From Visibility to Visuality: Patricia Grace's Baby No-Eyes & the Cultural Politics of Decolonization

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 2009,pp. 321-348 (Article)

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55 number 2, Summer 2009. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

from visibility to visuality:

patricia grace's baby no-eyes

and the cultural politics

of decolonization

Chris Prentice

'Decolonisation' is what has to happen in the minds and un-derstandings of everyone, including Maori, so that the issues can be properly addressed and equity brought about. There can't be equality, no matter how many catch-up policies are instigated, until the issues of racism and decolonisation are addressed.

—Patricia Grace, "Interview"

Culture loses all meaning when it is defined as cultural identi-ty, that is as a pure and simple statement of existence. . . .

—Jean Baudrillard, "The Global and the Universal"

As soon as identity . . . is granted a final statute, as soon as it is taken for granted, it becomes perverse, artificial. But as soon as it is recognized as such, we witness a search for a new voice, a new means of expression. . . .

—Saulius Geniusas, "Baudrillard's Raw Phenomenology"

A novel may serve as a cultural barometer for its times, indicat-ing politically significant pressure points within both hegemonic and

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oppositional discourses, even beyond the conscious or manifest intent of the narrative or its implied author. Patricia Grace's 1998 novel, Baby No-Eyes, offers a rich depiction of contemporary cultural politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a complex contention between the condi-tions that have sustained a Maori politics of visibility and those that inform a more recently emergent culture of visuality. While the former is predicated on the representational relation of sign to referent, the latter is produced by the liberation of the sign from the referent, as witnessed most obviously in the processes of image production asso-ciated with new digital visual technologies. The onto-epistemological implications of this shift can be interpreted as having more general political import, exacerbated precisely by the contemporary cultural privilege of the visual. The novel's engagement of this palimpsestic cultural-political moment is articulated thematically around intercon-nected Maori cultural concerns with land and embodiment. Land and bodies figure as sites of colonial expropriation, exploitation, and vio-lence. Infused with cultural meaning, they are also sites of continuing postcolonial struggle in the face of both colonial continuities and the "new area[s] of colonisation" characterizing contemporary western consumerist society (P. Grace, "Interview" 57).

Much of the narrative implies the apparent case for persisting with a politics of Maori visibility in opposition to the oppressive and exploitative practices of a colonially founded Pakeha majority society, and it does so through narrative strategies that have been identified as promoting the visibility of Maori cultural values. However, Baby No-Eyes also contains narrative moments suggesting that the basis for a political strategy premised on visibility (and the visibility of cultural values) is now confronted by changes in the structural or-der of representation, generally evoked in the novel with reference to the centrality of capacities and technologies of vision, visibility, and the visual in characters' lives. The novel's concerns, expressed through characters' struggles against the theft and the real and imagined uses of human organs and ancestral DNA, are focused on processes of reification, abstraction, and expropriation—radical decontextualization—that also haunt the assertion of cultural values in narrative strategies, tropes, and themes. Baby No-Eyes points to the increasingly compelling case for a revision of stakes and strate-gies to address the significance, for the cultural politics of decolo-nization, of the shift from a representational order, where reality is deemed to precede and to have ontological priority over the image, to a virtual order, where, beyond relations of true and false, "Reality and truth emanate from signs. The precession of the model figures the real" (V. Grace, Baudrillard's Challenge 84). Nevertheless, the novel's thematic treatment of art and the artist suggests the potential

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for culture to be rethought through the notion of incommensurable singularity, implying a more radical decolonization than liberation in the name of cultural identity. If colonization violently reduced culture to reified signifiers of identity, to become the object of struggle in a political economy of identities, art calls up the symbolic dimension of ambivalence, gesture, and reciprocity or reversibility that culture, in this sense, disavows.1

Postcolonial Politics of Visibility

In chapter 3 of The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha develops an analysis of the centrality of visibility to the operations of colonial discourse and colonial power. He argues that "despite the 'play' in the colonial system which is crucial to its exercise of power, colo-nial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and visible" (70–71). He continues that this discourse "employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism" and refers to discourse actively producing the visibility of the colonized (71). Focusing on the specific condition of visibility of the discriminated colonial subject, "at once visible and natural—colour as the cultural/political sign of inferiority or degeneracy, skin as its natural 'iden-tity'" (80), he cites Paul Abbot's contention that this discrimination is authorized by "the occlusion of the preconstruction or working-up of difference" (79), so that "recognition is contrived as primary cognition, spontaneous effect of the 'evidence of the visible'" (80). Although Bhabha's concern is with the function of the stereotype, or the "fixated" operation of stereotypical discourse, his references to "production," "reconstruction," and "working-up" invoke the function of signification itself as a structure or model for producing the signs of the real (Baudrillard, Simulacra 11). In arguing that "the point of intervention should shift from the ready recognition of images as posi-tive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectifica-tion made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse" (67), Bhabha further invokes the problems of insisting on, or acceding to, the position of subject within the terms—the regime—of realist representation, founded on relations between power and visibility. His signification-subjectification coin has important implications for visibility politics.

Visibility politics—making visible an antecedent, if occluded, reality—are founded on the semiological presuppositions underpin-ning the notion of representation, articulating relations of equiva-lence and substitution.2 Encoded as signification, the word or image is dichotomously separated into signifier and signified, ideologically


reconnected in a relation of equivalence to constitute the sign. The sign bears the same relationship of substitution and equivalence to the referent, where the latter is taken to precede the former as the guarantee and measure of its truth or adequacy. Two problems emerge at this point for a cultural politics of visibility. First, ontology is predi-cated on the naturalizing presumption of the priority of the signified or referent,3 while producing these as the effect of signification itself. This naturalizing presumption casts things or images as inherently meaningful, their truth given to be represented—adequately or not—by the sign. In this sense, a politics of representation or visibility is often based on the charge of the inadequate, limited, or wrong (or negative) representation by dominant signifiers, to be rectified by the self-representation of the once subordinated term—becoming the subjects rather than the objects of visibility. However, this cannot address the limitations of seeking the status of selves, subjects, and identities within a signifying order that structurally precedes—and structures—those very selves, subjects, and identities. Given Baudril-lard's contention that the contemporary orders of signification and of political economy emerged simultaneously within the modern West (they are historically and culturally specific), one might ask whose selves, subjects, and identities are being articulated? How are these articulations shaping the projects of cultural politics?

The second problem also concerns the foundation of ontology in binary oppositions (being and not-being, signifier and signified, subject and object). These extend to the "grand oppositions of modernity" within which the concept of "power relations" becomes meaningful, realized in the social struggles that have characterized the modern era—including the oppositions of self and other, identity and difference, colonizer and colonized (V. Grace, Baudrillard's Challenge 71). They also subtend representational politics, producing the very grounds in terms of which these oppositions have been contested by those violently cast into the suppressed, oppressed, repressed, or abjected position of difference/other/colonized. In other words, the oppositional structure of terms—only one able to signify as positive presence while the other is structurally cast as negative/absence—is both the problem and the precondition for a representational politics of visibility. The struggle of the dominant to retain mastery over the subordinate term is countered by the struggle of the subordinate to overcome the dominant and register itself as positive presence. This points either to a reversal of terms within the same structural order or a dissolution of the oppositional relation itself, with the ambivalent effect of also dissolving the grounds of a politics of opposition in fa-vor of acceding to the space of the same/subject/self—all subjects, no objects. This would result in an order without political stakes, of

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differences as positive presences within an additive social logic (di-versity), but without the conditions for transformation. Espoused as a goal, it would imply, for instance, that others wish to be selves in the same terms and under the same conditions as the selves they have been challenging. Nothing fundamental to the construction of such selves has changed.

