Capitalism policy sustains itself through haunting; the aff is a necessary challenge to structures at the level of the spectral

With Phillipe Pignarre, Stengers has explored what keeps us spellbound by capitalism; how it comes to appear inevitable and unstoppable; how it attaches to us, binding us to its programs (Pignarre and Stengers 2011). Other possibilities are turned aside, made difficult, curtailed, as we are lured in and entrapped by capitalism’s enchantments. Thinking of being spellbound, we might consider settler colonial justifications of ongoing dispossession as itself a kind of possession, as a way being possessed, of being put under a spell and alienated from other ways of thinking and being.16 It takes new spells to weaken the force of these powerful ontological bindings, and they cannot be cast by individuals operating on their own. Alliances matter. What might be called spellbinding can also be called haunting, depending on one’s standpoint. Invoking the spectral can bend social policy ethnography toward the hauntings that policy also bequeaths as trace effects, residues, and sediments, within any present-time “milieu.” Recall that real ghosts haunted the women’s toilets of the Chan Building, from where the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program was coordinated (chapter 2). Women were afraid to enter the ablution area, sensing something apparitional in there, gaping yet hidden. Who knows what happened in the corridors of that old building, or on its soil prior, that a ghost might still be wandering there? For women who police their physical movements based on absent-present threats every single day, it is not too hard to think of possible scenarios. Policy hauntings thus might literally refer to spectrally inhabited bureaucratic spaces that are animated by invisible yet felt forces. And there are metaphorical phantoms. Let’s not forget that the minister who banned my presence from that haunted Chan Building issued her edict as a verbal warrant, becoming an apparition in another guise. Unauthored bureaucratic edicts have their own spectral powers. Hauntings can also refer to the ways policies past and present are physically incorporated, having (insidiously or noisily) seeped into lives, affecting probable destinies and shaping overall circumstances, if not immutably then certainly as a powerful stimulus. Individuals are hindered or facilitated by the ghosts of policy pasts manifesting, for instance, as privileged or underfunded schooling, as life-sustaining potable water or water so contaminated that deaths are inevitable. Policies past and current adhere to bodies and things, making privilege feel earned and inequality feel natural, the product of personal destiny and pure choice. Perhaps a more familiar way of understanding policy hauntings, at least since Foucault, is to consider the dominant paradigms that are encoded within black-letter policy documents or, as I have referred to them, within policy artifacts.17 Policy vocabularies reflect (are shackled by) their own deeply invested socioeconomic logics. They require all things (animate and inanimate) to serve the settlers’ currently dominating form of existence, as a necessary condition of citizenship within the nation-state. Policy emphases and abandonments aggregate around an inherited and taken-for-granted cultural core. It is not simply paperwork about or served to Indigenous people that encodes what happens to whom, how, for what kind of money. Policy involves paperwork—the artifactual—but it is also an inheritance (which I have termed hauntological) that shapes conditions of possibility in the present and future. As a cultural formation, settler policy is an ancient mode of draining lifeworlds entirely legally, without visible violence or notable theft, via contracts, grants, regulations, negotiations, standards, accountabilities, and enumeration, and the avoidance, thwarting, attenuation, noncounting, or perennial bastardization of all these mechanisms, which together constitute a settler colonial policy hauntology that Indigenous people continually weather (Lea, Howey, and O’Brien 2018, Neu 2000). Here we might think about files, and what is kept in and what is missing from them (Vismann 2008). Forms, and what they do and don’t count (Hull 2012). Archives, and what they attract and repel (Yale 2015). Regulations, and what they protect or safeguard: a river occasionally (Neale 2017) or, more commonly, “deregulated” banking with financial regulations directed into banking’s profitable favor (Sikka and Lehman 2015). And I would include in this minigathering myriad other forms of policy blindness, where phenomena are not investigated in order that they cannot occupy a named policy existence—the levels of lead, cadmium, and other contaminants in groundwater where mining and people coexist being one such institutionally endorsed sightlessness (Kristensen and Taylor 2016).18 Policy hauntology encompasses these kinds of governance assumptions and adds something more. Tottering infrastructure and hollowed and gutted regulatory supervision are policy inheritances too, reflecting relational histories of human and other agencies. These relational histories include the gestational and corrosive contributions of water, soil, contaminants, human and nonhuman critters and their unstable, shifting sustenance systems—representing an intra-active metabolism with different ingredients reappearing and disappearing over time. Policy hauntings exist even where they don’t seem to. One day you might push against foam-filled wall cladding and have it spill cockroach leavings, for the wall’s insides have been eaten hollow by termites welcomed in by their friend, electrolyte water. Water pushes into weaknesses in buildings shaken by storms then left porous by the baking of hot days and the slaking of more rain; a permeability that can be made more, or less, fragile by the quality of policy-fed interventions and resurrections. By the quality, that is, of mesolevel (in)attention at multiple points in a policy’s mutations as it intra-acts with the environments that summon and authorize policy interventions. And then there are the hauntings of past violations that some Indigenous people might carry inside themselves as secret wounds stemming from microand macropolicy: from the abuses of a disdainful school clerk to the heartwrenching moment when a family is evicted, merging with inherited memories of murders and massacres haunting contaminated swamps, still too close in time for emotional neutering; and always, a sense of a judging sentient environment that might be pleased, or likely disappointed, with a person’s level of attunement and care within the meso of a particular clan member’s kin and country.19 In Karrabing hands, settler policy operates like viral matter, with discarded ideas and jettisoned programs from long ago still able to intercept contemporary lives, mingling with new openings and foreclosings. Karrabing members’ probative work and counterfactuals show that the contemporary is not “now” in the singular but a composite formation of multiple times. The contaminated swamp our fugitives hide in overnight is the real site of a real asbestos dumping ground, shoveled there from leftover military installations, from and through which new connections with ecologically altered and somewhat hostile ancestral forces are also forged. As untrained actors and amateur production crew, the Karrabing have been using techniques members would say are “story but true”: taking things from life that could have happened to challenge configurations of “the truth.” People are shown to be many things at once: hunters; families; married couples; loving parents; lovers in and out of love; cohorts squabbling across the generations; welfare beneficiaries and public housing tenants; jobholders; students; hospital patients; bush people and city people; drinkers; smokers; fighters—and people who, obliged to their country, get things done, when push comes to shove. The improvisational realism of film scripts mirrors the makeshift workarounds of everyday life, where obstacles include jail time, hospital episodes, negotiating lost bank-card details, the spatial tethering of a court order or a suspended driver’s license, and incarceration or eviction from accumulating fines. Members are resilient without this being a romantic way of being, as policy hauntings render both city and bush life equally precarious.