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NOMADS, CAPTURE AND COLONISATION

For a long time, the term ‘war-machine’ was associated with the type of military-industrial complex which emerged in the advanced industrial countries after 1945. Deleuze and Guattari use the term in this sense in their description of the post-war evolution of the nation-state, when they suggest that it is now plausible to view the major industrial states as subordinated to a global warmachine, a single many-headed monster whose most striking feature is its awesome destructive power: ‘We have watched the war-machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:422). Since the publication of A Thousand Plateaus in France in 1980, and in the aftermath of the ‘wars’ against Iraq and Serbia, the term has become commonly used to refer to anything remotely connected to the military capacity of a nation-state or multinational organisation such as NATO.
   

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See Stivale’s extended schizoanalytic analysis of this film and the documentary sequel Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness (Stivale 1998:27–70). Stivale comments that ‘Colonel Kurtz’s apparent desire and (narrated) “becomings” that so tempt Willard during his journey relate directly to the dream of merging with the flows of a warrior band in a nomadic military operation supposedly beyond the limited logic of the US Government’s war machine’ (Stivale 1998:34).
The forms of nomadism in actual societies are typically to be understood as a mixture of these distinct modes of social existence. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the formal differences are important since ‘it is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judgement on the mix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:410).
‘The authors’ reservations about anthropology do not prevent them from using it in two important ways: first, they borrow heavily from anthropological sources, and second, they make anthropological statements of their own’ (Miller 1993:13).
See their defensive comment at the end of Plateau 12: ‘We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war-machine to the nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that the war-machine as such was invented’ (Deleuze and Guatttari 1987:422).
See William Connolly’s micropolitical analysis of the emergence of a right to die in Connolly 1999:146–9.
Despite the fact that the first Governor of the colony of New South Wales was under instructions to take possession of lands only ‘with the consent of the natives’ and despite the long history of colonial negotiations and treaties with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, the British authorities chose not to regard the indigenous inhabitants of Australia as settled peoples with their own law and government. Instead, they opted for the fiction that New South Wales had been acquired ‘as desert and uninhabited’. This principle was clearly stated by the British Privy Council in an 1889 case, Cooper v.Stuart, when it declared Australia to be a Crown colony acquired by settlement on the grounds that it was ‘a tract of territory practically unoccupied without settled inhabitants or settled law’ (Reynolds 1996:16, 110).
‘Just as eighteenth century colonial law harboured rules governing such matters as the constitutional status of colonies, the relative powers of the Imperial Parliament and local assemblies, and the reception of English law, it also contained rules concerning the status of the native peoples living under the Crown’s protection, and the position of their lands, customary laws, and political institutions. These rules form a body of unwritten law known collectively as the doctrine of aboriginal rights. The part dealing specifically with native lands is called the doctrine of aboriginal title’ (Slattery 1987:737).
Johnson v.M’lntosh 21 US (Wheat) 543 (1823) at pp. 547, 573–4.
For Aotearoa/New Zealand see R v.Symonds (1847) NZPCC, 387; for Canada, see St Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Company v. The Queen (1888) 14 AC 46.
Mabo v.Queensland (1992) is reported at 175 CLR 1; 66 ALJR 408; 107 ALJR 1. It is published in book form, with commentary by Richard H.Bartlett, as The Mabo Decision, Sydney: Butterworths, 1993.
For example, the Chief Justice said in his judgment that ‘the common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterising the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organisation to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land’ (Bartlett 1993:41).

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In a Deleuzian analysis of Canadian aboriginal politics (which in several respects parallels this account of aboriginal title jurisprudence) Kara Shaw emphasises the degree to which both the trial judge’s 1993 decision in Delgamuukw v.British Columbia and the 1997 Appeal decision by the Supreme Court amount to a reassertion of the sovereignty of the colonial State as the ground of any claim to special rights. At the same time, with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the politics of minority and the majoritarian politics of the axiomatic (see Chapter 2, pp. 47–8), she points to the important sense in which these legal decisions also serve to expose the irreducible gap between the aspirations of the Gitskan and Wet’suwet’en plaintiffs and the available forms of recognition within the axiomatic of the colonial State. Without seeking to deny the importance of changes at the level of the axioms, she shows the sense in which, for the aboriginal plaintiffs as for Deleuze and Guattari, the domain of politics is not exhausted by struggle at this level (Shaw 1999:280–308).
Calder et al v.Attorney-General of British Columbia (1973) 34 DLR (3d) 145.
Re Southern Rhodesia 1919 AC 211, at 233–4. Cited in Bartlett 1993:26–7, 144.
This view was enshrined in the common law of the colony in R v.Murrell (1 Legge 72). This case, heard in 1836, involved the trial of two aboriginal men for killing another aboriginal man. The defence argument that the defendants should not be tried under British law since they were acting in accordance with tribal law was rejected on the grounds that native customs were not worthy of recognition as laws. Rather, these customs were considered ‘only such as are consistent with a state of greatest darkness and irrational superstition’ (Reynolds 1996:62). In an 1847 case, Attorney-General v.Brown (1 Legge 312), the judge explicitly refused to recognise any aboriginal customary law in relation to land when he asserted that ‘the waste lands of this colony are, and ever have been, from the time of its first settlement in 1788, in the Crown’, for the simple reason that there was ‘no other proprietor of such lands’.
Delgamuukw v.British Columbia (1991) 3 WWR 97 at 219–23. Cited in Asch 1999:438.
Van der Peet v. The Queen (1996) 137 DLR (4th) 289 (SCC). In this case the Canadian Supreme Court directly addressed the question of the nature and content of aboriginal rights, arguing that these should be understood as the means whereby the assertion of Crown sovereignty is reconciled with the fact of prior occupation by distinctive aboriginal societies.

 


Date: 2015-01-11; view: 684


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