These preconditions and presuppositions are integral to the problems of visibility politics, whether the emphasis is placed on their representational assumptions or their visual manifestation. As Kelly Oliver points out, "many contemporary theorists of society and culture talk about power in terms of visibility. To be empowered is to be visible; to be disempowered is to be rendered invisible. . . . Dominance and marginality are discussed in terms of visibility and invisibility" (11). Oliver makes the further point, however, that: "Vi-sion, like all other types of perception and sensation, is just as much affected by social energy as it is by any other form of energy. This is why theorists can talk about the politics of vision or the visibility or invisibility of the oppressed. To see and be seen are not just the results of mechanical and photic energies, but also of social ener-gies" (14).

In "Broken Symmetries," Peggy Phelan questions the nature of functioning and distribution of these social energies in terms of power relations when she argues for the need to examine "implicit assump-tions about the connections between representational visibility and political power which have been a dominant force in cultural theory." She suggests there is "a dismaying similarity in the beliefs generated about the political efficacy of visible representation," pointing out that "the dangerous complicity between progressives dedicated to visibility politics and conservatives patrolling the borders of muse-ums, movie houses and mainstream broadcasting is based on their mutual belief that representations can be treated as 'real truths' . . . [and] that greater visibility of the hitherto under-represented leads to enhanced political power" (106).

Against this she contends that "Visibility is a trap . . . it sum-mons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession" (109–10). Obviously invisibility is at least as ambivalent and must be analyzed in relation to the specific context and instance to assess its effects. Within a representational paradigm it registers as negativity in terms of power relations, the significance of which includes the material oppression of the other. From another perspective, a strategy of invisibility threatens power at the point of its dependence on the presence and the visibility of the other.


Both Phelan and Oliver imply that visibility politics do not neces-sarily refer to the ocular dimension of vision, but rather to a production of representational presence that may just as readily be mediated through voice or other markers of identity.4 Nevertheless, a contem-porary visual cultural hegemony encompasses the image-saturation of Western consumer society, the intense production of more and more dimensions of visibility—telescopic, microscopic—fields previ-ously hidden from view, and technologies for the generation and animation of digital, virtual images released from necessary reference to an original or a scene of production. In its emphasis on eyes, on ways of seeing and being seen, whether as subjects or objects of vision, Baby No-Eyes engages all of these aspects of contemporary visibility and visuality.

A Historical and Cultural Context for Baby No-Eyes

Although Maori have contested colonialism and Pakeha/settler legitimacy since the nineteenth century, the most visible movement of such resistance was the Maori political and cultural renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s.5 Land was a focus of large-scale demon-strations (in both senses) of Maori anger and assertions of Maori presence. This assertion also characterized the cultural efflorescence comprising the more positive articulation of Maori cultural identity. The Maori renaissance therefore inaugurated a politics of identity, and of visibility, after a sustained period dominated by a national ideology of assimilation. By the time of publication of Baby No-Eyes,6 Maori comprised around twelve percent of the national population. With essentially one Maori language steadily reviving after decades of suppression, Maori were undoubtedly impacting on national and cultural discourses in ways, or to extents, not shared by many other colonized indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, alongside the success of the renaissance in terms of cultural and political visibility, there has persisted an over-representation—a hyper-visibility—of Maori in poverty, crime, violence, and addiction statistics, pointing to contin-ued social and economic struggle. Further, Baby No-Eyes appeared against the background of wide-ranging neoliberal economic reforms introduced by the Labor Government in the mid-1980s and extended through the 1990s, producing both structures for Maori development and advancement, and an intensification of gaps between rich and poor. Employment sectors most hard hit by the reforms were the primary industries in which many Maori were employed, and the ideologies of individualism and user pays exacerbated disadvantage for many, as well as opportunities for some.7 This era in many ways reoriented Maori cultural politics from the mass movement of the

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renaissance into an articulation of economic self-management and cultural entrepreneurship within revived, traditional tribal-based authorities.

Predicating a movement on the self-representation of the posi-tive difference of Maori cultural identity, on the one hand, has argu-ably offered little other than culture as a response to conditions of struggle.8 On the other hand, the argument against culturalism and in favor of political economy threatens the difference Maori have been keen to assert, as it posits causal factors and proposes solu-tions always within the terms of the conditions that generated the struggle itself. Thus visibility politics emerges from the janus-faced foundations of culturalism (identity) and political economy (the production of value in relations of exchange). The contemporary form of their mutual implication is what demands a strategic shift in focus. Specifically, as the events comprising the narrative of Baby No-Eyes suggest, visibility has not itself resolved the problems of violence and exploitation and minimally requires an analysis of how visibility articulates power and vice versa. The novel adumbrates the problems of a politics articulated within the same terms as the con-ditions that produced that exploitation and oppression. However, it further suggests that while such political strategies may both extend and strengthen the system they oppose, the possibilities for making transformative interventions are also emerging elsewhere.

The plot of Baby No-Eyes is based on two events that took place in New Zealand in the 1990s. At a provincial hospital in 1991, a deceased infant's organs were removed without family consent, and the infant was later returned for burial incomplete, in disregard of Maori cultural protocols around the body and processes of mourning and burial (tangihanga). This event generated media investigation into the wider issue of the removal of organs for research or investi-gation.9 The second event was the 1995 Maori occupation of Moutoa Gardens, a park in the center of the provincial town of Wanganui, in protest against earlier land confiscations. The occupation, which lasted 79 days, involved constructing a settlement, planting food gardens, and living as a community—asserting both a right to live on their own land, and countering stereotypes of destructive protest activism and certainly the "fanaticism and barbarism" deplored on a monument in the park to those who fought in defense of government in early land disputes.10

In Grace's fictional treatment of these events, two main contem-porary plot lines echo their shared concerns with land and bodies. In the first, a stillborn baby is prematurely delivered as the result of a car accident that kills her father Shane and badly injures her mother Te Paania. She is disposed of in a Wastecare bin, found later only at


the family's insistence that she be returned to them. The baby's eyes are removed for research during a seemingly unnecessary autopsy, and she is given back without them until, again at the family's insis-tence, the eyes are returned in a small jar in a plastic supermarket bag, implicitly and offensively associating them with food and, more generally, with commodification. In the second, a Maori community and their supporters occupy Te Ra Park, in the center of a provin-cial town, in both a gesture of public visibility and as a distraction from the more sensitive site of contention, an ancient burial ground called Anapuke, illegally taken many years ago, though left alone as unusable. However, the community now suspects Anapuke is being targeted by scientists in pursuit of new sources of indigenous DNA for genetic research and patenting. These stories are brought together through Te Paania's central role in transcribing the oral histories and continuing concerns of Maori elders relating to the desecration of land and bodies in the interests of genetic research and profit.

Land and Bodies in Baby No-Eyes

The connection between land and body reaches back through Maori mythology in the story of Papatuanuku, or Earth Mother, whose separation from Ranginui, or Sky Father, brought about the te ao marama (world of light) in which their offspring could live. After these godly offspring, humans were created out of the earth, so are under-stood to be of the earth. The cultural meanings are carried forward in the Maori language itself: whenua means both land and placenta; the phrase tangata whenua denotes the people who belong, through ancestral connection, to a particular land or region (as much as it belongs to them), and traditionally the placenta would be buried in this ancestral land to secure belonging (turangawaewae).

