In the project of marking white futurity, the Native is endlessly laminated to death and incessant violation by the settler, provoking a relentless occupation of space in search of the Settler time of the future, foreclosing indigenous futures and instituting Western man as the interpreter of the world.

The process of converting time into space is part of the modern (geo)poloitical imaginary. Not only is the slicing up of the globe into various blocks of space part of the writing of colonial politics, so too is the organization of these blocks into “primitive,” “backward,” “modern,” and “advanced” temporal zones. This in fact is not converting time into space, but making both and ordering of political power. Time can be linearized, but only at a loss. Accordingly, the writing of the colonial other, from its roots in Western anthropology, has historically placed the native other in a time different than the present, which is occupied by the writing subject. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) calls this the denial of coevalness—a term that becomes the gloss for a situation where the non-European other’s hierarchically 87 distancing localization suppresses the simultaneity and contemporaneity of contact/the ethnographic encounter. The temporal structures so constituted in this way place anthropologists and their readers in a privileged timeframe, banishing the non-European other to a stage of lesser development. This situation is ultimately exemplified by the deployment of such essentially temporal categories as “primitive” to establish and demarcate anthropology’s traditional object. The discipline’s neo-Darwinist evolutionary doctrine—constituted at the intersection of scientism and Enlightenment belief in progress, as well as colonial ethnocentrism—in turn codified anthropology’s temporal orientation. As readers of Darwin know, none of this if found in Darwin’s original writing, but rather is a colloquial interpretation. In this way, contemporaneous ‘scientific’ categories like “savage,” “barbaric,” and “civilized” signified stages of historical development. This approach to time and the other not only illustrates how geopolitical discourse and the forms of colonialism that it has helped legitimate continue to be aided by a notion of universal human progress, but also draws attention to the temporalities that are erased under the continuing expansion of Western modernity. Flat, linear, teleological perspectives on time and development leave no space for divergent temporalities, ways of viewing the past, or alternative ways of imagining the future. This is a problem Mark Rifkin (2017) addresses in his book, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, arguing the need for “not just a more expansive or inclusive version of ‘history’ or the ‘present’ but an examination of the principles, procedures, inclinations, and orientations that constitute settler time as a particular way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality” (emph. added ii). As both Rifkin and Fabian emphasize, political space and political time are ideologically construed instruments of power. For Fabian, many/most critics of imperialism are prepared to admit this with regard to space, as it has long been recognized that the imperialist claim to occupy ‘empty’, undeveloped, underused space for ‘the common good of mankind’ should be taken for what it really is: “a monstrous lie perpetuated for the benefit of one part of humanity” (144). He argues, however, that with respect to the uses of time as political instrument of ideology and domination, most critics remain oblivious. He writes, “we remain under the spell of an equally mendacious fiction: that interpersonal, 88 intergroup, indeed, international Time is ‘public time’—there to be occupied, measured, and allotted by the powers that be” (ibid). In the epigraph with which this chapter commences, Fabian comments on the cannibalistic nature of colonial time, arguing that colonial-imperialist expansion fuels, and is fueled by, a “relentless appetite for the Time of the Other” (104). He argues: “the expansive, aggressive, and oppressive societies which we collectively and inaccurately call the West needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problematically, they required Time to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics” (emph. in original 144) and tells us less about time and space than it does their occupation and use, their experience and structured position. For Fabian, the mechanisms of Western epistemology delineate processes by which the primacy afforded to a series of first order principles that are true everywhere are elided with the laws of nature, becoming one and the same. Science is the language of this epistemology, and the Western subject its executor. In a closed loop, this system is repeated over and over (all over the colonial world), a repetition that performatively re-produces the Western scientific man as the world’s interpreter. The time of the other, of the observed, meanwhile, is a time of which the Western writer/scientist—by virtue of his access to the first order principles through language (e.g., science, ethnography, statistics)—is able to stand outside; the subject of his study, meanwhile, the other/object to his self/subject, is relegated to a time that is not the now of the writer, or his reader that is, itself, an other time. In making this point, about the impossible demands placed by Western scientistic ethos on its other(s), Fabian activates the story of the Western anthropologist, a figure that stands in for any taxonomic scientist whose object is the other. In this narrative, the scientist emerges already placed in a diagram of what Fabian calls “relations of order” such that he is “upstream, up the temporal slope” (103). Yet, Fabian continues, his posture is to accuse, by questioning, the