from Hypatia Volume 15, Number 2No One's Land: Australia and the Philosophical Imagination
GENEVIEVE LLOYD
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Drawing on the work of Michèle Le Doeuff, this paper uses the idea of "philosophical imagination" to make visible the historical intersection between philosophical ideas, social practice, and institutional structures. It explores the role of ideas of "terra nullius" and of the "doomed race" in the formation of some crucial ways in which non-indigenous Australians have imagined their relations with indigenous peoples. The author shows how feminist reading strategies that attend to the imaginary open up ways of rethinking processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Feminist philosophy, not surprisingly, has been centrally concerned with issues of gender and sexual difference. Perhaps it is now time to stand back from that familiar content in order to get a clearer idea of what might have emerged as distinctive about the practice of feminist philosophy, and to ask whether that practice might appropriately be broadened to take account of other pressing issues of contemporary societies. This paper traces just one route through this terrain by reflecting on what feminists have made of the exercise of re-reading texts from the history of philosophy from a standpoint of concern with contemporary issues. It is a route that passes from gender to race as a fundamental issue of concern. In that respect, this paper expresses the preoccupations of contemporary Australian politics. But I think broadly similar, though no doubt in detail very different, transitions can be traced in other countries where feminists have attempted to challenge and re-construct the agenda of mainstream philosophy.
My discussion will center on the idea of the "philosophical imagination" as a form of response to the present, a response that is both philosophical and political. This emerging philosophical practice has, for contingent reasons, had close connections with the development of feminist philosophy. But it is not tied, in any essential way, to feminism or to women. The "present," as I am using the term here, is meant to evoke both space and time. The idea is of a response, through understanding the past of philosophy, to the present of a particular place--in this case, contemporary Australia. The philosophical practice I am going to sketch has emerged from feminist response to a male intellectual environment. It is now, as I see it, coming to maturity as a thread in diverse patterns of intellectual practice in which feminist philosophy can claim a historical influence, but ought not to claim a continuing specific identity.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMAGINATIONWhat is this concept of "the philosophical imagination"? To many familiar with the philosophical tradition it may well sound a contradiction in terms. For philosophy has often been defined in opposition to the exercise of the imagination. It has been defined as a style of thinking free of the intrusions of imagination and of emotion--free of the impediments to clear, objective thinking. But that is an oversimplification of a philosophical tradition that has in fact been rich in the cultivation of imagination, though not always recognizing its presence. Even where philosophy has been most emphatically concerned to disown imagination, intellect has worked together with imagination. This complicity of intellect and imagination has been highlighted by one of the contemporary French female philosophers whose work has had a strong influence in Australia: Michèle Le Doeuff.1
In her book The Philosophical Imaginary (1989), Le Doeuff addresses the operations of imagery and metaphor in philosophical writing--"strands of the imaginary," as she puts it, "operating in places where, in principle, they are supposed not to belong." Philosophy is supposed to have defined itself through a break with "mythic fable, the poetic, the domain of the image" (Le Doeuff 1989, 2). But what we find in actual texts, says Le Doeuff, is a whole pictorial world--of architects and foundations, doors and windows, islands, seas and storms. For Le Doeuff, attention to imagery goes with a search for points of tension in a work, the "sensitive points" of an intellectual venture. To take philosophical imagery seriously is to open out the reading of philosophical texts to their cultural contexts in ways that are often dismissed as irrelevant to the concerns of philosophy. But the engagement with philosophical imagery is a philosophical engagement, an engagement with problems posed by the theoretical enterprise itself.
The influence of Jacques Derrida can be discerned in reading strategies that focus on imagery and metaphors, making the reading of a text a way, as he says, of reading an epoch: in reading philosophical texts we are reading ourselves. Le Doeuff herself has explored the ramifications of this emphasis on the literary dimensions of philosophical texts in her later book Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay on Women and Philosophy, Etc. (1991). Texts open up to an "outside" beyond the author's own intentions. The imagery yields points of access to dimensions of texts that escape authorial control. What I want to stress here is that attention to imagery in philosophical writing opens the texts up both to their own contemporary cultural context and to our own cultural context as modern readers. What is salient to us now, and especially what is salient in a text to modern female readers, may not be what would have been seen as most important by the author or by the author's contemporary readers. The imagery may have been so familiar it seemed transparent. In reading the text from a contemporary perspective, the operations of the imagination become visible.