In relation to the historical significance of land and bodies, Baby No-Eyes recounts the progressive colonial expropriation of land, while the deadly violence of racism and its domestication into the policy of assimilation is presented in the harrowing story of young Riripeti's treatment at school earlier in the twentieth century, precipitating her illness and death. These events continue to affect the generations that follow into the novel's contemporary setting, in damage and destruction to the landscape, and the accident that kills Shane and Baby and injures Te Paania. This is a history of the cultural alienation and devastation wrought by colonialism, though also one of struggles for cultural continuity and healing. Nevertheless, the imagery through which this healing is figured carries disturbing implications of its own violence and uncertain effects, exacerbated by the continued association of land and human bodies as cultural signifiers. The

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description of the landscape Te Paania passes through after release from hospital evokes bodily pain, destruction, and reconstitution of the same order as her own: "The road unrolled ahead of us like a spilled bandage. On either side the paddocks were an intense, exag-gerated green that I had forgotten belonged in the world except in plastic tags and paint and labels. Now it jolted into memory, shock-ing and sticking against my eyes—this aggressive, bleeding green. I could hear crying." Soon, "in the less green places, the stubbled paddocks were daubed with sheep that were like dingy clouds, dirty sky reflections. Swabs, dressings" (85). Then, imagery of her own broken body prosthetically held together is directly paralleled with the landscape: "White silence. Gauze and plaster, sheets and tubes. Stacked pipes by the roadside and heavy gouges in the hillsides. Clay and rubble in fallen piles . . . the road machines scooping up slush" (86). Ultimately, images of abortive maternity shape Te Paania's reflections on "the smell that a new baby has—of warm soil" (72), preparing for the parallel of the flooded, broken land with her own body as she is driven "beside the full, brown river, which the week before had broken its banks and gone through the town. I knew the mud smell of it. . . . Ghosts and the dirty river. Beside it the fences were hung with debris. . . . A dead sheep floated by" (87). On the one hand, the prominence of land and bodies as the foundations for the politics of resistance and identity—the struggle for the socio-political presence and cultural visibility of Maori as Maori—must be understood as signaling symbolic as well as material concerns. On the other hand, there is something unnatural, even obscene in the reconstitution of the land to appear more fertile than fertile in its exaggerated, bleeding green, the pipes and sheep-swabs testifying more to mortal damage than to recovery. The parallels with Te Paa-nia's own prosthetic reconstitution are ominous.

Grace therefore demonstrates the continuing colonization of land and bodies, despite the intensification of Maori visibility through the preceding years, and points to a basis for interrogating the complicity of visibility politics with objectification, commodification, and surveil-lance. Nevertheless she also shows the possibilities of a reconceived engagement with the challenges of contemporary visuality, particu-larly as Te Paania's second child Tawera explores various dimensions of the visual in his development as an artist.

Vision, Visibility, and Visuality in Baby No-Eyes

Grace's novel develops themes of land and bodies, history and politics through pervasive imagery of the capacities, qualities, and technologies of vision. It articulates concerns with vision, and with


visibility and its negative counter-part of invisibility, across their shift-ing valences for colonial subjugation and anticolonial resistance. The very fact that Tawera's deceased sister, the eponymous Baby, occu-pying a liminal state between the mortal and spirit world, is present but unseen by everyone but him, is consistent with the ambivalent treatment of visibility and invisibility. Even their mother Te Paania's relation to Baby is not primarily visual, though she "saw" as well as sensed Baby in other ways in the initial period after her death (125–26). She is envisioned throughout the novel from Tawera's point of view, the interpretation of which has sustained both psychologi-cal/naturalistic and cultural/spiritual readings.11 Having had her eyes removed, Baby's spirit lingers blind in terms of the ocular capacity of vision, though the two marks on either side of her navel that signify the missing eyes metaphorically suggest a capacity for insight, while visually denoting what was taken from her. Tawera's role is to act as her eyes for the external world, synaesthetically translating visual phenomena such as color into the terms of other senses, especially touch, taste, and sound: "Yellow is touching a number two hair shave with the palms of your hands. . . . Dark blue is when you pull down your bottom eyelids and let hard, cold wind blow on your soft eye meat," Tawera tells Baby (139). Their relationship relativizes the preeminence of visibility as a way of knowing and engaging the other. Indeed it problematizes the autonomy of the individual subject, even if the ethical privilege of touch is itself rendered ambivalent through the sibling blows Baby apparently dispenses to the hapless Tawera or when he suffers as he struggles to mediate the finite visible world and that of the spiritual plane. His bruises perhaps testify to the violence of their separation and of the socio-cultural scene of their attempted rapprochement.

The novel contains pervasive images of eyes—half or fully closed in political quietism, as in the "squint-eyed portrait" of Grandfather Tumanako (108), or wide open in recognition, anger, and challenge—ultimately privileging the latter. However, Kura traces back to her schooldays the enforced cultural invisibility and silencing of Maori cultural identity, subsequently internalized and reproduced as a pro-tective camouflage handed down to later generations in compliance with assimilative practices. Her grandson Shane, named for protection in a Pakeha world, nevertheless experiences this name as destructive alienation; he demands to know why he was given a "cowboy movie name" (26), with which his body cannot accord: "How can I be Pakeha with this colour, this body, this face, this head, this heart? How can I be Maori without . . . without what? Don't even know without what" (27). Shane is trapped in the (post)colonial replaying of the colonial scene of racial difference, "where the disavowal of difference turns

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the colonial subject into a misfit—a grotesque mimicry or 'doubling' that threatens to split the soul and whole, undifferentiated skin of the ego" (Bhabha, Location 75). He is "the subject primordially fixed and yet triply split between the incongruent knowledges of body, race, ancestors" (80). His anger, and the violence that accompanies it, culminate in the car crash that precipitates the crisis with Baby and, consequently, in Kura's recognition of the cost of attempts to evade racism through recourse to silence and invisibility as Maori.12

Shane's alienation and his catastrophic reaction can be ana-lyzed with reference to further instances of technologies of visibility and visuality integral to his and others' lives. These range from the (apparent) transparent simplicity of glasses and windows, and the everyday familiarity of cameras and screens—all of which seem to reflect or transmit a prior visible reality, whether in mimetic or distorted ways—to the scientific and medical technologies whose popular association with specialized laboratory and hospital loca-tions belies their part in a shift in the whole field of visuality that pervades—indeed informs—society, into the most intimate spaces of embodiment. Shane's violence early in the novel is directed against windows and glasses, and Dave is worried enough for Te Paania to say "'When there are no more glasses for him to see himself crookedly in, no more windows giving an ugly reflection, he'll look into your eyes and see himself in there to hit'" (24). Shane instantiates the drama of the mirror phase that prefigures the subject, where "the subject finds or recognises itself through an image which is simultaneously alienating and hence potentially confrontational" (Bhabha, Loca-tion 77), exacerbated by the colonial discourse of race, where he is "forced into a consciousness of the body as a solely negating activity" (75). Alone in their flat Te Paania and Shane watch television, which "was another window . . . to look into—where there was . . . blood, rape, rage, murder" (24). As a "window" the screen implicitly offers visual access to pervasive social violence beyond the home, and yet television brings that violence into the home itself. Social violence and Shane's own violence are mutually fed by their circulation in an economy of images reflecting one another.

