures including Spinoza, Godwin, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Tolstoy, Althusser, Foucault, Irigaray, Cixous, Deleuze and Latour, among others. Though diverse in philosophical and political intent, their thinking about the question of humanity and about the justice and injustices associated with historical understandings of ‘what is proper to man’, shares certain features that set it apart from—and sometimes set it against—humanist modernism.

The definition and elaboration of these features has been a task assumed in recent years by ‘posthuman’ philosophy, developed notably (though not exclusively) in important and original works by Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad and Cary Wolfe. In various ways, they explain how philosophy 166in the ‘postmodern’ condition involves a ‘posthumanist’ commitment to a process-oriented ontology of constructivist naturalism. Instead of defining humanity in modern terms, as definitively separated from object matter and animality, posthumanism connects human being creatively with the natural world; but at the same time it resists dogmatic accounts of the ‘givenness’ or ‘naturalness’ of worldly affairs.

Posthumanism is an important intellectual and political response (or alternative) to Eurocentric modernism. It promises an antidote to the worst excesses of this tradition, which are today evident in a worrying cluster of symptoms of deepening global malaise including, for example, the erosion of diversity as a consequence of Western cultural imperialism; the socioeconomic catastrophe, for the majority of the world’s poor, of late capitalism; and anthropocentrism as the genetic condition of environmental collapse and climate change tipping world society into the age of the Anthropocene. In various ways, posthumanism intends a certain reversal of the agentic priority and privilege that have attended Western anthropocentric modes of thinking and acting: when it is considered as enmeshed in ecological networks, human endeavour is no longer valued for its exceptional capacity to transcend existing limits or natural conditions. Instead, posthumanism recognises the rightfully limited powers of human agency: the ways in which human action is, or should be, subject to other agencies operating—often reciprocally—in complex networks of existence. Attending this reconceptualisation of ‘the posthuman’ is a new acknowledgement within Western philosophy that ‘nature’ itself is a cultural construct. Indeed, posthumanist philosophy following Nietzsche is deeply critical of the ways in which ‘nature’ has been construed in modern European frameworks of thought that demarcate it as an ontological negativity conditioning human presence and power: human being is here defined as exceptional only through an original exclusion and denigration of animal nature. As a consequence of this ontological separation of humanity from animality, modern European political theories of social contract have conceived ‘nature’ as a pre-social baseline from which human culture advances through increments of ‘civilisation’ and ‘Enlightenment’. And accordingly, human achievement has typically been measured in the modern era by the advancing technologies through which nature can be subjugated as an inert substance freely available for human appropriation and exploitation. As a corollary, those ‘native’ human societies perceived to be ‘closer to nature’ have historically been understood by modern European agents of empire as being open to manipulation and development (‘civilisation’) by apparently ‘superior’ human social forces that demonstrate a greater control over natural circumstance.

As a form of self-correction that originates predominantly within Western philosophy, posthumanism is critical of each of these tendencies. In part, this 167self-transformation stems from a postcolonial concern for cultural difference. Indeed, Europe’s intimacy with its colonised Others was experienced personally by a generation of European intellectuals, including Sartre, Fanon, Guattari, Derrida and Cixous, who spent time in French colonies including Algeria and Martinique and witnessed with sympathy their peoples’ struggles for independence. Their intimate encounters with colonisation influenced the formation of poststructuralism as a ‘philosophy of difference’.19 The postcolonial context of this new emphasis of French thought at the same time spawned the new Humanities as a struggle to ‘reelaborate’ the ‘concept of man, of what is proper to man’, beyond Eurocentric whiteness and androcentrism. Posthumanism is heir to these influences: Braidotti, for example, is careful to reference and address criticisms of Eurocentric humanism made by postcolonial theory and by feminism.20 However, posthumanism is predominantly a Western philosophical phenomenon, emerging as a critical strain within the Western academy. This is true also of much postcolonial theory, even when it is articulated by intellectuals such as Said, Chakrabarty or Spivak who hail originally from colonised societies or who identify with colonised peoples, but whose work is situated within the Western academy. For this reason, posthumanism has tended to criticise and reconceive ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’ mainly as these appear as cultural constructs of the West, with the (unintended) consequence that alternative, non-Western concepts of human being are frequently eclipsed.

