The Johannesburg Salon - Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and

Transcription

VOLUME FIVE 2012
THE JOHANNESBURG SALON
Editor: Achille Mbembe
Visual Editor: Juan Orrantia
Managing Editor: Leigh-Ann Naidoo
© 2012, The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism
Copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC),
and no part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission, in writing, of both the
authors and the publishers.
The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the JWTC, its trustees, members of the Council or
donors. Authors contribute to JWTC publications in their personal capacity.
First published by the JWTC
www.jwtc.org.za
An intiative of the University of the Witwatersrand
In partnership with:
Contents
5
symposium theory from the south
Juan Obarrio
10
Surpassing the North: Can the Antipodean Avantgarde Trump Postcolonial Belatedness?
Srinivas Aravamudan
14
Theory from the Comaroffs, or How to Know the World Up, Down, Backwards and Forwards
James Ferguson
18
Theory From the Antipodes Notes on Jean & John Comaroffs’ TFS
Achille Mbembe
26
Coevalness, Recursivity and the Feet of Lionel Messi
Ato Quayson
30
Theory from the South: A Rejoinder Jean and John Comaroff 37
High Wire Acts: Knowledge Imperatives of Southern Urbanisms
Edgar Pieterse
51
EPISTEMOLOGIES OF DECEPTION: Topologies of the Extra/Ordinary
David Theo Goldberg
63
Is Fanon Finished? / Fanon. Et après?
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
71
Monsoon Fever
Pamila Gupta
80
The aphorism and the ‘historical image’: Minima Moralia and Adorno’s politics of form
Louise Green
86
The Fetish and its Antis
Hylton White
89
Nature and/as Thing(s) in the Emergent Literary City
Meg Samuelson
92
The Political Theology of Antiracism
Diren (Chandiren) Valayden
98
mzanzi’s golden economy
Kim Gurney
102
The Zone (In reference to Yamaneko’s machine)
Juan Orrantia
104
REFLECTIONS ON AESTHETICS AND VIOLENCE IN COLOMBIA
María Victoria Uribe (Translated by Eduardo Arques)
110
REFLEXIONES SOBRE ESTÉTICA Y VIOLENCIA EN COLOMBIA
María Victoria Uribe
116
The Afterlife of coca dreams (Photo essay)
Juan Orrantia
symposium
theory from the south
Juan Obarrio
Johns Hopkins University
The Event The essays that follow were originally presented at a
round table on Jean and John Comaroff’s latest book,
Theory from the South. Or, how Euro-America is
evolving toward Africa (Paradigm 2012) held at the
American Anthropology Association annual meeting
(Montreal, November 2011). They represent the
spirit of collegial yet critical engagement in which
the event was organized1.
The panel was planned over months of communication and shared reading as the final galley
proofs of the book became available. A few events
held during the Southern winter of 2011 anticipated
the arguments that are part of this dossier. In July,
a book launch debate between John Comaroff and
Ato Quayson, convened by Achille Mbembe, took
place in the context of the Johannesburg Workshop
for Theory and Criticism (WITS University). In
August, a series of public lectures given by Jean and
1 Thanks are due to Achille Mbembe and Charles Piot
for all the joint work in co-organizing the event; to Jean
and John Comaroff for their participation and response,
to the critics who discussed the book from the viewpoint
of the humanities, literary criticism, political theory and
anthropology, as well as various perspectives on and from
the South; and to Anne Allison and Charles Piot, editors
of Cultural Anthropology, for hosting this publication.
Fernando Coronil was originally scheduled to participate
at the round table in Montreal. His untimely death is a
tragic loss for anthropology and Latin American studies.
THEORIZING THE CONTEMPORARY: Introduction Budapest, II. Weltfestspiele, Festumzug
German Federal Archives
John Comaroff in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires
(the latter hosted by the University of San Martin)
bridged various linguistic and intellectual gaps often present in South-South critical dialogues. Local
intellectuals and large public audiences discussed
the book; many of its arguments translated well and
others were critically dissected from various local
perspectives.
These exchanges in South Africa, Brazil and
Argentina proved that the book’s main themes resonate in different ways in distinct parts of the South,
constructing a diversified picture of the general category of “Global South”. The book’s arguments reveal
how multiple, diverse post-totalitarian and post-colonial trajectories seem to converge in the neoliberal
present into an imagined single territory that links
Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The events held in the South began to answer
a few implicit questions. How will Theory from
the South–the book–be read in places outside
Anglophone areas? Will other theories from the
South produced in languages other than English also
be read in the North? Where is the book’s potential
readership located? Where is timely anthropological
theory being produced after the end of the “ethnographic present’? The text provides insight into the
supposed divergence between the sites of production of theory and ethnographic sites and how those
two are being re-combined at present.
The book must be also contextualized within the
discussion on current intellectual production in the
South, where the relations between state, public
sphere and academic institutions are much more
intricate than in the North. Due to new configurations of funding, flows of information and other constraints, many Southern-based research centers can
only function as concessionary companies of knowledge, while in an opposing trend, political and social
movements in the South are producing their own
theory and not just importing Northern academic
conceptualizations.
The Southern public talks and discussions gave a
preview of the thrust of the round table held at a very
different location: the AAA meetings in November.
The event’s impact already anticipates other similar debates elsewhere. The notes that follow are a
critical introduction of the book’s themes and the
scope of the discussion. The first short section is on
“Theory” and the “South”. The second and last is on
“Africa.
The Southern Question The introduction develops the book’s title theme as
a gateway to various ethnographic chapters (some
of which were published earlier). The essays are
aimed at constituting both an empirical analysis of
Africa and “theory from the South”, one not oriented
5
toward the local exotica or the past nor aimed at an
anthropological enterprise of salvaging the strangely
precious and the vanishing. Instead, in consonance
with the book’s surprising sub-title, the analysis situates these materials in the future as an anthropology of anticipations of the socio-political reality of
the West (or, in this case, Euro-America, the “Global
North”).
One of the book’s central arguments revolves
around an old sophism about universals and particulars, reframing it as a question of invention
and mimesis. It revisits the notion that, from the
Enlightenment to modernization and development
discourse, Western modernity has been posed as the
true, original model and parameter of progress. All
other modernist processes in the South have been
regarded as mere degraded copies or imperfect,
unfinished imitations. In the linear teleologies of
reason, the South (the Orient, the Third World, the
Other) has always been depicted as being deferred:
historical change understood as a late arrival. In the linear teleologies of reason, the South (the
Orient, the Third World, the Other) has always
been depicted as being deferred: historical change
understood as a late arrival.
It is an argument that reminds the reader of the
debate between Aijaz Ahmad and Fredric Jameson
on the Northern critic’s demand that Southern aesthetic production should represent “national allegories”. Indeed, the book’s first chapter references
Coetzee on the problem of the “African novel” having to be re-translated into what could be called a
simulacrum or an authentified, more or less exotic, copy of Western liberal universalism. Similar
6
arguments had been prefigured in a more radical
way by African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o
and Wole Soyinka. Also, Borges already proposed
in his essay “The Argentine writer and tradition”,
from 1951, a reversal of literary centers and traditions. The result was not a Deleuzian “minor literature” but the (naïve?) hope in the availability for the
Southern writer of the “whole of Western tradition”
as his or her own mythology and genealogy.
And yet the book does not rehearse this argument in the usual simplistic, reactive or resistant
manner. It provides a new twist to it, such that the
South is not analyzed as the mere receiving end of
colonial subjection or modernization’s designs but
rather emerges as a space of experimentation that
prefigures the near future of the West. Whereas the
colonies might have always been the first laboratory
of modernity, there is allegedly something new in
the political, economic, and cultural ways in which
the South anticipates the contours of the EuroAmerican future.
The book offers powerful diagnostics of a zeitgeist, if not a final conclusion. It brings epistemic
and socio-economic considerations of the scope of
modernity back into conversation with political
economy by means of several related analogies. For
instance, the raw materials from an older colonial
world or from today’s South that become value-added commodities in the North are equated here with
the raw, unprocessed data from today’s postcolony
or “Global South”, which becomes Theory after being analytically processed by Northern authors. In
fact, at times, a deeper implicit analogy seems to be
operating in the text where “Theory” can be replaced
by “Capital” itself. The argument on value moves
back and forth from assemblages of production to
machineries of information. The text rescues the discussion on modernity, or
“multiple, alternative modernities”, from the linear
reductionisms of an older modernization theory.
Thus, it could be set in conversation with the most
sophisticated contemporary theorization on the
global neoliberal moment, from time-space compression (Harvey) and absolute real subsumption
(Negri, Deleuze) to financescapes and ethnoscapes
(Appadurai) and from hybridity and difference
(Bhabha) to “nostalgia for the present” (Jameson)
and modernity as a Neverland (Latour).
Beyond the discourses of development and modernization which gave their objects different names–
“Third world” or “underdeveloped world”–the book
aims to develop theory “on and from” the “South”.
The term “South” is deployed on the book as a set of
relations and not as a place, in order to emphasize
multiple causalities and the non-linear directionality of global flows and vectors. It is rather a space of
lines of flight, formations and informations, which
re-locates the discussion on Enlightenment and modernity, or on state and capital, in a new light. The
category of the South seems to be a heuristic tool of
great potential, but is also a problematic all-encompassing term, which might occlude difference2.
2 Consider, for instance, the case of Latin America.
The region saw the first implementation of neoliberal
policies in the early 1970s and is the central site for
rehearsal of alternatives to these policies today. In the
last 4 years some indicators of reduction of inequality
and growth have shown positive signs while in 2011
Brazil became the sixth largest economy in the world,
passing Great Britain. Indeed, the West might become
more like South America, in a near future of multiple
vectors and local nodes of production. The region merits
its own, particular, discussion vis-à-vis the arguments of
The Salon: Volume Five
At the time during which the seminars on Theory
from the South were held, the USA was entering
into a deeper round of its economic crisis and was
for the first time in its history on the brink of default
on its sovereign debt. Almost at the same time, race
riots and lootings in London and other British towns
projected a grim view of a UK in cultural and economic recession. The images resembled those seen
in Argentina during the financial and political collapse of 2001 when the connected strictures of structural adjustment and restrained democracy generated an almost absolute dead-end. In that context,
the publication of Theory from the South appeared
timely, closely in sync with the processes through
which “Euro-America” indeed was moving toward
Southern paths and schemes. The future of modernization seemed to be located one or two decades
ago. And yet, what the North resembled, whether
due to questions of state formation, citizenship or
the economy, was more like Argentina than Nigeria
or Ghana, more Latin American than West African
this book. The region that produced advanced analysis of
the social such as dependency theory, social movements
theory and the first studies of democratic transitions
constitutes still at present an immense laboratory of
futurity and potential. The Latin American context
makes the picture of a single “global South” more
complex in terms of state, class, ethnicity, land and
resources, or finance capital. The differentiated types of
settler colonialism that unfolded in the region provide
a particular perspective on the shape of a postcolonial
or neo-colonial “South”. Also, the type of neo-populist
governance currently in place in most of the region–
which some analysts label “post-neoliberal” –and its deep
connections with some of the largest social movements
in the world, highlights the need to consider the renewed
relevance of Latin American politics and culture.
THEORIZING THE CONTEMPORARY: Introduction or South Asian. The main arguments of the book are
not refuted in the light of current processes from
other Southern regions. If anything, the case study
approach on Africa presented in this book provides
a comparative framework that enriches South-South
conversations on parallel historical trajectories.
The book represents a timely provocation. It is as
though the urgency of the materials collected here
and the themes they address dictate a certain format
and perspective. This intervention at the heart of the
contemporary moment takes the pulse of current
events, apparently disdaining a historical perspective. Despite the authors’ exemplary previous work
on historical process and the archives of colonial
modernity, here the emphasis seems more on event
than on structure, on diacritics more than dialectics.
Yet, reading between the lines of the textured
ethnographic analysis, a certain “history of the present” emerges as a genealogy of the multiple origins
and causalities of the global condition described in
the text. Underlying the flow of detail and flurry of
categories, the ethnography develops an argument
on genealogical inventions and effects and about the
flattening of history in contemporary sociality. As a
sub-text, this ethnographic analysis follows the contemporary fate of various senses of the classical concept of “culture”, its potentials and pitfalls, in one of
the classical locus of anthropology: African cultural
politics and political cultures.
Africa, in Theory In examining the connections between a sub-continent and the global order, the book explores reversals and foreshadowings occurring between a world
region and a planetary context.
There are various genealogies that inform the
specific perspective of this book, including anti-colonial thought and postcolonial studies, dependency
theory and world systems approaches, not to mention the critique of area studies promoted by postOrientalist humanities. While those theories were
firmly rooted in the schemes of nation-states and
regional borders, this approach follows the flux of
trans-national capital and knowledge (what others
have described as “cognitive capitalism” and “information society”). “Africa” is here the name of a
regional space where flows of trade, finance, knowledge, cultural identification are inflected in a specific, vernacular way.
The text is in conversation with the trans-disciplinary field of postcolonial theory (Spivak, Bhabha,
Mbembe), updating some of its main assumptions.
It represents as well a revision (post-turn of the century and post-9/11) of the authors’ dialogue with
globalization theory, to which they crucially contributed with their earlier essays on “millennial capitalism”. To be sure, this kind of engagement could
only come from anthropology, (its disciplinary history, predicaments, potentials) and be developed on,
and from, one of its original key field-sites, such as
Africa. Indeed, paradoxically, in order to illustrate
the aporetic nature of the contemporary global moment, the text responds to the command to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty) with a provocation to
“universalize Africa”. This perspective explores the
colonial background of current Empire and various
global patterns and structures, reversing the previous colonial (and now global/(neo)liberal) system
of knowledge production and its teleological reason.
7
Through deeply textured and localized ethnography
the chapters theorize “Africa”, also deconstructing
it as a single locatable place.
Through deeply textured and localized ethnography the chapters theorize “Africa”, also deconstructing it as a single locatable place. Some of the
previously published essays address classical issues
in Africanist anthropology from personhood, labor,
identity, custom and health to zombies and the occult. Other chapters develop questions of millennial capital, citizenship in relation to liberalism and
multiculturalism, the uses of history and memory in
ways that recast the debate on interconnections between global flows and local, or regional, formations.