Whether reflected in glasses or in Te Paania's eyes, through windows or on television screens, Shane's alienation from himself, his fragmentation between and across body and name, self and image (signified and signifier), results in his efforts to aggressively smash the image, to expel the other housed in his name, and to reconcile the signifier with the signified. Tragically he cannot eradicate the one without also killing the other. He wants his true name, his ancestral stories, in order to resolve this fragmentation and alienation. His and Riripeti's (as well as Kura's) histories seemingly offer the rationale


for a politics of visibility, pitted in opposition to racist abjection. Yet Shane's struggle to articulate the failed equation of his name, and his embodiment in a coherent identity, points to the very problem of constructing the body as a representational sign. The total positiv-ity of the body-sign (its visibility without ambivalence or negativity) consolidates the basis of a differentiation of bodies from one another within a racist frame: it is an extension of the fixation and fetishization Bhabha attributes to the stereotype that, he warns, encompasses both positive and negative images. The corollary of this in cultural fetishization and exoticization is suggested in the glass display case in the hospital waiting room, containing a kava bowl, a strainer, and a root of kava, objects associated with Pacific cultures in another technology that produces culture for visual consumption. Its refer-ence to the museum objectifies the culture in terms that suggest reification, conquest, and possession. Fetishization is also suggested when Kura notes wryly that earlier in the twentieth century, "no one would take a Maori bag to town or to the shop, not even to a tangi-hanga, not even to land meetings. It wasn't like these days when you see these baskets everywhere. . . . [E]ven a Pakeha will carry a Maori bag now, paying a lot of money for one" (35). Her comment suggests that their newfound visibility relates to something other than the political liberation of Maori culture sought by activists for decolonization; something more like liberation into the market for consumable cultural signs. It invokes Phelan's contention that "Vis-ibility politics are additive rather than transformational," enacted in relation to a corresponding image of the Same, and that "Visibility politics are compatible with capitalism's relentless appetite for new markets" (112).

From this perspective, it is important to question Bhabha's call to "liberate the signifier of skin/culture from the fixations of racial typology, the analytics of blood, ideologies of racial dominance or degeneration," in the name of "the recognition of difference" (Location 75). Bhabha's invocation of "recognition" and "difference" uncomfort-ably echoes the keywords of this positivist apotheosis of the sign, calling for closer attention to what transformations are produced and what are foreclosed by the liberation of the signifier itself.13 For all the violence of racial typologies, the liberation of signifiers cannot be assumed to bring about the liberation of those who are violently signified; indeed as Victoria Grace explains, it has the effect of "ren-dering the [signified] meaningless as the referent of the [signifier]," giving rise to the hyperreal sign, "that construct which exists in its pure positivity, as 'identity' with no 'other' . . . no reference point that limits the freedom of meaning and value" (Baudrillard's 22). In this context, "differences" are "parallel positivities . . . that represent an

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infinity of positive values that never converge, never engage, that can never transform an 'other' or be transformed" (23). She expands on the political implications of this condition of the free circulation of signs that Baudrillard characterizes as hyperreality:

with the end of the dialectic of oppositional forces in the hyperreality of sign value, all "values" are liberated. Those categories excluded from the order of "identity" through a phallic social "politics" . . . are now "liberated terms" no longer subjugated as the necessary "other," assuming their positive identities which now circulate in their manifold differences. They are "liberated" not in the sense of made free, or emancipated from a position of subjugation within a dialectic of exploitation and oppression, but "liberated" from the structural logic of that very dialectic. (76)

Similarly, if the demand for visibility is now hegemonic, if it is the dominant culture's demand, and moreover if it is to be visually real-ized, how subversive—indeed how possible—is it to stake a trans-formative politics on visibility? Kura's comment about the newfound popularity of "Maori bags" adumbrates this challenge to contemporary cultural discourses whose import, I argue, has to be developed and brought to bear on arguments regarding agency and the appropria-tion of market means for anticolonial ends.14 The breakdown of the binary oppositional logic of visibility politics suggested in Bhabha's call for the liberation of the signifier (skin) from the signified (race) points not to an other of that logic, but to the production of the sign-without-referent, a higher order of signification as simulation. The challenge remains one of evoking without actually signifying (culture/being), of eluding the orders of Same and different through a notion of culture, including visual forms, as incommensurable, as gesture—as symbolic in Baudrillard's sense.

Visual media—both newspaper photographs and television cameras—are deployed by characters as useful means of generating awareness of the occupation at Te Ra Park, and although the interna-tional media initially show more interest in the historical background and political concerns of the occupation, while local media seek a spectacle, eventually even they begin to give coverage to the issues. In other words, Grace does not offer any simple judgment of the increasing reach of technologies of visual representation. The same could be said for her treatment of medical and forensic technologies of visualization, which have developed in degrees of intensity and abstraction from procedures for seeing bodies (visibility), to seeing inside bodies (hyper-visibility), to producing bodies as visual images (visuality). The novel's depiction of such technologies and their impli-


cations for understandings of embodiment extends the interrogation of discourses of visibility and visuality with their ramifications for the politics of decolonization. Indeed the eyes, and other visual technolo-gies, most directly associated in the novel with violent power relations, are those characterized as disembodied. In the dilapidated walls of the hospital waiting room where Kura awaits the return of Baby, the white plaster patches, like eyes but with no tears, connote carelessness and, at the same time, surveillance. Panoptical surveillance, along with the failure of cultural (Maori or otherwise) dimensions of encounter, response and care, is further evoked in the anonymity of the "hidden eye" laser-beam that grants Mahaki entry into the hospital building (53). The literal removal of Baby's eyes causes young Tawera to draw on familiarity with popular film and television violence in assuming she's been shot, left with two bullet holes where the eyes should be. Their removal is, of course, associated with the power relations that produce scientific knowledge, and family members speculate as to the reasons for such removals: to "experiment on us brown people"; for "cures for their own sicknesses"; to "See what we're made of"; to get "eyes for other people's babies"; to "sell them, get a lot of money," perhaps "From doctors in China"; or to "find out if the mother's a druggy" (84). The image of disembodied eyes arguably reifies eyes as organs of vision, extracted and abstracted from both the rest of the central nervous system on which vision is dependent and indeed from the social production of vision. It points to that further horizon of concern invoked, rather than fully confronted by the novel, relat-ing to the epistemological assumptions and the changing ontological foundations of representational visibility itself.

Through the ambivalence of its treatment of visual technologies and of genetic research, Baby No-Eyes points to an important space opening between the fading of the episteme that underpinned rep-resentation and the entirely different political and cultural landscape constituted by an era of simulation, where "the real is generalised from the model; the real proliferates from the modulation of differences in accordance with the model. Reality is coded" (V. Grace, Baudrillard's Challenge 88). The logic of the code that underpins developments in imaging technologies and genetics nevertheless has wider implica-tions for discourses of culture and identity in contemporary political concerns. A transition from an era of visibility, founded on the as-sumptions of representation and referentiality, to an era of visuality, where these assumptions no longer anchor the image, needs to be engaged in different terms than with recourse to the natural predi-cates of the former order. A perceived continuity of the objects and terms of struggle should not occlude changes that might point to a

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relocation of contemporary stakes away from representation and towards the challenges and possibilities of visuality.

