Abstract
This article critiques current theories of the commons as having been produced and sustained by human-centered paradigms of intellectual reasoning. It develops a commons beyond the human in response, which offers another way to envisage the commons and its pledge to the construction of better, alternate futures. Rather than advance yet another definition of the commons, this article examines how its means of knowledge production might ensue differently by dislocating the concept from its existing points of epistemological orientation. At the heart of this inquiry lies an attempt to rethink the commons concept beyond its regulating logics of liberal humanism, a radical reconsideration of the kinds of politics it should and might still enable beyond the lure of progressive reason. Turning to a reading of Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, the article argues that a commons beyond the human gathers in the text through the more-than-human existence engendered between a young Aboriginal girl, Oblivia, and a flock of black swans. The novel presents neither the disavowal of the inherited knowledges of the commons nor a concrete policy to herald its appearance in a conjectural future, but a critical expansion of its transitive acts of worlding. This is made feasible by its insistence on upholding an Indigenous Australian ontological reality as the structuring provision for its narratives—one that has long stressed its dissonance from dominant Western genres of thinking and being.
Against the backdrop of an incoming dust storm in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, a solitary black swan makes an unexpected appearance at the lake settlement that is home to Oblivia Ethyl(ene), a young Aboriginal girl and the central protagonist of the novel. The novel is set in Australia around a century into the future and offers a postapocalyptic glimpse into a world blighted by the devastating effects of climate change. Its narratives open into multiple crises of the global geopolitical imagination, framed by the interminable experience of “one extinction event after another.”1 Reminiscent of the Indigenous heritage of Wright’s ancestral Waanyi land, the lake where Oblivia grows up is not spared the impact of these ongoing environmental disasters and governmental collapse. Its wretched condition is moreover exacerbated by the unique violence of human invasion.2 While the freak weather that conveys unrelenting sandstorms causes the lake to degenerate into a swamp, this atmospheric misfortune pales in comparison to the sudden, unwelcome presence of the army that designates its watery perimeters to be a dumping ground for abandoned ships and, later, a militarized space for target practice. By all accounts, the swamp is a thoroughly cursed place, befitting of the “anti-halcyon times” that the novel dramatizes.3 It therefore comes as no surprise that when the swan shows up without prior warning, it is seen by the locals as more of a “paragon of anxious premonitions, rather than the arrival of a miracle for saving the world.”4 Flying in ahead of a red cloud of roiling dust, the bird comes to stand not only for its classical metaphor of extreme rarity but also as an omen for yet another impending catastrophe soon to befall them.5 This extraordinary vision of the black swan is intensified by the encounter it stages with Oblivia, who can only wonder at the occasion of their meeting: “What kind of premonition is this?”6
In many ways, the novel unfolds as a response to the above question, bringing into being an entanglement of more-than-human existence that Oblivia and a flock of swans will come to inhabit.7 They will together enact a radical possibility of survival amid the scenes of unending calamity assembled by its narratives. It is in this sense that the unanticipated arrival of the bird can be construed as a portent for the possibilities of another, more hospitable world that can only be grasped by reaching beyond a certain scope of the already given. After all, Wright’s third novel is foremost an indictment of settler Australia’s ongoing failure to acknowledge its Indigenous histories and the turning of its back on the social and political dispossession suffered by Aboriginal lives.8 To this end, the novel compels an unflinching gaze at these atrocities, laying bare the ruins of Indigenous presence in the wake of the nation’s colonizing projects. Its overture to a dystopian future is etched within the cruel confines of a past and present that are in fact already being lived by those whose stories have been rendered destitute by a national imaginary forged in the categorical erasure of its own Indigenous memory. As the supernatural sight of the swan would then suggest, the novel is also crucially invested in an exercise to reimagine these desecrations of Aboriginal life. Operating in a palpable register of the speculative, its narratives deny the inevitability that too often overshadows the fate of Indigenous peoples otherwise preordained by the legacies of settler colonialism.
But as the novel comes to reveal, the world that it summons for this intent requires less of a suspension of readerly disbelief than a reflexive expansion of the kinds of knowledges and practices that have been key to the animation of its very existence. Put another way, the world that emerges in The Swan Book does not simply appeal to an epistemological flight of fancy, nor instigate an escape into an alternate dimension of the impossible. Rather, it takes shape in the configurations of an Indigenous Australian ontological reality that have long stressed their dissonance from dominant Western paradigms of thinking and being, and in a literary mode that the Wiradjuri writer and scholar Jeanine Leane has described more generally as “Aboriginal realism.”9 For Leane, this is a term that accounts for the indisputable realism of Indigenous stories of time and place, which disavows their frequent—and very much inaccurate—association with the realm of pure fantasy.10 If the novel alludes to the conjectural order of a new world, in other words, then it is one given coherent meaning by the spiritual and cultural beliefs faithful to an already existent Aboriginal tradition.11 Wright has elsewhere explained the evocation of Aboriginal memory and time as an intrinsic part of her writing process: “The world I try to inhabit . . . is like looking at the ancestral tracks spanning our traditional country which, if I look at the land, combines all stories, all realities from the ancient to the new, and makes it one—like all the strands on a long rope.”12 Here, she emphasizes the indebtedness of the seemingly unprecedented textual events in her novel to the actualities of an Indigenous worldview, which may be perceived by a reader as wholly inexplicable and unfamiliar only insofar as they are apprehended by non-Indigenous frameworks of understanding.
