Historic Yeast in the Ingredients of ‘Culture’
Historic Yeast in the Ingredients of ‘Culture’
I do not suggest that we should look for, or accept a relativity of values in the mixing bowl of frontier meeting. The yeast[1] of truth needs to be there like Christ’s instruction to the Christian to be a leaven that leavens the whole. My point is that we might deepen and broaden in the replenishment of ourselves as we meet the other: the stranger, alien, foreigner. I do not agree with those who see no truth of substance in being or in belonging to a branch of the human family. The frontier is to be seen, not as a no-man’s land of values, a middle ground of compromise, but a place of truths[2] meeting as stones in a building of a larger consciousness.
Historic, cultural, or religious identity needs to hold on to notions of what is central and what is peripheral, even as those things are regenerated by meeting the other. This change is not just into the hands of mere power. Culture is not of an unchanging order in the realm of values.
On the Australian frontier English and Aboriginal peripheries were often dispensed of, and the places where centralities themselves met caused a hybridised sense of becoming linked to the need to belong in this new landscape. This ground, cultured of new building of identity, grown hybrid, based on that living yeast of generation in truth, is what we call Australia.
Maybe this Australia is of the heart and spirit, but the bridging corpus of Australia as we know it is where that heart and spirit reside. Gellibrand & Beruke, Batman & the Parramatta Five[3], and each-way Buckley, all belong on that bridge. ‘A society without strangers would be impoverished; to live only amongst ourselves, constantly inbreeding, never facing an outsider to make us question again and again our certainties and rules, would inevitably lead to atrophy. The experience of encountering a stranger - like the experience of suffering - is important and creative, provided we know when to step back.’[4]
Truly epic questions are broached by these ‘fusions’ in our histories. The nature of our heroes is thrown into a different ‘reality’ light. People like Buckley need to be given their proper regard.[5] Our statues and memorials, are often without otherness, monochrome! Players who bridge the cross-cultural abyss are ones worth looking at in terms of the long-term ‘Settlement’ of this Australia in spirit and justice, peace and heart. The treaty of 1835, and its aftermath needs to be looked at, not so much as an illegal document, nor as a shonky real estate deal, but as more than the usual string-bridges across the borders of peoples; as an attempt at more solid structure in cross-cultural bridging, on firmer foundations. ‘Intercourse’ is the model of cultural romance in an event. ‘If transcultural events form part of an invisible and pedestrian history, a “living history” which lies dormant in the shadow of a monolithic, positivistic picture of non-European peoples and places, this is because the events themselves escape the thresholds of what is normally considered to be historically significant.’[6]
History often fails; foundational strings of co-existence are ignored, misrepresented. Attempts on borders deadfall into traps of misunderstandings. ‘“The first man who rode a horse there, though he had had dealings with them on several other trips, so horrified them in this posture that they shot him dead with arrows before they could recognize him:”[7].- ‘...the horseman’s death ... signals a rupture in communication, the demise of history, and the unmasking of a fatal misrepresentation.’[8] Events like this, like frontier meetings with aborigines, whether those happen to be in peace or in violence, are prime sites of focus in crossing a divide into a hermeneutic of deeper historical understanding. Such historic sites are places where prime memorialisation and epics of cross-cultural story telling (history) might capture the electric suspense of the frontier. The overlooked ahead-of-us[9] at the contact frontiers are prime places of proto-reconciliation. As well as the treaty, the disappearance of Joseph Tice Gellibrand, like the departure of Buckley, or the death of Batman, all seem to have a part, greater or lesser, in this threshold, this crossing over.
There is a human desire for the other. Some crossings go too far.[10] There is a death and resurrection quality to the attempts at bridging of the chaos of cultural misses, whether they succeed or fail. Often cruelty[11] or death[12] is the result. There is an ordeal, a trial[13] of identity in going over to the other. In Australia this was often a breaking-making or unmaking-making that led to adaptive and hybrid becoming in terms of both identity and belonging.