The technology of X-ray, although not explicitly mentioned in the novel, is implied in the plates, bolts, and screws that hold Te Paania's bones together after the accident, producing what she calls "my new bionic self" and that function as supplements, like the other machines to which she was attached, restoring her body to completeness (68). This "new bionic self" connotes the hyperreal embodiment of the cy-borg, like the image of hyper-fertility of the aggressively green fields of reconstituted landscape she passed on her way to the marae,15 at the same time testifying to the original damage to her body (like the land). Further, while the implied X-ray can be seen as enabling the medical intervention to reconstitute Te Paania's functional whole-ness, it is a technology that produces as visible that which the eye cannot see: it renders the interior of the living body visible without surgical procedures of opening that body to anatomo-clinical vis-ibility. Similarly, the ultrasound fetal scan externalizes into visibility the inner spaces of Te Paania's maternal body, though the analogy is ominously more with outer space and aliens when Te Paania first shows Mahaki the image of the scan of Baby: "the little images . . . at first seemed more like blurry pictures of the moon's surface than anything resembling a human being." It is Mahaki who first registers misgivings over prenatal scans, with the sense that "there always seemed to be paybacks, somewhere along the line, for what was thought of as advances in medicine." Te Paania begins "pointing out a head, an eye socket, a hand in front of a face," and then "'Inside and out,' Te Paania had said. 'Arms, legs, face, sections of kidney, heart chambers . . . and here . . . first report.' It was a tick sheet showing that the baby had everything it was supposed to have" (53). His concerns are shown to be prescient, as the technology that al-lows the wellbeing of the baby to be established does so in terms of a gaze that produces the body as body parts, as organs. While the isolation and identification of body parts or organs is consistent with the medical "advance" of life-saving transplants, it also has the kind of negative "payback" Mahaki refers to in the legal and illegal com-mercial trade in body parts that has contributed to the exploitation of people's poverty internationally, bodies seen as raw materials for the development of knowledge, for monetary gain, for the well-being and longevity of the rich.

This fragmentation of embodiment into discrete visible parts can be understood in terms of how the technology itself functions. The X-ray image is produced through the manipulation, in the first instance, of light in relation to densities at specified levels of the body's interior—isolating the bones from the soft tissue that surrounds


them. Similarly the ultrasound scan does not offer a photograph, in the usual sense, of the bodily interior. It translates soundwaves into light, rather than producing the image as a function of light passing through the negative stage (V. Grace, "Medical" 197). Further, while both produce images with reference to specific bodies as referents (in this case, Te Paania's body), in producing as visible what the eye cannot see (bones, fetus), they marginalize or even exclude what the eye can see: the embodied mother/woman/patient. She is ex-cluded from the image, and even from the diagnostic scenario, as the eyes of the clinician or technician are more likely to be looking at the image against light or at the screen where the image of the fetus appears. As Sharon Lehner has recounted, "A sonogram takes a picture of me that I'm not in. . . . For the fetus to be seen as an independent entity, the woman must drop out of the image" (547), though she acknowledges that "the danger and pleasure of dropping out of one's own picture should not be underestimated" (548), a point to which I shall return.

Although the X-ray and the fetal scan are produced in referential relation to a particular body, they are now contemporaneous with developments in medical visualization whose methods of producing images as intelligible "are predicated on, and fully characterised by, their virtuality . . . the absence of any scene that might be required for their staging" (V. Grace, "Medical" 197). Liberated from any neces-sary embodied referent, "correction," enhancement, and interactive "manipulation" of medical photography can proceed digitally with ref-erence to an idealized model (194), while the ill body/the patient may be diagnosed and treated with reference to the digitally interactive simulation model produced by the Visible Human Project (198–99). In this way the image does not represent in the strict sense of the word, but rather presents a fully positivized image without reference to any prior object or scene. Further, this era of visual simulation, while thematically related to the questions of body politics in the novel, also points to wider shifts in the presuppositions and predica-tions of knowledge and the real, posing challenges to the politics of visibility, representation, and identity.

It might be argued that a technology that enables one to see inside or beyond the markers of race—skin color, for example—holds promise for the critique of visible difference and its construction of the body as the site of oppression. It could point to a way of knowing the embodied subject that would liberate the likes of young Riripeti, "a girl so black that it would make the teacher angry" (31), or allow Shane to transcend the conflict between his name and his face. However, the fragmentation of the body/image into parts and organs offers

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the preconditions for more radical abstraction: "Already, biophys-ioanatomical science, by dissecting the body into organs and func-tions, begins the process of the analytic decomposition of the body, and micromolecular genetics is nothing but the logical consequence, though at a much higher level of abstraction and simulation—at the nuclear level of the command cell, at the direct level of the genetic code" (Baudrillard, Simulacra 98).

Such problems emerge with reference to both visual-techno-logical and onto-epistemological concerns, and are invoked in the novel's own concerns with genetic research. Just as the era of visual simulation is characterized by the production of images with no nec-essary reference to an antecedent situated real, but to a digitized code that precedes production or replication of any specific image, DNA is increasingly—if problematically—understood as the code of life itself.16 If skin, hair, and so on are seen as the epiphenomena of race (what Bhabha, following Fanon, referred to as its "most visible of fetishes," as in no way "a secret" [Location 78]), then to privilege the technologies of hyper-visibility that see into the body is less a move away from visibility than its intensification, as we are no longer all the same under the skin, but comprised of distinctive chains of DNA, often referred to as genetic signatures that can be isolated, decoded, and mapped according to race.

Once again the novel's concerns around bodies and land con-verge as Mahaki has been recording testimony from elders of his hapu (sub-tribe) worried that an ancient ancestral burial site, Anapuke, is being surveyed from helicopters by scientists interested in access-ing the bones to extract DNA for genetic research. Mahaki, aware of the mapping of the human genome in the Human Genome Diversity Project, recognizes that while modern Maori, being too "impure," are not among the targeted indigenous peoples, the ancestral bones might well be of scientific and commercial interest (187). Te Paania transcribes the recorded concerns of community elders, relating to everything from reducing Maori to patentable resources, to transgenic research and cloning. They want assurance that

the bones of our ancestors will not be thieved for medi-cines, so we know our ancestors will not be used for ex-perimentations, so we know our ancestors' patterns will not be separated from their bones for a Pakeha to go and make money or to make things for them to use . . . or so they can be known for putting a Maori in a sheep or rising a Maori up from a dust. (185–86)

The latter concerns with transgenic research and cloning articu-late a tension between biological and cultural understanding of iden-


tity. They register the postcolonial echo of colonial power relations as represented in Mahaki's references to bio-prospecting and bio-piracy, where Maori bodies are—like the land—subject to mapping, mining, theft, and invasion. However, while Mahaki's account of the exploi-tation of poverty for scientific and commercial gain conventionally invokes the question of who benefits from research,17 the economic question might not mark the most fundamental threat to a cultural understanding of Maori (or any) identity. Indeed, positing the stakes in the discourse of political economy serves to divert attention from the question of what is lost in the very focus on a struggle over ac-cess to cultural resources.

Just as implosion of the erstwhile poles of materiality and vir-tuality produces the clone as an embodied simulation, it is a mistake to insist nostalgically on the politics of an embodied materiality as known through a representational economy of signification, without confronting the reach of simulation into our very being.18 As Baudril-lard suggests, "all this digital, numerical and electronic equipment is only the epiphenomenon of the virtualisation of human beings in their core" (qtd. in V. Grace, "Medical" 201). His point regarding the logic of cloning resonates with contemporary discourses of cultural identity more generally: "This is how one puts an end to totality. If all information can be found in each of its parts, the whole loses its meaning. It is also the end of the body, of this singularity called body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells, that it is an indivisible configuration" (Simulacra 97–98).