Continental philosophy has begun to seek out perspectives beyond its own Western horizons as it becomes outwardly engaged in helping to forge the new Humanities as a genuine ‘mondialization’, receptive to non-European conceptualisations of self and world.21 We believe this resetting of previously imperial modes of relationship responds to new understandings about an ethical and political imperative of global hospitality, conceived in the wake of the decolonisation of many of Europe’s (and Britain’s) former overseas imperial territories in Asia and Africa. However, not all of Europe’s colonies have undergone decolonisation: Indigenous peoples in Canada, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere remain subject to the foreign occupation of their territories by settler-colonial populations, who now dominate in these regions. Lorenzo Veracini (2010) has explained how the internalised settler-colonial paradigm differs in important respects from the external model typically considered by postcolonial theory.22 European colonies in Asia and Africa were governed externally from the ‘Mother Country’, with local colonised populations employed as an indentured labour force used for fattening the imperial coffers until independence was achieved. While external colonisation has naturally left the postcolony troubled by a legacy of poverty and strife, to some extent the colonial trauma has been resolved by the postcolonial achievement of independence from Empire; consequently 168the damaged relationship between France or Britain and many of their former colonies has recovered significantly. By contrast, settler-colonial polities established new self-governing societies and made themselves a far-flung home on Indigenous peoples’ lands, which they seized for possession either by treating the land erroneously as ‘terra nullius’ (as vacant, unowned and nonsovereign), or by imposing dispossessing terms of Treaty in conditions of conflict, ambiguous consent, and forced surrender. Independence, when it happens, involves severing the governmental ties between the Imperial Crown and the settler society, which thus becomes self-governing; but Indigenous peoples in these situations remain colonised by the structures of settler government imposed upon them. Settler colonial nations characteristically remain traumatised by their violent founding through the expurgation of a sovereign Indigenous presence: this erasure of indigeneity is a symptom of colonial fantasy (when settlers imagined the land as vacant and free for taking); but often also took place literally, in colonial acts of biological and cultural genocide sanctioned covertly by government policy. The trauma remains unresolved, because it is formative: settler nations were constituted as such only through the negation of Indigenous presence and sovereignty. Accordingly, Indigenous Australian Geonpul theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that postcolonial settler identity depends upon a possessive and patriarchal whiteness, inextricably connected to dispossessing Indigenous peoples of country, sovereignty and collective identity.23 Settler societies today appear to repeat compulsively this condition of their determination even while repressing the harrowing collective memory of colonial violence aimed at the elimination of Indigenous peoples from the land. This unresolved trauma tears at the social fabric and manifests in various unhealthy ways, typically involving the continuing disavowal by settlers of a significant contemporary Indigenous presence, as well as the disinclination of settler society to acknowledge the ways in which Indigenous disadvantage stems from a legacy of original and ongoing colonial injustice, and not from supposed deficiencies inherent to Indigenous humanity or Indigenous sociality; imagined deficits which historically served as an imperial justification for colonisation and ‘civilisation’.

The practical erasure, through settler-colonial policy and governance, of Indigenous power and presence is doubled in the domain of theory, where ‘epistemic ignorance’ of Indigenous traditions of thought continues to shape the contemporary academy. Sami philosopher Rauna Kuokkanen notes: ‘Having participated historically in the displacement of indigenous peoples, today’s universities reflect and reproduce epistemic and intellectual traditions and practices of the West through discursive forms of colonialism’, so that in the ‘contemporary university, it is no longer [indigenous] people, but rather their systems of knowledge and their perceptions of the world, that are labelled 169inferior’ and dismissed as irrelevant and unworthy of academic hospitality.24 We suggest that contemporary Western institutions of knowledge retain vestiges of an imperial attitude of negation towards Indigenous philosophies, because this attitude is not incidental but rather is constitutive of Western epistemology and subjectivity: as posthumanism has shown, the subjectivity of Western thought is defined by its departure from ‘primitive’ or ‘animal’ nature, which typically has been cathected onto Indigenous peoples by agents of imperialism. Decolonisation in Asia and Africa has allowed the imperial West to begin reconceiving its systems for knowing self and other, apart from Orientalist frameworks of understanding including European modernism and humanism. However, it seems clear to us that the ongoing situation of settler-colonisation prohibits a similar transformation in the relationship between Western philosophy (including nascent Western philosophies such as posthumanism) and the Indigenous knowledges it denied, displaced, and attempted to destroy during genocidal moments of European imperialism. These acts of negation cannot be reversed with ease by thinkers whose subjective coherence as Western philosophers relies upon a structural refusal of Indigenous authority, insofar as Western philosophy remains implicated in global world histories of European settler colonialism and the ongoing (widely unacknowledged) dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Western philosophy, and the academy more generally, remains subconsciously, compulsively blind to Indigenous expertise. One effect of this scotoma, according to Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd, is that the Western ‘philosophies of difference’ we see in poststructuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism and posthumanism continue to ‘demonstrate a colonialist trace that continues to prevent indigenous peoples from having agency to transform the assumptions within postcolonial and poststructuralist conversations, despite the best work of postcolonial scholars to make room’.25

