Avoiding Colonial Creep: Coming to Terms with Radical Difference

Pasley (Ngāti Pākehā) and Sturm (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa) engage in kōrero about agential realism’s conceptualisation of the void and the risk of colonial conceptual creep. Pasley details their responsibility to acknowledge how their understanding of the void was only possible by way of trying to understand Te Korekore, a Te Ao Māori (‘the Māori world’) conceptualisation of existence’s potentiality. Cameron-Lewis and Mika’s kōrero on the All, which opened this double special issue, raised a similar problem: that the comfortable fiction of seeking to define these fundamentally unknowable states undermines their capacity to support coming to terms with radical difference. Pasley and Sturm see the conceptual creep of Modern/colonial dualism as evident in the false binary that – to borrow agential realism’s device of hyphenating equivocations – mis/understands the void/existence as no/thing, rather than appreciating that exclusions matter. Similarly, they question whether the unknowability of the void returns an agential realist ethics of response-ability, which is enacted through the tracing of entanglements that constitute im/possibilities, to a politics of recognition. Returning to an earlier conversation, they suggest that Althusser’s aleatory materialism might offer a heuristic for understanding alterities as always already haunting im/possibility. They tie off the kōrero by discussing what it might mean to come to terms with the unknowable, or rather, to come to the unknowable’s terms as a means of tracing the incomprehensibility of radical difference.