In other words, the problem that (corporeal) materials could be used to simulate a whole is as pertinent to the novel's cultural discourse as to its "biopiracy" plot (48). The simulated whole—the clone—is no less corporeal, no less an embodied, living entity, but it is a virtual one. It is generated by the manipulation of its own elements, the replication of the Same, with reference to the ideal-ized model, not (re)produced in encounter with an, or its, other, its negative instance—that which is not it. The objectification and fetishization of culture encompasses both its abstraction into cells—such as values or aesthetics—and its extension by way of an ideology of growth and development, taken to signal its vitality. Such reified cells, amenable to fractal replication—and to appropriation—might include what have become familiar as Maori narrative strategies and cultural aesthetics.

Since the publication in the 1980s of works such as Keri Hulme's the bone people (1984) and Grace's own second novel, Potiki (1986), Maori cultural patterning and aesthetics have become a conventional focus of critical attention. Narrative structures and strategies that evoke both the oral performance modes and spaces of traditional

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oratory (whaikorero), and the visual art forms of weaving (raranga), or carving (whakairo), or the spiral shapes found, for example, in the fern frond, have been used to figure different constructions and practices of space and time in the narratives. Emerging into literary visibility during the Maori cultural renaissance, these and other aes-thetic strategies constituted an exciting intervention into the national literary landscape, and were consistent with the objective of many Maori writers to "instil in non-Maori readers a greater understanding of Maori cultural concepts" (P. Grace, "Interview" 54). In "Parade," one of Grace's earliest and best known short stories, a character admonishes a young woman, reluctant to take part in a performance of Maori song and dance as part of a town parade: "It's your job, this. To show others who we are" (88). The stories that make up the narrative of Baby No-Eyes seem to support the continued need to promote understanding through enhanced visibility and familiarity. However, I would argue that the novel also implies the dangers of cultural objectification and simulation precisely by virtue of the nar-rative concerns with these processes at the corporeal (genetic) level. It is here that the complex cultural moment in which the novel is set comes fully into view. The ability of a literary work to figure experi-ences of space and time that challenge the decultured and deculturing character of modern western consumer society is both vital and yet also threatened by the attachment of such spatio-temporal figures to specific cultural values and identities. In turn, the cultures thus named in terms of values and identities are threatened rather than sustained, as cultures, by the discourses of property, or properties, that attach to such notions.

Baby No-Eyes recounts a history of violence against Maori cul-ture and presents that culture as facing critical discursive and political decisions as to how to confront its persistence and effects. There is an implicit cultural response in the familiar Maori narrative strategies I have mentioned. The interconnected themes are presented through an intergenerational narrative of multiple spatio-temporalities: history, memory, past and present, and looking to the future. The story is told in the voices of four narrators: the first-person accounts of Te Paania, her son Tawera, Shane's grandmother Kura, and the third-person nar-rative of their lawyer friend Mahaki. Their stories thread through each other in an evocation of raranga (weaving), as a traditional practice associated with storytelling, as the content of respective narrators' stories wind back, reach forward, and overlap. Beginnings and end-ings, specifically those of life and death, are thrown into question as Tawera's story begins before his birth, and his sister's continues after her death, while Tawera evokes the womb-space again at the end to express the basis of his artistic practice. Both Tawera and


Baby invoke Te Kore (the Void) in cycles of origin and destiny. These thematic and narrative processes combine to acknowledge Maori land and bodies as inseparable aspects of Maori cosmology and cul-ture, the spiritual and material foundations of culture as such, which together comprise the identification of tangata whenua, or people of the land. The specifically maternal body, invoking the traditional Earth Mother Papatuanuku, envelops the narrative, and in pointing to a belief in the cycle that entwines past, present and future, myth and history, youth and age, ancestors and those still to be born, it challenges ideologies predicated on the linearity of time, including accumulation, development, and progress.

While the affirmation of reified Maori cultural values may pro-duce a site of difference that maintains and sustains a sense of Maori group cohesion in a medium suited to the dispersed conditions of urbanization, at the same time it produces as visible a set of alienable cultural features that enter the economy of literary representation as values detachable from the relations within which they are meaningful for Maori, evolving into a codified set of cultural models. Culture, in this instance, is recast as the simulacrum produced from the various combinations of such (modular) features.19 They risk reduction to an element in an economy of diversity, compatible with a consumer-ist rather than a transformational logic. The thematic concern with extraction and profiting from indigenous DNA provides an uncannily material instance of this very problematic of abstraction. On one level, there is a tension between the focus on the visual technologies that capture and consign human lives to the sphere of the image and the articulation of narrative strategies that figure the visibility of Maori cultural values in self-representation. The technologies objectify what they produce as visible or visual, whereas the narrative strategies articulate subjects of cultural identity. However, the subject-object or active-passive distinction is difficult to sustain in a context where such narrative strategies inevitably become objects of aesthetic attention and where developments in visual technology—and their bio-medical uses—have rendered the corporeal scene (the object) redundant to the processes of image production; not to become subjects, but to be eclipsed by the virtual model and the manipulation of the digital code that generates and proliferates its objects. Nevertheless, if the textual enactment of reified Maori cultural values functions ambivalently in relation to the very opposition to objectification and appropriation that motivates the novel, I would argue that their integrity to this novel relates to the centrality of family and community as contexts for storytelling; the interconnectedness of the stories and that of the characters mean that a cultural or symbolic (reciprocal, reversible) exchange among them, and with the reader, may be adumbrated. It is, at this juncture, a very risky line between literature's cultural

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(symbolic) power and its transmutation into the economic production and circulation of signs of cultural difference.

Have the politics of visibility succeeded, as it were, to the ex-tent that visibility has been raised to the higher power of visuality? A politics predicated on cultural visibility becomes a simulated cultural politics to the extent that it succeeds in being absorbed into a range of techno-bureaucratic and managerial systems for producing and protecting and promoting that culture in relation to concepts of tradi-tion and authenticity. Michael Phillipson invokes this sort of problem in discussing "The plight of aesthetic practices and their analysis in a technoscientific culture"; in his critique of culture in the systematized and simulated sense I have discussed, he calls for the work of art to become "a-cultural, ungatherable in terms of existing rules for aesthetic response, good sense, firm knowledge, and so on" (202), critiquing "The global buy-out of aesthetics by the institutional ma-chinery of culture" in favor of "the challenge that [art] throws down to culture," its "transforming potential" (203).

A critical reading of the politics of visibility, and indeed of the complicity between a consumerist logic of cultural diversity and the "precession of the code"20 that comes increasingly into view with respect to dominant discourses of DNA as well as the functioning of new visual technologies (and cultural forms), does not result in the nihilistic end of all politics. On the contrary, the failure to pursue such critiques is more complicit with that dead end. Bhabha refers to "the problematic of representation which, Fanon suggests, is specific to the colonial situation. He writes: 'the originality of the colonial context is that the economic substructure is also a superstructure.'" Although Bhabha expands Fanon's point to argue that this "provides a 'visibility' to the exercise of power" (Location 79), I suggest that its intensified relevance to the postcolonial situation generates precisely the opposite effect, or at least that this "visibility" cannot be (must only be?) taken at face value: it is the visuality of power.