The philosophical imagination has both active and passive dimensions. Philosophers have often unreflectively assimilated imagery from their surrounding culture. They have also often engaged in astonishingly creative exercises of imagination to articulate truths that resist easy articulation. By being attentive to the interactions between these passive and active dimensions of the philosophical imagination we can rethink a philosopherís thought in a new setting. We can see the interweavings of active philosophical thought and the broader network of images at play in a culture at any one time. We can see how the imagery enforms the thought, and how it can operate in some ways independently of what is going on at the level of explicit philosophical doctrine. We can see too how the operations of imagery in philosophical thought can both reflect and affect the operations of power in a culture.
Among the most powerful exercises of what I am here calling the "philosophical imagination" has been the use of imagery of the feminine. Past philosophers used the male-female distinction to express ideas and ideals of reason, with the consequence that features of that distinction, as it operated in the author's own cultural context, became part of the philosophical understanding of what it was to be rational. Even where the explicit claims of the text were, for example, that all minds are equal with regard to reason and that reason knows no sex, the symbolic operations at play in the text--the imagery, the metaphors, the rhetorical devices--carry another message. The supposedly lesser aspects of being human, what is associated with sensibility, emotion, and weak-mindedness, are conceptualized as "feminine." The dominance of reason is conceptualized together with that of male over female. Assumptions about relations between the sexes are here one of those "unthought elements," in Le Doeuff's phrase, which feminist critique has made visible as something more than mere superficial adornment of philosophical ideas.
The images around which philosophical texts are structured are often closely related to the dominant images--the guiding fictions--of a culture. Imagery, and the affects associated with it, can persist when the explicit doctrines associated with them have been left behind. The philosophical text takes in the dominant imagery of its context, and uses it in the articulation of philosophical doctrine. Feminist readings have tried to make visible the nexus here between philosophy and the collective "social imaginary," thus making the activity of history of philosophy a way of engaging in social critique of the present. Operations of collective social imagination, which can be difficult to get to grips with in cultural analysis, can become visible in a close study of the philosophical texts which have had a formative role in a culture. Making connections of this kind between history of philosophy and contemporary social critique has been one of the ways in which feminist philosophy has helped transform and enrich contemporary philosophical practice.
"INSIDE" AND "OUTSIDE"Le Doeuff's work has influenced the development of reading strategies which focus on the imagery of a text as a way of opening it up both to its own cultural context and to the cultural context of contemporary readers. A second set of strategies, also influenced by French feminist theory, has been a strong influence in the emerging strategies of Australian feminist critique--that is, the concern with what have come to be called "speaking positions." These strategies have developed largely out of the work of Luce Irigaray; they emphasize the idea of the feminine as occupying the position of the excluded "other" of philosophy--what lies beyond the rational. Irigaray, often with apparent irony, appropriates that position of the silenced feminine in order to speak from it. By speaking from a position that is "outside," she tries to make visible that excluded space which structures "male" discourse; the maleness becomes visible from the perspective of the excluded feminine. Irigaray describes the strategy in terms of "mimicry," an ironic appropriation of the position of the excluded, non-speaking other. By positioning ourselves at this "outside," we make visible exclusions that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The insight is an important one, though like other important insights it can be mis-stated or overstated. The speaking position of the excluded feminine can be the site of quite loquacious insistence that the feminine has been reduced to silence. But Irigaray's rhetoric captures something crucial about the experience of women in relation to philosophy, the odd sense of being both "inside" and "outside," both speaking and silenced--the experience of being there without being visible as women. The excluded "other" here claims a voice within the theoretical structure without paying the usual price--assimilation. These strategies, centred on Irigarayan "speaking positions," can sound abstract and esoteric, but they often capture the concrete experience of women, providing ways of articulating, for example, the strange position of "honorary male" which has been the experience of many women within the structure of academic life.
