In the Name of the People. Liaisons
absence of borders—and against those who traverse numerous communities in their hearts (provoking daily conflicts between the border guards and the traditionalists who refuse colonial passports), the nomadic mode of impropriety involves an intensive dose of circulation. It is only through perpetual movement beyond one’s “plot of land” that nomadism can hope to attain an exhaustive understanding of the interdependence of natural processes in their smallest ramifications, an intelligence whose spiritual counterpart is animism, and whose political consequence is the rejection of development.
Nothing could be further from progressivism, obviously. Yet it is not any more conservative than progressive, since this nomadic conception by definition is in constant movement. For in the absence of movement, all that is solid melts into air: the trail of hunting tracks would be lost, the animals would not offer themselves anymore, the connections with other peoples would be poisoned, and isolation would lead to entropy. Songs and stories would soon be lost if a continual remembrance, a migration of thought in the mode of transmission, did not constantly call them back to memory. So goes the movement of tradition, which is forgotten as soon as it loses contact with the other to bring the self back to its original otherness. Such a practice, lost to some, will return to them through others, who will lose it in turn if the first ones do not come to remind them. This is because nomadism is the quintessential form-of-life of contact, which revives tradition at the point of touch: the time of tradition is carried in the flesh.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, if the nomad is the “one who does not depart” (A Thousand Plateaus), the tradition’s necessity for contact is far from confining beings to their immediate environment: on Turtle Island, the fluxes were considerably distended, at the level of the river network that supplies most of the continent, from the Yukon to the Mississippi. But the fact is that despite the distance, these relations passed inevitably through touch. For example, the presence of Cherokee culture (from the southeastern United States) among the Potawatomi (based at the south of the Great Lakes) would not have occurred without the movement of real bodies having traveled—through an effort hardly imaginable to us—up to “their” territory. As a result, the relationships found themselves to be highly exposed, in all of their vulnerability, as well as—if we are to think in terms of power relations—their violence.
Our hypothesis is that the reason for this necessity of contact in a nomadic-animist regime, which makes Native separatism an ungovernable tradition in the eyes of the imperial powers, lies in its self-destituent nature. The art of proximities, as a situation-oriented ethics, is a mode of non-government characterized by the material impossibility of a concentration of prestige beyond a certain threshold that would enable it to reach subjugated subjects. This is the nature of what Pierre Clastres calls the “continual effort to prevent chiefs from being chiefs, it is the refusal of unification, the endeavor to exorcise the One, the State” (Society Against the State). Here, there are no more subjects than there are objects, but one purely subtractive multiplicity (Deleuze’s “n – 1”), where decisions (under the traditional horizontal systems pillaged by American democracy) take the time they need.
This idea is crucial in order to grasp the intrinsic difference between destituent separatism and constituent sovereigntism. In a “materialist” perspective—in a sense much broader than Marxism understands it—the constitution of a mode of government capable of projecting and imposing its operations on distant peoples must be understood through the material means by which it spreads and enforces itself. If relations, within the mode of non-government proper to a time of tradition, are held in the flesh, the governmental regime of colonial time must disincarnate them. Which is to say, turn them into inert matter, disanimate them. Animism, however, does not know any “matter” as a separate category: matter is always already there, living and shaped in a way that is inseparable throughout all relations—familial, ritual, political, or hunting. The first colonists, who landed on Turtle Island imbued with a scholastic-intellectual tradition, had only such inanimate matter on their minds, most of their thought struggling to distinguish it from the soul. Thus, from the outset, they searched for that which they could develop on this continent, an attitude that only intensified over time, while 95 percent of Americas’ Indigenous population was annihilated. Only then could the romantics mistake a cemetery for a “wilderness” (William M. Denevan, The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492).
Against the tradition of contact—against all tradition—particular to a territory, colonialism had to substitute an empty and abstract space to make place for the infrastructures that would take the place of traditions once held in the flesh. This relegation of contact to infrastructures would tend toward an inexorable monopoly, which continues to be pursued today through those infrastructures that we fallaciously call “virtual.” By forcibly changing relations—which then become “social”—to make themselves the go-betweens, the infrastructures and facilities obstructed the possibility of contact in favor of this inextricable entanglement of optimization that we call technology. Evidently, the maintenance of this system of interdependencies presupposed and required the constitution of a state to ensure its functioning. In this way, contact turns out to be more separatist than infrastructure, insofar as it immediately and entirely carries in its smallest fragments the entirety of a culture.
This phenomenon is the logistical setback of the materialism applied by Benedict Anderson in his reading of the emergence of modern nationalism (Imagined Communities). If Anderson reveals the determining role of print capitalism—first and foremost the daily newspapers—in the constitution of the homogenous time and language through which a national entity can be imagined, his focus on the field of representation leads him to underestimate the infra-symbolic material conditions that allow it to unfold. Newspapers, which inculcate the feeling of a quotidian continuity in a given cultural unit, would be nothing without the roads—and eventually the trucks—that distribute them to the four corners of the “imagined” nation.
Benedict Anderson’s analysis—which attributes the imagination of the nation primarily to the unification of language brought about by mass printing—allows us to pinpoint what, in separatism, “makes a difference.” In effect, in indigeneity, it is not only because of the extrinsic links between the different dialects, whose contact only increases their heterogeneity by creating Creoles and Pidgins, but also the internal articulation of languages that creates the possibility of a “nation.” The encounters between Europeans and Native Americans is so recent that Native languages have been able to keep their structure relatively safe from colonial syntaxes. In spite of modern attempts to annihilate their use of their own languages by educating Native children in colonial residential schools, the vestiges of these languages offer rare examples of an adherence between spoken word and territory, of which they are the symbolic and sonic expression. Some Mohawk traditionalists say that their language tunes to the telluric frequency of the territory from which it originates, echoing its plants, animals, and uses at the specific resonance of a given geographical constitution.
Could it be that the structure of Indigenous languages themselves contain something that resists the colonial matrix?4 This would explain both the colonizers’ relentless effort to exterminate these languages that are unfit for trade, as well as their astonishing survival five hundred years after contact. The practice and memory of these languages has become essential not just for cultural transmission and the history of a people, but also as a real support for the match between a mode of life and a vision of the world—a shared truth.
On the other hand, the fact that colonization and the operationalization of language is still ongoing even within our own Indo-European languages allows us to believe that they might carry something else, something like a mode of living that resists—a nomadic language inhabiting the perpetual movement of the verb. We would have to break open our language from within (using as much etymology as poetry) to see how Indo-European languages could only have become colonial through the force of a long history of struggles crystallized in language. This still leaves its traces in even the smallest of our statements.
V: JUNCTION
It is up to us to distinguish this originally animist “accursed share” presumed at the basis of any culture, and that which is a part of the colonizer mentality, in the sense of a