I make this case not to diminish the speculative gesture of the novel but to argue that it undertakes a more significant labor of unsettling the epistemological and ontological grounds on which most of its readers have established the validity of their lived experiences and likewise take for granted the apparent truth of their universality. In its underlying commitment to the world-making capacities of Aboriginal existence, The Swan Book reckons with those other knowledges that have assumed precedence as compulsory acts of the imagination. Its narratives undermine the settler worldview to revolve instead around the possibilities engendered by Indigenous ways of living and being that are inherent to a present tangible, material reality, rather than relegated to some abstract utopian horizon. This is a line of inquiry that can further be ascribed to the more encompassing aim of the novel to envision the means through which the invariable course of harm and destruction wreaked on Australian Aboriginal communities might ever come to cease. To this end, it urges the approach of this revisioning to be drawn from the distinct perspectives of an Indigenous imaginary, which would effectively entail a complete upheaval of presiding settler ideals of social and political transformation. This is to say that the novel betrays mainstream ideological assumptions that have guided the semblance of a better world as themselves expedient articulations of settler conquest, as symbolic enclosures of violence, which will only serve to prolong the oppression of those beings and things presumed subordinate to their singular agenda. It overturns the ethical feasibility of such a societal model, thus deeming it unworthy of aspiration. For if there is a chance for the survival, much less the flourishing, of Indigenous lives in Australia and beyond, then its accompanying outlook can no longer be devised from the avenues of reasoning that have ensured the systemic renunciation of these same communities. In short, what the novel extends is an invitation not only to reassess the structuring premise of the world at large but also to critically rethink the strategies that can and should be employed to alter its being.
This is an ethical refrain that I argue must be heeded at a time marked by the catastrophic repercussions of widespread social dispossession and environmental exploitation. It is a provocation to more rigorously examine the epistemological valences inflecting those governing policies, statements, and concepts that have been disseminated as desirable vehicles for enabling such a revolution. At stake in a truly ethical reimagination of this world is also the selection of methodological practices most commensurate with the task.
In what follows, this article tests the limits of these claims on a term that has of late been valorized for precisely such an aim: the commons. By exposing current theories of the commons as having been produced and sustained by human-centered paradigms of intellectual reasoning, it develops, as its title suggests, what I call a commons beyond the human. As I will elaborate, this is a concept that refuses the regulating logics of liberal humanism that have thus far governed the commons and its obligation to transformative politics. I analyze The Swan Book to show how a commons beyond the human might be conceived. I advance a reading that focuses on how Oblivia and the swans—as consigned to the durational limits of human recognition in their expression of this extant concept of the commons—discompose the temporal claim to a redemptive future. The ethical exigency arising from the demand for their collective endurance is therefore one that necessarily exceeds settler colonial ways of knowing and being.
Capitalism and the Commons
A commons beyond the human is an alternate way to envisage the commons and its pledge to the construction of better, alternate futures. The commons—chiefly understood as shared resources, either material or immaterial—has most often been theorized in its immediate connection to capital.13 But there has thus far been no agreement on its true relationship with capitalism, much less any consensus from commons scholarship about its absolute deployment.14 In recent years, the notion of the commons has also experienced a dramatic resurgence of interest, gaining traction as a buzzword in both scholarly circles and commercial sectors as an extrapolation, however tenuous, of its promises of collaborative thinking and living.15
Much of this work has attempted to prefigure the continued potential of the commons for upheaving the foundations of the capitalist regime of extractive labor and exploitation.16 In contrast to earlier thinkers on the commons, such as Garrett Hardin and Elinor Ostrom, who focused more on the introduction of corrective policies to adjudicate the fair expenditure of common-pool resources, at stake for these scholars has been a critique of the logic of enclosure perpetuated by technologies of privatization and accumulation.17 George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, following Karl Marx, for instance, frame the rubrics of enclosure through primitive accumulation: one of the key organizational strategies of capital to which “the capitalist class always resorts in times of crisis when it needs to reassert its command over labor.”18 With the advent of neoliberalism, primitive accumulation has been “extremized, so that privatization extends to every aspect of our existence.”19 If the ideologies of neoliberal capitalism have infiltrated contemporary life, then the commons as its historical adversary has emerged as a convincing antidote. In the same vein, the creation and reclamation of the commons involves the social and cultural habits that Peter Linebaugh has termed practices of “commoning.”20 These undertakings have been perceived as tools for developing an alternative economy founded on collaborative movements of anti-capitalist means of social reproduction. With its impetus for dismantling the structural antagonisms that mark neoliberal forms of late capitalism, it comes as no surprise that the commons has become a symbol of hope for collective survival in these apocalyptic times of worsening social, political, and ecological crises.