other who is accordingly positioned “downstream.” His posture is to act as if the two were engaged in a game allowing moves in both directions. Fabian writes: “He acts as if there were a give and take; as if what is valid in the time of the other (there and then) could be made visible in the time of the scientist (here and now)” (103). As it is, the avowed aim of taxonomic discourse to 89 establish relations that are always and everywhere valid: the story must end with the scientist absorbing historical time into his own. For Fabian, this story illustrates an ideology of relations, a game that defines its own rules. A crucial strategy in this game is to place the players on a temporal slope before the game even begins. What this element of the allegory usefully points out is that the premise by which the time of the other is not the same as the time of the scientist is not demonstrated. Rather it is simply postulated, assumed to be true from the outset, and then transcribed in such a way as to affirm/validate the assumption. In other words, for Fabian, an evolutionary view of relations between self/subject and other/object is anthropology’s point of departure, codified into its formal structure, mode of analysis, and style of writing and corresponding practices of reading, not its result. Fabian concludes this lesson in Western orthodoxy by stating that a taxonomic approach inserts itself effortlessly into anthropology’s evolutionary perspective, whose ostensibly achronic stance turns out instead to be what he calls a “flagrant example of allochronic discourse” (104)—allochronism understood here as a discourse that places the other in a time other than the present of the writing subject with the implication that they are what we used to be like. Of singular importance to my argument here is the emphasis Fabian places on the consumptive ethos of the western taxonomist, what Fabian calls “his relentless appetite for the Time of the Other, a Time to be ingested and transformed into his own” (104). This drive is impelled, for Fabian, by the search for logics that establish relations and rules that are universal, applicable everywhere, like laws. The time of the other must be consumable by the logics and rules that govern the world of the colonialist. Indigeneity was, and in many respects is, conscripted to a “downstream” location on a timeline along which Western epistemologies and corresponding aggregates of politics and sociality continue to advance. Indigeneity, meanwhile, by continuing to exist at all, is only allowed the option of repeating itself. Additionally, the temporality of colonialism necessitated a forward moving economistic mobilization of everything as resource. A central component of Canada’s so-called “Indian problem,” especially as it was addressed by Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932—which, not coincidentally, was the height of the Indian 90 Residential Schools in Canada—was economic non-viability. “Indians” were seen as a drain on resources through medical expenditure government subsidization, rather than contributive members of the economy and, by extension, the body politic. As Scott viewed the “Indian problem,” it was not the proper act of governance to “continuously protect a class of people who are unable to stand alone” (Scott). The metaphor of ‘standing alone’ is as chronopolitically charged as it was/is spatial, designating a temporality of the Indian that, as long as Indians remain Indian together as a population or, in his terms, “class”— which is a legal term of segmentation tied to rights—relegates them to a position outside of the body politic. Certainly, however, the ‘body politic’ is not an entity that stands alone or is even asked to do so. Convoking the body politic takes energy, resources, constant bolstering, and involves the ongoing disciplining of all manner of different bodies. Scott’s objective, through the aggressive policies of assimilation he advocated, was to continue the IRS’s violent assimilative processes until, as he stated to the Special Parliamentary Committee of the House of Commons (which was convened to examine his proposal to amend the sections of the Indian Act that focused on enfranchisement52), “there is not a single Indian that has not been absorbed by the body politic” (55). Differently stated, Scott’s stance on the problem that the Indian posed to the political was to consume until ingested the time of the other. By eradicating the other/the Indian, the time of the other/the Indian could be subsumed within the body politic, transformed into the political time of the (rising) nation. I am reminded here of the refrain with 52 Enfranchisement is a legal process for terminating a person’s Indian status. Voluntary enfranchisement was a key feature of Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and assumed that Indigenous people would be willing to surrender their legal and ancestral identities in exchange for Canadian citizenship. If a man with a family enfranchised, his wife and children would automatically be enfranchised. In the 1850’s the government shifted a policy aimed at creating separate ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’ self-sustained Aboriginal communities on reserves to policies of aggressive assimilation. The new policy sought to assimilate Aboriginal people into Eruo-Canadian society and gradually eliminate the reserves. This was to be done through a process called “enfranchisement”. Under the provisions of the Act for the Gradual Civilization, an Indian male who could read and write in either English or French, was free of debt, and was of good character could receive all the rights of a British subject, fifty acres of reserve land, and a share of funds. Between 1857 and 1876, only one man was voluntarily enfranchised. The government did not interpret this lack of response as an indication of the strength of Aboriginal attachment to Aboriginal identity. Rather the government blamed the failure on Aboriginal people to seek enfranchisement on the influence of their leaders. This increased government hostility to Aboriginal government. 