These two interconnected strategies--attention to imagery and attention to speaking position--have helped women articulate more clearly the tensions, both negative and potentially fruitful, in a position that is both "inside" and "outside" an intellectual tradition. The strategies have brought together the understanding of symbolic exclusions with the real life experience of discrimination. They have helped women understand the complex patterns of acceptance which were simultaneously processes of exclusion. Those insights into the paradoxes of difference have of course not been confined to the academy. Their formulation has been strongly contested, not only in the tensions between feminist philosophy and "mainstream" professional philosophy, but also within feminist philosophy itself and in broader debate on issues of sexual difference and equality.
Australian academic feminism has attempted to engage, sometimes intelligently, sometimes quirkily, in the broader currents of debate on difference and equality. Those hard-won insights into the recognition of difference are now being tested and transformed by crucial shifts in the consciousness of non-indigenous Australians in relation to race. Non-indigenous Australian women may be still coming to terms with their own sense of exclusion. But they are now having to confront the fact that, whatever their sense of "outsideness" in relation to their own intellectual tradition, they are undeniably "inside" that tradition in relation to indigenous women and men. Non-indigenous Australian women are having to come to terms also with being, in some sense, responsible for a history that is emerging ever more clearly as a history of dispossession and oppression of the original inhabitants and, as can no longer be denied, the original owners of Australia. Precisely in what sense we are to take responsibility, or to be held responsible, is deeply contested within contemporary Australian politics.
THE "IMAGINARY" OF CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAThe current upheaval in Australian consciousness around Aboriginal issues centers on two judgments of the Australian High Court relating to native title: the Mabo judgment of 1992 and the Wik judgment of 1996. That upheaval has escalated with debate on a report by the Human Rights Commission, completed in the second half of 1997, on the nature and consequences of the official removal of Aboriginal children from their families, which went on into the 1960s and, in more subtle forms, even later.
In June 1992, the High Court accepted the argument of a Torres Strait islander, Eddie Koiki Mabo, that his people could trace an unbroken line of communally established ownership to land they still regarded as theirs. Although the area of land explicitly at issue was tiny, the significance of the judgment was profound. It effectively ended the long-standing fiction of terra nullius, the notion that Australian land belonged to no one at the time of the arrival of the first white settlers in the late eighteenth century. The judgment involved no threat to the ownership of land currently held under freehold title that, the High Court agreed, had extinguished native title. It did mean, however, that native title could still exist on vacant Crown land. The Labour government's Native Title Act, passed in December 1993, gave effect to the Mabo judgment, providing for the recognition and protection of native title and setting up a tribunal to adjudicate on native title claims. Although the area of land that then became subject to native title claim was small, the repercussions in Australian consciousness of the rejection of the notion of terra nullius were enormous.
The Mabo judgment and the subsequent Native Title Act left unresolved the vexed issue of the status of native title in relation to land for which non-freehold, specifically "pastoral" leases for the grazing of sheep and cattle, had been granted. That issue was the subject of another High Court judgment which found, in late 1996, in favour of the Wik people of Cape York, to the effect that native title was not extinguished by pastoral leases, although in the event of a conflict of interest between pastoralist and Aboriginal uses of land, the rights of the pastoralist should prevail. The Wik judgment involved the recognition of possible coexistence of native title with pastoral leases. It gave rise to complex questions of Aboriginal rights in relation to the rights of pastoralists, and in relation to mineral exploration and mining rights on pastoral properties. The attempts of the present Australian government, a coalition of Liberal (Conservative) and Nationalist Parties, to legislate changes to the Native Title Act that effectively wind back native title in order to protect the interests of the pastoralists have been the focus of continuing angry debate.
My purpose here is not to discuss the political or legal complexities of native title issues, but rather to examine how the experience of feminist philosophers might contribute to the crucial "re-imagining" of contemporary Australia in the wake of those legal developments. I want to explore ways in which the history of European philosophy might be brought to bear on understanding what is now happening in Australian consciousness; in particular, I want to examine how reading strategies which have developed in feminist philosophy might now be used to clarify the operation of the key "fictions" that have organized the collective imaginings of non-indigenous Australians.