But this hope is a troubled one. Although the commons concept continues to signal the possibility of mutual solidarity against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization, current debates surrounding its relevance still revolve around its vexed relationship with capitalism.21 In other words, even as the relational politics of commoning is arguably still upheld as an unequivocally positive endeavor, the commons itself has increasingly been acknowledged to be implicated in, and at times even dependent on, the very frameworks of hegemonic capital it seeks to overturn.22 The co-optation of the commons by forces of capitalist growth is evident in the proliferation of the term in areas of life from real estate developments to digital resource repositories, from the privatization of ecological reserves to the management of planetary resources under the beguiling designation of the “global commons.” These acts of appropriation have established the commons as no longer in direct opposition to the indices of capital—as most of its advocates on the intellectual Left would prefer it—but rather as worryingly tethered to the interests of its generation.23 Whether by name or in practice, the commons can no longer provide a clear path toward the progressive politics envisioned beyond the realities of the present.
My aim here is not to discredit these approaches, whether theoretically or empirically driven. Neither is it to further question the commitment of the commons to a radically transformative political project by continuing to parse its rejection of, or collusion with, capitalist forms of thinking. Rather, I develop the notion of a commons beyond the human as a reckoning with the analytic of human exceptionalism that has thus far mandated these efforts to build a better, if still provisional, world. This is not to say that those now mobilizing the commons have not already offered critiques of the fantasies of human supremacy and the civilizational hierarchies of knowing and living that have been installed for Man’s exclusive benefit. On the contrary, much of this work, having developed precisely in response to the dire effects of large-scale social and environmental devastation, has indeed reflected not only on the ethics of relationality between singular human entities but also on the reciprocal contact of these beings on their physical environment as that which supersedes the category of the human altogether.24 A commons beyond the human also undertakes this crucial labor by concurrently interrogating the multiple logics safeguarding some beings as more human than others. It is similarly prescient in rethinking entirely these ways of existence proving themselves to be increasingly unlivable.
A Refusal of Progressive Reason
This line of argument follows that of Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, who have pointed out the inherently recursive nature of the conceptual tools used to advance anthropological knowledge: “[Inasmuch] as knowledges are world-making processes, they tend to make the worlds they know.”25 Blaser and de la Cadena reveal that intellectual modes of analysis have a kind of circular, looping quality that reinstate themselves through the objects they study. This has resulted in the “epistemic or ontological invalidations—or [the] absences” of other alternative forms of knowledge that resist the capture of scholarly tools at hand.26 Their claim is most evident in how mainstream definitions of the commons have been shaped by the paradigm of progress as both an ideological axiom and an epistemological method. These dual iterations of progress are mutually reinforcing and, moreover, do not discriminate across economic leanings or political beliefs. Whether it is for or against the power relations of capital, the conceptual groundwork of the commons has largely been laid in the shadow of a teleological trajectory of progress. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that there has been a ready agreement on what exactly the allegiance to progress should bring. Progress reveals itself as a contradictory logic; it is actualized in accordance with whichever path the commons chooses to take in its long-term tarrying with the instrument of capital. On the one hand, in those instances where the commons has shown itself to be more tolerant of systems of capital, progress is quite simply coded in their lasting perpetuation. On the other hand, where the political freight of the commons has been predicated on the deracination of capitalist inequality and enclosure, its structural recuperation of various forms of imperiled life demands progressive efforts toward pragmatic political reform. The affective worlding of the commons has moreover not been spared the inflections of progress. As a means of articulating new forms of emancipatory politics, the commons is inevitably treated as a placeholder of hope for concerted struggle and change. This has amounted to the “confirming affective surplus” that Lauren Berlant has observed the commons to deliver ahead of—or even in absence of—its eventual coming into being.27
That the commons inhabits some kind of progressive capacity may very well be crucial for its continued relevance in social and political discourse. It might even be necessary for setting into motion the revolutionary endeavor its project has come to beckon. But I take issue with the conventional wisdom of progress insofar as it has never been, and can never be, cultivated in a neutral or all-encompassing sense. As Anna Tsing writes, progress “is embedded . . . in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human.”28 Whether it manifests in our attendant beliefs about historical or scientific development, or elsewhere under the guise of personal improvement, the conceit of progress has only ever been legible as a story of human advancement. It is a narrative told by and for the exclusive figure of the human. And the oversubscription to this blinkered human mindset has had the consequence of effacing the perspectives of those beings long considered other than human. “As long as we imagine that humans are made through progress,” Tsing argues, “nonhumans are stuck within this imaginative framework too.”29 This naturally extends to the wishful thinking that precedes the realization of a better future, which is arguably only perceived within the limits of human experience. These fictions of progress have ensconced a singularly human state of being and knowing at the expense of other ways of existence.