The (“counter evolutionary”) subtitle points out
toward a global scheme where “Africa” is a point
of resonance which progressively acquires more
predominance as a particular laboratory of political, economic and cultural processes. The sentence
seems to be more spatial than temporal, more geopolitical than historical, in sum, more about directionality and dispersion than about teleology. It is
not predicated upon a scheme of centers and peripheries. It alludes to a global order that is a multipleentry scheme, a variegated, textured canvass, where
“global” “regional” and “local” are not scales but
rather various interrelated entangled dimensions
and folds. While in the book “Africa” stands for the whole
Global South, the essays that follow pave the way
for comparative South-South discussions. Some key
intuitions about the future might emerge in other
regions, and not only in a sub-continent that politically, to say it with a Comaroffian reference, is
moving from revolution to revelation. That is, going
8
from politics and warfare as a source for liberation
to an evangelical quest for wisdom and redemption. Various types of conversion–economic and
religious–are currently at stake in the continent, appearing as possible modes of escape from the recent
political and cultural impasse. To what extent this
text refers to Africa in general and how much it revolves around the question of South African exceptionalism is also matter for further discussion.
Any attempt that emerges “out of Africa” in order
to present the continent as a theoretical construct
and not as a mere collection of parochial or bizarre
decaying objects is welcome. The jury is still out on
the actual meanings of the current African condition
as it is on this Theory on and from the South. The
following essays open a rich debate and underscore
its value.
REFERENCES
Appadurai, Arjun 1996. Modernity at Large.
Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of
Minnesota Press.
Ahmad, Aijaz 2008. In Theory. Nations, Classes,
Literatures. London: Verso.
Bhabha, Homi 1994. The Location of Culture.
New York: Routledge.
Borges, Jorge Luis 1951. The Argentine Writer
and Tradition.
Comaroff, Jean and John 2012 Theory from the
South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward
Africa. Paradigm Press.
Coetzee, J.M 2003 Elizabeth Costello. London:
Viking Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2000 Provincializing
Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Princeton University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix 1987 A
Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press. 1986 Kafka: A Minor Literature. University of
Minnesota Press.
Harvey, David 1991. The Condition of
Postmodernity. An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jameson, Fredric 1990 Postmodernism, or The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno 1993. We Have Never Been
Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. Mbembe, Achille 2001. On the Postcolony.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Negri, Antonio 2005. Time for Revolution.
Continuum.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 1986. Decolonising the
Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature. Heinemann.
Spivak, Gayatri 1999. Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.
THEORIZING THE CONTEMPORARY: Introduction 9
Surpassing the North: Can the
Antipodean Avantgarde Trump
Postcolonial Belatedness? Srinivas Aravamudan
(Duke University)
The Comaroffs want it both ways in that they
want the whiff of authenticity and the credit given
to proximate knowledge by claiming that the
Nuer attitude to friend and enemy precedes Carl
Schmitt’s theorization of the same; the Tswana
practices of being-as-becoming anticipates
Western notions of the autonomy of the individual,
argues Srinivas Aravamudan.
To start with the subtitle, the geocultural epistemology of this volume brings with it some very precise observations about Africa within the situation
of contemporary globalization, even as it does this
within a larger set of claims that tend to obscure even
while claiming to clarify. A subtitle, such as this volume bears, when read at face value, proposes a novel
truth that reverses standard expectations concerning
the West’s claims of advancement in relation to the
imputed benightedness of Africa. Turning the epistemological racism of such an account on its head,
and deriving its counterpoint from the Hegelian philosophy of history that began in Africa and ended up
in the West, the title suggests the precise reverse of
the Hegelian hypothesis. However, this negation of
Hegel carries with it the odor of parody. Hegel is not
just generally untrue but precisely so. While the general refutation of Hegel would suggest that his reification of the world-spirit was an essentialist ontology carrying the racist overtones of civilizationism,
10
An early illustrated work dealing with the school of Salerno. The
cover shows Constantine the African lecturing to the school.
Fredou
the Comaroffs knowingly return to the parodic restatement of the original proposition in reverse; a
two-centuries-old proposition concerning the evolution from Africa to the West is returned with interest by articulating its precise reversal. Hegelian
logic lives on, even if Hegel was wrong, and the
problematic of civilizational essences is unchanged,
even if the thematic is altered. What is at stake is
epistemic posture, orientation, or disposition, and
this formal attribute of geo-epistemological positioning deliberately exerts pressure on more than a
century of social Darwinism by foregrounding “evolution,” or what they call the “counter-evolutionary
trope” as they hasten to add, does not simply reverse
the epistemic reflex, but their rhetoric largely belies
their intention. While the subtitle is straightforward
in its reference to Hegelian epistemology that is both
serious and parodic at once, I want to proceed from
the subtitle to the main title, that I believe is somewhat more ambiguous, and arguably, less coherent.
Theory: In their glossing of this term, the authors
hasten to explain that by “theory” they mean not “abstract theory” but “grounded theory”: “the historically contextualized, problem-driven effort to account
for social and cultural ‘facts’ in the world by recourse
to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between the inductive and the deductive, the concrete
and the concept, empirical observation and critical
ideation” (48). Theory, in other words, is neither an
escape from reality nor an over-ready acceptance of
it but the attempt to make sense of it by a process of
testing. What is claimed as theory resembles socialscience epistemology, not standard philosophy or
politics but a kind of unsettling that occurs as facts
come into contact with thought, and abstract observation with daily life and praxis. Here I’d suggest
two kinds of theory are at work. One is a Marxist critique of political economy that is largely persuasive. Another is an obsessive anxiety about latest fashions
in Northern theory (what Achille Mbembe records
as a hysterical effect of theory in the absence of the
discourse of the missing or defunct master) to record and prove that Southern “symptoms” precede
Northern ones in areas of politics, culture, and daily
life. That is not so much about the production of
value but the theft of experience from the South rendered as intellectual property in the North, a theft
the authors want to restitute to rightful owners, just
like zombie banks evoke African zombies.
The South: There are at least three meanings to
the polythetic category of the “South” in the way
that it is used. One is simply hemispherical, connoting as it does the terra australis that since classical
European terms inverted European anthropological
reason, and in this regard, a reversal of the reversal
that Hegelian anthropology had conducted on the
possibility of native knowledge that preceded and/
or surpassed European attempts to know it: Africa
as the inverse of modernity, the North’s underside. The second meaning to the “South” is in terms of the
developmental category it connotes. The Comaroffs
do not mention the initial origin of the term in Willy
Brandt’s “North-South” report that attempted to
transpose the major developing divide in the world
of the 1970s away from the standoff represented by
the Cold War that was seen as an “East-West” divide. All the same, as the authors acknowledge, the
“South” stands loosely for the “postcolonial” and is
a relational term that conjures up with it the idea
of the “North.” The old-fashioned epistemology that
went along with the power and exploitation represented by colonialism and empire made the “South”
into so much empirical data processed by the theoretical tools of the “North,” a region that both explained and appropriated the “South” at the same
time. In this regard, “North” and “South” are a
direct analogy of what was explored as “West” and
“East” in Edward Said’s rendition of Orientalism as a
dualist ontology of scapegoating and demonization.
However, as indicated earlier, the authors’ predilection is less Manichaean than it is Hegelian. They are
not content with Fabian’s hypothesis of the “coevalness” of metropolis and colony: rather the formal
colonies are advanced metropolises that presage the
world to come in relation to which it is the North
Surpassing the North
that is playing catch-up. The “South” and “North”
are to be seen as relational and dialectical rather
than absolute ontologies, and the reversal of the categories does appear in their exposition to be classically Hegelian, in that it is not so much reversal but
supersession in the manner of the lord-bondsman
dialectic. Africa is not so much the unperceived origin but the advanced state that is on the other side of
European control and purity. However, such a thesis is unable or unwilling to make up its mind about
something crucial, which is whether the realization
of Africa as the endpoint of late capitalism is truly an
advancement in the sense of the nineteenth-century
idea of progress, or a trajectory that is an augury of
the dystopian outcome of capitalism: in other words
this is Marxist tragedy disguised as Hegelian farce,
the worst of the worst rather than the best of the
best. Africa is ahead not because it is more enlightened in classical terms; it is ahead because it is more
familiar with the unprotected experience of various
ills that most leftists decry, including neoliberalism,
urban blight, the erosion of the welfare state, the
postpolitical end of democracy with the judicialization of politics, the rise of xenophobia and the genocidal epidemic of HIV-AIDS, and the entrepreneurialism of self in a world of the commodification of
everything: in other words, the African present that
is also the world’s future rather than just as was argued before, the underdeveloped future of an Africa
that was wrongfully seen as belated and catching up
with the achievements of its colonialist master, and
should instead now be seen as the world’s dark overlord, prescient of all things to come. If the latter is
true, the “evolution” toward Africa—whether serious
or parodic—is no evolution at all, but a deterioration, and EuroAmerica’s evolution toward Africa is
the equivalent of the entire world going to hell in a
handbasket, where “hell” is “Africa” and the “handbasket” is “late capitalism.” The much-vaunted evolutionary advantage that
Africa enjoys is a kind of vainglory where in each of
its peculiar sufferings under late capitalism, it can
claim to have been there first, rather than last, and
this arrival is forced, not desired.
The much-vaunted evolutionary advantage that
Africa enjoys is a kind of vainglory where in each of
its peculiar sufferings under late capitalism, it can
claim to have been there first, rather than last, and
this arrival is forced, not desired. Furthermore, the
greatest incoherence of this volume comes from the
unremarked use of the word “from”: in what manner is all this “theory” “from” “the South”? This is
neither the classic anticolonial speech of the colonized, the Southern Calibans who theorize their
own oppression, nor the deconstructive logic of the
Spivakian subaltern who cannot speak. Rather the
“from” is a representation where the theory is not
any more from the South than it is from the North,
as it is the product of the relational interaction between anthropologists such as the Comaroffs who
are just as comfortable in South Africa as the United
States. This might sound churlish, but there is something a bit over-earnest about needing to claim that
the theory is from the South, as there is a certain
alibi-producing aspect to that claim. What is important here—that the theory is
accurate? Or that it originates from the classic
position of the object?
11
What is important here—that the theory is accurate? Or that it originates from the classic position of the
object? The former position, of accuracy, reeks of
Western epistemological imperialism, something
that always claimed abstract scientific and clinical superiority over its inert material objects. The latter position, of originality, is one more typically associated
with the subject of oppression, who knows through
experience what the oppressor could not know because of epistemic distancing. The Comaroffs want
it both ways, in that they want the whiff of authenticity and the credit given to proximate knowledge by
claiming that the theory is from the South: the Nuer
attitude to friend and enemy precedes Carl Schmitt’s
theorization of the same; the Tswana practice of
being-as-becoming anticipates Western notions of
the autonomy of the individual. As I said before, the
claim bespeaks a fetishism of originality and precedence, i.e. the African lived symptom gazzumps the
Western theoretical apercu. Deep down this is also
a disciplinary setting of scores: cultural anthropology trumps Western philosophy, aka literary theory. Africa 1 EuroAmerica 0. At the same time, the authors want the credit
of dialectics by suggesting that North and South
are relational categories, in which case any useful
theory has to be a mixture of both, from both—and
ineluctably bound up with—both. It might be more
accurate to say that their book is much less from the
South, than it is about the South, and foregrounding its ironic advancement in relation to the North
with respect to so many angles and dimensions of
late capitalism. There is no shame in admitting to
that. Or if it is not just about the South, then it is
speaking for the South, and it is speaking on behalf of that which theorizes itself mutedly, but that
12
hard-hitting. Maybe the ultimate desire is again one
to make Africa the generator rather than object of
theory, the ultimate symbolic reversal of colonialism
through epistemology, where theory in the South is
alive in the minutiae of everyday life rather than,
as is more often the case in the North, residing as
a product of academic snob value that is deemed
inconsequential, irrelevant, or obsolete, in terms of
the runaway train of economic value production and
the exercise of political power. In conclusion, it is worth noting that the book
might be more broadly persuasive if its orientation was wheeled around: rather than theory from
the south, it could aspire more overtly to answerIn which case, the grandstanding claim by the
ing the question of “whither the south?,” and with
Comaroffs that their theory is from the South is
that question, presumably, “whither the rest of the
more window-dressing than it is a new version of
world?” for which the authors claim that Africa is
epistemological continentalism. the vanguard. However, the authors do let it slip that
Evolutionary Advantage?: All the same, the they have an alternative possibility for the future of
dilemma faced by the authors is a genuine one. the world rather than just the question of origin or
Progressive scholars would always want to docu- symbolic revenge concerning earlier claims of conment the extent to which mechanisms of exploita- tinental vanguardism. It turns out the blind spot in
tion and domination have created social death, and the volume is not so much the North vs. South isat the same time register the extent to which the hu- sue (a shell game if there ever was one) but that the
man subject can escape violence, hope for remedy, authors are fundamentally uncomfortable with one
or even surmount existing conditions. This is the direction, and that is East. As they say in one very
difficulty of the move from the “is” to the “ought,” enigmatic sentence, “[China], which profits from
but also given their hypothesis, the desire to prove playing in the interstices between worlds, has interthat the case is actually a paradigm. As in the man- polated itself into both north and south without bener of Rem Koolhaas on Lagos, there are occasional ing truly either, all the while promising, some time
glimmers where a dystopian landscape yields habits off into the future, to alter the political economy,
of endurance, survivability, and even futurity, but and the geo-sociology, of the entire planet” (46). we are left wondering if there is a mismatch in terms Having said that, they move on, but it is as if they
of the scale of the grand claim of the book, which have cursorily acknowledged that even as they are
is less successful as opposed to the specific obser- documenting the reversal of the Hegelian trajecvations within it, that are far more trenchant and tory with respect to EuroAmerica and Africa, the
particular muted situation needs the Comaroffs to
provide the academic megaphone that makes that
theorizing audible. Then we are more on the classic
terrain of “they cannot represent themselves—they
must be represented,” and this is not so much about
the Northern expropriation of Southern value as it
is about the academic recognition, explanation, and
advocacy of anthropological life-worlds. In which
case, the grandstanding claim by the Comaroffs
that their theory is from the South is more windowdressing than it is a new version of epistemological
continentalism. The Salon: Volume Five
Archimedean leverage of the world-spirit exists now
not so much in Africa, but in Asia. China, by competing with Euro-America, even as it turns its face
toward Africa, is capable of turning both North and
South into its hinterland. In that case, and if that
is so, we would need a new geographical information system whereby North, South, West, and East
are all empty categories waiting to be respatialized
in relation to China as hegemon. What directional
categories would be used in a sinocentric world? It is
apparent that the authors are indeed apprehensive
of that eventual outcome. Who would theorize that
world? What about the ironies of China’s massive,
yet very recent neocolonial involvement in Africa
that have yet to be taken up adequately? And what
would be the overarching symbolic narrative concerning that world? Would that be Marxist tragedy,
Hegelian farce, or Arrighian romance?