Two interrelated exercises of imagination have structured non-indigenous Australians' ways of thinking about their past. First, the notion which I referred to earlier, terra nullius--the idea of a land that belonged to no one prior to European occupation. It is a fiction whose power has extended well beyond the law courts. It is one of those dominant, organizing fictions of a culture which can coexist with lack of explicit belief. Without it, the notion of "occupation," for example, undergoes a shift; for, of course, the occupation of what has been previously uninhabited has very different connotations from the darker associations of "occupation" as intrusion on social structures which were already there. The idea of terra nullius allowed thought of the sovereignty of Australia to be organized around reassuring ideas of discovery and settlement, rather than more disturbing notions of invasion and conquest. Terra nullius allowed non-indigenous Australians' sense of their history to resonate with emotions of pride--of continuity with achievements of discovery, of endurance, and of the creation of something new. Unowned, the great south land was as yet also unknown, not just new to its newly arrived visitors, but new to human knowledge.
This brings us to the second fiction, which both reinforces and feeds off the first: the idea of Aborigines as an inferior "doomed race," superseded by more highly developed, more enlightened Europeans. The two fictions are interconnected, both conceptually and in their legitimizing function: the idea that the land was owned by none, and the idea that what was already there was not a full human presence. As the Australian historian Henry Reynolds has pointed out, the idea of terra nullius was quite often, even in the very early days of the Australian colonies, regarded with skepticism. But, however dubious the idea may have been as a representation of past reality, it could nonetheless point the way to the future: "The catastrophic fall in the Aboriginal population as a result of disease, deprivation and violence suggested that indigenous demographic decline would resolve the vexed question of prior ownership once and for all" (Reynolds 1996, xi). It was as if the Aboriginal peoples' claim on ownership was made irrelevant by the weakness of their claims on existence.
The idea of terra nullius was the core of a way of imagining what happened at the time of European settlement that has sustained the consciousness of non-indigenous Australians. It allowed non-indigenous Australians to think that there was no need to adapt to the presence of the people who were already there, and no need to acknowledge their customs or law. It encouraged the idea that adaptation only needed to go in one direction, and that this enforced adaptation, rather than being an imposition of something alien, was a gift and the promise of a fullness of humanity that could never have been attained if the Europeans had not come.
Fictions of this kind are not illusions, set over against reality. They are constitutive of our collective construction of a social world, affecting how we see our past and how we take, or fail to take, responsibilities in our present. These are fictions that have a way of making beliefs true. In a similar way, philosophers of the western tradition could be regarded as expressing "truthful" observations of female lesser rationality. But beliefs are formed in a context of collective imaginings, and attitudes that might otherwise seem inexplicable are shaped by the patterns of images that organize affects and make things seem obvious for which there is no real evidence. The conviction of superiority was not based on observation of Aboriginal customs and habits in relation to the Aborigines' own understanding of an environment untouched by European presence. The conviction of superiority arrived with the first fleet, shaping their very first dealings with the original inhabitants. In the journals of Watkin Tench, a young captain of the marines who arrived in the first fleet, there is a striking account of the new arrivals' attempts to make friendly contact with "the Indians," as they called them, by first firing a rifle then whistling a tune. "Our first object was to win their affections and our next to convince them of the superiority we possessed: for without the latter, the former we knew would be of little importance" (Flannery 1996, 42).
What do these fictions have to do with the history of philosophy? The idea of the doomed race was no doubt associated with the social Darwinism of the times, and the idea of terra nullius belonged to legal history rather than philosophy. But there is a strong philosophical component in both ideas. Both had already been worked over by philosophical thought, which sophisticated and refined what the philosophers had taken from their own cultural context, rationalising and legitimating it and passing it back into general circulation. Both these formative fictions belong with central themes in the enlightenment philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, themes that have already drawn the attention of feminist philosophers in their critiques of the maleness of the philosophical tradition.
The idea of the doomed race echoes eighteenth-century ideas of reason, the supposedly highest aspect of being human, as unfolding in the human species in time. The idea is explicit in the political essays of Immanuel Kant. Enlightenment is for Kant a temporal concept--the process in which human minds come to maturity. Notoriously for feminists, in his essay "What is Enlightenment?" Kant presents it as a stage not yet reached by "the entire fair sex" (Reiss 1991, 54). The temporalization of reason and its construction as "attainment" provide a structure within which it is possible to locate the feminine as a lesser stage of human development. The feminine is presented as something to be transcended, a developmental stage to be left behind in the higher attainment of "manly" rationality. But the idea is there too in the construction of the indigenous as a lesser stage of human development, awaiting the advent of a higher stage in the form of European occupation. The temporalization of reason provides a structure within which it is possible to locate the indigenous as a stage of human development which would be a dead end if it were not somehow subsumed or assimilated into the ongoing stages of enlightenment enacted in European consciousness.