Theorizing a Commons beyond the Human
A commons that claims the realm beyond the human as a zone of possibility is in dialogue with the expansive domain of posthumanism that has, for the past two decades, been rethinking various ideologies that govern the relations and interactions between human and nonhuman entities. Generally speaking, posthumanist discourse has sought to challenge the boundaries defining the category of the human, those that have established and authorized human agency and consciousness as superior over other excluded beings. With the acknowledgment of the fallibility of liberal humanism, and by extension the sustained devolution of its project, has come new forms of understanding and relating to entities considered other than human.30 Within the broad imaginary of posthumanism, two overlapping trajectories of thought guide my inquiry into a commons beyond the human. The first, following Blaser and de la Cadena, is an attentiveness to the ethics and politics of knowledge that have produced the conceptual object currently known as the commons, and a reorientation of its analytic configuration as such.31 Posthumanist interventions have long troubled human epistemology as a transparent and objective lens for perceiving the world. But alongside Blaser and de la Cadena, theorists such as Isabelle Stengers, Eduardo Kohn, Donna Haraway, and María Puig de la Bellacasa have more recently expressed the urgency of cultivating new critical practices that can better accommodate the shift toward more-than-human ways of thinking.32 As Haraway writes: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”33 In this vein, a commons beyond the human engenders an expansion of the existing world designated by the commons; it is concurrently invested in the task of retelling those stories responsible for having first created the limited blueprint of that world.
At the same time, and even as the ideological potential of the term remains fundamental to my rethinking of the commons, I am wary of the reductive—and oftentimes epistemologically violent—allusion to “beyond the human.” The second line of thought that I follow involves not only a reconsideration of what constitutes the human but also the more explicit articulation of what is meant by the “beyond.” As earlier delineated, the interrogation of the human as a privileged locus of understanding illuminates the agency of those beings excluded from its boundaries; this has immediately come to encompass nonhuman animals and, by definition, has also extended to include forms of matter and other nonliving things. But the glaring erasure of perspectives on race, sexuality, and colonialism that has occurred when this universalized figure of the human is examined in the name of posthumanism can no longer be ignored.34 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that the methodological appeal to “beyond the human” “may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race.”35 Jackson cautions against the lure of the movement “beyond,” insofar as the racialized idiom of humanism has been instantiated back into such onto-epistemological paradigms of seemingly progressive thinking.
My understanding of the commons beyond the human can finally be aligned with Nadja Millner-Larsen and Gavin Butt, who have argued that the conceptual power of the commons “is orientated toward the potentiality of a future in which more might be had by the many rather than by the few.”36 I take a similar view not in spite of the implication of the commons by multiple orders of human reasoning but precisely because of this very predicament. Underlying this claim is my belief that it will do less good to abolish the commons with the idealities it encapsulates than it will to pry open the term to other, necessary meanings of what such idealities might still entail. Rather than advance yet another definition of the commons, I examine how its means of knowledge production might ensue differently, which is to say that I dislocate the concept from its existing points of epistemological orientation.37 What might this alternative framework of thinking resemble? Through what means are we best able to ethically narrate a theory of the commons that radically alters the shape of its design, and which critical vocabularies can we draw from to facilitate this endeavor? These questions surrounding the methodological construction of the commons pivot on the task of troubling humanist hierarchies of thinking, while at the same time refusing to accept this endeavor as in and of itself an altruistic one.