Positing that at either extreme of visibility lies visuality, I invoke two senses of visuality: the totalizing violence of simulation functions in terms of its simulation precisely of representation; conversely, vi-suality might connote the image as "the illusion of the real," a sense of visuality that logically rather than historically precedes visibility "before meaning marks its appearance" (Geniusas 298). Baudrillard refers to "the intelligence of trompe l'oeil . . . of always proceeding according to the rules of appearances, through allusion to and ellipsis of presence" ("The Violence" 106). This is not an argument for coun-tering visibility or visuality with invisibility tout court, or (the semio-logical projection of) meaning with the lapse into nonmeaning, but for considering the possibility that staking everything on the politics of the subject of history, of liberation, of decolonization, might be to


act in accordance with the very system being opposed, generating a simulated politics, and that this system is more radically challenged by a strategy of illusion, where "'illusion is simply the fact that noth-ing is itself, nothing means what it appears to mean. There is a kind of inner absence of everything to itself. . . . It is where we can never get hold of things as they are, where we can never know the truth about objects, or the other'" (Baudrillard, qtd. in V. Grace, "Medical" 204). This is an ironic strategy that "registers the impossibility that the object conform to the logic of simulation" (204), can never be grasped as value (for exploitation) or truth (for simulation). Perhaps this is one of the pleasures of dropping out of one's own picture to which Lehner alluded.

There are narrative moments in which Baby No-Eyes invokes the reversible play of appearance and disappearance, truth and illu-sion. The occupation of Te Ra Park offers the appearance of political action, perhaps all the more effective because it nostalgically calls up an earlier era of occupations and demonstrations. It is readily consumed by media publicity, while the truly cultural stakes are in protecting Anapuke precisely from the destruction that its publicity and media capture would engender. The role of Baby in the novel, particularly as this is inseparable from her relationship to Tawera, is another obvious play of visibility and invisibility. Finally, though, the epilogue, which focuses on the development of Tawera as an artist, tantalizingly suggests the parameters of a different politics. His artistic pursuits have been traced throughout the novel from his childhood drawings and paintings to the struggles he faces on the threshold of adulthood. Again, Grace's treatment of this moment is ambivalent. Tawera explains that "This year I attend university where I study between the lines of history, seeking out its missing pages, believing this may be one of the journeys that will help me be an artist" (291). Between the lines of history, he implies, is suppressed history, more history to be brought to light; this will be the source of his development as an artist. Yet his trajectory is away from history and towards art itself. In this sense, between the lines of history is something other than history. Against the violence of images depicted throughout the novel, there is the "violence done to the image" in "its exploitation as a pure vector of documentation, of testimony, of mes-sage (including the message of misery and violence), its allegiance to morale, to pedagogy, to politics, to publicity" (Baudrillard, "The Violence" 176). Art (and indeed fiction) represents the possibility of challenging such violence, and one aspect of this is its eclipse of, the subject or the cycles of allusion to and ellipsis of, the subject. As a young man, Tawera struggles against the egg-shaped spaces of emptiness that keep finding their way into his paintings: "So I sit

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down to read for a while—the unsaid matters of history—but I don't find what I'm looking for" (292). One night out walking, he sees for the first time two words written in red marker pen on a hatch door down an alley: "Try Opposite," and now he can begin work: "But now, instead of trying to shrink the egg of space, I begin to enlarge it. Instead of ending with that little unbreachable gap I begin with it, embrace it, let it be there, make it be there, pushing my drawing further and further to the outskirts. I persist with this, night after night, until one night everything's gone, fallen from the edges of the paper" (293).

Only after this complete emptying of the canvas can he begin to make his art, and the account of his first painting is as tactile as it is visual, as his sister reappears in his new "incantation" "to make visible who was invisible," entailing that he will "become the invisible one, opposite, with a hand reaching forward. I'll be unseen—except that now and again I'll step in to meet her. We'll go rollerblading together in a place where she will be my eyes" (294). This image is not devoid of representation, as it depicts what was done to his sister, but it envisions her as she never was in the finite material world. At the same time, rather than a simple reversal of positions, it invokes the cycles of being and non-being, visibility and invisibility. Further, his role as an artist is not to express or represent himself, his own identity, but to disappear in/in relation to, the work itself. This once again recalls Lehner's reference to the pleasures of dropping out of one's own picture. There is a strongly ethical charge in the image of his hand reaching towards his sister, whose arms "reach out to something as untouchable as a receding dream" (294), but this ethi-cal moment has its greatest force in the context of a critique of the political ramifications of the passage of the politics of visibility into the visual simulations of hyperreality.

Conclusion

Identity is a precondition of visibility; to be visible, something has to be, in the sense of having ontological status, and to be itself, as distinct from an other. Ambivalence cannot be encompassed within such a logic. In contemporary discourse, identity has become the term around which culture is articulated, but it also freezes what is cultural about culture. In response to theft or suppression of Maori cultural objects and practices has emerged a counter-discourse of property and rights. This is a response in the terms of the original (colonial) threat or aggression, and it inserts its subjects into the logic and social order that produced it. Expressions of difference are reduced to differences within, or modulations of, that order. In other words,


no fundamental challenge can be posed to it in terms of identity or property, both of which sustain it.

In Baby No-Eyes, the characters intuit cultural threat to their own identities as Maori as they confront the implications of genetic research. Nevertheless, they can only articulate the threat with reference to the economic predicates of identity, worrying about the theft of DNA (a resource question) and its use in transgenic re-search (an identity question). They invoke the question of stakes: would decolonization mean consolidating identity and its attendant property or properties systematically as culture, or would it mean renouncing these priorities to open culture itself, as constitutively ambivalent, to continual processes of symbolic exchange? It would testify to the profound effects of colonization if these could not be seen as radically different approaches to the problem of decoloniza-tion. Baudrillard insists that "Culture does not translate the identity of a society, the immanence of a system of values. On the contrary, culture is their transcendence, disavowal, challenge, distance" ("The Global" 29). He continues that "[o]nce it materialises as heritage, as power, as appropriation, as identity, once it becomes signature, that is, a materialised image of this power," it is "an after-effect of the colonisation of mental space and the failure of its decolonisation." He cites Hannah Arendt on power to argue that culture "'cannot be stockpiled and kept for emergencies, like instruments of violence: it exists only as act'" (30).

Art is sometimes seen as the least political or politicized sense of culture. This is not to deny politicized art, but art's political efficacy is much less determinable or tangible. Perhaps, though, this is the point, especially in a context of overwhelmingly instrumental invocations of culture. I suggest that art—in the most general sense of cultural practice that takes its distance from and challenges the orthodoxies of identity, truth, and the social—institutes or enacts a radical ambiva-lence of the (visual or verbal) image, puts it into cycles of appearance and dissolution. In its irreducibility to the sphere of political economy, art is uncontainable, unconstrainable, and noncompliant. Its power is that of seduction, the term Baudrillard uses to denote the radical other of production with its attendant implications of identity, accu-mulation, and economic exchange. Seduction is, rather, of the order of a duel, a play (drama/game) of "presence and absence, creation and destruction, appearance and disappearance" (V. Grace, Baudril-lard's Challenge 143) that endlessly raises stakes in "a game that never ends. And cannot end, since the dividing line that defines the victory of the one and the defeat of the other, is illegible" (Baudrillard, Seduction 22). What is seductive, in Baudrillard's sense, about art, the image, or the literariness of literature, is its status as illusion: it

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is the "specifity of the image" (Baudrillard, "The Violence" 178), or pure appearances with their symbolic adumbration of another space, incommensurable with, irreducible to hegemonic reality in social and representational space. Yet the challenge implicit in Baby No-Eyes is to attend to the specificity of the cultural encounter with the work of art, while opening that same engagement out to the social, to a rethinking of the political.