The construction of indigenous peoples as instantiating a lesser stage of humanity is reinforced by John Locke's analysis of property as grounded in the mixing of the labor of human bodies with the fruits of the earth. Such appropriation, Locke says, makes the deer that Indian's who killed it, whereas before it was the common right of every one. Locke explicitly relates this way of understanding the basis of property to the contrast between indigenous and non-indigenous modes of relating to land, the contrast between the cultivated fields of Devonshire and the "wild woods and uncultivated waste of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry" (Laslett 1988, 312).
James Tully has pointed out that Lockean theories of property helped form the perception that North American Aboriginal peoples had no property rights in the land itself, as distinct from the fruit or nuts they gathered, the fish or deer they hunted (Tully 1994, 153-80). The famous Lockean metaphors that mix labor with things encouraged the idea that because indigenous peoples did not engage in European style agriculture, they did not really own the land, but merely ranged over it. They could then be seen as not dispossessed, because they had never truly owned in the first place. So it could be thought that it was somehow through their shortcomings, and through their failure to really possess their land, that they lost it. Rather than being dispossessed of what was rightly theirs, they were being given new opportunities by being shown how to own things.
Kant, in his essay "Perpetual Peace," repudiates the idea of indigenous peoples as incapable of really owning their land. But he nonetheless presents the fullness of human progress as fostered by the spread of European forms of government and law. The "lawless freedom" of hunting, fishing, and herding--"of all forms of life . . . without doubt the most contrary to a civilised constitution"--rightly gives way (Reiss 1991, 110). What conflict there might be in the process of colonial conquest is subsumed as "unsocial sociability," an idea which he presents in his "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" as the key to attaining the maturity of enlightenment. Nature wishes this "discord" of these productive antagonisms for the sake of the ultimate end--the release of the dormant higher powers of enlightenment reason.
The Lockean analysis of property and the Kantian temporalization of reason come together to rationalize European presence as embodying the most fully human way of relating to land. Colonization is imagined as the historically inevitable unfolding of nature in the spread of enlightenment, and the participation of indigenous peoples in its fruits. The indigenous gives way to the non-indigenous, not just under the imposed force of conquest, but also under an inner force of reason, unfolding in history as the coming to maturity of the human species.
THE STOLEN CHILDRENThe continuing alignment of ideas of terra nullius and enlightenment images of progress has persisted in the history of Australia's treatment of indigenous peoples and in contemporary Australian consciousness. It is visible in the rhetoric of official policies documented in the Stolen Children Report. The colonial conviction that there was no fully human way of life that was interfered with by European presence reappears in a succession of policies whose explicit purpose was often to remedy the conditions of Aboriginal peoples. At each stage policies were formulated that could be deemed humane in contrast to what had gone before. But each stage perpetuated the failure to recognise Aboriginal culture as a distinct way of life to be preserved and helped to flourish. Aboriginal culture, rather than being seen as something already there to which European presence must accommodate, was seen as a problem to be confronted. As individual human beings, the succession of policy statements insist, Aborigines are to be humanely treated. They were of course there, as individuals, but as Aborigines they remained invisible. Indeed, at some stages the policies were undoubtedly aimed at systematically eliminating Aboriginality, while supposedly saving the individual.
The shifts in ideas of "protection" documented in the Stolen Children Report illustrate the power in the broader culture of the fictions whose operations are apparent in the philosophical texts of the Enlightenment. The early "protectorate" policies responded to the massacres and atrocities perpetrated by the early settlers. The protectorate experiments involved the creation of reserves where Aborigines would willingly establish self-sufficient agricultural communities on the English model. The violence and disease that quickly became characteristic of the reserves was then seen in terms of the survival of the fittest: this was a doomed people who could not of their own efforts survive. In retrospect the perception can only seem ironic in view of what we now know of the time span of Aboriginal presence on the Australian continent. But the common perception of the time was that the Aboriginal race was soon to disappear; what was needed from government and missionaries was to "smooth the dying pillow."
