Abstract
There is a deep ambivalence between the economy of a "return to origins," as avant-primitivism, & the search for "new myths." Antipodeanism, as an expression of such ambivalence, can be summed up in Guy Debord's observation that, "as for the productions of peoples who are still subject to cultural colonialism (often caused by political oppression), even though they may be locally progressive, they play a reactionary role in the broader cultural movement" (Rapport sur la construction des situations, 1957). The antagonism between institutional culture-which can only be colonial in its meaning & orientation-& insurrectional poetics, by which the "unpresentable" of indigenous resistance destabilizes the political order, is irreconcilable to the project of mythmaking at the level of national consciousness-which is to say, of the state.
Since Plato, the state has defined itself as that which excludes poetry-meaning, those forms of language that evade the discourse of power.