Their elision of Indigenous philosophies threatens to render the new Humanities parochial in unwitting Eurocentrism. Cary Wolfe has been criticised for his silence,

about the fact that Enlightenment humanist dogmas represent a particular, indeed provincial, body of thought on the question of the human. Thus, he does not mention that such dogmas originated in European societies involved in colonization, were globalized in and through colonial practices, and are currently given life in white supremacist settler societies. Along these lines, Wolfe makes no mention of past and present knowledge systems founded in non-dualist thinking. Consequently, Wolfe universalizes Enlightenment humanist dogmas and participates in on-going colonial practices that eliminate or erase other ontological frameworks in other knowledge systems.26

170 Viewed from an Indigenous perspective, the ideas expressed in posthumanism do not constitute a ‘new paradigm’, and there is nothing especially new about the vibrant ‘new materialism’ presently gaining traction in the philosophical academy.27 Such claims of innovation can appear reasonable only because Indigenous knowledges are not widely referenced in the indexes of the scholarly works currently creating the ‘new Humanities’. A notable exception to this tendency lies in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, whose ‘philosophical nomadism’ is rich with reference to studies of Indigenous ways of knowing the world and experiencing their humanity. This exception seems especially surprising, when we consider that Deleuze and Guattari are frequently cited as a shaping influence for posthumanism.28 What role does their philosophy, or the reception of it, play in the continuing elision of Indigenous knowledges by the new Humanities?

Nomadic Thought

Significant critical attention has been directed towards the association made by Deleuze and Guattari between nomad experiences and the creative process of philosophy conceived as a dynamic constructivism. Relatively early interrogations by Christopher Miller and by Caren Kaplan of the colonialist underpinnings apparent in Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology prompted swift responses from Eugene Holland and Paul Patton, both in the main defending Deleuze and Guattari against the charge of colonialist referentiality towards figures of indigeneity.29 While we agree with the assessment made by Patton that Miller’s and Kaplan’s arguments are misguided with respect to key aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s methodology, we remain troubled by their use of indigeneity as an element in the idea of ‘nomad thought’. This is not a representational or metaphorical use, as Miller and Kaplan charge, and which Patton notes would sit contrary to Deleuze’s strict antirepresentationalism and his frequent warnings against a metaphorical interpretation of his concepts. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari make a constructivist use of indigeneity as an element in their assemblage of the idea of ‘philosophical nomadology’ and in their associated account of the deterritorialising operation of the nomadic war-machine.

In answer to the question What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari answer that it is ‘the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts’.30 For them, this is a nonfrivolous and indeed disciplined art of creation, requiring sober techniques of evaluation immanent to the constructive process:

The philosopher is expert in concepts and in the lack of them. He knows which of them are not viable, which are arbitrary or inconsistent, which ones do not 171hold up for an instant. On the other hand he knows which are well formed and attest to a creation, however disturbing or dangerous it might be.31