[1] ‘ No doubt culture can be made to mean an affair between tautology and entropy. Yet , the whole world keeps expanding like yeast, and distinctions between difference, novelty, innovation, change begin to blur with respect to the status quo. The notions of center and periphery tend to blend together; when polyphony is indirectly compared to mayonnaise.’ ~ M Pierrette Malcuzynski A Critical View of Recent Propositions in Cultural Theory - Critical Studies Amsterdam Netherlands 1991 Cultural Studies: Crossing Boundaries pp 222
[2] If there is a “ true” value to “truth,” it seems to be decreed in terms of a little truth everywhere and in everything and/or the profoundly sceptical mistrust of everything, together with consequent attempts to prove that “Truth” lies somewhere in the middle, in a no-man’s land. And nothing will disprove that the very conception of “ Truth” may be induced according to (and from within) its own symbolically encoded and signifying order. Culture itself, (whatever that means) will thus always appear to be an object of exchange, handed-over, as it were, from one system of reference to another. Likewise, there seems to be no legitimate counter-argument to the conception of the “New” as synonym for “ Change” and by which we refer to the indeterminate number of polysemical effects a system will put to work to increase its own efficiency. ~ M Pierrette Malcuzynski - A Critical View of Recent Propositions in Cultural Theory pp 222 In Cultural Studies: Crossing Boundaries 1991
[3] Alistair Campbell ~ John Batman and the Aborigines
[4] Wiesel op cit
[5] ‘He was a man cast out by one society and welcomed by another - the two apparently so different, so antithetical, that they have yet hardly ever met without conflict. How was it that he could survive and thrive on his passage from European civilization where others failed and perished? And why is it that a failure like Burke is revered, while Buckley is half-forgotten? How do we choose our heroes, the subjects of our statues, our monuments.’ Craig Robinson, Preface, Buckley’s Hope Melbourne 1980
[6] Tomas op cit ‘... the geopolitical dimensions of transcultural spaces are defined by highly localised power relations whose fragmentation and transience are the result of territorial questioning. They are characterised, more often than not, by the undefined or ineffectively claimed nature of space itself. In addition to being rooted in geographic terrain, transcultural spaces are triggered by technological, architectural, or human forms, as bodies and ships, as well as shorelines, are momentarily transformed into contested spaces. Such space, however, are limited not only to these sites and forms, for as human and animal forms can also be sites for the creation of transcultural spaces since they too are a fertile breeding ground for misrepresentation and perceptual confusion.’ pp 41
[7] Michel de Montaigne - quoted by Tomas op cit
[8] Tomas Op cit pp 41-44
[9] Liberman: Ch.6 ‘The Hermeneutics of Intercultural Communication’ p.174 ‘Merleau-Ponty (1964:xv) writes, ‘The germ of universality...is to be found ahead of us in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us. The essential character of understanding in the radical sense I am employing rests in the ‘ahead of us’ as the practical concern of the interaction’s participants This ‘ahead of us’ is not always grasped with precision. It may be, in Husserl’s words (1973: 38) only an empty horizon of familiar unfamiliarity;’
[10] Wiesel Op cit ~ Now, we realize that there is in man precisely such a desire, calling for this kind of end, this kind of death. A desire to break with his surroundings, burn his bridges, deny his past and his experiences, plunge into the mass of humanity and go under . . . thus solving the problem of existence by putting an end to that existence. It is a desire to become another, to live the life of another, the destiny of another, assume the death of another - to die as a stranger in order to forget pain, shame, guilt, in order to disappear - to commit either physical or spiritual suicide. That urge may or may not be rooted in weakness. Man may feel helpless to adjust to the image he has of himself and so wish to adopt the image the stranger has of him; ultimately he may try to resemble the stranger - or even the enemy. But then it may also be related to a more positive passion - his need to renew himself, to replenish himself. He may leave his land, his home, his habits, in the hope that as an expatriate he may have greater opportunities to rethink, re-evaluate, and redefine his place and role under the sun. And so the stranger gets up one morning and without saying goodbye to anyone, disappears. He goes underground, joins a counterculture; he seeks out places and societies whose languages he does not understand, whose laws are alien - but those things don't frighten him. On the contrary: he wants not to understand, not to know. For what he knows, he does not like; and what he understands, he does not accept. He has chosen exile so as to be someone else - a stranger and thus to discover a new expression of truth, a new way of living out the human condition in its ever-changing forms. That is why he is always on the run. Everywhere he leaves one more mask, one more memory. In order to become a total stranger, he must reject the last vestiges of his former self. Sometimes it ends well: Abraham did break with his parents to become Abraham, Moses did leave the royal palace to become the leader of leaders. Later, much later, mystics chose exile to achieve anonymity; Hasidic masters became vagabonds; poets sought poverty and adventure. Sometimes it ends badly: Philo of Alexandria, Josephus Flavius, Spinoza, Otto Weininger, and even Heine and Bergson - all were attracted by the other side and, to different degrees, went too far and became estranged from their people. They were not prudent enough. So taken were they by the stranger that they became strangers themselves . . . to themselves. What went wrong? They could not resist the stranger's temptations. They forgot that we are supposed - and indeed commanded - to love the stranger as long as he fulfils his role, meaning, as long as his mystery challenges our certainties and forces us to re-examine our own values, our own sincerity - as long as the stranger represents the question; but if and when he attempts to force his answers upon us, he must be opposed. He can be of help only as a stranger - lest you are ready to become his caricature. And your own.