Surpassing the North
13
Theory from the Comaroffs, or
How to Know the World Up, Down,
Backwards and Forwards James Ferguson
(Stanford University)
I remain wary of “evolving-toward” sorts of storylines, no matter how cannily and self-consciously
they may be deployed in the service of strategic
disruption. If taken too literally, some of the
Comaroff’s startling claims about who is “evolving
toward” whom risk obscuring more than they
reveal about the inequalities of our inter-connected
world, argues James Ferguson. But of course the
Comaroffs know all this, he concludes.
You are flying into Johannesburg, in the late 1970s. The pilot’s authoritative voice comes over the intercom. “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to South
Africa. We will shortly be landing at Jan Smuts
International Airport. To adjust to local time, please
set your watches back 30 years”. It is an apartheid
joke—one of a particular genre of jokes that flourished in those dark times, playing with apartheid’s
anomalous temporality, its status as exception, aberration, and (most of all) anachronism.
South Africa has long been out of step with the
rest of the world’s time. It was colonized in the 17th
century, more than two centuries too soon, in relation to the history of European colonization of the
rest of the continent. In 1948, when the rest of the
world was giving up on the color bar, South Africa’s
apartheid government declared color the very basis
of their society, and set about a concerted effort to
segregate, rather than integrate, the society in racial
14
Scan of the frontispiece from The book of record of the time
capsule of cupaloy, deemed capable of resisting the effects of
time for five thousand years, preserving an account of universal
achievements, embedded in the grounds of the New York World’s
fair, 1939 The caption reads “The Envelope For A Message To The
Future Begins Its Epic Journey”
Cygnis insignis
terms. While most of the rest of Africa gained independence in the early 1960s, South Africa had its decolonization moment only in 1994, and went through
a kind of post-independence politics in the 1990s
that recalled, to many elsewhere in Africa, nothing
so much as the 1960s. Little wonder then, that many
South Africans responded to the 1990s academic
critiques of modernism and enlightenment with the
dismayed objection: “You all are ready to abandon it
before we’ve even gotten to try it!”
But South Africa’s anomalous temporality has
never just been a matter of “belatedness”. Monica
Wilson, the undisputed queen of South African social anthropology, and influential teacher of Jean
and John, was reputed to have told foreign visitors in the 1970s that coming to South Africa was
like going 30 years backward in time and 30 years
forward—all at the same time. Her insight was sustained, in important ways, by later developments,
as we have seen the rest of the world increasingly
wrestling with conditions South Africans have long
been familiar with—including such things as the
spectacularly multicultural make-up of the nationstate, massive inequalities within a single country,
the geographic juxtaposition of socioeconomic conditions once associated with “the Third world” with
those of the “First world”, and running battles between regimes of legal prohibition and processes of
spontaneous but illegal urbanization and migration.
In starting in this way, I mean only to point out
that South Africa has long been a place not just to experience historical time but to think about it—even
to play with it. I take “Theory from the South” (and
its deliberately outrageous claim that “EuroAmerica
is evolving toward Africa”) in that experimental (and
indeed playful) spirit. The move to invoke “the South” as a kind of historical actor moving through time, “ahead of” another actor called “the North” is, of course, a rhetorical
shock tactic rather than an analytic strategy. Indeed,
both the structure of the essay and the structure of
Jean and John’s own lives require us to understand
the structures and hierarchies we gloss with terms
like “south” and “north” in their constitutive relation rather than in a teleological race. For those who
would really conceive of “the south” and “the north”
as separate or literal places of authentic belonging,
it will be troubling that the Comaroffs are in fact
writing as much “from” the “Northern” places where
they have been trained and held academic positions
as they are writing “from” the South Africa where
they were born and raised and now spend much of
their time. (One colleague encapsulated the reflexive suspicion of Northern-based academics who
would speak for the South with this snarky response
to “Theory from the South”: “Oh great—we finally
get theory from the South and it turns out to be
two white people from the University of Chicago”.) But of course many if not most of what we think of
as the key works of “southern” or “post-colonial”
theory have emerged not from a pure and authochthonous “South” but from points of juncture and
crossing, often involving the intersection of the institutional support of Northern universities with the
personal and political commitments of lives lived at
least partly elsewhere. (Consider the roll call: Said,
Spivak, Bhaba, Mamdani, Chatterjee, Chakrabarty,
Mbembe—like all of these key global intellectuals,
the Comaroffs, too, write from a South that is also
the North and a North that is also a South). Nor
should this be surprising. Transnational circuits are
no less central to intellectual production than they
are to every other kind, and “Southern” theory is no
more made “in the South” than “American” cars are
made in Detroit. With that said, I must say that I remain wary of
“evolving-toward” sorts of story-lines, no matter
Theory From the Antipodes
how cannily and self-consciously they may be deployed in the service of strategic disruption. Even
when used in play, these kinds of tropes of “ahead
and behind” have their dangers, and I am especially
worried about the way that a subtly playful argument
such as the one made by the Comaroffs here is likely
to fare in the readings of less subtle readers. Clearly
some of the Comaroffs’ more startling claims about
who is “evolving toward” whom, if taken too literally, risk obscuring more than they reveal about the
inequalities of our inter-connected world. Do we really think that in matters of, say, per capita income,
or life expectancy, that Europe and North America
are evolving toward Africa? In a host of very significant areas, it is manifestly still the South that is, or
ought to be, “catching up” to the North, a fact whose
acknowledgment seems essential if we are to recognize key claims for global justice in domains as
various as immigration, climate change, and food
security. And the idea that Montreal (say) will soon
come to resemble Lagos is, on a little reflection, as
least as implausible as the old modernization idea
that Lagos would soon look like London. ... we don’t really want to conceive of nations
or continents moving like bounded individuals
through a linear historical time
Then, too, we don’t really want to conceive of nations or continents moving like bounded individuals through a linear historical time—surely we’ve
learned our lessons on that one. Eurocentric modernization theory turned upside-down has all he
same faults as the original, allowing a fairy tale race
between discrete protagonists to obscure the constitutive relationality of the global political economy
within which regions and nation-states find their
ranked positions.
Eurocentric modernization theory turned upsidedown has all he same faults as the original...
But of course the Comaroffs know all this. No
sooner have they said, in the bluntest of terms,
that “the South” is “ahead” of the North—that it is
a literal geographical place (“Africa, Asia, and Latin
America”) that serves as “the vanguard of the epoch” (p. 19) and may “prefigure the history of the
global north” (p.12)—than they go on to insist that
“the south” isn’t actually a substantive thing or place
at all, but “a relation”—a window onto a world of
flows and connections “transcendent of the very
dualism of north and south” (p. 47). In projecting
a familiar progressivist tale in a startlingly inverted
form, they knowingly take the risk of being misunderstood, indeed (as true provocateurs) almost invite it, in order to disrupt the conventional time lines
and world maps that so often constrain our thinking
about the world and how it is ordered. But if we can
understand their mock-evolutionist provocations as
(like Monica Wilson’s quip) a kind of playing with
time, a mental stretching exercise, if you will, then
the Comaroff’s figure of “theory from the South”
can perform a great service. That service would be
to call our attention to conceptual and institutional
innovations linked to specific social sites, and specific problems and struggles, in parts of the world
long assumed to be marginal but now increasingly
ascendant, in both economic and demographic
terms. And by explicitly identifying their “partially
parodic”, “counter-evolutionary” perspective (as
they term it) as coming “from the South” (another
15
deliberate provocation), they provide a useful reminder, too, that thinking is always thinking-from.
On this point (the “where”, rather than the
“when” of theory), it is worth recalling that South
Africa is also usefully anomalous. As is commonly
observed, it is a place that seems to be of the South
and of the North at the same time—First World
and Third World conditions lie cheek by jowl, and
colony and metropole seem curiously to have ended
up, almost by mistake, in the same country. Indeed,
South Africans have never even been sure if they
are Africans (and if so, what that might mean)—the
same white supremacists who created separate public facilities and national homelands for the disparaged category, “Africans”, proudly called themselves
Afrikaners (which of course simply meant “Africans”
in their own language), while today black South
African xenophobes disparage immigrants from
north of the Limpopo as useless and unwanted (you
guessed it) “Africans”. Today’s South Africa mixes
north and south just as relentlessly (and promiscuously) as it mixes past and future (and so, too, many
other familiar binaries—white and black, African
and Western, traditional and modern, and so on). Perhaps, then, we need to recognize that Jean and
John are asking us to see the world, not just from 30
years ahead and behind at the same time, but also,
in the same way, from plus or minus 30 degrees of
latitude. This is not just thinking-from a place—it is
thinking-from more than one place at the same time. Theory is for use, so I want to take a moment to
use the provocation the Comaroffs have provided
us to reflect on the historicity of theory itself and to
suggest how new developments in the Global South
are opening up intriguing new ways of thinking
about both social policy and social theory (a subject
16
that has been central to my own current research). Social theory has always both reflected and participated in the construction of something called “the
social” (the domain of social policy, social work,
social assistance, etc. and also, of course, social science). Indeed, mid-20th century Euro-American
social theory and the welfare state could be fairly
described as co-constitutive of each other, with key
theoretical concepts (such as “solidarity”) doing
double duty through their use as central concepts in
social theory, and key organizing principles in the
construction of programs of social policy. Today, social assistance is being fundamentally
reconfigured as a host of developing countries (from
South Africa, to Brazil, to India, and beyond) have
confounded the by-now standard scholarly narratives of a triumphant neoliberalism by morphing into various new kinds of welfare states. And
they have not modeled these new welfare states on
Northern exemplars (Sweden or what have you). Instead, they have developed new mechanisms of
social assistance, and new conceptions of society,
that rely less on insurance mechanisms and the
pooling of risk among a population of wage-earners
and more on non-contributory schemes anchored
in citizenship and operating via the payment of
small “cash transfers” (often to women and children). An influential recent book documents these
new schemes, and celebrates their achievements,
even as it registers, in its title, the fact that the new
programs of direct distribution are an affront to the
old rules of the development game. (The title -- another deliberate provocation—is Just Give Money to
the Poor. [ Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010]) And interestingly (for our purposes here), the subtitle reads: “The Development Revolution from the
Global South”. The rise of the new welfare states usefully illustrates Jean and John’s argument about global innovation today often emerging first in the South. For
the conditions to which they are a response—persistent and “normal” high unemployment, growing
informalization, the coexistence of mass poverty
and mass democracy—no longer seem specific to a
form of experience that could be cordoned off within
a “Third World”, but instead seem almost shockingly relevant to the news of the day in places like
the United States. And if existing conceptions of
“society” seem increasingly to have lost their critical and political force (“that decaying monster”, as
Latour has referred to “society”), these emergent
new empirical configurations of the social may perhaps provide us with clues for thinking about how
we might re-imagine “the social” as object both of
theory (“social theory) and of politics (“socialism”—
the meaning of which has perhaps never, in its long,
contested history, been less clear). If nothing else, it
does seem likely that countries like Brazil and South
Africa are serving as early laboratories for social experiments likely to be of wider significance in the future, in ways that Jean and John’s essay alerts us to. But if innovations of this sort in social policy
do end up constituting a “development revolution”
(something that is not yet at all clear), it is not entirely obvious that it is really (as that book title proudly
proclaims) “from the Global South”. Tracing intellectual origins has not been central to my project to
date, but it is difficult not to notice that many of the
most interesting and radical ideas and arguments
that have made up this “revolution from the South”
were originally developed in the ILO, for instance,
in places like Switzerland, while a key agent of their
dissemination has been a labor economist (Guy
Standing) who has spent his career at Australian
and British universities, working in strategic alliance
with a Brazilian senator who did his graduate work
at Michigan State, and an American college professor who is married to a South African who spends
part of the year in Cape Town—and so on. In short,
we are dealing, once again, with crossings and conversations, not stable geographical points of origin. Yet the larger point is simply that the grey, technocratic world of social policy in southern Africa has
emerged as a site of conceptual and institutional invention, in ways that may indeed have much to teach
the rest of the world. This sustains the Comaroffs’
key insight that sites conventionally thought of as
lagging or catching up may in fact be places where
interesting things often emerge first.
REFERENCES
Hanlon, Joseph, Armando Barrientos, and David
Hulme 2010 Just Give Money to the Poor: The
Development Revolution from the Global South.
Sterling, Virgina: Kumarian Press.
... what I think is of lasting value in this work of
counter-evolutionary sabotage is the very act of
denaturalizing taken-for-granted ideas about time
and space
But what is key here, I would insist, is not really
who is ahead and who is behind, or whether conceptual and institutional innovations are well described
in hemispheric terms. Instead, what I think is of
lasting value in this work of counter-evolutionary
sabotage is the very act of denaturalizing taken-forgranted ideas about time and space. And that, the
defamiliarization of habitual ways of thinking—
whether it comes from the North, the South, or, indeed, both at once—is what theory, at its best, is all
about.
17
Notes on Jean & John Comaroffs’ TFS Achille Mbembe
(University of Witwatersrand)
A theory from the Antipodes will attend not only
to “how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa”,
but also to the conditions under which Africa (the
South) and China (the East) are trying to weave
the paths that tie both regions in the present and in
the future, writes Achille Mbembe.
