Coming to matter: the grounds of our embodied difference

Abstract

In the Australian scene, how does a settler subject see Indigenous others, how does a settler see ‘country’? This essay takes visual practices to be always corporealised. The settler's body, then, must be installed in any theorisations of encounter between Indigenous and settler, and a corporealised vision installed in approaches to reading story, country, and subjectivity across such cultural differences. Drawing on theories of the materiality of the sign as well as Lacanian approaches to vision, this essay suggests that the failure of settlers to see, feel, or hear things that for some Indigenous men and women are materially evident—‘true story’—cannot be understood simply through recourse to a notion of the cultural relativity of truth. Instead, embodiment and therefore the bodily senses are differently substantialised—bodies come to be different matter—in different places. Taking examples from Nyigina and Warlpiri story, ritual and visual art, the essay argues that a settler's capacity to hear, feel, and see is radically, and necessarily, limited.