Speculative Ethics in a Time of Extinction
To address the above questions, I turn back to The Swan Book to examine how the figural capacity of the novel extends another story of the commons—an ethical expansion of its discursive limits through the world-making propensities of literature. My reading of The Swan Book is suggestive of how certain Aboriginal forms of knowing might inform such a conceptual reimagination of the commons.38 I focus on the idea of time as key to Deborah Bird Rose’s explication of the cultural construction of modernity that was established and glorified as a master narrative of progress during the settler conquest of Australia.39 As Rose writes, this violent founding of a new nation demanded the literal sacrifice of “Indigenous peoples, their cultures, their practices of time, their sources of power, and their systems of ecological knowledge and responsibility.”40 The ways of living and being that Rose lists here must be seen as inextricable from an all-encompassing creation ontology that serves as the cornerstone of Aboriginal law, religion, and philosophy.41 On this account, what might be considered as Indigenous Australian time must not be understood as an external measure of chronology but rather a complex “quality of life.”42 This is a temporal phenomenon that does not respond to strict demarcations of the past, present, and future; it is one that instead transcends multiple continuums of time and space, and unfolds across intergenerational histories and genealogies. It has—together with more overarching Aboriginal belief systems as its ontological provenance—been marginalized and steadily eradicated by the regime of settler colonialism.43 In the following analysis, then, and if the velocity of progressive time has served as the presiding temporal logic for liberal humanist notions of the commons, I trace those other temporalities that abound in The Swan Book, ones that refuse to be sequenced by the linear time of colonial modernity. At every narrative juncture, what the novel emphasizes is the living presence of the latter times as the temporal grounds for a commons beyond the human. By centering the experience of Aboriginal memory and time this way, it once more stresses the active realism of its existing lifeworlds that cannot be committed to the mystique of a regressive, primordial past.44
I return to the moment of fortuitous encounter between Oblivia and the black swan in the novel. This is a convergence of lifeworlds that coalesces an entanglement of more-than-human existence, which in turn generates a powerful force of resistance that shakes up a world predicated on the locus of human exceptionalism and sovereignty.45 That the swan has chosen this girl to behold it cannot therefore be read as a mere coincidence. Oblivia is no ordinary human being but one whose emphatic otherness dislocates her from the epistemological coordinates that have validated the liberal category of the human. If the swan, as Oblivia notes, had been displaced from the south of the country by worsening ecological hazards, then she too has lived “the experience of an exile.”46 As a victim of a brutal gang rape by a group of intoxicated Aboriginal youths, Oblivia is indelibly scarred by the trauma of this episode. She is shunned by her family for now being sexually contaminated and then regarded as forever lost by the rest of her extended community, who are too cowardly to be reminded of the residual shame surrounding the crime. Oblivia finds solace in the bowels of an ancient eucalyptus tree, where she becomes suspended in sleep. But in a curious twist of fate, she is found and rescued a decade later by the sea gypsy Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, a white European refugee who had always sworn that her own escape to the Australian coast was guided by the migratory flight of a swan. Oblivia resurfaces from her slumber having little recollection of the past. And if she had already been persecuted by a forced exclusion from her own Aboriginal kin, Oblivia is in her reawakening dismissed even further into the peripheries of human existence. She is reviled as a specter “best suited dead,” an unwelcome reminder of some heinous violence inflicted in the past and of the violations on Aboriginal populations still being wielded in the present.47
I argue that the relational dynamic between Oblivia and the flock of swans with which she will soon convene inscribes the ethical infrastructure for a commons beyond the human in a time of extinction without end. This alternative vision of the commons that Oblivia and the birds articulate is conceived not only in the radical interweaving of their more-than-human existences but also in their steadfast repudiation of progressive time as a key driver of prevailing conceptions of the commons. More to the point, with both the girl and black swans existing on planes of temporality irreducible to the chronology of progressive modernity, they insinuate a constant threat to the arc of linear time as a regulating framework of the liberal humanist consciousness.48 Oblivia is a survivor of the harms imposed by unresolved histories of settler colonialism and gendered violence, a stark reminder of a living temporality out of sync with the relentless passing of sequential order. And the swans are the nonhuman collateral damage of worsening climate change in the country, in search of ancient Aboriginal narratives now lost, a marker of species history and the geological epochs of deep time. What they will together articulate is an ethics answerable to the temporal modalities of an extinction event conceived not as the demise of human teleological advancement but as one that altogether exceeds it: a speculative ethics unbound by the rhetoric of progressive or prescriptive thinking.49
Soon after Oblivia’s inaugural meeting with the black swan, thousands of its feathery kin descend on the decaying swamp settlement. The otherworldly appearance of the swans is a sight that thoroughly disturbs the swamp people. In one sense, the birds are an evil sight for the locals, “created by devils”; they are suspected of being the final radioactive weapon of mass destruction that the army has put in place for the annihilation of the settlement.50 The swans recall the 2007 Australian governmental reform agenda launched to address the social, political, and economic disadvantage affecting the Indigenous populations in the country, more specifically known as the Closing the Gap initiative.51 Associated with the pervasiveness of these interventionist policies, the swans’ hostile reception by the swamp people exposes the government’s humanitarian reasoning as a facade for abstract and insidious state-sanctioned violence. But in another sense, the birds connote an alarming presence because the locals “feared any ancient business that was not easily translatable in the local environment.”52 These displaced flocks from the south of the country are not only a literal source of ecological endangerment to the biodiversity of the other species native to the territory. They also puncture the veneer of the lives of the swamp people with their intimate but opaque connection to the “stories in the oldest Law scriptures,” stories that are profoundly disconcerting insofar as they have since been lost.53 What the swans also represent is a recessive point of cultural origin: the endless black ribbons of their flock plummeting down onto the waters are a persistent, but also inexplicable, reminder of the vestiges of nonhuman life that have long existed on a different scale of planetary time.