First of all, I would like to acknowledge how difficult it is, in this noisy age of ours – an age of yelling
rather than argument and an age that gives a premium to distraction and distortion rather than to the
virtues of listening together – to nurture a scholarly
and public voice that can be legitimately regarded as
daring, original and authentic.
Yet, this is exactly what Jean and John Comaroff
have achieved not only throughout their previous
scholarly works (the depth and breadth of which
have been widely lauded1), but specifically in this
new book. I read Theory From the South as their dialogue with their own journey through places, times,
problems and disciplines. The voice in this new book
is unmistakably theirs—the eloquence, the prose, a
certain kind of rhetorical style, a new lexicon that
makes new thought, even moments of polyphony, possible.
Theirs is also an effort to work from, within,
through, and at times against the archive of their
first love, anthropology. Time and again, in this book
1 See in particular the two volumes of Revelation … 18
The antipodes.
Kmorozov
as in Rules and Processes, Body of Power, Ethnicity
Inc., Millennial Capitalism, Law and Disorder and
countless other essays, they return to the centers of
their discipline while, at the same time, mining its
peripheries, They play the peripheries of the discipline against its centers and other bodies of knowledge against anthropology itself. This is because
theirs is a mode of thought whose primary object is
to delineate the crucial fault lines and turbulences
that constitute our world today as well as the world
of contemporary criticism. Reading this many-faceted book, a complicated tapestry threaded with multiple strands and sub-themes but with one master
thesis, we are faced once again with what we have
come to expect from them – a generosity of spirit
and a polymorphous intelligence capable of sweeping claims, starting with the seemingly outrageous
(and yet plausible) idea that “Euro-America is evolving toward Africa”; or the more heuristically productive one that “in the present moment, it is the Global
South that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large”, which is why, in accounting for these workings of the world, “our theorymaking” ought to be coming from there, “at least in
significant part” (1).
Although their claims warrant substantial empirical evidence, a proper response to Jean and John
Comaroff’s new book might not be to ask whether
what they say—especially in this “provocative”,
“parodic” and “counter-evolutionary” sub-title,
Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa—is true
or false. Of course in more than one instance, they
do back with facts the claims that “the global north
is becoming more like the south” (13); that we can
read the future of the north in what is happening
in the south (12); that “the global south is running
ahead of the global north” (19); or that the south
can be taken as the “frontier in the unfolding history
of neoliberalism” (38). To be sure, these different
claims are not exactly the same. Nor do they carry
the same weight in this book, and each, taken separately, would warrant a specific treatment. But besides chapter 1, the rest of the book (which concerns
itself with questions of personhood, identity, difference and belonging, sovereignty and governmentality, citizenship and borders, law, liberalism and democracy, history, memory, labor and the politics of
life) is less about actually tracing the lineaments of
Euro-America’s “evolution” toward Africa than it is
about “inverting” and “subverting” the standpoints
from which we read both Africa and the world at
large or what they call “the contemporary order of
things” (2).
In this risky and quasi-Herculean task, they are
the first to recognize the dangers inherent to this
gesture – especially the danger of the turning of the
story “upside down” leaving intact “the Manichean
dualism that holds Euro-America and its others in
the same fixed embrace” (7) – and I would add the
all too familiar danger, whenever the sign “Africa”
is mobilized in modern theory, that any trace of historicity will be effaced in favor of images of regression and dystopian collapse. They also know very
well that “displacing” the established telos with its
opposite might not be enough if this operation ends
up “leaving teleology itself intact” (7). “What we suggest, they say, is that contemporary world-historical
processes are disrupting received geographies of
core and periphery, relocating southward – and, of
course, eastward as well – some of the most innovative and energetic modes of producing value” (7).
And this, they add, “cuts to the very heart of contemporary capitalism” (13).
on “the present and future
of global capitalism”
As we can see, a major goal of Theory From the
South is therefore to take Africa as a window from
which “to interrogate the present and future of global capitalism and its many mediations” (19). This
implies bringing “Africa” to perform a radically new
kind of work in theory—a work radically different,
in its nature and scope, from the one “Africa” has
always been historically assigned to perform. This is
a project I fully support.
Now, to interrogate the present and future of
global capitalism in terms of “Euro-America “evolving” toward Africa” will undoubtedly scandalize
many if only because, in the eyes of many, Africa
has simply dropped out of history, written off as a
hopeless and terminal case of—as I have just suggested—dystopian collapse. With its “failed states”,
archaic “ethnic hatreds”, famine, human-made catastrophes and pestilence, it is at best ministered to
by NGOs and not by capital as such, at least not in
its incarnation as global finance—a thesis that can
be critiqued of course. One might expect that many
might want to dismiss the Comaroffs thesis simply
by restating the old Hegelian myth the Comaroffs
are precisely trying to subvert—the myth according
to which strictly speaking Africa, this living vessel
of global and historical misery and debt has nothing
to say about the current condition of our world, let
alone its future. ... many might want to dismiss the Comaroffs
thesis simply by restating the old Hegelian myth
the Comaroffs are precisely trying to subvert—the
myth according to which strictly speaking Africa,
this living vessel of global and historical misery and
debt has nothing to say about the current condition
of our world, let alone its future. Yet, in spite of its uneven incorporation into the
world economy, this region does tell us a lot more
than we might want to think or we might want to
hear about the histories of market societies and
commercial cultures2. It tells us about the future of
global capitalism—and not only of the kind that lies
close to, but is not always coincident with, the vast
global shadow economy dependent on illegal activities like smuggling, drug and people trafficking and
2 Jane Guyer, Marginal Gains ...
money-laundering through which trillions of dollars
circulate around the globe outside formal legal reckoning. Let’s call this extractive economy of unprocessed raw materials the raw economy. It has been
the source of growth in Africa over the last decade.
This growth has been largely the result of a tremendous demand for export commodities and the resulting high price of crude oil and minerals. Africa
today supplies the world economy with more than
half its diamonds, platinum and cobalt and more
than a third of strategic minerals like Vanadium.
The logic of extraction that underpins this raw
economy might not be the same as the logic of deindustrialization that seems to partly characterize
Northern economies. But both seem to have quickened the accumulation of surplus populations. Marx
used to divide “surplus populations” into three
categories: latent (made up of those with insecure
employment); floating (composed of those cycling
rapidly in and out of the labor force; and stagnant
(comprised of those only rarely employed)3. To these
three categories we should add a fourth composed
of those who will never be formally employed. The
expansion of capitalism in this new phase of globalization and its transformation into a financial system significantly intensifies this process. In fact, it
confirms global unemployment, un-employability
(?) and the rise of surplus or superfluous populations as part of what Marx called its “absolute general law”. Such a rise itself points toward the growing
crisis of reproduction going on worldwide—a crisis
of reproduction Africa has, to use one of Comaroffs
terms, “prefigured”. Whether old categories of
3 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
Volume 1, New York, Vintage Books, 1976, ch. 25. 19
“production”, “work”, “exploitation” and “domination” —and more recent ones of “bare life” or “naked life” inherited from recent theorizations of sovereignty and the state of exception—suffice to write
into theory such planetary recodings of situations
of misery, debt and enforced idleness is open to
question.
Second, the Continent’s historical experience
shows that in order to expand, capitalism paradoxically does not need to absorb everything in its path.
It does not need to interiorize everything that was
hitherto exterior to it. In fact, it needs to keep producing or generating an exterior. And for this to
happen, it needs to do two things. On the one hand,
it needs to keep jumping from place to place— “hopping”, as Jim Ferguson puts it4. In Africa in particular, the machine might be constantly “breaking
down”. Whether from the perspective of the “longue
duree” it is repairing itself remains to be seen. What
is evident is that whenever it undertakes to solve its
local problems, it is usually either by mutation onto
larger and larger scales or by a singular concatenation of profit-making and, where necessary, warmaking activities and the militarization of trade.
This is how the dynamic of primitive accumulation
has historically been able to produce its full effects.
Third, Africa also teaches us that global capitalism cannot expand without what we should call
massive racial subsidies or discounts. It needs to
work through and across different scales of race as
it attempts to mark people either as disposable or
as waste. It needs to produce, order, segment and
racialize surplus or superfluous populations to strategic effect. This takes various forms throughout our
contemporary world. One of these is their incorporation into military markets. Significant in this regard is the fact that today white working class masculinity has been alienated in the de-industrializing
contexts of Euro-America, allowing for an accumulation of “excess masculinity” upon which the military complex is drawing. To maintain military numbers, unemployed or under-employed whites are not
enough. Vast reserves of the racially disenfranchised
men have been recruited. It hardly matters that some
are uneducated. Those with criminal(ized) pasts are
granted “moral waivers” that allow them for the first
time to join the lower rungs of military ranks and
to, hence, gain a semblance of enfranchisement and
citizenry. Those who are marked as waste are disenfranchised, or simply spatially confined within the
prison-industrial gulag5. Another form is through
cross-border migrant labor. Labor operating in the
interstices or the entrails of the global economy is
hyper-exploited. The racial subsidy is precisely what
allows global capital to feel no sense of responsibility for its actions, the crimes against humanity, the
horrendous damage done not only in Euro-America,
but to the rest of the world as well.
Finally - significant, too, is the increasing conflict
between market forces and democracy. Democracy
should normally imply the rule of the majority.
Since the rich in any given society are almost always a minority, democracy in the form of majority
rule should—taken to its logical consequences—imply the rule of the poor over the rich. It is also the
idea that people have rights that take precedence
over the outcomes of market exchanges and one of
the roles of a democratic government is to honor,
4 James Ferguson, Global Shadows … 5 Ruth Gilmore, The Golden Gulag … 20
to some extent, this most human expectation of a
life outside the law of the market and the right of
property. Historically, the biggest fear of capital has
always been that the rule of the poor over the rich
would ultimately do away with private property and
the “free” play of market forces. Faced with this dilemma, capital would rather abolish democracy in
order to save capitalism from a majority dedicated
to economic and social redistribution. Today, we
have reached a stage where it is increasingly apparent that capitalism is not naturally compatible with
democracy. For capitalism to be compatible with
democracy, capitalism would have to be subjected to
extensive political control and democracy protected
from being restrained in the name of market power. The collapse of the international credit pyramid
on which the prosperity of the late 1990s and early
2000s had rested only highlights this fact. Under the
emerging international politics of public debt, global
capital increasingly requires that the “average citizen” pays—for the consolidation of public finances,
the bankruptcy of foreign states, the rising rates of
interest on public debt, and if necessary the rescue
of national and international banks—with his or her
private savings, cuts in public entitlements, reduced
public services and higher taxation6.
The capacity of national states to mediate between the rights of citizens and the requirements of
capital accumulation is severely affected. The tensions between economy and society, between market
power and democracy, can no longer be handled exclusively inside national political communities (see
recent events in Greece, Italy, Ireland). They have
6 Wolfgang Streeck, “The Crisis of Democratic
Capitalism”, New Left Review 71, Sept.-Oct. 2011. The Salon: Volume Five
become internationalized. Markets are dictating in
unprecedented ways what presumably sovereign
and democratic states may still do or not for their
citizens. The pre-emption—or even suspension—of
democracy by market forces is now propounded
as the only rational and responsible behavior in a
world in which individual debt, public deficits and
public debt have resulted in the mortgaging of the
future of entire nations and the quasi-expropriation
of their citizens. Euro-American democratic states—
just like African states during the long years of structural adjustment programs—are in danger of being
“turned into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of
a global oligarchy of investors” and the propertied
classes now firmly entrenched in what looks like “a
politically unassailable stronghold, the international
financial industry” (Streeck, 29).
The arguments sketched above clearly indicate
that the Comaroffs’ master thesis is not without
foundation.
Euro-America|Africa|China
I would now like to turn to another important dimension of their project, which is to turn their back
to the Western ethnocentric tendency to re-interpret the world and all its socio-economic, political
and cultural processes from a Euro-American perspective. This epistemic re-orientation has been attempted in a number of disciplines (world history
in particular) where it has raised various methodological questions not unlike those implied by the
Comaroffs’ “counter-evolutionary” and “prefigurative” approach7. For instance, should the global
7 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony,
system be studied as a single world system? Should
it better be described in terms of its many nodes and
edges or as a whole that is greater than the sum of its
parts? Should we rather understand regions of the
world in their own terms, mindful of the fact that
they experience separate models of development
which may overlap in various ways but that are
nonetheless essentially independent? Or is it that
what we need is a horizontally integrative macrohistory, one that seeks for the connections between
the various events that are happening in regions
that have traditionally been considered separate?
To what extent does our ability to link events in one
region to subsequent events in those regions connected with it depend on a close identification of
the series of paths that tie the various regions of the
world? Is it true that simultaneous and momentous
events triggered in different regions or contexts do
necessarily lead to similar outcomes and similar implications elsewhere?
This brings me to Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith
in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty First Century. As
he himself said in an interview by David Harvey before his death8, Arrighi’s variety of world-systems
analysis had deep African roots—just as, I must add,
some of the most powerful social theories of the
twentieth-century (a story—that of the work Africa
does in 20th-century theory—that still needs to be
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989; Andre Gunder
Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998; G. Arrighi,
Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First
Century, London, Verso, 2007. 8 Giovanni Arrighi, “The Winding Paths of Capital.
Interview by David Harvey”, New Left Review 56,
March-April 2009.
properly written!). In fact, some of the key categories
Arrighi will later deploy in his work were forged during his African experience—especially his encounter
with “the Africa of the labor reserves” (Samir Amin),
i.e., the trajectories of accumulation through racialized dispossession in the context of white settler
colonialism in Southern Africa9. It is in Southern
Africa that he discovered that the full dispossession
of much of the African peasantry (so as to provide
low cost migrant labor for agriculture, the mines and
manufacturing industry) not only ended up raising
labor costs, it hindered the development of capitalism there by eliminating the ability of the rural labor
force to subsidize its own reproduction and capital
accumulation. In this sense, the Southern African
experience stands in marked contrast to accumulation without dispossession and associated rural development and industrialization throughout much
of East Asia.