91 which the chapter begins, the children’s song that counts up and down between one and ten little Indians. Never does the song arrive at zero or no little Indians. Rather it repeats until it wears out, and the singing dies away. On the level of language, Scott’s use of the word “class” is a suggestive synonym, standing in for the term we might today expect to hear: race. By invoking class rather than race, Scott signals a dynamic and powerful element of the form and function of race in biopolitics, as well as signaling the dominant metaphorics and imperatives of the market and capitalist market (e)valuations. Biopolitically, the features of race and racism operate strategically, as much an invention of these forms of politics as a technique of stratification and control. In Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, the concept of race initially describes a specific historical-political division, and does not designate biological signification. In this way, it aligns more closely with what we today might call class (though it is also race, gender, ability, etc.). As Foucault explains, in place of the historical-political thematic of war, the modern biopolitical era introduces the evolutionary-biological model of the struggle for life. Based on pop-Darwinian descriptions of natural selection along the lines of morphological similarities and traits, emerging dynamics of racism furnish a technology that secures the function of unilateral killing in the name of life. Biopolitical governance aims toward a horizon of futurity in which life is sublimated, in which there is no state-sanctioned killing, no need for punishment. Indeed, modern biopolitical formations of power can only authorize killing as that which makes life in general better. What this means is that politics’ is a knowledge, not of the norm, but of the range of its variations. The center point is much less interesting for power than a population’s range and variations. In relation to the norm, life, understood as “society,” must be defended by exposing to death those who are deviant, those who are other. On the topic of this somewhat abstract and contradictory logic, Foucault (History of Sexuality 1980) writes: “How can a power kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings? …It is … at this point that racism intervenes” (254). In other words, the arrangement into higher, lower, ascending and descending races makes it possible to establish a line between who must live and who must die. 92 Foucault explains the emergence of this logic by tracing it back to the nineteenth-century in which there emerged an idea of a society that is biologically monist. Scott makes visible this ideology in his recruitment of what he calls the “body politic”—a single body operating in unity, towards the same ends. In this notion of racial difference, society is understood not as a plurality of races competing for survival, but as a single race (or body politic) that is no longer threatened from without, from external threat, but from within. The result is what Foucault calls, “an internal racism of permanent purification” (62): a racist platform that renews itself constantly by making racially marked otherness—such as indigeneity—re-produce itself, over and over, outside of the forward moving progress of history, society, and politics. The second function of racism in Foucault’s biopolitical model goes even further. It does not limit itself to establishing a dividing line between those worthy of life and those worthy of death; rather it searches for the establishment of a positive dynamic between the death of the bad race and the lives of the good race, situating the health of one person in direct relation to the disappearance of another. This positive dynamic furnishes the ideological foundation for identifying, excluding, combating, even murdering others, all in the name of improving life. “The fact that the other dies,” writes Foucault, “does not simply mean that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the bad race, the inferior race, is something that will make life in general healthier” (255). It is perhaps obvious, but bears underscoring, that Scott’s rhetoric, the image he projects of an Indian “class” that must/should “stand alone” outside the body politic could only fail. By the time the “Indian class” was asked to “stand alone” outside the purview of the federal government, traditional hunting grounds and herds had been decimated. Disease and malnourishment were already rampant. Aboriginal leadership had been severely and strategically weakened by the federal government, and generations of Indigenous children had already been taken from their communities of origin and reduced to the barest shadow of bare life. The outsider status of the Indigenous class was worked out spatially in the sense that residential schools and reservations were deliberately built apart from white settlement. As Scott demonstrates, to the extent that Indigenous life could not seem to “stand on its own” without 93 government support—support which the federal government had promised to give in exchange for land acquisition when it signed treaties with Aboriginal governments, treaties it has consistently refused to honor—Indigenous life was understood to be doomed. Scott’s logic seems to be: because Indigenous life is already (and always) doomed, it must therefore be assimilated. This move to assimilation manifests as a kind of forceful ‘help’ in the face of undue protection, and class is thus erased in all its valences except as caste—a signifier that brings together race and class