In the succeeding stages, what was seen as the Aboriginal failure to take responsibility for themselves--to willingly take on European, agricultural life styles when given the opportunity to do so--was seen as justifying a more interventionist approach. "Protection" became more literal. Responsibility for Aboriginal welfare passed from the individuals themselves to a Chief Protector or Protection Board, whose powers were often mediated through missionaries, providing the civilizing benefits of European education and religion. With the shift in the idea of "protection" to assuming responsibility for, rather than protecting from mistreatment, a further shift occurred in the goals of policy. In reaction against the failures of the segregated reserves to improve the conditions of Aboriginal people, new policies in the late nineteenth century were developed to "merge" or "absorb" children of mixed descent into the non-indigenous population. Removing children from parents became central to these policies. In some states, the policies were rationalized through explicitly biological models. Aboriginality was to be gradually bred out by intermarriage between mixed descent Aboriginals and the white population. In others, the biological, miscegenation models gave way more quickly to socio-cultural models of "assimilation" and processes of surveillance of Aboriginal adjustment to non-indigenous standards.
The story is not one of malign intent being acted out in a succession of explicitly discriminatory policies. Much brutality occurred along the way; the realities of Aboriginal life on the mission stations, for example, was often far from the Christian ideals that inspired them. But the connecting thread in the policies was not discrimination against something seen to be different, but, on the contrary, a failure to recognize difference. The most striking example of the discriminatory effects of policy intended to be non-discriminatory is perhaps the later stages documented in the report, where the removals take place under the application of general "welfare" provisions.
So, for example, in the South Australian version, which is one of the more intentionally humane approaches documented in the report, the removal of indigenous children was brought, early this century, under the provisions of the general child welfare laws of the State Children's Act of 1895. It was only on grounds of "neglect" or "destitution" that a child would be removed, but a child could be deemed "neglected," according to the definitions of the Act, if he or she "sleeps in the open air, and does not satisfy the Justices that he or she has a home or a settled place of abode," and "destitute" if he or she has "no sufficient means of subsistence" and is in the care of people who are "in indigent circumstances and unable to support such a child." Applied to non-indigenous children, the definitions may have had some plausibility, but such definitions could of course easily be applied, as the report points out, to "children whose parents were nomadic, involved in seasonal (and therefore necessarily shifting) work or impoverished through loss of their land" (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, 120-21). As such acts were applied in practice, being a child of mixed descent would suffice to be treated as neglected. So, in practice, children were removed because they were Aboriginal. In another example, from Tasmania, which echoes very closely the Lockean definition of property, the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act of 1912 provided that, unless Aborigines constructed dwellings and fenced and cultivated land, they would lose their right to occupy that land. The intention was to encourage them to become self-sufficient. The upshot was dispossession.
From the perspective of the people affected, the "stolen," it was often a totally inexplicable, brutal removal from a culturally and emotionally rich environment into harsh loss. Even in those cases where the children were well treated, the damaging effects have often been life long. Typical of the stories documented in the report is painful bewilderment about why it happened. Contemporary non-indigenous Australians are now grappling, mostly not well, with the retrospective perception of the removals as cultural genocide. Politically conscious Aborigines had no doubt, even much earlier, about the real import of the policies of assimilation. Thus in a speech at a 1938 protest meeting held on the 150th anniversary of British occupation, William Ferguson and John Patten argued that:
If you would openly admit that the purpose of your Aborigines legislation has been, and now is, to exterminate the Aborigines completely so that not a trace of them or of their descendants remains, we could describe you as brutal, but honest. But you dare not admit openly that what you hope and wish is for our death! You hypocritically claim that you are trying to "protect" us; but your modern policy of "protection" (so-called) is killing us off just as surely as the pioneer policy of giving us poisoned damper and shooting us down like dingoes! (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, 46)
"WE FEMINIST PHILOSOPHERS"The history of western philosophy is bound up with the formation of non-indigenous attitudes towards indigenous peoples, no less than with the formation of male-female relations. Operations of the philosophical imagination have been at work in the social practices through which indigenous peoples have been both forcibly included and powerfully excluded in the ongoing enactment of the ideals of the European enlightenment. The philosophical imagination is at the nexus of theory and cultural context, the point where "well-meant" ideas can come to amount to something "unthought." But it is the point too where the inherited fictions that disable our collective imaginings can be actively challenged. Insights drawn from feminist critique might now help us engage with the defensive postures through which non-indigenous Australians avoid taking responsibility for the past.2
Feminist philosophy has challenged those past, apparently innocuous patterns of concepts, images, and affects through which the male-female distinction took on symbolic meanings that became in their social context oppressive to real women. That kind of critique can now be used to make visible the "unthought" imagery and speaking positions which have historically structured non-indigenous Australian perceptions and attitudes. Oppressive social policies are reinforced by patterns of meaning that can mask their real upshot. As with the "excluded" feminine, the explicit policy objectives have often not been to damage individuals. On the contrary, the ostensible rationale of many of the practices that are now under scrutiny was inclusion; the aim was to include the individual while simultaneously excluding what was different about them. Hence the puzzled male resistance to many of the demands of feminism, and the outraged self-defensive posture of much contemporary Australian non-indigenous response to the Stolen Children Report's claims of cultural genocide.