Examples taken from other parts of Africa
might very well contradict the validity of this thesis. Nevertheless significant to me is that, having
started his attempt to account for the longue durée
of capitalism and its current crises in Africa, Arrighi
ended in East Asia, and in particular in Beijing. To
be sure, his project was not necessarily to de-center
9 See, “Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective: A
study of the Proletarianization of the African peasantry
in Rhodesia”, Journal of Development Studies 6, 1970;
“The Political Economy of Rhodesia”, NLR …; with John
Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa, New
York, Monthly Review Press, 1973; “The African Crisis.
World Systemic and Regional Aspects”, NLR 15, MayJune 2002; and, with Nicole Ashoff and Ben Scully,
“Accumulation by Dispossession and Its Limits: The
Southern African Paradigm Revisited” (Unpublished
Paper, 2009) 21
Euro-American theory or to highlight the plurality
of theories that emerge out of the processes of decolonization10. He ended up in Beijing because China
has become the workshop of the world. He ended up
in China because Euro-America is no longer where
the most advanced production facilities are located
although Euro-America is still able to cream off a
substantial part of the super-profits created elsewhere. He ended up in China because Euro-America
depends, more than at any time in its history and
nowadays in an increasingly parasitic manner, on
the productive labor of others.
The Comaroffs did not end in China although
they agree that some of the most energetic and innovative modes of producing value are increasingly
relocated southward and eastward. The production
of value is one thing. The capture or appropriation
of value physically produced elsewhere is another.
How surplus-value created in newly industrializing nations is captured by de-industrializing ones
through transnational production networks, foreign
trade and international finance is key to our understanding of the future of global capitalism. They did
not end in China, and I think they should have—
or maybe not in China as such but in that space of
new material relations being formed between China
and Africa in particular. Indeed, it might be that if
“Euro-America is evolving toward Africa”, Africa in
turn is “evolving” toward China rather than toward
Euro-America. The need to feed a vast and growing productive capacity compels Chinese capital to
source raw materials all over the world, especially
in Africa. China is now the world’s largest consumer
10 For a recent attempt, see Françoise Lionnet & Shumei Shih, The Creolization of Theory, Durham, Duke
University Press, 2011. 22
of Africa’s copper, tin, zinc, platinum, and iron ore;
a large consumer of Africa’s petroleum, aluminium
and lead, nickel and gold.
The ongoing acceleration and redistribution of
global productive forces China is leading will not
by-pass Africa forever.
The ongoing acceleration and redistribution of global productive forces China is leading will not by-pass
Africa forever. Without Africa, China will not be able
to indefinitely lend so that America (the globe’s most
parasitic nation) can buy Chinese and other Asian
products and see a sizeable portion of its enormous
debt written off through the fall of the value of the
dollars and Treasury bills China holds. If America’s
irrecoverable debt to China is the price China pays
for the enlargement of her own productive base,
then for America to be put in a position where she
can no longer exact this right of seigniorage, China
will need to build a stronger domestic economy of
her own. But this she cannot do without Africa.
A theory from the South will therefore attend
not only to “How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward
Africa”, but also to the conditions under which
Africa (the South) and China (the East) are trying to
weave the paths that tie both regions in the present
and in the future. For us in Africa, one of the implications of China’s (and for that matter India’s)
ascent for the future of theory is that it forces us to
reflect anew on the multiple ways to grow the wealth
of a nation. Prior to the arrival of capitalism, Africa
may not have known models of growth based on labor-intensive forms of production and husbanding
of natural resources. The region’s subordinate incorporation into the Euro-American centered regime of
accumulation did not simply erase the historical matrixes that governed the production of wealth prior
to the arrival of capitalism. One such matrix is the
existence of a long tradition of market economy and
long-distance trading diasporas which mobilized
human rather than non-human resources and protected rather than destroyed the economic independence and welfare of agricultural producers. Under
what conditions could these historical matrixes reemerge or be reshaped as resources as Africa tries
to formulate a place for herself in a world where the
power of the West has begun to decline is certainly
a question the rise of China and India poses to the
future of theory from Africa.
on theory as such
Let me finally turn to the question of theory itself
which, after all, is at the center of this book. The
question here is whether the kind of “reflexive theorization” Jean and John propose—and which they
call grounded theory—helps us, in any way, to
make sense of the times we live in; whether it helps
us to assess with some degree of plausibility various
intuitions about what is going on, what is possible,
and the odds against it. I say “what is possible” because for the Comaroffs themselves, “to theorize”
only makes sense if theory is part of a broader design: to make “the history of the future different
from the history of the present” (48). Whether they
are examining questions of personhood, of liberalism, citizenship and democracy, of boundaries and
modes of belonging, or questions of memory and
alien-nation, capitalism and bare life, theirs is as
much an anthropology of the present as it is an anthropology of the future—the future as that unique,
singular creation resulting from the encounter between difference and repetition.
And here, I think Jean and John are not necessarily saying that Euro-America has hit an impasse
(although others have made such an argument here
and elsewhere). Nor are they saying that the EuroAmerican archive has, after a thousand years of
world ascendancy, finally run dry and has nothing
new to offer in our struggles to perceive the world
anew. I hear them saying that we are witnessing a
situation in which something that will perhaps matter (or that already matters) is unfolding amidst
the usual activity of life—something in the present
that may become an event (that is already an event),
something of a drama that shocks us (and for that
matter theory itself) into radically open situations.
This is how I understand the controversial expression “Euro-America is evolving toward Africa”—as
an audacious attempt to solve a historical, sociological, but also philosophical and representational
problem. They are trying to solve this representational problem in a very peculiar context for theory.
Indeed, I would characterize the current theoretical
moment as one of cacophony.
Cacophony for four reasons—first, because there
is no agreement today about the state of “theory”,
what it is all about and what distinguishes it from
“criticism”.11 Just like the term “critique”, theory today covers a wide variety of acephalic, segmentary
practices from methods to question the truth of authority to techniques to reveal the figures of power
that operate in dominant discourses, institutions
or social processes to investigating the limits of human reason and judgment.12 Cacophony, too, for a
reason Jean and John themselves single out in their
book. There have been, they say, “something of a
flight from theory, a re-embrace both of methodological empiricism and born-again realism; also
a return to the ethical and the theological” (47) to
which I would add biology, or the growth of a kind
of popular science that has produced a ready public for arguments that seek to reduce human nature
to biology. The increasing theoretical confidence of
11 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?”, The Politics of
Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 2nd ed, 2007; Judith Butler,
“What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, The
Political, ed. David Ingram, 2002. 12 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?”, The Politics of
Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 2nd ed, 2007; Judith Butler,
“What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, The
Political, ed. David Ingram, 2002. Theory From the Antipodes
Cities and towns which are near antipodes in equirectangular projection. Blue labels correspond to the cyan areas and brown labels
correspond to the yellow areas. Areas where blue and yellow overlap (coloured green) are land antipodes.
Cmglee
theology and biology has resulted in the story of “being human” becoming more and more conflated with
the story of “human nature”.13 What the Comaroffs
call “the flight from theory” has left a vacuum in
which sociobiology, genetic reductionism, neurosciences and cognitive sciences have flourished. These
disciplines are annexing core humanities questions
of intentionality, agency, memory, sexuality, cognition, and language.
In this context, I understand the kind of grounded theory advocated by the Comaroffs as a conscious effort to reassert a domain of inquiry which
13 Roger Smith, Being human: Historical knowledge
and the creation of human nature (Manchester
University Press, 2007). 23
focuses not so much on “the place of human beings
in the universe” as on the modes of production of
the historical and the social. Grounded theory, they
suggest, is “historically contextualized”, a “problemdriven effort to account for the production of social
and cultural “facts” in the world by recourse to an
imaginative methodological counterpoint between
the inductive and the deductive, the concrete and
the concept”, “the epic and the everyday, the meaningful and the material” (48). In other words, it is a
reflexive theory, a theory of how “history” is humanly produced not as an essence, but as openness-tocontingency. This is indeed what the term “evolving”
of their title (“Euro-America Is Evolving Toward
Africa”) signifies—openness-to-contingency, rather
than the domestication of contingency (which can
be said to have been the project of theory for most of the twentieth-century). I also understand “grounded
theory” to be a process—a process whereby the theory of what is human changes what it is to be human, that is, contributes to creating the conditions
for the emergence of the sort of world we want to
live in and the sort of life we wish to pursue, the sort
of imaginative ways in which human self-assertion
manifests and expresses itself.
Third, cacophony because in the US especially,
or at least in certain sectors of the US academy, theory is still understood or represented as literature.
But more importantly—an after effect of deconstruction and psychoanalysis in particular (?)—theory is
constantly haunted either by melancholia or by
hysteria. Of the melancholic affect surrounding theory now, Wendy Brown has written some remarkable pages.14 She has not gone as far as to argue that
14 Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy”,
24
... theory, like hysteria, is a strange discourse that
is never satisfied with a neat answer. It is always
asking for more.
what we call theory is not an object but a mediated
affect. What passes for theory is itself, in some way,
“hystericizing” in the sense that it always tends to
provoke or produce effects that, for better or worse,
are hysterical.15 This is the case because theory, like
hysteria, is a strange discourse that is never satisfied
with a neat answer. It is always asking for more. It
is asking for more in the name of a certain notion
of truth, at a time precisely when, thanks partly to
deconstruction and psychoanalysis in particular, the
idea that there is no truth has gained a lot of traction. This is a time, too, when history as such has
become a problem of representation; interrogations
of truth now turn around the question of representation. And the problem of representation has destabilized the dimensions of language, reference, and
even thought itself. And this idea that there is no
truth is filling some of us with a certain kind of real
terror. In such a context, theory is nothing but the
discourse of a relation to a missing Master/Mistress.
And as we know all too well, where the Master/
Mistress is missing, the discourse of hysteria always
tends to mask—or to compensate, or substitute for—
his/her absence.
As we know, historically, theory among the
Western Left has always been many things at the
same time. It has always been, of course, an investigation into the conditions and limits of knowledge.
But the task of theory has also always been to ask
“what characterizes our present and our age”—a
“construction of the intelligibility of our time” as
Barthes said—and of “who is the collective subject
that belongs to it”.16 Even more so, Theory was always conceived as a political intervention, something somewhat beyond critique as such. What
gave it its power was its presupposed capacity both
to transform the existing structures of power and
to create alternative social arrangements. In this
sense, Theory was always understood to be a means
of struggle—which allows Michael Hardt to define it
as a form of “philosophical and political militancy”.
But the feeling today is that critique has run out
of steam.17 We keep making the same gestures when
everything else has changed around us, says Bruno
Latour. We keep fighting enemies long gone, wars
that are no longer possible, and we are ill-equipped
in the face of threats we have not anticipated and for
which we are thoroughly unprepared. In short, we
are on the ready but one war late. How should we
get out of this impasse? Says Latour, by “renewing
empiricism” (231), getting closer to facts, cultivating a “stubbornly realist attitude”—realism in relation to what he calls “matters of concern”. As we can
surmise, Latour’s crusade is mainly directed against
“deconstruction” which he would like to replace
with something he calls “constructivism” (232)—a
franco-French war, therefore (?). For Mary Poovey
on the other hand, “we now need to move beyond
theories of representation” (what she calls “language-based theories”) to “consideration of social
boundary 2, 26.3, 1999. See, too, Brown, “Untimeliness
and Punctuality: Critical Theory in Dark Times”, in
Edgework….
15 Jean Michel Rabaté, The Future of Theory … 16 Michael Hardt, “The Militancy of Theory”, 20.
17 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?
From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, CI, 30,
winter 2004. The Salon: Volume Five
processes” (same volume of CI)—a project which
requires, according to her, forming “alliances with
practitioners in the social and natural sciences”—as
if the human and natural worlds were not, to a large
extent, organized into discrete series of signals and
messages that invite recognition and interpretation,
a certain way of coming to terms with language and
with representation.
On the other hand, if we look carefully around
us, beyond the ivory tower of the humanities, we can
make two observations, both of which profoundly
contradict most of recent assumptions concerning
the death of theory.
The first is that abstract theory has never had
such a hold on the material and social reality of the
world as today. The particular power of economic
abstraction is a case in point.
Theory is always a particular theory of the world.
Increasingly, that world is being constructed by invisible entities like finance capital and abstract singularities like derivatives—a business, says Nigel
Thrift, “that uses theory as an instrumental method,
as a source of expertise and as an affective register
to inform an everyday life that is increasingly built
from that theory”.18 The power and effectivity of abstractions depends not so much on whether their depiction of the world is accurate as on their capacity
to constitute a world. This is indeed the case when
“idealized apprehensions of the world produced
through theory” end up being held up “as desirable
states of being” to which social, economic, political
or cultural life should conform.19 As a practice that
18 Nigel Thrift, “Re-inventing invention: new
tendencies in capitalist commodification”, Economy &
Society, vol. 35, no 2, 2006, 301. 19 Andrew Leyson and al., “Accounting for
flows from abstraction to action, theory becomes a
guideline or a template that operates on different
scales and registers.
On the other hand, a myriad of critical practices
are flourishing, alongside new forms of public and
politically committed intellectual work. Practice
plays a role in the construction of a wide range of abstractions. Some of these critical practices are direct
responses to an emphatic moment of urgency, which
itself seems to have rekindled the utopia of the radically new. They are also facilitated by the rapid transformations in contemporary media. Here, I do not
simply refer to the arts of transmission of knowledge
but also to the fact that the sensibilities, ethos, interior and public life of most people today are determined more and more by television, cinema, DVDs,
the internet, computer games, and technologies of
instant communication. Critical intellectual practices today are those that are capable of writing themselves within a frame of immediacy and presence;
those that are able to locate themselves in nodes
that attract other texts; and forms of discourses that
have the potential of being forwarded, redistributed,
quoted and translated in other languages and texts,
including video and audio. The result is not only a
transformation in the language of knowledge itself,
but also a displacement of theory, the kind of disarray in which it finds itself these days.
Conclusion
at once. It is moving towards increasing exploitation of large parts of the Southern world through
what Marx called “primitive accumulation”, which,
as suggested earlier, is increasingly taking the form
of a raw economy. Worldwide, it is attempting to
squeeze every last drop of value out of the planet by
increasing the rate of innovation and invention or
through an active refiguring of space, currencies, resources and time itself. By boosting difference and
by reinserting this difference into the cycles of its
reproduction, contemporary global capitalism, as
with its earlier incarnations, relies more than ever
before on a reconfigured version of the “racial subsidy”. This is probably what explains its renewed
violence and the extreme disorders it is engendering
worldwide.