Deleuzian concepts are created through a method of assemblage: conceptual elements are combined to produce the concept as a complex formation, which ‘solves’ a problematic Idea or sense-event. The concept is defined by the elemental parts it contains and unites, and also by the consistency of the relations binding these elements. Furthermore, because its constituting elements can be shared with other conceptual structures, each concept not only is characterised by its internal consistency, but also by the set of external relations it has with neighbouring concepts. This network of connections renders the concept mobile and infinitely open to alternative possible configurations of sense, since the significance granted to an elemental idea by virtue of its inclusion in a concept can affect the sense of other concepts also containing that element. All concepts and complex conceptual systems are assemblages; however Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two different kinds of assemblage on the basis of the disposition of the multiplicity they form. One is rigid in its structure: it aims to consolidate an established meaning, by disciplining and institutionalising an interiorised system of sense that conforms to regular channels of knowledge, and by closing off relations to exterior concepts and conceptual elements that potentially challenge this order. The other kind of assemblage is open to transformation because it prioritises the external relations it enjoys with a range of neighbouring concepts. It is characteristically fluid, since it is ‘traversed by a movement which comes from the outside’.32 Its constitutive connections to the ‘outside’ cause the permanent metamorphosis of the assemblage as it takes up new elements of sense and discards others, according to the shifting compatibilities it forges through various environmental associations.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the critical and creative vocation of philosophy aligns best with this second kind of conceptual assemblage, which they characterise as ‘nomadic’ because of its mobility. This is not at all a metaphorical identification: according to them, thought is not ‘like’ a style of thinking exercised by nomadic peoples, but is itself nomadic. Knowledge, by contrast, is ‘sedentary’ or ‘royal’ in the nature of its assemblage of sense: it disciplines orders of ‘truth’ on the basis of property regimes and property relations; and once a ‘truth’ is established it can be staunchly resistant to transformation. In the service of knowledge, ‘philosophical discourse has always maintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the Sovereign’s problem, traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic formations to democracy’.33 In comparison with this operation of disciplinary regulation, nomadic thought is a ‘counter-philosophy’ that liberates sense for a new use; a new creation. Nomadic movement is valorised by 172Deleuze and Guattari as something for thought to aspire towards, and is a mode of thinking not connected essentially with itinerant peoples. At their best, Europeans can be nomad thinkers, and indeed Nietzsche is described by Deleuze as a nomad thinker par excellence. And yet at the same time, throughout their oeuvre, nomad thought is clearly associated with figures of indigeneity, such as Indians ‘without ancestry’ or ‘with subtlety of perception’; or the ‘primitive rural communities’ upon which ‘the despot sets up his imperial machine’.34

We suggest that a particular construction of indigeneity as primitive and preconceptual appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, because it plays a necessary structural role in their assemblage of the concept of ‘nomad thought’. This becomes clear once we understand how the two different kinds of assemblage they describe in various ways—as nomad and state-form; as smooth and striated; open and captured; fluid and fixed; and so forth—compare not only in independent contrast to one another, but also are joined inextricably in a reciprocal relationship of hostility or opposition: they coexist and are definitively, constitutively, at war with one another. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s treatise on nomadology and the war machine is influenced by the work of Pierre Clastres, who posits that nomadic society always-already anticipates the state-form, which it deliberately and strategically wards off by disbanding concentrations of power that may result in the emergence of a state.35 At the same time, the state-form is constitutionally opposed to those loose elements that escape its purview and challenge its control; it seeks to capture them and assimilate them within its order, and thereby to consolidate its sovereign reach and power. This imposition of an imperial order of logic upon a nomadic process of life or of sense-making is violently constraining, and Deleuze writes: ‘we know all too well that nomads are unhappy in our regimes: we use any means necessary to pin them down, so they lead a troubled life’. However, this capture is never complete, since ‘at the periphery, the communities [integrated tenuously into the state-form] display another kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage a nomadic war-machine, and they tend to come uncoded rather than being coded over. … [This adventure] is the call of the outside, it is movement’.36