along with a historical sense of inevitable tautology (the Indian cannot “stand alone” because he is Indian) into a stabilized hierarchy by which the marked body of the non-European native other is always constituted against the body politic. This racist ideology disguised as Darwinism id driven to a homeostasis that contains difference within it is, to a very large extent, a more viable state project than the attempt to holistically eradicate the difference of the other. In nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada—an epoch shaped by colonial politics and emerging forms of nation-building centered on a collective futurity—the chronopolitical we/other opposition was fundamentally racialized: we indicated whiteness, while other indicated racial difference. Racial difference is here understood as “a class of people” (Scott 55) unified through their morphological similarities and perceived shared traits, and who, together, presumably were unable to stand “outside the body politic” (ibid, emph. added). The metaphor of standing “outside” the body politic is, I point out, as inherently temporal as it is spatial. The temporality of the body politic here convoked is a temporality of the here/now that also claims linear progress towards the future. The temporality of the Indian—whose position is distinctly outside the here/now—is a circular time that, in the colonial imagination, repeats itself in a closed loop. Not only is Indigenous time perceived to be circular and outside the body politic, it is outside of history. The interpellative call to die with which the Canadian Indian Residential School System legitimizes its objectives and ethos, therefore, recapitulates a subjectivity that has been trapped, already, temporally, within the field of signification, and the dense network of intersubjective relations these ideological structures suture and render legible. As a way of elaborating upon this, perhaps abstract, argument, pointing both to the materializing force of language, as well as the structural mechanism(s) whose circularity produces the effect of subject as ideological misrecognition, I offer the following story: 94 In 1942 government researchers visiting a number of remote reserve communities in northern Manitoba, found people who were hungry, “beggared by a combination of the collapsing fur trade and declining government support” (Mosby 147). They also found a demoralized population marked by, in the words of the researchers, “shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia” (ibid). In a potentially paradigm shifting moment that must have come close to epiphany, the researchers suggested those problems—“so long regarded as inherent or hereditary traits in the Indian race” (ibid, emph. added)—were in fact the results of malnutrition.”53 Importantly, and vividly illustrative of my argument in this chapter, and the project overall, instead of recommending an immediate increase in support, the researchers determined that isolated, dependent, already malnourished people would be ideal subjects for tests on the effects of different diets and nutritional interventions. Plans were developed for a longitudinal study to be conducted “on a limited number of Indians” (ibid) including Aboriginal children in residential schools in British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Alberta—tests which, through large-scale and coordinated efforts, greatly exacerbated already existing conditions of starvation and malnourishment by further withholding much-needed nutrition. Thus, “hereditary traits” in the “Indian race” were, through mechanisms of biopolitics, further inscribed in both bodily and discursive practices—concretized more immutably into Indian-ness with every rotation of the circular reasoning that characterizes ideological misrecognition. This kind of strategic, repeated exposure to prolonged conditions of near or actual physical death marks the indigenous body for inevitable decline and erasure. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant describes this as a condition of “slow death,” which she defines as, “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence” (754). Thus, through material and signifying practices, Indianness is laminated more concretely onto death and finality. Correspondingly, the Indigenous body is marked as 53 “Furthermore,” continues the report, “it is highly probable that their great susceptibility to many diseases paramount amongst which is tuberculosis, may be directly attributable to their high degree of malnutrition arising from lack of proper foods.” See Mosby, Ian. “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952.” Histoire Sociale/Social History. 46.91 (May, 2003): 145-172. 95 anachronistic, a relic, an embodiment out of time whose configuration of experience is slow death. Simultaneously, Indianness is renewed continually in the field of signification, performatively reproduced as “shiftless”, “indolent”, and “inert.” Through biopolitical techniques of control and regulation, the socalled Indian race was trapped simultaneously in two temporalities: slow death and circularity, neither of which afforded it a future—through a strategy of control that is fundamentally chronopolitical. Whiteness, the Child, and the Logics of Futurity Against the politicized topographies and temporalities of indigeneity and race, I now move into a consideration of the contributions of psychoanalytic theory to the questions of politics and time presented thus far. The kinds of questions psychoanalysis is interested in asking, the registers upon which it performs analysis, and its unique emphasis on temporality, language, and difference provide an excellent conceptual apparatus through which we might begin to trouble/problematize stable, taken-for-granted oppositions between psychic and social, personal and political, self and other.