[11] ‘Insofar as a history is a product of interruptions upon the efficacious transmission of codes ( dialogue), communication is a definitive environment for a parasites activities and the purest medium for the exercise of its Artuadian-based logic of cruelty.’ Tomas, op cit
[12] Tomas, op cit ‘For a moment, ... I too, exist outside of space and time, as well as outside my own history. ... What is so special about this moment, [Barthes] went on to suggest, is its thanatological quality; for in becoming an object, one experiences “a micro-version of death (of parenthesis). ( Barthes 1984:14) To experience death, in his opinion, was to experience the transformation from a subject to a “ a spectre” pp 159
[13]Raymonde Carroll ~ Op cit ‘ ( the practice) demands patience and a great deal of intellectual discipline, but it is nevertheless not difficult from a methodological point of view. It is, nonetheless, a strenuous, sometimes exhausting undertaking from an emotional point of view. Cultural analysis can be more painful than psychoanalysis, as painful as the latter may be. It occurs through a questioning of the very tissue of my being, and it demands an effort which is all the more difficult as I am perfectly integrated into my group and function within it without difficulty. ‘...this also means that I am going to alienate myself from myself, examine myself where I least expect it.’ p 11
I do not suggest that we should look for, or accept a relativity of values in the mixing bowl of frontier meeting. The yeast[1] of truth needs to be there like Christ’s instruction to the Christian to be a leaven that leavens the whole. My point is that we might deepen and broaden in the replenishment of ourselves as we meet the other: the stranger, alien, foreigner. I do not agree with those who see no truth of substance in being or in belonging to a branch of the human family. The frontier is to be seen, not as a no-man’s land of values, a middle ground of compromise, but a place of truths[2] meeting as stones in a building of a larger consciousness.
Historic, cultural, or religious identity needs to hold on to notions of what is central and what is peripheral, even as those things are regenerated by meeting the other. This change is not just into the hands of mere power. Culture is not of an unchanging order in the realm of values.
On the Australian frontier English and Aboriginal peripheries were often dispensed of, and the places where centralities themselves met caused a hybridised sense of becoming linked to the need to belong in this new landscape. This ground, cultured of new building of identity, grown hybrid, based on that living yeast of generation in truth, is what we call Australia.