A great book is, first and foremost, a creative and
imaginative act. It is a book that formulates better questions which can reveal aspects of the world
that have hitherto been neglected or, in this case,
un-imagined; a book that is likely to shape the discourse of an age; a book that carves out an entirely
new domain of inquiry; a book that creates a space
for interaction among different forms of knowledge
while striving to keep such a space open. And on
all these counts, this new book is not only compelling. It powerfully advances contemporary debates
about the place of theory in cultural criticism in the
aftermath of postmodernism, decolonization and
globalization.
Theory From the South suggests that global capitalism today seems to be moving in many directions
e-commerce: abstractions, virtualism and the cultural
circuit of capital”, Economy and Society, vol. 34, no 3,
2005, 431.
25
Coevalness, Recursivity and
the Feet of Lionel Messi Ato Quayson
(University of Toronto)
For Ato Quayson, Jean and John Comaroff’s
Theory from the Global South outlines a suggestive
agenda for rethinking not just the relations
between the Global South and its northern
counterparts, but also about the problems we have
to robustly confront in thinking of world history as
a totality of inter-related processes, contradictions
and values.
The Comaroffs put forward three main propositions
in Theory from the South. First is that modernity
was a north-south collaboration, indeed a “worldhistorical production”. Thus, rather than the Global
South being merely the laboratory for the Global
North, it is the co-producer of modernity. To quote
them: “To the degree that the making of modernity
has been a world-historical process, it can as well
be narrated from its undersides as it can from its
self-proclaimed centres–like those maps that, as a
cosmic joke invert planet Earth to place the south
on top, the north below” (7). Despite this statement,
the Comaroffs are also at pains to show that theirs is
no mere inversion or displacement of an established
telos with its opposite.
Their second proposition is that Afromodernity
demands to be seen not as a derivate copy or
counterfeit of the real thing, but in its own right
as “a hydra-headed, polymorphous, mutating ensemble of signs and practices in terms of which
people across the continent have long made their
26
Image from a full-page cartoon by John Tenniel of the 1868
Expedition symbolized as Britannia threatening King Tewodros II
as a key-holding jailer.
Caltrop
lives” (7). Afromodernity “is a vernacular – just as
Euromodernity is a vernacular – wrought in an ongoing, geopolitically situated engagement with the
unfolding history of the present” (9).
The third proposition they put forward is that
the Global South affords privileged insight into the
workings of the world at large. They thus attempt
to properly subvert the epistemic scaffolding that
from the time of the Enlightenment has asserted
that the Global South is merely the source of raw
materials or unprocessed data for the fashioning of
Euromodernity. As they put it: “[G]iven the unpredictable, under-determined dialectic of capitalismand-modernity in the here and now, it is the south
that often is the first to feel the effects of world-historical forces, the south in which new assemblages
of capital and labor are taking shape, thus to prefigure the future of the global north” (12). The highly
suggestive header to the section in which this quotation is taken from is The Global South: HyperExtensions of the Present, Harbingers of FutureHistory. They provide a number of examples to illustrate this third proposition, including: the seizing
of the initiative in innovating the biofuel economy
by Brazil, the reach of the Indian auto industry into
Britain and the impact of the Hong Kong banking
sector on the development of new species of financial market, among various others. Or, in another
register, the emergence of South Africa, a major
force in the international mineral economy, as the
America of Africa, an African-America eager to experiment with constitutional law, populist politics,
and, even if hesitatingly, post-neoliberal forms of
redistribution. Or, in yet another register, the rise of
new forms of urbanism, as in Lagos, where many of
the trends of canonical modern, where “Western cities can be seen in hyperbolic guise. . . “ (14)
The points about modernity as a world-historical process and the nature of vernacular Afromodernity are both ones that should not raise much
disagreement. In fact, the Comaroffs synthesize a
vast amount of very good existing literature to assert
their views on world-historical processes and Afromodernity. The main point that is likely to raise interest and perhaps controversy is what they assert
about the Global South being proleptic of trends in
the north, a harbinger, as they put it.
There are a number of what I want to describe
as “talking points” for debate that are implied by
the overall curvature of the Comaroffs’ argument
and not just by the individual propositions in and of
themselves.
1 The first is that reading through their model,
whether the Global South is conceptualized as victim, vessel or mirror, its agency is implicitly a form
of illumination, once again, of the north. True,
Theory from the South is strongly aligned to a concept of coevalness, but the fact that it commits itself
to showing that the Global South is a harbinger of
what is to come in the north (note, not in other parts
of the south, but in the north) means that the Global
South may still be taken as some form of laboratory
for the north, despite all the Comaroffs’ best intentions. In fact, one wonders how the argument of the
book would have looked if the focus were shifted
from a south-north dialectic to a south-south dialogue. Thus, for example, what would it mean to
suggest that everything that has and is happening in
a place like Nigeria regarding the politics of ethnicity
is a harbinger of political trends in South Africa or
vice versa?
2 The second talking point derives from the implications of what I want to term the “discourse of
aggregation”. This discourse shows itself on at least
two levels in Theory from the South. In the first instance there are a large number of summative lists
that act as shorthands for various economic, social
and cultural processes that the Comaroffs want to
propose as identificatory markers of the south or of
the north. This is an inescapable necessity to avoid
the book becoming over-long and unwieldy. One
very useful aspect of the summative listing is that it
... the discourse of aggregation extends also into
the larger discursive aggregate labeled “the Global
South”, with the implication that phenomena in one
part of the south (Southeast Asia, South America or
Africa) can handily be taken as metonymic of the
Global South in general. I think this is a mistake.
provides various possibilities of expansion and further elaboration. However, the discourse of aggregation extends also into the larger discursive aggregate
labeled “the Global South”, with the implication that
phenomena in one part of the south (Southeast Asia,
South America or Africa) can handily be taken as
metonymic of the Global South in general. I think
this is a mistake. For once we begin to disaggregate the Global South, we see that there are different things that they might signify about modernity. Thus, for example, it is now a well-documented fact
that an estimated 26-30% of those who run Silicon
Valley in California are born, bred and educated in
India. India produces by far the highest number
of top-end computer scientists in the entire world. The entry requirements into the Indian Institutes
of Technology (IITs) are so stringent that it is said
that all the big firms in Silicon Valley begin recruiting from among this group as soon as the names of
successfully admitted candidates are publicly posted
in India. It is more difficult to get into say the IIT in
Delhi than into MIT. For many years now India has
been one of the world’s top producers of small arms
and ammunition to the extent that the British Army
sources all its small arms and ammunitions from
that country. In the case of Brazil it has now overtaken the UK as the world’s 6th largest economy. Brazil
has 3 times as much investment in Canada than
Canada has in Brazil. Plus it is one of the largest
overseas investors in Angola, second only to China
at the present time. Once we disaggregate the Global
South and take Africa separately, the argument of
Africa being a harbinger of phenomena and processes in the north seems to be quite fragile. And even in
the specific case of the African continent it is South
Africa that may be taken as providing templates for
the future time. However, it might also be argued
that South Africa is best compared to Brazil in terms
of the transformation of an originally oppressive settler criollo colonial society into a multicultural postcolony, with all the features of class hierarchies and
contradictions, of labor exploitation and its connection to race, and of the inherently uneven distributive mechanisms for mediating both economic and
social value. It would then be seen that South Africa
has more in common with Brazil than say with Italy
or the UK, to take just two European examples. The
class and social structure of the United Kingdom is
so different from that of South Africa that whatever
insights regarding inter-racial conviviality or racial
tension that South Africa generates cannot be easily
translated into our understanding the UK. Brixton
is just not Soweto. And as for the rest of Africa, despite the praise of Lagos and Accra in Theory from
the South, what the two cities present does not
give much ground for celebration, at least not just
yet. Accra and Lagos are multi-ethnic without being multi-cultural, a completely different form of
urban heterogeneity altogether. Urban planning
in both West African cities has not yet cracked the
relationship between the built and natural environments. Finally, the African continent is still riven by
preventable diseases, there are still wars and the rumours of war, and the political class are often still
27
instantiation often becoming the template for understanding all the avatars of such a point of origin. So, how then do we retain the very useful notion of
coevalness and yet avoid the pitfalls of implicit spatial teleologies, south-to-north, north-to-south and
south-to-south? I suggest that one way of doing
this is to tie coevalness to a model of recursivity. As
a literary scholar I am going to robustly resist the
strong temptation of drawing my model for recursivity either from Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and rather want to turn to soccer in today’s
world. But before that it is necessary to digress into
the notion of the spatial fix variously elaborated by
Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom and David Harvey in
The two elevens (Accra and Sekondi), Coronation Cup Final.
different works of theirs. The version that I wish to
(The soccer teams of Accra and Sekondi as finalists of the
work with draws from Harvey’s The Limit of Capital
Coronaton Cup in May 1937.)
(1981). There Harvey suggests that understanding
intent on converting the bureaucratic state appara- global capitalism through the concept of the spatial fix suggests two dimensions: first is in a largely
tus into instruments for private accumulation. geographical sense of the “fixing” of material infrastructure upon space to create an enabling environCoevalness, Origins and Recursivity ment for the processes of capitalist accumulation. Let us now turn to some implicit difficulties in the For this we might list railroads, schools and central
concept of coevalness deployed by the Comaroffs. business districts, among other elements. Few peoWe can all safely agree with them that coevalness ple know that the now ubiquitous Western Union,
implies that history in the north and the south are now associated exclusively in the popular imaginary
not only equal, but deeply interrelated. However, with money transfers, started out life in 1851 as the
the key problem emerges when we try to identify New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph
and differentiate between the concepts of origin and Company with the initial aim of creating the most
causality. For the fact that something can be shown extensive telegraph network for the United States. to have originated in a particular place does not But the nature of their geographical spatial fix also
always and necessarily provide us a proper under- altered with time and context. Thus, even though
standing of the relation between origin and causal- Western Union was formed in America in in the
ity. In fact, as a general rule, the most remarkable mid-nineteenth century initially as a telegraph comsocial processes and phenomena can be shown to pany, it underwent a series of transformations drivhave multiple origins in different contexts, with one en both by the changing financial and technological
28
landscape until its present incarnation after 2006
as the most significant money transfer engine in the
world today. The spatial fix of Western Union would
have to be understood in its present configuration
as well as in terms of its particular historical unfolding and reconfiguration of space (the telegram and
the internet being two such moments of spatial reconfiguration). The second aspect of the spatial fix
David Harvey elaborates relates to the inexorable
process by which, in its attempts to resolve the cycles
of capitalist crises, global capital persistently tries to
convert hitherto peripheral zones into the capitalist circuit. However, the incorporation of peripheral zones into the capitalist circuit often produces
a complete re-orientation of center and periphery to
the extent that the relationship between the two has
to be understood more in terms of recursivity as opposed to mere hierarchy. Thus a concept of coevalness would have to be augmented by one of recursivity for an understanding of the relations between
origin and causality and the configurations of world
historical processes. And so to soccer.
... a concept of coevalness would have to be augmented by one of recursivity for an understanding
of the relations between origin and causality and
the configurations of world historical processes.
Lionel Messi and the Infernal Carousel After their defeat to FC Barcelona in the final of the
2009 UEFA Champions League played in Rome,
Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson referred to Barcelona’s style of play as an infernal carousel of passing, and passing, and passing. The formula was replicated to great effect again in the 2011
final between the two teams played at Wembley,
which Barcelona won again 2-1. What Sir Alex referred to as the infernal carousel is also known as
Total Football and is based on the soccer training
method perfected by the Dutch Wiel Coerver and
first dazzlingly displayed to the world by Holland at
the 1974 World Cup. Coerver was himself nothing
short of a scientific genius: he closely analyzed
film footage of some of the best players of his time
including Pele and concluded that far from their
talents being innate, all their skills could be carefully
systematically inculcated into players starting
from a young age. This insight and the method
he developed proved to be revolutionary and has
spread all over the world. Total Football was introduced to FC Barcelona by Johann Cruyff when he
managed the team from 1988-1994. Pep Guardiola,
the current manager of Barcelona, was a player under Cruyff and clearly fully imbibed his mentor’s
philosophy. However much we currently admire
Barcelona, it has to be remembered that despite
their perfection of Total Football and its breathtaking display at the 1974 World Cup, the Holland national team has not managed to win the World Cup
yet. Furthermore, most people would be surprised
to know that Arsenal FC also play a variant of the
infernal carousel. In fact, close students of soccer
will quickly point out that Arsenal and Barcelona
play an uncannily similar style of soccer. The main
difference between them is ultimately one of personnel, to wit the incomparable Lionel Messi. Which
takes us to a central qualification to the Comaroffs’
implicit focus on origins in the demeanor of coevalness. To put it somewhat polemically: the feet of
Lionel Messi are more important for understanding
the status of world soccer today than are its origins
in England’s Victorian public school system or in
the perfections of the Coerver Method. It is a wellknown fact that rugby, cricket, and soccer were all
products of the English public school system and
that they were exported throughout empire to various locations in India, Australia, the Caribbean and
Africa. However, the origins of these sports is now
a completely banal fact when we want to explain the
global reach of soccer and its governing body FIFA
today. Rather, it is best to consider the ways in which
global TV networks, in collusion with some of the
best teams in the sport, exert incredible effort to try
and identify new players from the erstwhile global
peripheries in order to further incorporate these peripheries into the formidable global advertising and
publicity franchises. Thus the injuries to Chelsea’s
Ghanaian Michael Essien are immediately reported
on all global networks while the goal-scoring feats
of South Korea’s Kim-Jung Park of Manchester
United produces endless marketing opportunities in
Southeast Asia. Messi, Essien, Kim-Jung Park, Yaya
Touré, Sergio Agüero, Luis Suarez and players such
as them illustrate the recursive relations between
multiple origins of both form and content because
ultimately that is what world soccer today really is:
the conquest of more and more obscure markets
by the identification and marketing of players from
various parts of the world. Global soccer may thus
be giving us a handy parable of the links among
the concepts of coevalness, origins, recursivity, the
spatial fix and the complex character of the social,
cultural, political and economic dimensions of the
world today.
