State Engagement Link: Engagement with the state is framed under discourses of hope – where if indigenous people just suffer enough redemption will occur in some future. Theorizing the indigenous political subject as such ontologizes it

In philosophical and theoretical terms the capacity for perseverance is crucial to the view, said to have emerged in the seventeenth century with Spinoza, that basically all living things seek to persevere and that therefore anything of which perseverance can be observed may be said to be living and have life. As he put it in his Ethics ‘everything in so far as it is in itself endeavors to persist in its own being’ and ‘the endeavor wherewith a thing endeavors to persist in its being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing’ (Spinoza, 1972: 91). Whether this underlining of the importance of perseverance by Spinoza actually amounts to the assertion of a ‘life drive’ is seriously disputed (Williams, 2016). Nevertheless, influential interpreters of Spinoza today argue the case that not only do all things which live persevere but that all things which persevere ought to be accorded the same right to life because they are all of equal value (Povinelli, 2012: 465). If perseverance can be said to be a particular virtue of indigenous peoples then perhaps that is because they have greater access to the most fundamental law of living systems than other peoples.

The work of the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli has been central to this new discourse on indigenous perseverance, as well as the wider claim that perseverance is fundamental to political subjectivity per se. Povinelli describes herself as concerned with the questions of ‘[How] new forms of social life maintain the force of existing in specific social spacings of life? How do they endure the effort it takes to strive to persevere?’ (Povinelli, 2012: 462). At the same time, Povinelli has been pushing the boundaries of the limits of the kinds of space with which we are taught to associate perseverance as a capacity of things, not just by multiplying the forms of life in which we identify the capacity to strive and persevere, but by shifting from life to non-life, bodies to assemblages, and the organic to the non-organic (Povinelli, 2015: 440–41).

Others have picked up on Povinelli’s argument that qualities of perseverance as well as endurance are ‘defining characteristics of the late liberal present in settler democracies such as Australia’, where Povinelli has conducted most of her fieldwork (Povinelli, 2011; Rickards et al., 2017). In these contexts, the assignation of these qualities of perseverance and endurance to indigenous peoples is exposed as a discourse of state and subjugating political power. As noted perceptively by Lauren Rickards and her coauthors, the perseverance of indigenous peoples ‘is co-opted into legitimising narrations of the settler nation’ while ‘the same perseverance is simultaneously undermined by continuing racialised governmentality’ (Rickards et al., 2017: 472–73). As Rickards et al. argue, in extension of Povinelli, such discourses of perseverance rest also on the messianic promise that ‘persistence under present suffering—including suffering imposed by the state—will be redeemed in some anticipated future’ (Rickards et al., 2017: 473). In other words, perseverance is often linked in these discourses also to the governmentality of a Christianised form of ‘hope’ (Rickards et al., 2017: 472).

Radical political theorists and activists are among the last people who would like to be associated with the colonial projects which forced the subjugation and exploitation of indigenous peoples, and yet when we read their work we encounter similar kinds of awestruck observation as to the remarkable perseverance of the indigenous, which can be dated back to the origins of colonial encounters of settlers with indigenous peoples. Such colonial ways of representing the indigenous subject, particularly the perseverance that supposedly defines it, find traction, for example, in Povinelli’s much lauded Economies of Abandonment (2011: 33), which, via an engagement with indigeneity, aims to theorise political subjectivity as such.

Here, again, we encounter the same paradox as that which we saw emerge from Butler and Athanasiou’s engagement with indigeneity in the earlier chapter on dispossession. The conditions of indigenous subjugation to liberal colonial power function also to provide the attributes for the subject of resistance to that subjugation. In Butler’s case that paradox played out through her theorising of the condition and concept of dispossession. Dispossession is not simply what has been done to the indigenous—it is also the precondition for a new form of political subject: one that transcends the desire to turn the world into property. In Povinelli’s case, this paradox plays out through her theorisation of the condition and concept of perseverance. Perseverant is not simply what the indigenous have had to be in order to survive the experience of colonisation; it is the capacity which acts as the font of political subjectivity as such, be that the political subjectivity of indigenous or non-indigenous communities. In this context, we can see how perseverance connects with a range of other concepts and conditions: especially those of immanence and potentiality.