Maybe this Australia is of the heart and spirit, but the bridging corpus of Australia as we know it is where that heart and spirit reside. Gellibrand & Beruke, Batman & the Parramatta Five[3], and each-way Buckley, all belong on that bridge. ‘A society without strangers would be impoverished; to live only amongst ourselves, constantly inbreeding, never facing an outsider to make us question again and again our certainties and rules, would inevitably lead to atrophy. The experience of encountering a stranger - like the experience of suffering - is important and creative, provided we know when to step back.’[4]
Truly epic questions are broached by these ‘fusions’ in our histories. The nature of our heroes is thrown into a different ‘reality’ light. People like Buckley need to be given their proper regard.[5] Our statues and memorials, are often without otherness, monochrome! Players who bridge the cross-cultural abyss are ones worth looking at in terms of the long-term ‘Settlement’ of this Australia in spirit and justice, peace and heart. The treaty of 1835, and its aftermath needs to be looked at, not so much as an illegal document, nor as a shonky real estate deal, but as more than the usual string-bridges across the borders of peoples; as an attempt at more solid structure in cross-cultural bridging, on firmer foundations. ‘Intercourse’ is the model of cultural romance in an event. ‘If transcultural events form part of an invisible and pedestrian history, a “living history” which lies dormant in the shadow of a monolithic, positivistic picture of non-European peoples and places, this is because the events themselves escape the thresholds of what is normally considered to be historically significant.’[6]
History often fails; foundational strings of co-existence are ignored, misrepresented. Attempts on borders deadfall into traps of misunderstandings. ‘“The first man who rode a horse there, though he had had dealings with them on several other trips, so horrified them in this posture that they shot him dead with arrows before they could recognize him:”[7].- ‘...the horseman’s death ... signals a rupture in communication, the demise of history, and the unmasking of a fatal misrepresentation.’[8] Events like this, like frontier meetings with aborigines, whether those happen to be in peace or in violence, are prime sites of focus in crossing a divide into a hermeneutic of deeper historical understanding. Such historic sites are places where prime memorialisation and epics of cross-cultural story telling (history) might capture the electric suspense of the frontier. The overlooked ahead-of-us[9] at the contact frontiers are prime places of proto-reconciliation. As well as the treaty, the disappearance of Joseph Tice Gellibrand, like the departure of Buckley, or the death of Batman, all seem to have a part, greater or lesser, in this threshold, this crossing over.
There is a human desire for the other. Some crossings go too far.[10] There is a death and resurrection quality to the attempts at bridging of the chaos of cultural misses, whether they succeed or fail. Often cruelty[11] or death[12] is the result. There is an ordeal, a trial[13] of identity in going over to the other. In Australia this was often a breaking-making or unmaking-making that led to adaptive and hybrid becoming in terms of both identity and belonging.
[1] ‘ No doubt culture can be made to mean an affair between tautology and entropy. Yet , the whole world keeps expanding like yeast, and distinctions between difference, novelty, innovation, change begin to blur with respect to the status quo. The notions of center and periphery tend to blend together; when polyphony is indirectly compared to mayonnaise.’ ~ M Pierrette Malcuzynski A Critical View of Recent Propositions in Cultural Theory - Critical Studies Amsterdam Netherlands 1991 Cultural Studies: Crossing Boundaries pp 222
[2] If there is a “ true” value to “truth,” it seems to be decreed in terms of a little truth everywhere and in everything and/or the profoundly sceptical mistrust of everything, together with consequent attempts to prove that “Truth” lies somewhere in the middle, in a no-man’s land. And nothing will disprove that the very conception of “ Truth” may be induced according to (and from within) its own symbolically encoded and signifying order. Culture itself, (whatever that means) will thus always appear to be an object of exchange, handed-over, as it were, from one system of reference to another. Likewise, there seems to be no legitimate counter-argument to the conception of the “New” as synonym for “ Change” and by which we refer to the indeterminate number of polysemical effects a system will put to work to increase its own efficiency. ~ M Pierrette Malcuzynski - A Critical View of Recent Propositions in Cultural Theory pp 222 In Cultural Studies: Crossing Boundaries 1991
[3] Alistair Campbell ~ John Batman and the Aborigines
[4] Wiesel op cit
[5] ‘He was a man cast out by one society and welcomed by another - the two apparently so different, so antithetical, that they have yet hardly ever met without conflict. How was it that he could survive and thrive on his passage from European civilization where others failed and perished? And why is it that a failure like Burke is revered, while Buckley is half-forgotten? How do we choose our heroes, the subjects of our statues, our monuments.’ Craig Robinson, Preface, Buckley’s Hope Melbourne 1980