29
Theory from the South: A Rejoinder Jean and John Comaroff (University of Chicago University of Cape
Town and American Bar Foundation)
For Jean and John Comaroff, understanding these
times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is
the point, the provocation, the critical pulse that
underlies both the poetics and the disciplinary
practice toward which Theory From the South
aspires. Whether it succeeds or fails, or does both
in some proportion, the issues that it was written
to address remain too important to ignore, too
serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.
We should like to thank our dear friends and
comrades, Achille Mbembe, Juan Obarrio, and
Charles Piot for having had the temerity to organize
the “Authors Meet Critics” session at the 2011
Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological
Association (Montreal, 2011) at which these papers,
and our response to them, were first presented. It
is to their great credit, and to our great benefit, that
they were willing to grab a rather wild, willful text
by its tail. We also owe a debt of gratitude to James
Ferguson, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Ato Quayson
for agreeing to engage seriously with Theory from
the South and to do so with obvious critical acuity.
It is with a deep sense of loss that we note that
Fernando Coronil, our long-time friend, could not
take part as planned. In our shared bereavement at
the tragic loss of a person of uncommon humanity
and grace, of singular imagination and scholarly
flair, we dedicate this symposium to his life, his
work, and his memory.
30
The book cover of Theory From The South by Jean Comaroff &
John L. Comaroff.
The conversation among the participants here has
already spanned several years, continents, and contexts; indeed, many of their ideas have contributed
directly to the arguments made in the book. Our exchanges have always been conducted in a spirit of
empathetic critique, of mutual respect, and of reciprocal, playful vexation – as, gratefully, they were in
Montreal. The point of Theory from the South, and
its even more intemperate under-title is, as Ferguson
and Mbembe note, to provoke debate and to raise
intractable questions about matters that really count
in the world today—at least, if it is to be a world in
which the very idea of social science and social theory has any salience. Yes, Srinivas [Aravamudan],
we plead guilty, without the slightest trace of guilt,
to being social scientists, not philosophers. Ours
is a time in which society truly does need to be defended; this less in the sense intended by Foucault
(2003), for whom there was too much of it, than by
our intellectual ancestors for whom the sui generis
nature of collective facts, of Hegel’s social ethic, had
to be established against the reductionist excesses of
methodological individualism and economic reason.
We agree with Ferguson that, premature announcements of its death notwithstanding, “the social” is
actively being refigured in our times as both theoretical and political object; also, that its refiguration is often palpable in places where we have not
classically thought to look. But tracking transformations of the social requires that we rethink received
space-time configurations, theoretical trajectories,
and disciplinary practices, thus to move beyond now
well-worn colonial and postcolonial perspectives.
The Courage to Do An Anthropology At Large—
whatever the risks of failure—is a sine qua non of
participation in the world of contemporary critical
theory. This, we hasten to add, is not to forsake our
longstanding commitment to the ethnographic—to
ethnography, through thick and thin—or to eschew
our perennial encounter with the parochial, the intimate, the experience-near; to be sure each of the
chapters of Theory from the South is an encounter with grounded human practices. It is, rather, to
open up an argument about our unique disciplinary
sensibilities in the face of the Biggest Question of
All: how are we to grasp the unfolding history of advanced capitalism—and the world being fashioned
by its pervasive, invasive designs—as it takes tangible shape in different places, as it makes real its
abstractions and extractions, as it runs up against its
own contradictions?
Theory from the South has already given rise to
a range of comments, critiques, and conundrums,
not just those raised by the contributors to this symposium, but also by others elsewhere. Of the most
frequently asked questions posed of the book, four
stand out.
The first is this:
What is the status of “the South” in our argument?
Given the ways in which we qualify, critique,
and deconstruct it, why retain it as a term of use
at all? What, indeed, do we actually mean by it?
An initial caveat here in response to a remark made
by James Ferguson, speaking of a colleague who dismissed Theory from the South as the work of “two
white people from Chicago.” Echoes, this, some of
the sillier sorts of self-reflexivity that afflicted the
discipline in the 1980s, and of the identitarianism
that mistook itself for serious epistemic critique at
the time. We are writing neither “for” the south—
heaven forfend—nor, simply, “from” the south; in
this respect, too, Aravamudan, who accuses us at
once of Western epistemological imperialism and
a quest for authenticity, appears to misunderstand
our position, perhaps derived from his particular
grasp of the word “from.” Writing from the south, in
that sense, is a species of intervention that Raewyn
Connell (2007) has captured under a different label,
“Southern Theory.” As Ferguson points out, most of
us bear scholarly signatures that are simultaneously
north and south. Our critical edges are honed not
from single placements but from multiple displacements, multiple focal lengths, multiple interpellations, multiple movements both away and towards.
But that is a side bar. Theory from the South is NOT
about the theories of people who may be wholly or
Theory from the South: A Rejoinder partially of the south, least of all ourselves. Nor is it,
as Aravamudan would have us confess, simply theory “about” the south. It is, as Mbembe has stressed,
about the effect of the south itself on theory, the effects of its ex-centricity, to invoke Homi Bhabha’s
(1994:6) term, of its structural and tropic situation in the history of the ongoing global present. Of
course, we have long had a species of “theory from
the south.” Its other name is anthropology: anthropology, that is, of a certain critical sort. Or, at least,
it was—until much of the discipline, seduced by the
neoliberal flight from history, society, structure, system, determination, and explanation retreated from
theory sui generis in favor of contingency and the
documentation of difference. But that is another
story.
Back to the core of the question: What is the status of “the South” in our argument? What, finally,
do we intend by the term?
Despite the fact that it has replaced “the third
world” as a more-or-less popular usage, the label
itself is inherently slippery, inchoate, unfixed. It describes less a geographical place than a polythetic
category, its members sharing one or more—but not
all, or even most—of a diverse set of features. The
closest thing to a common denominator among them
is that many once were colonies, though not all in
the same epochs. “Postcolonial,” therefore, is something of a synonym, but only an inexact one. What
is more, like all indexical categories, “the Global
South” assumes meaning by virtue not of its content,
but of its context, of the way in which it points to
something else in a field of signs – in this instance,
to its antinomy to “the Global North,” an opposition that carries a great deal of imaginative baggage
congealed around the contrast between centrality
and marginality, kleptocracy and free-market democracy, modernity and its absence. Patently, this
opposition takes on a hard-edged political and economic reality in some institutional contexts, like the
G-8 and world bond and credit markets—a reality
that makes it appear as though it has a “hard” geocartography. That process of reification is precisely
why we cannot simply do away with the term by
fiat: it has a life in the world. Analytically, then, the
problem for a critical anthropology is to account for
when, why, and how it takes on that reality and with
what implications. In other words, “the South” is not
an analytic construct. It is an analytic object. Its very
facticity—like its labile relationality and its capacity
to signify—is something for which we have to give
account. This, to answer Aravamudan, is why it has
multiple connotations in our narrative: they refer
to different levels of abstraction, different levels of
theory-work.
In the complex hyphenation that links economy to
governance and both to the enterprises of everyday
life, then, the contemporary global order rests
on a highly flexible, inordinately intricate web of
synapses, a web that both reinforces and eradicates,
both sharpens and ambiguates, the lines between
hemispheres.
But let us reiterate, lest we be misunderstood.
Empirically speaking, however it may be imagined,
the line between north and south is endemically unstable, porous, broken, often illegible. It is not difficult to show that there is much south in the North,
much north in the South, and more of both to come
in the future. All of which is underscored by the
deep structural articulation—indeed, by the mutual
31
entailment—of hemispheric economies, not to mention by the labyrinthine capillaries of the world of
finance, which defy any attempt to unravel them
along geopolitical axes. In the complex hyphenation
that links economy to governance and both to the
enterprises of everyday life, then, the contemporary
global order rests on a highly flexible, inordinately
intricate web of synapses, a web that both reinforces
and eradicates, both sharpens and ambiguates, the
lines between hemispheres. As a result, what precisely is north, and what south, becomes ever harder to
pin down. Which is precisely why, as we argue in the
book, “the Global South” cannot be defined, a priori, in substantive terms, why it bespeaks a relation,
not a thing in or for itself—even though it can, and
has, taken on material substance along certain spatiotemporal axes for certain purposes. Analytically,
however, whatever it may connote at any given moment, it always points to an “ex-centric” location, an
elsewhere to mainstream Euro-America, an outside
to its hegemonic centers, real or imagined. For our
purposes here, then, its importance lies in that excentricity: in the angle of vision it provides us from
which to estrange our world in its totality in order
better to make sense of its present and future.
The second question, which is closely related, is
this:
In speaking, however provocatively, of a “counter-evolutionary” moment in the global geohistory of capital, are we not, by a somewhat
disingenuous subterfuge, sustaining the telos of
modernist narratives, except in reverse? More
generally, are we suggesting an historical overdetermination, a directionality, to the history of
the present, to the history of capital in the 21st
century?
32
As Quayson and Mbembe both make plain, the quick
answer is an unambiguous no on both counts. But,
given Ferguson’s suggestion that we may confuse our
readers on this account and may indeed be reversing
the telos of modernity, given also that Aravamudan
has it that we are unwilling to decide whether Africa
is either the end point of contemporary capitalism
in its utopic, most advanced form or an augury of
its most dystopian, degenerate future, let us address
the issue head on.
... our central thesis does not hinge, as Aravamudan
appears to think, on deciding whether Africa is
either one or other of these things.
Note here that our central thesis does not
hinge, as Aravamudan appears to think, on deciding whether Africa is either one or other of these
things. The problem, and our argument, is rather
more complex. It is that, while Euro-America and
its antipodes are caught up in the same world-historical processes, the Global South has tended to
feel their effects before the global north. There are
good reasons for this, reasons both historical and
geopolitical, reasons that we spell out in considerable detail in the book. Old margins are becoming
new frontiers, places where mobile, globally-competitive capital finds minimally regulated zones in
which to vest its operations; where, as Mbembe also
reminds us, capitalism flourishes as democracy is
displaced by autocracy or technocracy; where industrial manufacture opens up ever more cost-efficient
sites for itself; where highly flexible, extraordinarily
inventive informal economies—of the kind now expanding everywhere—have long thrived; and where
those performing outsourced services for the north
develop cutting edge enterprises of their own, both
legitimate and illicit; where new idioms of work,
time, and governance take root, thus to alter planetary practices.
In the upshot, the “advanced” edges of contemporary capital—its experiments, among other
things, in re-engineering legal and regulatory instruments; in the appropriation of productive land,
intellectual property, and other resources; and in
the development of new modes of extraction and
enclaved sovereignty—root themselves there; vide
the fact that, early in 2010, Newsweek, not known
for its post-racist take on the global economy, declared that Africa is “at the very forefront of emerging markets...Like China and India, [it is] perhaps
more than any other region...illustrative of [the]
new world order” (Guo 2010:44), a multi-focal order, we argue, whose axis mundi is no longer selfevidently in the north. At the same time, and for
the same reasons, the dystopian sides of that order
have also been most readily evident in the Global
South. Material inequality, human disposability,
epidemic illness, social exclusion remain endemic
there—which, in turn, have produced more than
just “glimmers...of endurance, survivability, and
even futurity,” to recall Aravamudan’s phrase. As
we take pains to demonstrate, they have also yielded
their own forms of politics, their own forms of postproletarian labor, their own kinds of sociality, their
own modes of income accumulation, investment,
and distribution, some of them, as Ferguson notes,
authored in intricate north-south collaborations.
But these collaborations are motivated by conditions in southern contexts, recast in them, and, increasingly, exported northward. In short, as a frontier of contemporary capital, the south has spanned
everything from corporate giants like Mittal Steel,
Cosan Biofuels, and the Royal Bafokeng platinum
empire through experimental enterprises of various
scales and reaches, to lumpen life-worlds notorious for their desperate immiseration, their unruliness, their terrifying violence. It has also spawned
political fields in which sovereignties are asserted,
collaterally and in shifting proportions, by corporations, the state, NGO’s, organized crime, religious
orders, ethno-polities, and others. It is the broadsides of this dialectic that we seek to document: a
dialectic, we stress, that is under-determined and
full of surprises, one that does not recapitulate the
telos of modernity or its reverse, one that defies both
received Marxisms and Hegelian liberalism.
This is half of our “counter-evolutionary” story.
Note that “counter,” here, is intended to mean not
just inversion but also negation. We deploy it to
point to irony, not to teleology. The other half of
our story has to do with the contemporary history
of Euro-America, one of rising carceral populations,
rising unemployment, a rising politics of the belly
and the bellicose, spiraling inequality, spiraling crises of social reproduction and generation. It is not we
who first noted that the “new normal” of the North
appears to be replaying the recent past of the South,
ever more in a major key. Which is why, in many respects—note, many, not all—Africa, Asia, and Latin
America seem to be running ahead of Euro-America,
prefiguring its history-in-the-making. And why the
Global North appears to be “going south.”
Even some of the more apparently outrageous
claims in this respect are not easily sloughed off.
Take the rotting urbanism spreading through parts
of the Global North. Montreal may not resemble
Lagos, as Ferguson rightly says, but large parts of
Theory from the South: A Rejoinder Chicago do. To be sure, Youngstown, Ohio, an allAmerican wasteland, would actually like to. The
point? When, after Rem Koolhaas (Koolhaas and
Cleijne 2001; cf. Comaroff and Shepard 1999), we
say that Lagos is a hyperbolic frontier of the 21st
century conurbation, we do not merely have in mind
the fact that real estate on Victoria Island is more
expensive than its equivalent in Manhattan, nor that
Chicago has inner city slums little different from
those of Lagos, nor even that the patterns of rampant inequality in the two contexts are running in
pathological parallel. We intend, technically, that
urban scapes, as global phenomena, have strongly
convergent tendencies—in respect of property relations, political life, patterns of trafficking, claims to
sovereignty, local economies, and the like—because
of the way that capital, and its cultural mediations,
tend to play themselves out under specific demographic, infrastructural, and sociological conditions; conditions that, again, are most graphically
visible in places like Lagos. Not everywhere, nor all
in the same way—hence, again, our anti-teleological
insistence—but in ways that materialize the hydraheaded configurations of contemporary capitalism
as it takes its historical course. These configurations,
we stress, are ill-captured by terms like “deterioration” or “advancement” or any of the other dualisms
that we seek so carefully to avoid in Theory from the
South.