Notes

1. The terms of my argument here are drawn from Baudrillard's work, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Although he devel-ops the most sustained analysis of the implications of the symbolic as singularity, and thus as radically other to political economy, Bhabha has also argued for an understanding of culture as incommensurable singularity. See Bhabha, "The Postcolonial Critic" 49–51.

2. See also Gayatri Spivak's account of the dynamics of representation as an articulation of the political sense of "speaking for" and the more illustrative sense of "re-presentation" (275), glossed as "the contrast . . . between a proxy and a portrait"; the representative as "bearer" of "the (absent) collective consciousness" or as "a 'representative' who appears to work in another's interests" evokes the dual dimen-sions of substitution and equivalence (276).

3. While it is not conventional in semiological analyses to conflate the signified and the referent, my point derives from the work of Bau-drillard, in which the recourse to a referent preceding the signified misses the crucial point that things emerge as meaningful entities (as referents) within this larger semiological structure. See Baudril-lard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign; see also Geniusas, "Baudrillard's Raw Phenomenology."

4. In Haunted Nations Sneja Gunew discusses what she argues is the under-theorized aural dimension in the dynamics of racism and of the identity politics whose contestations of racism are premised on a similar metaphysics of presence. See, especially, chapter 5, "Acous-tic Transgressions and Identity Politics: A Translated Performance," 79–89.

5. The visibility of protests and demonstrations was in large measure the result of the reach of the media, particularly visual media such as television, throughout the country and abroad. The publishing industry, in the widest sense, was also influential in this visibility.

6. Grace has been publishing fiction since the 1970s and is generally regarded as one of those writers whose work signaled the emergence of the Maori cultural renaissance itself.


7. The term "user pays" became prominent in New Zealand political dis-course from the late 1980s, when economic and social policy greatly reduced the role of state funding in the areas of health, education, and welfare, and required users (students, patients, clients) to pay a much larger proportion of their own educational and treatment costs. This was a fundamental shift away from what had been New Zealand's welfare state policies predicated on the belief that the ability to pay should not determine access to these services.

8. Throughout Patrons of Maori Culture, Stephen Webster argues force-fully against analyses of Maori socio-economic disadvantage in New Zealand that privilege culture and the positive recognition of cultural difference as the key to improving the condition of Maori, rather than focusing on the political economy of social inequity.

9. Underlining a more general problem of the relation of medical and family discourses of the body, there was a more recent corollary in the 2002–2003 scandal of the heart bank discovered to exist at a major Auckland hospital: hearts and lungs of fetal and infant bodies were retained for research without consent or even knowledge of the family, the bodies again returned incomplete for burial. Maori families involved responded to this news with reference to specific cultural values and protocols.

10. The terms "fanaticism and barbarism" appear on the monument itself to describe those who fought against the government.

11. Keown offers both ways of reading Tawera's envisioning of Baby in the novel. See Postcolonial Pacific Writing, 152–55.

12. She vows never to speak English again, and the rest of her story, although presented in English in the novel, is to be understood as having been spoken by her in Maori. Describing Baby No-Eyes as "a testament to resistance," Keown argues that linguistic craft is the political fulcrum of Grace's work and that "if silence is complicity, Grace seeks to end the silence and to challenge the grammatical and social structures that have enforced that silence" (Postcolonial 168).

13. Baudrillard points to the liberation of the signifier when he argues that "When things, signs or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins and aims, they embark on an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content" (Transpar-ency 6).

14. Here, I am proposing a qualification to Graham Huggan's argument that "The well-intentioned desire for 'adversarial internationaliza-tion'—for the fashioning of global solidarities in the continuing anti-imperial struggle—must contend with the power of the market that seeks, in part, to contain such oppositional gestures. The choice here may be not so much whether to 'succumb' to market forces as how

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to use them judiciously to suit one's own, and other people's, ends" (10–11).

15. The marae is the community gathering place where the customs, protocols, and rituals of Maori life are most fully expressed, and where community issues are raised, debated, and resolved. It usu-ally comprises the grounds themselves and the main meeting house, or wharenui, as well as a building for dining. There may be other spaces and buildings, depending on the location and the nature of the community whose marae it is.

16. In the introduction to the second edition of The Ontogeny of Infor-mation, Susan Oyama critiques the binary thinking that posits an implicitly autonomous and determining role for genes as expressed in the notion of there being a gene for a particular condition, char-acteristic, or disease, without reference to environmental factors.

17. In her interview with Michelle Keown, Patricia Grace suggests that the collection of DNA for the Human Genome Project "will not benefit these dying communities, but will benefit researchers, pharmaceuti-cal companies and people of wealthy nations" (57).

18. See, for example, Katherine Hayles's argument that "If, on the one hand, embodiment implies that informatics is imprinted into the body as well as mind, on the other, it also acts as a reservoir of materiality that resists the pressure towards dematerialization" (504).

19. As this is not a representational relation posited in terms of referen-tiality, the positions of (Maori as) objects or subjects of this process would become increasingly indeterminate.

20. This phrase is associated with Baudrillard's analysis of hyperreal simulation, and its critical force underpins the concerns of this essay. See Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. 1972. Trans. Charles Levin. St Louis: Telos, 1981.

———. "The Global and the Universal." Grace, V.; Worth; and Simmons 23–36.

———. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St Martin's, 1990.———. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann

Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. ———. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. 1990.

Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993.———. "The Violence of the Image and the Violence Done to the Image."

Grace, V.; Worth; and Simmons 171–81.


Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. ———. "The Postcolonial Critic: Homi Bhabha Interviewed by David Ben-

nett and Terry Collits." Arena 96 (1991): 47–63.Genuisas, Saulius. "Baudrillard's Raw Phenomenology." Journal of the

British Society for Phenomenology 35 (2004): 293–309.Grace, Patricia. Baby No-Eyes. Auckland: Penguin, 1998.———. "Interview with Patricia Grace." By Michelle Keown. Kunapipi 22.2

(2000): 54–63.———. "Parade." Waiariki and Other Stories. Auckland: Penguin, 1975.

81–89.Grace, Victoria. Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading. London:

Routledge, 2000.———. "Medical Visualisation: Ontological Politics and Paradoxes." Grace,

V.; Worth; and Simmons 189–206.Grace, Victoria, Heather Worth, and Laurence Simmons, eds. Baudrillard:

West of the Dateline. Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003.Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multicultur-

alisms. London: Routledge, 2004.Hayles, Katherine. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." Jones

497–506.Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Lon-

don: Routledge, 2001.Jones, Amelia. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Rout-

ledge, 2003.Keown, Michelle. Postcolonial Pacific Writing. London: Routledge, 2005.Lehner, Sharon. "My Womb, The Mosh Pit." Jones 545–49.Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: U of Min-

nesota P, 2001. Oyama, Susan. The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems

and Evolution. 2nd ed. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.Phelan, Peggy. "Broken Symmetries: Memory, Sight, Love." Jones

105–14.Phillipson, Michael. "Managing 'Tradition': The Plight of Aesthetic Practices

and Their Analysis in a technoscientific culture." The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Chris Jenks. London: Routledge, 1995. 202–17.

Spivak, Gayatri. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Inter-pretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. 271–313.

Webster, Steven. Patrons of Maori Culture: Power, Theory, and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance. Dunedin: U of Otago P, 1998.

Documents

From Visibility to Visuality: Patricia Grace's Baby No-Eyes & the Cultural Politics of Decolonization