[6] Tomas op cit ‘... the geopolitical dimensions of transcultural spaces are defined by highly localised power relations whose fragmentation and transience are the result of territorial questioning. They are characterised, more often than not, by the undefined or ineffectively claimed nature of space itself. In addition to being rooted in geographic terrain, transcultural spaces are triggered by technological, architectural, or human forms, as bodies and ships, as well as shorelines, are momentarily transformed into contested spaces. Such space, however, are limited not only to these sites and forms, for as human and animal forms can also be sites for the creation of transcultural spaces since they too are a fertile breeding ground for misrepresentation and perceptual confusion.’ pp 41
[7] Michel de Montaigne - quoted by Tomas op cit
[8] Tomas Op cit pp 41-44
[9] Liberman: Ch.6 ‘The Hermeneutics of Intercultural Communication’ p.174 ‘Merleau-Ponty (1964:xv) writes, ‘The germ of universality...is to be found ahead of us in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us. The essential character of understanding in the radical sense I am employing rests in the ‘ahead of us’ as the practical concern of the interaction’s participants This ‘ahead of us’ is not always grasped with precision. It may be, in Husserl’s words (1973: 38) only an empty horizon of familiar unfamiliarity;’
[10] Wiesel Op cit ~ Now, we realize that there is in man precisely such a desire, calling for this kind of end, this kind of death. A desire to break with his surroundings, burn his bridges, deny his past and his experiences, plunge into the mass of humanity and go under . . . thus solving the problem of existence by putting an end to that existence. It is a desire to become another, to live the life of another, the destiny of another, assume the death of another - to die as a stranger in order to forget pain, shame, guilt, in order to disappear - to commit either physical or spiritual suicide. That urge may or may not be rooted in weakness. Man may feel helpless to adjust to the image he has of himself and so wish to adopt the image the stranger has of him; ultimately he may try to resemble the stranger - or even the enemy. But then it may also be related to a more positive passion - his need to renew himself, to replenish himself. He may leave his land, his home, his habits, in the hope that as an expatriate he may have greater opportunities to rethink, re-evaluate, and redefine his place and role under the sun. And so the stranger gets up one morning and without saying goodbye to anyone, disappears. He goes underground, joins a counterculture; he seeks out places and societies whose languages he does not understand, whose laws are alien - but those things don't frighten him. On the contrary: he wants not to understand, not to know. For what he knows, he does not like; and what he understands, he does not accept. He has chosen exile so as to be someone else - a stranger and thus to discover a new expression of truth, a new way of living out the human condition in its ever-changing forms. That is why he is always on the run. Everywhere he leaves one more mask, one more memory. In order to become a total stranger, he must reject the last vestiges of his former self. Sometimes it ends well: Abraham did break with his parents to become Abraham, Moses did leave the royal palace to become the leader of leaders. Later, much later, mystics chose exile to achieve anonymity; Hasidic masters became vagabonds; poets sought poverty and adventure. Sometimes it ends badly: Philo of Alexandria, Josephus Flavius, Spinoza, Otto Weininger, and even Heine and Bergson - all were attracted by the other side and, to different degrees, went too far and became estranged from their people. They were not prudent enough. So taken were they by the stranger that they became strangers themselves . . . to themselves. What went wrong? They could not resist the stranger's temptations. They forgot that we are supposed - and indeed commanded - to love the stranger as long as he fulfils his role, meaning, as long as his mystery challenges our certainties and forces us to re-examine our own values, our own sincerity - as long as the stranger represents the question; but if and when he attempts to force his answers upon us, he must be opposed. He can be of help only as a stranger - lest you are ready to become his caricature. And your own.
[11] ‘Insofar as a history is a product of interruptions upon the efficacious transmission of codes ( dialogue), communication is a definitive environment for a parasites activities and the purest medium for the exercise of its Artuadian-based logic of cruelty.’ Tomas, op cit
[12] Tomas, op cit ‘For a moment, ... I too, exist outside of space and time, as well as outside my own history. ... What is so special about this moment, [Barthes] went on to suggest, is its thanatological quality; for in becoming an object, one experiences “a micro-version of death (of parenthesis). ( Barthes 1984:14) To experience death, in his opinion, was to experience the transformation from a subject to a “ a spectre” pp 159
[13]Raymonde Carroll ~ Op cit ‘ ( the practice) demands patience and a great deal of intellectual discipline, but it is nevertheless not difficult from a methodological point of view. It is, nonetheless, a strenuous, sometimes exhausting undertaking from an emotional point of view. Cultural analysis can be more painful than psychoanalysis, as painful as the latter may be. It occurs through a questioning of the very tissue of my being, and it demands an effort which is all the more difficult as I am perfectly integrated into my group and function within it without difficulty. ‘...this also means that I am going to alienate myself from myself, examine myself where I least expect it.’ p 11
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