Unlike the rest of the settlement’s inhabitants, Oblivia is unfazed by the swans. She follows Bella Donna, who has extended her caregiving role to the birds, deciding that she herself “would be fluent in swan talk.”54 As a reflection of her own search for a past she has never been able to recall, Oblivia expresses a peculiar inclination for uncovering the mysteries of the avian migratory route toward the swamp. The swans have been banished into newfound territory “where they have no story line for taking them back,” a thus far uncharted terrain except perhaps by their ancestors from another time now forgotten.55 This is a story that has no beginning and therefore a narrative that Oblivia finds a striking affinity with: she who has “disowned her people by acting as though she had bypassed human history, by being directly descended from their ancestral tree.”56 In contrast to the other children at the settlement, whose lives have developed along a trajectory of reproductive continuity, Oblivia’s unexpected return fractures this semblance of temporal normalcy in which the swamp people are now desperately abiding. Her presence at the settlement is a painful reminder of a spiritual rebirth cursed by the irrecoverable absence of Aboriginal origins; the sacred eucalyptus tree from which she resurfaced was eventually destroyed by the army, “a loss that was so great, it made [the swamp people] feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity.”57 Oblivia is further believed to have circumvented the account of human inception and advancement that the locals, by their own necessity, had internalized in the years following their invasion and occupation by armed forces of the state. Her durational existence is an ideological interference for how it “stands still.”58 It cannot simply be relegated to a distant Aboriginal past, but neither can it be ascribed to the present measure of life that has been sutured to a specific definition of what counts as human. If Mark Rifkin has identified the irreconciliation of these temporal positions as the “double bind” that Native peoples occupy within dominant settler reckonings of time, then Oblivia exemplifies the marked refusal of either orientation.59
That white European colonizers of Australia brought with them a particular temporal frame of reference, one with a linear, progressive directive to the future as a transcendence of the past, constitutes a given knowledge that imbues the entirety of the novel. On the one hand, the ramifications of this universalizing gesture of modernity are distilled in the legal and political violence enacted on the Aboriginal people at the swamp. It is a form of control proliferated until “there was full traction over what these people believed and permeance over their ability to . . . define what it meant to be human, without somebody else making that decision for them.”60 Because of their anachronistic position in the historical trajectory now installed for the country, the swamp dwellers are condemned for their particular failure to correspond to the rubrics of settler colonial time. But what Wright presents on the other hand—the Indigenous assimilation of the juridical apparatus of progress as illustrated by the character of Warren Finch—is an alternative consequence that proves even more insidious for the continued oppression of Aboriginal peoples. Finch belongs to the Brolga Nation, the Indigenous community set in direct opposition to that of the swamp dwellers for their embodiment of the aspirational sentiment to be “good Black people, not seen as troublemakers, radicals, or people who made Australians feel uneasy.”61 As an antithesis to the tragic fate of those “damned people” at the swamp, the Brolga Nation has readily acceded to the modes of recognition legitimized by the settler colonial state; their upward mobility is the result of successfully modeling the dominant outlook of the country at the expense of their own vanishing history.62 It comes as no surprise, then, that Finch is introduced as a man who “stared at the future.”63 In his compliance with a master plan for his eventual ascendency to the highest political office in the country, Finch is a hyperbole for what Elizabeth Povinelli has called “the impossible object of authentic self-identity” in the context of Australian liberal multiculturalism.64 He is eagerly absorbed into the national imaginary of the country as a preeminent icon of authentic Aboriginal culture, a process that disingenuously relies on the systemic renunciation of the alterity intrinsic to that culture itself.65 It is on account of his “post-racial” or “post-Indigenous” achievement that the novel exacts a critique of the deceptively inclusive axiom of multiculturalism revered by the Brolga Nation, a discourse that exerts its pernicious logic by way of the dissolution of Aboriginal cultural difference.66
In some ways, Oblivia is a mere plot device for the advancement of Finch’s messianic life story, long foretold by his elders—she is his “promised wife first lady” whom he abducts from the settlement, forcibly marries in a ceremony televised nationwide, and finally imprisons in his glass-enclosed apartment in the southern capital.67 Finch proceeds to remotely detonate the swamp settlement, which compels the swans to be on the move yet again. And on this note, it has perhaps also been foreseen that the swans will come to Oblivia’s rescue; they have, after all, always connoted a lifeline for her. Each time she watched the birds lift off from the polluted waters of the settlement back then, she had already “[felt] the miracle of leaving . . . the lightness of being airborne.”68 Their otherworldly disposition in the narrative, as indicative of a speculative ecology of more-than-human ethics, invites the prospect of departure from the multiple forces of continued colonization that are circulating in the text. The gesture toward this alternative ideality hereby comes to be suggestive of a commons that encompasses a plurality of lifeworlds beyond the human, those same lifeworlds that have eluded the temporal grasp of colonial modernity. Accordingly, this is a commons theorized against the normative conceptual imaginary in the foreground of the text—since exposed for the hypocrisy of supposedly progressive politics—and reassessed to account for more ethical acts of world-making that most crucially involve those beings long banished to the margins of humanity. Oblivia and the swans are exactly these existents in the novel, dwelling in the antihumanist thresholds of dominant settler colonial time and rupturing its otherwise uninterrupted flow. By staying with the temporal bearings of the commons concept reimagined as such, they refuse to be implicated in any semblance of a redemptive future. If the possibilities of another commons might be perceived in the speculative entanglement of their being, it is a vision that is—and must be—entirely incommensurate with the epistemological continuity of liberal humanism. This is to say that there is no reassuring narrative of progress that Oblivia and the flock will actualize, then, at least not one that can be subsumed by the ideologies that they seek precisely to elude. In the southern city, the swans are preparing for what will be their final migratory path up north. Oblivia senses that the birds are “in training for something even they had not quite anticipated.”69 Indeed, there is no regimen that can prepare them for what is to come. When news breaks of Finch’s assassination, Oblivia and the flock embark on a long flight back to the swamp settlement. This is a journey that will result in the extinction of the black swans.