The point of making these connections is not to expand the position of the excluded other of "white male" philosophy to include the plight of indigenous peoples. The point is not to seek to embrace fellow victims, but to take responsibility for understanding the operations of imagination involved in the sad history of white Australia's attempts to assimilate what was never really acknowledged as different. The experience of feminist philosophy can give us insight into this political present. The hidden structures of exclusion have become visible to women through experience of what it is like to be supposedly included without having one's difference recognized, that strange experience of being both inside and outside. Having gained basic inclusion, it became possible, sometimes no doubt with deliberate perversity, to speak from the position of the excluded other. Feminist philosophers have learned to read the texts of their philosophical tradition from that complex position, both inside and outside. Perhaps we can now apply some of those insights into the complexities of exclusion to better understand our own position in relation to the exclusions and the assimilating inclusions of indigenous Australians.
We can now see in the light of a shameful history some of the pathos of Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress. But we cannot, as non-indigenous Australian women, position ourselves with indigenous peoples as different variants of the excluded other of western reason. Whatever our own predicaments may be in relation to the "male" structures of philosophy, "we" are here not in the excluded position. No doubt there are differences in the ways in which non-indigenous men and women are positioned in relation to colonial history, but here non-indigenous female philosophers are on the inside, in the excluding position. It is from that position that we must now take responsibility for re-figuring our place and our present. To do this, we may have to be prepared to accept and welcome the dissolution of fixed identity that is increasingly apparent in feminist philosophy. For in its very fluidity it reflects one of the most challenging features of our present, an ever-increasing diversity which is experienced as an inner multiplicity of identity.3 The early challenge faced by feminist history of philosophy was to give visibility to the excluded feminine. The new challenge is to keep that visibility without being limited, or perhaps diminished, by too insistent an identification with "feminist" perspectives. "We feminist philosophers" are not the bearers of clearly bordered identities occupying stable, though newly won, speaking positions. Feminist philosophy is not insulated from the multiplicity of identity that is a feature of our present. We are not always in the position of the excluded other. We are shifting subjects, taking on multiple identities, multiple positions in relation to power. If we are serious about engaging with our present, we cannot afford to let that engagement be circumscribed by postures of opposition to the "male" past of philosophy. The challenge is to refine the strategies for thinking our way into that past and its processes of exclusion and constitution, and for appropriating its intellectual possibilities the better to understand not only the exclusions we have suffered but also those in which we have been complicit.
NOTES
1. I discuss Le Doeuff's treatment of imagery and metaphor in philosophical texts more fully in "Le Doeuff and the History of Philosophy" in Deutscher (forthcoming).
2. I discuss these issues of feminist identity and engagement with the present more fully in "Feminism in the History of Philosophy: Appropriating the Past" in Fricker and Hornsby (forthcoming).
3. For an important discussion of the "inner multiplicity" of identity under conditions of cultural diversity, see Tully (1995).
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Tully, James. 1994. Aboriginal property and western theory: Recovering a middle ground. Social Philosophy and Policy 11: 153-80.
------. 1995. Strange multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an age of diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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