Browsing by Author "Tie W"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Bi-cultural knowledge production, commodity fetishism, and food governance.
    Tie W
    A 14-year collaboration between indigenous peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand and ecological scientists with Otago University – for the sustainability of a traditional food source of the Māori of Rakiura (the titi - Sooty Shearwater) – gestures towards an emergent form of food governance under colonial conditions, that grows out of bi-cultural knowledge production (Moller 2009). A set of reflections by those involved (Stephenson and Moller 2009) suggests that commodity fetishism structures how ideas work within that relationship. This qualifies, at the very least, the co-produced character of the collaboration, reproducing the colonialism of the situation. Commodity fetishism does so in this instance by shaping the terms in which a key debate moves regarding the relative epistemological roles of ‘scientific’ (linear) and ‘traditional’ (retroactive) conceptions of causality. Scientific conceptions come to be valued over traditional. My reading of those reflections identifies within the scientific position on causality, however, a state of ‘empty time’ (Deleuze 2013) capable of averting the reproduction of colonial relations. This possibility turns upon the granting of analytic priority to a particular kind of object in the development under colonial conditions of bi-cultural governance forms: that of the fantasy objects by which fetishistic attachments develop to explanatory mechanisms including models of causation.
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    Knowledge in a Perfect Storm
    Tie W
    In this presentation, I explore the prospects for subjectivities that might collaborate with indigenous ecological projects under the conditions of climate change, without controlling them. Intimations for subject positions of this kind may lie, following Mark Fisher and Nina Power, with a form of hope that ‘haunts’ rather than ‘promises’. I draw upon a particular archive of writing to explore this possibility: a set of reflections published on the 14-year collaboration between scientists from Otago University and the people of Rakiura on the ecology of mutton-birds (the sooty shearwater). Pākehā contributions to cross-cultural knowledge production, the archive suggests, find themselves moving between linear and retroactive temporalities as used within scientific disciplines to map causal relationships. Indigenous forms of explanation are seen to build exclusively upon retroactive forms of causality and are routinely ‘positioned’ in the archive as being secondary in explanatory power to the linear forms of explanation that characterise the scientific model. The movement of retroactive causality nevertheless structures each of the scientists’ reflections, thereby turning up throughout the texts ‘out of place’. As a consequence, retroactive time has the potential to inaugurate a state of haunting. Another form of haunting also emerges within the archive, in the form of a spectral standpoint from which it is envisaged that the movements between temporalities/causal forms can be witnessed. The seminar explores the implications and prospects of these hauntings for collaborative knowledge production, under the impress of climate change as an externalisation of capital’s contradictions.
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    Learning to Tell Time Again
    Tie W
    In this seminar, I ask how Pākehā might collaborate with indigenous socio-political projects in ways that disrupt the(ir) colonial tendency to control. Encouraging me is the idea, from Mark Fisher and Nina Power, of a hope that ‘haunts’ rather than ‘promises’. To understand the prospects for a hope of this kind, I explore a set of reflections by Pākehā who were involved in a 14-year collaboration between Otago University scientists and the people of Rakiura on the sustainability of the mutton-bird (sooty shearwater). These reflections suggest that Pākehā find themselves haunted by an ‘empty time’ (Deleuze) that irrupts between the linear and retroactive (circular/spiralling) temporalities used within university discourse to map causal relationships. The persistence of time of this kind appears in the reflections as an unruly surplus, persistently interrupting attempts to either systematise the relations between linear (= scientific) and retroactive (= indigenous) time or to impose upon them a hierarchy of analytical importance. The seminar seeks to understand how a haunting of Pākehā by such profusion and excess might enable, in the spaces of collaboration; ways of contributing that avert the colonial proclivity to control.
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    Making Trouble with Vehicularity
    Tie W
    The notion that ‘vehicular ideas’ – that is, ideas which sustain socio-political argument in the absence of new normative vision – are artefacts of informational capitalism (McLennan 2004), suggests that critical interrogation of ideas deemed ‘vehicular’ need involve a ‘double movement’. That movement comprises the identification both of ‘radical variants’ of the vehicular idea amongst the networks of its appearances, and of radicalising deviations of vehicularity itself. In themselves, the constitutive features of vehicularity lack the pulsion to induce this double movement. As a means by which to identify the conditions of possibility for that double movement, I differentiate between three forms of vehicularity. I do so in relation to a particular vehicular idea – knowledge management – within the context of its application to the collaborative production of ecological knowledge between scientific and indigenous communities under the conditions of climate change. The three forms – vehicularity that induces systemacity (‘system inducing’); vehicularity that produces normative traction (‘system reinforcing’); and vehicularity that engages its own excess (‘system troubling’) – produce different analytic outcomes. The latter approach provides the greatest possibility for the simultaneous radicalisation of the given idea (knowledge management) and subversion of the logics of late capital under climate change. The exemplar of knowledge management of this kind is Sartre’s phenomenology of ‘matter as inverted praxis’.
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