Nomadic thought answers this call: its art is to ‘find, assign, join those external forces which give … [an expression] its liberating meaning, its sense of exteriority’.37 Conceiving of thinking as a process of conceptual assemblage gives an image of thought as constructive, but also as critical. If a conceptual system is an assemblage of elements interconnected in a complex network or relationships, then elements participate in the structure as ‘piecemeal insertions’;38 conceptual elements join a structure of thought according to the ways in which they are affected (attracted or repelled) by other elements in the arrangement. Some of these affective bonds will be 173strongly compatible and consistent, and in their continuity of association they will form the core structure of the assemblage. Other elemental relations, though, will be fragile and shifting: some ideas may be associated in part, only until they are challenged by alternative ideas that come into contact with the conceptual system and contradict its previous order of sense. This image of thought is therefore rhizomatic: the core structure, being a consistent order or a relatively stable interiority, constantly sends out creative offshoots that may combine productively with fresh ideational material encountered by the thinker affected by the changing situations in which she is embedded. But it is also deterritorialising: at the periphery of a conceptual order, where its composing elements are least stable in their participation, the structural organisation may shift as new ideas combine with old ones. Sometimes new encounters can radically challenge an existing order, when its elemental configuration becomes entirely destabilised within the structure as a consequence of a new incompatibility of some of its composing parts. Such sites of partial disjunction can cause the interior order of a previously fixed conceptual arrangement to escape its confines, to trace a creative line of escape. Conversely, sites of partial disjunction in thought-relations combining at the edges of a conceptual order can destabilise the structure so that it becomes flooded with a potentiality for radical change, as conceptual connections that were previously unthinkable suddenly become possible. In such cases, the established territory of the conceptual structure is eroded as it encounters a foreign alterity, an ‘outside’ force of affection that claws and gnaws at its borders, breaches its boundaries and rushes in to overwhelm and transform it. For Deleuze and Guattari, this deterritorialising activity is necessary to free up stymied thought for its proper creative vocation. The liberating task involves the operation of a nomadic war-machine that comes from without to challenge the state-form and resist its order:

It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.39

We value Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivist emphasis on the creativity of thought, and also the ways in which they prioritise a nomadic force of resistance against the imperial state-form. Similarly, we value efforts by thinkers after Deleuze, notably Rosi Braidotti, to theorise the importance of philosophical nomadology for political perspectives including feminism and postcolonialism that affirm a positive role for difference in constitutive relation to identity and processes of identification. However, there are aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘treatise on nomadology’ that we find disconcerting 174when viewed from an Indigenous and anticolonial perspective. First, historically speaking, ‘deterritorialisation’ is far less an Indigenous strategy of resistance against the formation of a state, than it is an imperial technique used in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by claiming that their homelands are ‘terra nullius’, owned by nobody and free for the taking. It is not clear to us what a valorisation of deterritorialisation implies for an ethical response to actual colonial histories of Indigenous dispossession and forced transit. And second, the radical exteriority of the nomad war-machine in relation to the state apparatus concerns us, insofar as it implies that the ‘smooth space’ home to the Indigenous nomad is without sovereignty, without law, without governing institutions. This closely mirrors a colonial ideology that Indigenous peoples strongly contest.

In fact, Deleuze and Guattari are careful to note that actual Indigenous societies are not always or essentially nomadic or without law and order: they describe the Native American Hopi, for example, as a ‘sedentary people’, and they understand that ‘bands and clans are no less organised than empire-kingdoms’.40 However, as Paul Patton has explained, Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in concept creation and not in social science or the anthropological study of actual nomadic societies: ‘Deleuzian nomads are virtual or conceptual objects whose features are settled not by observation but by definition’.41 As ‘conceptual objects’ in the assemblage that nomad thought forms in its conflictual relationship with ‘sedentary knowledge’ or ‘royal science’, Indigenous figures are defined as radically external to the imperial state-form that captures them and against which their war-machines are aimed; they occupy (and define by the mode of their occupation) the deterritorialised smooth space of the steppes or the desert, constituting the open exterior that the creative thinker must hook into. The problem that concerns us here is that, in constructivist philosophy, a concept receives its determination through the affections it receives from proximal concepts. When Deleuze and Guattari link a concept of nomadic subjectivity to a concept of indigeneity without law or land and as radically exterior to a sovereign space, to notions of existential imperceptibility as qualitative being ‘without number’, and to a preconceptual (primitive) or nonconceptual (disordered or irrational) state of flux that resists, contests and disrupts organised thought, then we end up with a ‘definition’ of indigeneity that connotes nonsovereignty void of territory and law, invisibility and marginality, irrationality, and a permanent situation of oppositionality within the system. These are conceptual linkages that Indigenous peoples have long resisted in their struggles against settler colonialism and its ideologies. And yet, for Deleuze and Guattari, indigeneity conceived as a pure exteriority, an imperceptibility, a placelessness or formlessness, operates as a crucial element within their conceptual assemblage of nomadic thought: it is something the sedentary, despotic, imperial (European) 175thinker relies upon in the creative process of becoming-nomad: ‘[The thinker] becomes Indian and never stops becoming—perhaps so that the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else’.42

