Living Deadwood: imagination, affect, and the persistence of the past.

• Author: Johnson, Rebecca
• Position: Canada - Legal Outsiders in American Film

In this paper, the object of my attention is the HBO television production, Deadwood. (1) In this highly acclaimed series, NYPD Blue's (2) creator, David Milch, both drew on and disrupted the genre of the American Western, generating fans in both popular and scholarly circles. (3) The series, part historical, part fictional, takes place in the 1870s, a time explicitly marked by the forward movement of colonial expansion. It is set in the illegal settler camp of Deadwood, in the shadow of the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota, what was long part of Lakota Indian territory.

As historians would remind us, that territory was the subject of a treaty (4) that promised that no white people would enter without the express permission of the tribes, a treaty which promised the Army would remove any settlers who did come, and a treaty, like so many other treaties, whose terms were violated. For the hills held gold, and prospectors came, and gold was taken, and an outlaw town sprung up, providing goods and services to those with gold, and people flooded to it, and fortunes were won and lost, and the illegal settlers were not removed, and the outlaw town was eventually made legitimate. Hundreds of thousands of Indian peoples of course lost their lives or were displaced as the colonizing settler society spread over the land.

The series's starting place is the camp of Deadwood, a place beyond and outside of the law. It is filmed in what one might call a mode of gritty realism, in the palette of dirt, blood, sweat, and mud. The dialogue balances on the thinnest edge between the exquisitely poetic and the discomfitingly profane, rather like Shakespeare meets The Sopranos. (5) Viewers are placed to re-inhabit the camp of Deadwood in this time of change, to consider how it might have been that order was built from chaos. The town is populated by a range of compelling characters, some fictional, others historic, including Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Hurst. David Milch, creator and executive producer of the series, asserts, however, that the story is less about the people than about the camp itself. It is, he says, "about something larger, about drivers below the surface, moving the characters and the action forward." (6)

Deadwood is, of course, a story about the past. Such stories, Edward Said reminds us, tell us less about that past than about cultural attitudes in the present. (7) Further, such stories participate in creating what Raymond Williams referred to as "structures of feeling." (8) In this context, I find both Deadwood, and Milch's comments about it illuminating. What does the series assume and presume about those who are inside or outside the legal, and or, social order? What are the "drivers below the surface"? What are we to understand about the relationship of those drivers to law, order, and the economy? What structures of feeling invite certain kinds of emotional investments, certain ways of thinking about the past and its place in laying the sediment for the world in which we now live? These are some of the questions I want to touch upon in this paper. In the spaces of imagination it opens to us, in the pleasures it offers us, what does Deadwood suggest about the place of the outside and the outsider in our past, present, and future?

In this discussion of imagination, I do take the question of pleasure quite seriously. In the interest of full disclosure, and with a measured dose of self-mockery, I might confess that, as befits a feminist, the pleasure that most interests me is indeed my own. I confess myself to be a fan; one episode and I was hooked. (9) Of course, I also acknowledge the variability of people's experiences of pleasure in the stories, textual or cinematic, that they consume. My love of the series might be matched by others' equally powerful experiences of revulsion, annoyance, or even disinterest. I am not suggesting here that Deadwood should or must move viewers in specific ways, but rather, that it is important to grapple with the feelings, pleasurable and otherwise, that inhere in the viewing experience. I think it important to acknowledge that my experience of viewing the series, of thinking about the series, of making connections between the series and my other research projects, was marked by enjoyment and pleasure. Pleasure is, of course, far from apolitical. It can and should be open to critique, interrogation, and with a tentative nod in the direction of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, (10) perhaps even change. The point here is only to assert that, in taking a law-and-film approach to the question of outsiders in law, it is worth asking questions about the place of pleasure in structures of feeling.

In thinking about Deadwood, and about the pleasures the series offers, I have come to see and appreciate lines of connection between what I might once have described as three independent research projects--projects I will call Colonialism, Affect, and Dissent. Before returning in more detail to the television series itself, I want to make a few comments on two of those projects, Colonialism and Affect, to make visible some of the questions and theoretical resources that have been shaping my experience and understanding of Deadwood. After the discussion of the television series, I will comment on the relationship of Deadwood to my third project, Dissent.

1. COLONIALISM AND AFFECT

   Let me begin with the observation that, in Canada, colonialism is neither an arcane concept nor a function of the distant past. Canada continues to bear the marks of its particular colonial past--one marked not simply by conflicts between French and English colonizing superpowers, but also by multiple and complicated histories of Aboriginal/settler encounters. (11) Though there are undoubtedly continuities in the U.S. and Canadian experiences, I am conscious of Robert Young's reminder that histories of colonialism are not monolithic. (12) It is important to attend to the details of particular histories, even where the histories, for settlers and indigenous peoples alike, are unpleasant to hear or tell. (13)

   Certainly, for those of us living on the far west coast of British Columbia, the colonial is an unavoidable reality. Here on "the edge of Empire," (14) colonialism came late, and a great diversity of First Nations communities already populated the territory into which settlers flowed. (15) Though the federal and provincial governments asserted their sovereignty over the land, such claims have always rested on tenuous grounds: the government negotiated very few treaties, and the doctrines of conquest and terra nullius were not possible grounds for government claims to sovereignty over British Columbia's land and resources. As it is, the government of British Columbia is currently in ongoing treaty negotiations over the status of well over 75 percent of the land in the province. (16)

   These treaty negotiations, of course, are taking place against the background of a pattern of colonial encounters marked by the practices of disrespect and assimilative laws and policies that were imposed on Aboriginal peoples across the nation. (17) Laws prohibited Aboriginal cultural practices such as the potlatch, (18) restricted traditional hunting and fishing practices (19) and prevented Aboriginal people from taking legal action to pursue their land claims. (20) Some communities were moved to reservations, while others were relocated to far distant places where they experienced starvation and death. (21) Policies forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their families, (22) sometimes placing them in residential schools that attempted to train the indigenous culture out of them. (23) These attempts to break intergenerational connections had devastating effects on Aboriginal communities, the results of which are still felt today. (24) The five volume report of the Federal Government's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was clear in its conclusions: in Canada, colonialism is not a thing of the past, but persists into the present. (25)

   This persistence of the past into the present is not only a Canadian phenomenon, but is also visible when one shifts attention from North America to the global context. Decolonization has been the order of the day for many years. We speak in the language of "former colonies," and yet, activists, theorists, and politicians alike speak to the persistence of informal colonization, and to its puzzles. How is it that, in the face of formal decolonization both at home and abroad, the same pattern of deprivation and exploitation remains largely in place? How is it that "Empire" continues to persist?

   Here, I just want to draw in a few insights from three theorists whose work focuses attention on continuing colonial patterns, and who I have found helpful in thinking through the challenges of postcolonial activism: political philosopher Jim Tully, economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, collectively known as J.K. Gibson-Graham, and cultural theorist Edward Said. Though each theorist works in a different domain, each focuses attention on the place of the imagination in the politics of thinking otherwise. First is the approach taken by political philosopher James Tully, in his work on imperialism and civic freedom. Tully, focusing on global or imperial relations of dependency, would of course remind us that Empire was and is economic. (26) It was never just a set of beliefs about more or less desirable/savage peoples, but was also a system of wealth generation, for some, at the expense of others. Tully also attends to the significance of the languages and processes that sustain Empire. (27) These languages, he notes, describe and legitimate European imperialism and colonization as irresistible processes of development. These languages suggest that "no one is in control," that life is just like this, and that there is "no reasonable alternative." The...