Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought as an affective structure. It draws together ideas from cultural studies, cultural anthropology and critical Indigenous studies to theorize whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The first section of the article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ (Berlant 2011) is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. Within this context, I introduce Utopia (2013). Made by the journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger, Utopia specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The following sections of the article unpack this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film’s journey to Rottnest Island—formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers—to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective ‘surfaces’ (Probyn 1996) of whiteness by analyzing the film’s encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and Indigenous ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2011). Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2014). Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession—including, in the form of life—disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding, and state led impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of affective relations that mediate whiteness.