Indigenous critical theorist Jodi Byrd is deeply critical of the ways in which indigeneity is figured in Deleuzian nomadology as a placeholder of alterity available for the Western thinker: it is a conceptual site of access to potentiality, traversed by the non-Indigenous philosopher engaging in a creative process of subjective revision, via the transcendence or dissolution of his sovereign limits. This schema mirrors Europe’s developmental movement through colonialism, where the native colonies are the necessary economic and epistemological supports for the expansion of the imperial centres. According to Byrd, this kind of thinking entails the Indigenous presence is ‘not a fully realised one’; it is a ‘latency’ that others must ‘learn to access, to channel and to recognise in order to fully grapple with modernity. That native presence has no agency of its own, in its own right’.43 Byrd is also critical of the ways in which Indianness or indigeneity in Deleuzian nomadology is something ‘beyond’ thought: it escapes representation and its unruliness destabilises the sovereignty of the concept itself; it disrupts ‘the known’ and operates as the limit of the Western subjective reach. Indigeneity cannot be captured, but neither can it be known. It is imperceptible, inexpressible, a radical exteriority beyond knowledge. Byrd points out that this is a parochial conceptualisation, which is alien (and alienating) when considered from the perspective of Indigenous philosophers whose intellectual authority as such relies upon the accessibility of their cultural knowledge and subjectivity, their ‘Indianness’ as it is known to them. For Byrd, these tendencies in contemporary European philosophy are markers of an ongoing imperial violence waged by Western minds against the knowledge systems of the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional lands European settlers now live. Relegated to a nonconceptual, preconceptual space in relation to organised knowledge, Indigenous thought is rendered ‘imperceptible’; no wonder, then, that Continental philosophy today seems to think it unnecessary to engage with Indigenous philosophies as organised systems of thought in their own right.

What, then, should we conclude regarding the de-colonial potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad thought, and of the contemporary strains of posthumanist philosophy they have influenced? It is important to attend critically and strategically to how concepts in constructivist philosophies are ambivalent, ‘improper’ in their essence: their properties come to them in the context in which they are formed and used. Noting that Indigenous peoples globally have suffered the ‘transit of Empire’, Byrd points out that, for colonised Indigenous peoples, being in nomadic movement has often meant ‘to be made to move by force’, or ‘having one’s movement policed’; though it also can mean ‘to exist relationally in process, to be human by being multiply moved 176by others, to transition creatively through the affective input of others, active in a world of relational movements and counter-movements’.44 Employing posthumanist philosophy in a way that is sensitive to differential experiences arising from colonial legacies of imperial humanism and contributes to the ongoing task of decolonisation, can require ‘joyful acts of disobedience and gentle but resolute betrayal’ to conceptual assemblages originating in the (imperial) West.45 One such assemblage is the ‘treatise on nomadology’ presented originally by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, which we have indicated retains problematic elements associated with an imperial mindset. And yet, as a complex assemblage of elemental ideas, the concept of nomadic thought is in any case multiple and shifting: this is evidenced, for example, by Rosi Braidotti’s significant elaboration of ‘nomad subjectivity’ as a nonhumanist, feminist framework for conceiving processual embodiment and ethical processes of co-relational becoming. Another ‘improper’ (reconsidered or transformed) use of Deleuzian nomadology is made in an Indigenous Australian context by Bentarrak, Muecke and Roe, who use it as a framework for ‘Reading the Country’ in a way that brings to light the consubstantial intersubjectivity of human becomings, conceived in complex interactions with nonhuman modes of existence.46 Indeed, ‘nomad thought’ is given various expressions by Deleuze and Guattari themselves, who on occasion prefer to understand the nomadic exterior of the plane of consistency, not simply as a ‘smooth space’ that is formless and radically exterior to the organisation of the state-form, but rather as ‘the intersection of all concrete forms’ in a zone of proximity.47 ‘Becoming-nomad’ in this particular configuration of their philosophical framework does not dissolve the subject or the concept in virtual deterritorialisation, but rather opens it to the complex actuality of existence, as a relational multiplicity that intersects potentially with diverse others in an affective neighbourhood.