But even, or perhaps especially, in the finitude of their deaths, the swans continue to be reminiscent of a disturbance at the temporal limits of human life. The commons to which they refer is a thoroughly disconcerting concept as much as it is also a transformative possibility of survival. Worn down by an endless drought that stretches across the country, the swans eventually “stand on baked earth and hiss at the sky they cannot reach, then the time arrives when no more sound comes from their open beaks.”70 This marks a silencing of their strange swansong as extinguished by the anthropogenic hazards of the environment. If the swans have succumbed to a certain climatic threat of extinction, however, their demise refers only to a single facet of life that can be understood as the eschatological end point of humanity. The birds are in fact illustrative of a lifeworld that exceeds this restricted posture of depletion: as their “weak, feather-torn necks drop to the ground,” the dying swans are now awaiting—with their wings still spread—“spirit flight.”71 They symbolize another definition of existence at this moment, in other words, one consonant with the Aboriginal imaginary that has inevitably become intertwined with, but more importantly still extends beyond, a crisis of the human condition. Both in life and now in death, the swans are impelled by a temporal orientation that will return them to their ancestral community of the land.72 In this sense, their extinction event should be thought of less as a vanishing of an entire species than a final questioning of the idea of extinction itself, coded as yet another structuring narrative of human development.73 The incertitude that accompanies the fate of the swans thus becomes resonant not only with the multitude of lifeworlds that it paradoxically illuminates at the point of their vanquishing. It is also reflective of the dissonance of their temporal presence from the gratifications of progress that ensconce liberal humanist thinking up until its very end. The swans ultimately express the oftentimes unsettling effort of apprehending the commons in a different way, one that is nevertheless imperative for its ethical commitment to life beyond the human.
What might the commons look like when it is conceived beyond the limits of acceptable forms of living? How might its transformative impulse not simply reproduce a future of the same? At the convergence of these questions, The Swan Book envisions a prospect of the commons more ethically gleaned from the Aboriginal imaginary, from modes of knowing and knowledge-making that have been cast as marginal to the human and by this logic attenuated in their utility for liberal, progressive politics. And with the speculative tendency of the novel orienting its readers not toward worlds of an inconceivable nature but rather ones that have long existed and in fact once thrived beyond their narrow, epistemological fields of perception, a commons beyond the human gathers in its pages as a very real and tangible possibility.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at Environmental Humanities for their constructive suggestions that have made this article a much sharper and more incisive one. Special thanks also to Irving Goh, Elizabeth Grosz, Anjuli Gunaratne, and Logan O’Laughlin for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of the essay.
Notes
Wright’s depiction of the swamp settlement recalls the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response that was enacted by the Australian government. “The Intervention,” as it is now more colloquially known, involved the deployment of the military to enforce a series of highly controversial measures that actively legalized the discrimination of Aboriginal people and undermined their rights to land and property.
The earliest reference to the black swan as a thing of perceived impossibility (OED Online, s.v. “black swan, n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/282957/ [accessed 28 July 2020]) has more recently been refashioned by Taleb, Black Swan.
Wright, Swan Book, 13; emphasis in original.
In recent years, the conceptual analytic of entanglement has gained much traction in the wider domain of the environmental humanities. See van Dooren on “multispecies entanglements” (Flight Ways, 4); see also Daley, “Fabulation,” who argues that Oblivia and the swans offer a relational identity of inhuman life.
Wright’s two other novels are Plains of Promise and Carpentaria.
Leane, “Historyless People,” 155. This term confronts the label of “magical realism” that has often been used to classify Wright’s work.
Leane explains that Wright’s narratives have been described as “magical,” or “mythical,” which has the effect of legitimating only a Western understanding of reality. See also Ravenscroft, “Dreaming of Others.”
See Sefton-Rowston, “Hope,” for such a defamiliarizing treatment of hope that the novel enacts.