Indeed indigenous ‘understandings of the immanent geontological source of life and its possibilities’ are identified by Povinelli as being an answer to her own philosophical project of immanent critique, aimed as it is at finding ‘a source of a social otherwise outside a gesture of transcendental consciousness’ (Povinelli, 2011: 16). Not only, therefore, is the indigenous subject fully equipped, despite its condition of subjugation, to resist the very strategies of subjugation by which it came to be subjugated, so, also, does it provide the answers to the broader social and political project which Povinelli seeks to advance, concerned as she is with theorising the life of the subject in its potentiality, at the thresholds between being and non-being, other than and against the capacity for transcendence which she, like Butler, identifies with the liberal subject, which is to say, the subject responsible for the subjugation of the indigenous.

If the philosophical question, Povinelli asks, then, is that of how forms of life are able to maintain their force of existence, persevere and endure—surviving, in specific organisations of social space (Povinelli, 2011: 9)—then her political question is that of how the indigenous can maintain their life in the context of the structures of subjugation set in place to stifle and constrain that life. Either way, this is a subject the life of which lacks the force ‘to act in the sense of making anything like a definitive event occur in the world’ but which, nevertheless, persists in its being, staring back at us without necessarily being able to speak back to us (Povinelli, 2011: 30). This capacity for persistence, and not transcendence, is the font of political subjectivity, Povinelli argues, as well as being a particular kind of virtue we can find specifically among indigenous communities and subjects.

The embrace of the perseverant subject that lacks the force to act, to produce events, to master its world, is a signature of course, not just of the works of Elizabeth Povinelli or Judith Butler, nor of indigenous studies, but of wider and deeper trends in the culture of critique which we have already made reference to. For a while now the social sciences have been beset by an obsession with the ‘other-than-human’ and idea of moving ‘beyond the human’, and for a long time that has meant a shift toward discovering the connections between human and other nonhuman life forms. Today, and as indicated by a range of works which back up Michael Marder’s treatment of the topic, it is increasingly plants which are inspiring ‘conceptual advances’ in these sciences (Head et al., 2014: 863).

The driving force here is, of course, neither the real struggles of indigenous peoples nor those of plants themselves, but the theorists and conceptual entrepreneurs appropriating whatever forms of life they can to subjugate them to their own ends. Alcida Rita Ramos, for example, notes the remarkable similarities in ethnographical interpretations of indigenous modes of life and the ways in which indigenous thought is appropriated as ‘Other’ to an equally homogenised thought of the West (2012; see also Agrawal, 1995, 2005). It would appear that, increasingly, all forms of existence are able to play the same speculative role, highlighting the prevalence of this appropriative form of critique. Joe Crowdy, for example, has argued weeds and undergrowth to be especially queer, by ‘showing no respect for human norms and private property’ (Crowdy, 2017: 425). They are equivalent to ‘insurgents’, he argues, in the otherwise normalised space of the garden (Crowdy, 2017: 425). Humans who weed the weeds are practicing ‘mastery over the life and death of plants’ (Crowdy, 2017: 425). Catriona Sandilands argues plants possess a shocking, complex and queer agency, on account of their refusal to submit to the biopolitical imperatives through which life is otherwise governed (Sandilands, 2017: 425–26). The growth of weeds is not normal but ‘obscenely vigorous’, ‘wild and rank’, shocking to the civilised (Crowdy, 2017: 425). Their nature is to resist, and they can never be eradicated fully (Crowdy, 2017: 425). Their natural space of occupation is the wilderness, from which they invade the cultivated spaces of humankind, by following the winds and the movements of the soil (Crowdy, 2017: 425).

In other words there is much to compare between the life and agency of plant life, particularly that of weeds, and that assigned to the indigenous. Anna Tsing, for example, uses ‘weeds’ as a conceptual lens for thinking through inter-species storytelling, where life escapes the constraints of human engineering and colonial imaginaries (2017). Weeds queer and disturb the projects of social and environmental engineering and thus create new potentials and opportunities. She argues: ‘So many of us are Anthropocene weeds. Weeds are creatures of disturbance; we make use of opportunities, climb over others, and form collaborations with those who allow us to proliferate. The key task is to figure out which kinds of weediness allow landscapes of more-than-human livability’ (Tsing, 2017: 17). Indigenous studies, critical and queer approaches increasingly share an interest in the propagation of certain forms of indigenous being, seen to practice perseverance and to be part of speculative projects of ‘everyday decolonisation’ and the practice of ‘queering’, facilitating the critical deconstruction of normative knowledges, identities, behaviours, and spaces’ and increasingly as a major tactic of decolonisation itself (Hunt and Holmes, 2015).