Deirdre Tedmanson, University of South Australia
All is Vanity: Charels A Gilbert (1873-1929)
not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself… (Baudrillard,1988)
In arguing the McLuhan-isation of contemporary life where the medium is the only message and hyper-reality is simultaneously all and no truth; Baudrillard nonetheless asks, “is globalisation fatal?” Often derided as poet of postmodern apocalypse, Baudrillard’s analysis of globalisation as antithesis of a universalizing humanity has some pivotal insights for social theory. In this paper I explore Baudrillard’s interest in Mausse’s anthropological notions of the ‘gift’; his argument, in common with Agamben, that the West is all but lost in its politicized hyper realization of means without ends – and relevance of such concepts to attempts to find symbolic meaning in the renewed de-humanization of Indigenous minorities in Australia. By arguing that discrimination and exclusion are not just accidental consequences of globalization, but rather globalization's inherent “logical outcome” (2003), Baudrillard opens new ways of conceptualizing the reality of contemporary inhumanities and the inhumanity of contemporary hyper-realities. He argues global violence as global virulence, a viral contagion that proceeds as a chain reaction destroying immunity and capacity to resist (2003). For the Indigenous hosts in nations such as Australia the parasitic analogy is infectious. This paper explores non-Indigenous organizational invasion and control of Indigenous spaces and will consider the symbiosis between invader and host and the ways in which conquest, annihilation, containment and assimilation operate through everyday technocratic practice. As Bhabba (1994:2) says it is in the ‘double space’, the “emergence of the interstices, overlap and displacement of domains of difference” that the inter-subjective and collective experiences of nation-ness, community interest, and cultural value are negotiated. Baudrillard argues that it is jealousy and deep resentment, not of loss but rather of the excesses of domination, which humiliates and violates: the hollow craving for self validation at the base of outrage against ‘other’s. Nietzsche argued vanity as lack of pride - that within the hubris of power lies meaningless, the fear of originality, fear of authenticity. By contrast to Western neurosis, in many traditionally oriented societies it is possible to give back, to belong, to sacrifice, to be connected to place, time and timelessness. Through Ngarpatji: Ngarpatji as part of the epistemology of Pitjantjatjara peoples, reciprocity is all: the balance and ballast of community life, the fulcrum between the human and non - human world of country, indivisible from collective consciousness. The rule of “symbolic obligation” stipulates that an integral basis of any domination is total absence of counterpart, of any reciprocity or return. “The unilateral gift is an act of power. And the Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able to give without any possible return”(2002). Baudrillard argues what we hate about ourselves, the curse of our culture is “not that the gift is impossible, but that the counter-gift is” – all sacrificial forms have been neutralized – what’s left is a parody of sacrifice, visible in contemporary forms of victimization. In this paper I will track the notion of vanity as the reflection of emptiness; explore Baudrillard’s linking of the symbolic order in ‘gift exchange’ with his rendering of simulacra, where copy replaces original - and through this window reflect on Indigenous claims that the West lacks ‘culture’, merely living and lying in a ‘gammon’ world of superficiality. As one elder put it: “…lacking any Tjukurpa: you, the white people, have lost your dreaming” (Divakaran-Brown, 1993).