For a more extensive survey of the historical origins of the commons, see Linebaugh, Magna Carta Manifesto; Caffentzis, “Commons.”
Where Caffentzis ascribes confusion over the current definitions of the commons to its propensity for “metaphorical expansion” (“Future of ‘The Commons,’” 24), I find the very capaciousness of the term productive for my article.
See Nelson, “Enduring Appeal of the Commons,” for an overview of both old and new uses of the commons.
See Klein, “Reclaiming the Commons”; Linebaugh, Magna Carta Manifesto; Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!; Caffentzis, “Future of ‘The Commons’”; De Angelis and Stavrides, “On the Commons”; Reid and Taylor, Recovering the Commons; Harvey, “Future of the Commons”; Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons”; Federici, Re-enchanting the World; Federici, “Women, Reproduction, and the Commons”; De Angelis, “Does Capital Need a Commons Fix?”; De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia; Caffentzis and Federici, “Commons against and beyond Capitalism”; Mezzandra, “Resonances of the Common”; Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World; Stavrides, Common Space.
Caffentzis and Federici, “Commons against and beyond Capitalism,” i94. For them, primitive accumulation signaled the beginnings of the modern capitalist society in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
Berlant argues that the aspirational sign of the commons should itself be subjected to suspicion, insofar as it occludes the political struggle necessary for its realization (“Commons,” 395).
The ambivalent relationship between the commons and capital is further explored by De Angelis, “Does Capital Need a Commons Fix?”
See De Angelis, “Tragedy of the Capitalist Commons”; Caffentzis, “Future of ‘The Commons’”; Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons”; Caffentzis and Federici, “Commons against and beyond Capitalism.”
This includes existing scholarship on the multispecies or nonhuman commons, in which human and nonhuman species become entangled in ways that refuse conventional meaning. See Baynes-Rock, “Life and Death.” My thinking on the commons differs from such work in its critique of the human-centered frameworks of knowledge that have secured the idea of the commons in the first place.
Berlant, “Commons,” 395. Berlant is skeptical of this affective attachment to the utopian construct of the commons, insofar as it risks the collapse of what is better into what merely feels better (399).
Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 21; emphasis original.
For approaches that have run both parallel to and in critique of posthumanism, see Grusin, Nonhuman Turn; Luciano and Chen, “Introduction”; Singh, Unthinking Mastery.
Blaser and de la Cadena have themselves proposed the making of an “uncommons” (“Pluriverse,” 4). See also Haines and Hitchcock, “Introduction.”
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12. Haraway extends this from Strathern, Gender of the Gift.
For similar critiques, see Chen, Animacies; Jackson, “Animal”; Jackson, “Outer Worlds”; Jackson, Becoming Human; Sundberg, “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies”; Nyong’o, “Little Monsters”; Todd, “Indigenous Feminist’s Take.”
Jackson, “Outer Worlds,” 215. Jackson aligns this with “an attempt to move beyond race, and in particular blackness” (216; emphasis in original).
Millner-Larsen and Butt, “Introduction,” 402. For more speculative ideations of the commons, see Muñoz, “Brown Commons.”
See Harney and Moten, Undercommons, on the dislocative effect of the undercommons.
Along these lines, recent scholarship in Indigenous studies has shown how Aboriginal ecological knowledges, in particular, might be able to articulate geographies beyond the human. See, for example, Raven, Robinson, and Hunter, “Emu.”
It is key to note that Australia was first established as a British penal colony in 1788.
In accordance with the multiplicity of Aboriginal languages from different regions of Australia, this creation ontology is known by names such as Tjukurpa, Alcheringa, Ungud, and more. Although it has most commonly been translated into English as “The Dreaming,” the reduced form of this term simply cannot account for the inherent complexities of Aboriginal meaning. See Nicholls, “‘Dreamtime’ and ‘The Dreaming.’”
See Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time. Rifkin focuses primarily on the Native American context, but his observations about the colonizing tendencies of settler time are nevertheless informative for my own arguments.
On the idea of sovereignty in the novel, see Mead, “Unjusticeable”; Mead, “Unresolved Sovereignty.” On Indigenous sovereignty in the social and historical context of settler colonial Australia, see Moreton-Robinson, Sovereign Subjects; Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive.
On the temporal disorientation in the novel, see Fisher, “Untidy Times.”
Wright, Swan Book, 42; emphasis in original. See also Council of Australian Governments, “Closing the Gap in Partnership.”
Wright, Swan Book, 72; emphasis in original.
See Povinelli on the “impossible demand” (Cunning of Recognition, 8) placed on Indigenous people as a consequence of the convergences between liberalism and multiculturalism in Australia.
See Rose on this orientation “towards origins” rather than a future state (Reports from a Wild Country, 55).
For a key work on thinking extinction as such, see Colebrook, “Extinct Theory”; Death of the PostHuman.
