[-empyre-] aesthetics / gestalten

[simon]

On 17/04/16 08:00, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> black
> Maori cultural work -- could you tell us more how they perceive "collapsed time"?
several accounts exist, weighty with references, hardly liquid at all, 
like this one: 
http://press.anu.edu.au//austronesians/inside/mobile_devices/ch08s06.html

My own sense of the marae's collapsed time, in the sense of senses, 
including somatic orientation, and, in the title of the volume Richard 
Kearney recently edited, 'carnal hermeneutics', finds an additional 
orientation in Gilles Deleuze ... already weighing us down with references!

Paul Tapsell provided the keynote for the conference Johannes refers to, 
where I conducted a workshop in a theatre form developed from several 
years work with Minus Theatre, /theatre of individual life/. Paul, of 
Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, spoke of the collapsed time of the 
marae, where ancestors (Tipuna) and gods (Atua) are actively present; he 
also spoke of the marae as the parliaments of Maori, 800 of them 
existing before European settlement, where the women were the 
"economists" and the men and women were and are in audience before the 
Tipuna and Atua, the Taonga adorning the Wharenui: so there is a 
relationship between time and power (political economy) on the marae. 
Note that between these 800 marae were apportioned every square inch of 
mountain, stream and land of Aotearoa, a distribution that was itself 
fluid and to each marae belonged a number not exceeding 180 people, the 
maximum before the decision-making processes, self-sufficiency and 
autonomy of marae would be difficult to manage. Naturally, European 
settlement has forever taken power from marae, first by force, now under 
law, even under conditions of reconciliation. The Waitangi Tribunal, as 
Paul said, does not recognise marae as bases of power and the government 
will not negotiate with them; it will only pay out 'settlements' and 
agree to the sums involved to the legally recognised entities of Iwi and 
the representatives of these, predominantly male. It might be said that 
the time structure goes ignored with the power structure of Maori.

I realise I am here concerned with the imbrication of political economy 
and collapsed time, which is timely I think. It also speaks to the 
compound of time found in Deleuze's notion of the time-image that too 
has a political component.

Johannes asks about a certain instrumentation communicating "beyond 
racial terms", when within racial terms, those of Maori, marae became at 
the end of the 19th century places the power of which came from them as 
places of death, /beyond/ itself. At this time the marae's main use was 
for the ritual of death, the Tangihanga, leading to the rise of the 
priestly caste, Tohunga, who thereat officiated, and further to the 
Prophet Movement of Maori messianism. This last was quashed under the 
Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907. The shift in "sites of mourning and 
recovery" it appears "connect us all" in racial terms communicated under 
the instrumentation of the law.

Best,
Simon


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