Through a strategically ‘improper’ use of its defining concepts—such as ‘philosophical nomadology’—posthumanism may become less collusive with past tendencies to exclusion within the Humanities and more adept at bridging the ‘missing links’ characteristic of such exclusions, including those between ‘postcolonial theories, the environmental humanities and indigenous epistemologies’.48 If Aboriginal philosophies can assume their rightful place in the affective neighbourhood of the new Humanities, postimperial humanity will be better equipped to undertake the work of ‘excolonisation’,49 which requires nonimperial styles of thought and cross-cultural conceptual communication as much as it needs collaborative practices of social reconstruction. The value of an ethos of cross-cultural philosophical engagement lies partly in shared contributions to the work of critique, revealing through a disjunctive awareness which concepts are ‘not viable, which are arbitrary or inconsistent, which ones do not hold up for an instant’.50 However, we agree 177especially with Rosi Braidotti when she argues for a ‘cartographic move, which aligns theoretically diverse positions along the same axis to facilitate the transposition of the respective political affects that activate them … like a musical variation that leaps across scales and compositions to find a pitch or a shared level of intensity’.51 Jodi Byrd expresses a similar view when she suggests ‘indigenous critical theory could be said to exist in its best form when it centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and in the specificities of the communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available’.52 Such alliances generate expansive concepts for a new earth and a people to come, bringing new conceptual understandings about the play of difference in complex ecologies, and how human values (including values related to the nonhuman world) can sometimes be shared across cultures. For us, just as for Deleuze and Guattari, these forms of alliance ‘attest to a creation, however disturbing or dangerous that might be’53 to Western humanism and its insular modes of thought and being.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Steve Hemming and the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority, whose work on ‘Speaking as Country’ has inspired our argument. This article was produced with the support of the Australia Research Council for projects, Negotiating a Space in the Nation: The Case of Ngarrindjeri (DP1094869) and Indigenous Nationhood in the Absence of Recognition: Self-Governance Insights and Strategies from Three Aboriginal Communities (LP140100376).

Notes

1. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 110.

2. See also Bignall, Rigney and Hemming 2016.

3. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 110.

4. See, for example, Cajete 2016; Panelli 2010; Rice 2005.

5. Wesley 2013.

6. Reid et al., 2013, 5; see also Marsden 2003.

7. Reid et al., 2013, 5.

8. Ibid.

9. Henare 2001.

10. Reid et al., 2013, 6.

11. Moreton-Robinson 2007, 2.

12. Cornell 2015; Hemming and Rigney 2008; Hemming, Rigney and Berg 2011.

13. Ngarrindjeri Nation 2007, 5.

178 14. Hemming, Rigney and Berg 2011; Rigney, Hemming and Berg 2008. See Hemming et al. 2015.

15. See Bignall 2018.

16. Wilson 2001, 177; see also Smith 2012; Cajete 2016; Berkes 2012.

17. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 361–62.

18. Derrida 2001, 25.

19. Ahluwalia 2010.

20. Braidotti 2006b; Braidotti 2011; Braidotti 2002.

21. For example, Braidotti et al. 2017.

22. Deleuze’s appreciation of this distinction is clearly evident in his interview with Elias Sanbar, published in Two Regimes of Madness. See Deleuze 2007.

23. Moreton-Robinson 2015.

24. Kuokannen 2007, 14–16; see also Nakata 2008.

25. Byrd 2011, xxxiii; see also Watson and Huntington 2014.

26. Sundberg 2014.

27. Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010.

28. See, for example, Roffe and Stark 2015.

29. Miller 1998; Kaplan 1996; Holland 2003; Patton 2010.

30. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 2.

31. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 3.

32. Deleuze 2004, 256.

33. Ibid., 259.

34. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 283; Deleuze 2004, 258.