Which brings us to the third question:
Why, in speaking of “the South,” and of the putative evolution of the North in its direction, do we
take Africa as paradigmatic, rather than, say,
Brazil or India, the economic success stories of
the contemporary moment? Or better yet, why
not focus on China, the biggest story of all?
The most immediate answer to this question, raised
here by Ato Quayson, is that Africa is the place from
which we enter the world; as Ferguson observes, all
knowledge is situated somewhere. Southern Africa is
where we do our scholarly work, where we live much
of our lives. Note that “we,” here, already implies
a situated deixis, a contextual relativity of personand-place that captures a central dimension of our
argument. Our anthropology, like the phenomena
we observe—whether it be the figurations of finance,
the politics of life, or the fetishism of memory—take
manifest shape in an African locale. But they are
also the products of translocal processes and multiple crossings, of dialectical engagements of varying
scale. Africa, to reiterate, provides a fertile forcing
ground for many of the most destructively rapacious
and the most urgently inventive faces of advanced
capitalism. It is both a frontier of and a window onto
the signature operations of our polymorphous global economy, an economy that has many more-orless interdependent, quasi-autonomous mutations
and emplacements—and no unencumbered centers
of Archimedean leverage.
That said, the question is not whether Africa
or China or Brazil is the vanguard of the planetary
economy. Each makes evident a distinct dimension
of the ways in which capitalism at its most energetic
is plying its course, seeking to solve its mounting
contradictions, exercising its sovereignty over biopolitical life—and running up against its ecological
limits. China might indeed have become the workshop of the world. It certainly is a critical node in
the new global imaginary, one that writes modern
history again as an evolutionary narrative, this time
with East Asia as its endpoint. But, as its internal
crises mount, we must beware of mistaking Chinese
33
... China might indeed have become the workshop
of the world. It certainly is a critical node in the
new global imaginary, one that writes modern
history again as an evolutionary narrative, this time
with East Asia as its endpoint. But, as its internal
crises mount, we must beware of mistaking Chinese
capital ... for Chinese capitalism as a realized
formation...
capital, however huge its impact on the global economy, for Chinese capitalism as a realized formation—
which, in its etatist form, has generated its own particular character, one toward which the rest of the
world is not evolving. It has its own dystopias, global
dependencies, and contradictions, some of them
with palpably African foreshadowings. As Mbembe
points out, China and Africa are likely to develop
in vibrant symbiosis, both to decenter American
seigniorage and to set up new kinds of south-eastsouth axes. BRICSA, note —the economic alliance of
Brazil, India, China, and South Africa—has already
been conjured into existence. To return yet again to
our under-title, then, our ironic invocation of Africa
here was meant less to argue for a unique harbinger
of a capitalist or post-capitalist world than simultaneously to invoke and to dismantle the kind of
Hegelian thinking for which Africa has long served
as the negative pole; this in order to tell a very different kind of story of the present and future.
Which, finally, takes us to the last of our four
questions:
What do we intend here by “theory”?
In part, we have already addressed this. It has been
widely noted, in Euro-American contexts, that
there has been something of a retreat from theory
34
of late (see above). To wit, a new handbook, currently in press from the British Association of Social
Anthropologists (Fardon et al, n.d.), dwells nervously on the discomfort of the discipline with general
theory of any kind. In the social sciences at large,
methodological empiricism and born-again realism
have been re-enchanted. There has also been a return to the ethical, the theological, and the biological.
For many in the South, however, the refusal of
theory has long been an unaffordable luxury. The
need to interrogate the workings of contemporary
world-historical processes—to lay bare their uncertainties and invisibilities, to make sense of their
ways and means, to comprehend their inclusions
and exclusions, to court, counter, mediate their
dystopic implications—has become increasingly urgent. Hence the unveiling in 2009 by the Ministry of
Higher Education in South Africa of a Humanities
and Social Sciences Charter, its objective being to
prioritize the development of “social theory” and
“critical skills.”1 What the South Africans have
grasped is that the courage to theorize is a prerequisite of any effort to make the history of the future
different from the history of the present. If, indeed,
the recent past of the south is becoming the “new
normal” of Europe, and of Arianna Huffington’s
Third World America (2010), there is clearly a need
in the north for a return to Theory. Perhaps this is
1 See Media Statement on the Development of a
Humanities and Social Sciences Charter, Ministry of
Higher Education and Training Republic of South Africa,
6 October 2010; http://www.education.gov.za/dynamic/
dynamic.aspx?pageid=310&id=10648, accessed 7
October 2010. The words from the statement quoted
here are those of the Minister of Higher Education and
Training, Blade Nzimande. a respect in which Euro-America ought to evolve
more rapidly toward Africa.
... By theory ... we do not intend Grand Theory
in the high modernist tradition. Ours is not a
flight into pure abstraction or into a philosophical
anthropology. We mean grounded theory, concrete
abstraction: the historically-contextualized,
problem-driven effort to account for the perverse
patterning of social, material, and cultural “facts”
by recourse to an imaginative methodological
counterpoint between empirical observation and
critical ideation ...
By theory, we stress, we do not intend Grand
Theory in the high modernist tradition. Ours is not
a flight into pure abstraction or into a philosophical anthropology. We mean grounded theory, concrete abstraction: the historically-contextualized,
problem-driven effort to account for the perverse
patterning of social, material, and cultural “facts”
by recourse to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between empirical observation and critical
ideation and also, in a different register, between
the epic and the everyday. In short, our predilection
is for theory that is neither an all-embracing metanarrative nor microcosmically, myopically local. It
tacks, rather, on the awkward scale between the two,
seeking to explain phenomena with reference both
to their larger determinations and their contingent,
proximate causes; this by plumbing the complex,
often counter-intuitive points of articulation among
them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003). As we say in
the final chapter of the book, the object of our praxis
is to interrogate the connections between what it
is that constitutes the lived world and the manner
in which that world is experienced, acted upon,
and inhabited by sentient human subjects. Theory
from the South is an argument for just this kind of
grounded theory, which, we submit, has always been
the stock in trade of a critical anthropology.
A final thought. We began the book by reflecting
on the genealogy of enlightenment liberalism, on its
presumptions about the subjects and objects of theory-making. All of this goes back at least to Plato, to
The Philosopher and His Poor (Rancière 2003), to
the conceit that there is one class that reflects while
others do only menial work. Ours is a different genealogy. For us, theory, particularly critical theory, is
immanent in life itself, which always implies a degree of reflection, abstraction, inspired guesswork.
In this sense, it need not be an elite practice, even
though it is often dismissed as such. To the contrary,
theory often derives as much from a lived praxis—
a praxis grounded in the ordinary—that may occur
anywhere in the “mesh of contemporary wiring,”
to invoke the spirit of Walter Benjamin.2 Nor, in
these wireless times, is theory just “on the ground.”
It is also in the expansive, immediate, etherealyet-personalized technologies aptly termed social
media, media that in 2011 helped congeal a North
African Spring - and, following it, a European summer of discontent. These, again for better and worse,
are rich new sites of knowing-and-being that have
the capacity to inform and transform theory at its
2 The phrase itself is Simon Schama’s. He uses it in
describing Benjamin’s reflections on the obligation to
“capture memory”in times of danger through ordinary
experience – rather than in the “[fetishization] of the
meditative.” See “Television and the Trouble with
History,” Simon Schama, The Guardian, 18 June 2002;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,739347,00.html.
Theory from the South: A Rejoinder self-appointed centers, to trouble its assumptions
about the motors, mechanisms, and pathways of
history in these, our late modern times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994a. The Location of Culture.
New York: Routledge.
*
Understanding these times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is the point, the provocation, the
critical pulse that underlies both the poetics and the
disciplinary practice toward which Theory from the
South aspires. Whether it succeeds or fails, or does
both in some proportion, the issues that it was written to address remain too important to ignore, too
serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.
Afterword
Soon after we wrote this piece for the Annual Meeting
of the American Anthropological Association in
Montreal, there appeared a cover story in The
Economist (December 3-9, 2011) under the banner heading, Africa Rising. Among other things,
it reported that, over the past decade, “six of the
world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African.”
In “eight of the past ten years,” it noted, “Africa has
grown faster than East Asia,” adding that its rise in
productivity easily exceeds that of the USA (p.15).
The Economist went on to detail the complex reasons for why it is that the continent bespeaks both
the “transformative promise of [capitalist] growth”
and some of its bleakest, most dire dimensions. In
short, it gives empirical flesh, in a very different register and from a very different perspective, to precisely the argument of Theory from the South.
Comaroff., Jean and John L. Comaroff 2003 Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial
anthropology and the violence of abstraction.
Ethnography, 4(2):147-179.
Comaroff, Joshua and Gullivar Shepard 1999 Lagos Charter: Case studies in the African informal. Harvard Project on the City: West Africa.
Cambridge, MA: Graduate School of Design,
Harvard University.
Connell, Raewyn 2007. Southern Theory: The
global dynamics of knowledge in social science.
Malden, MA: Polity.
Fardon, Richard, John Gledhill, Olivia Harris,
Trevor Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Chris Shore,
Veronica Strang, and Richard Wilson, eds. n.d. Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology. London:
Sage, with the Association of Social Anthropologists
of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.
[Forthcoming, 2012.]
Foucault, Michel 2003. Society Must be Defended:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6. Edited
by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David Macey. New York: Picador.
Guo, Jerry 2010. How Africa is Becoming the New
Asia. Newsweek, March 1:42-44.
35
Huffington, Ariana 2010. Third World America:
How our politicians are abandoning the middle
class and betraying the American dream. New
York: Crown.
Koolhaas, Rem and Edgar Cleijne 2001. Lagos:
How it works. With Harvard Project on the City
and 2X4, (ed.) Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi. Baden:
Lars Müller Publishers.
Rancière, Jacques 2003. The Philosopher and
His Poor. Edited by Andrew Parker, translated by
John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
36
High Wire Acts: Knowledge
Imperatives of Southern Urbanisms
This intervention is a reflection on the emergent
knowledge experiment that is the heartbeat of
the African Centre for Cities (ACC) where I ply
my craft. This allows me to reflect on a number of
contemporary debates in urban studies; debates
that both shape and recast the plethora of research
and practice orientations of ACC. At the core of
these debates is the question of the political in
emergent cities of the South because at ACC we
explicitly seek to address so-called applied urban
development questions but in a reflexive and
theoretically informed manner.
Awareness is dawning that cities will have the
shoulder the responsibility to achieve a much more
resource efficient global economy by that magical point of futurity—2050—as conjured by the
International Panel Climate Change (IPCC) work
reflected in the Kyoto Protocol on reducing carbon
emissions. The imperative for radical reduction in
carbon emissions presents an opening to pose some
fundamental questions about the drivers, patterns
and distributional effects of contemporary patterns
urbanization. But this imperative coincides with a
contradictory moment: one the one hand increasingly retrogressive and exclusionary forms of governmentality and urban management remain pervasive, and on the other hand, an unprecedented
opportunity to contest and recast imaginaries about
longer-term futures that are more resilient, inclusive and just is more possible to project than has
been the case over the past two decades of unbridled
neoliberalism.
ACC has just turned five years of age, having been
established in early 2008. Since then the scope and
breath of the organisations’ research has grown tremendously but more or less within the conceptual
parameters that were developed right at the outset.2
In our early formulation we posited five propositions
1 Gregory Bateson, quoted in Mostafavi, M. (2011)
“Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?” in M. Mostafavi
and G. Doherty (eds) Ecological Urbanism. Boston:
Harvard University Graduate School of Design & Lars
Muller Publishers, p. 44.
2 Parnell, S., E. Pieterse and V. Watson (2009)
“Planning for Cities in the Global South: A Research
Agenda for Sustainable Human Settlements”, Progress in
Planning, 72(2): 233-241.
Edgar Pieterse
(University of Cape Town)
Edgar Pieterse plies his craft at the African Centre
for Cities (ACC) in Cape Town. In this essay, he
reflects on a number of contemporary debates in
urban studies. He argues that at the core of these
debates is the question of the political in emergent
cities of the South. These debates are happening
at a contradictory moment. On the one hand,
increasingly retrogressive and exclusionary forms
of governmentality and urban management
remain pervasive. On the other hand, and
after more than two decades of unbridled
neoliberalism, an unprecedented opportunity to
recast imaginaries about longer-term futures that
are more inclusive and just is at hands.
“to remain on the wire, you have to continually shift
from one condition of instability to another...”1
as guide posts for how we would grow the research
agenda and sensibility of ACC:
One, the available stock of urban and planning
theory are largely unsuited to help us understand
and navigate the complex lived realities of cities
in the global South.3
Two, building an alternative planning praxis
rooted in the South demands a progressive value
base that is both socially and ecologically informed.
The concept of universal socio-economic and
environmental rights offers a profound moral
base for planning, but its application in cities of
the global South needs interrogation.4
Three, relevant theory must be built on
‘empirical’ and analytical work about real-life
experiments in city building, whether in the
form of official government programmes or the
mundane ordinary practices associated with
reproducing livelihoods and ‘lifeworlds’ in the
city. The gravitational point of focus, particularly
in the field of planning theory, has shifted too far
to the process end during the past two decades,
leaving the material basis of urban exclusion
obscured and under-theorised.
Four, effective urban policies can only emerge
out of the deliberate articulation of appropriate
theory and real-life data about trends, practices
3 Watson, V. (2009) “Seeing from the South:
Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe’s Central Urban
Issues”, Urban Studies, Volume 46(11): 2259–2275.
4 This aspect is elaborated in: Parnell, S. and E.
Pieterse (2010) “Realising the ‘right to the city’:
institutional imperatives for tackling urban poverty”,
International Journal for Urban and Regional
Research, 34(1): 146–162.
37
and conflicts in the city. This implies an explicit
and formalised system of storing information and
bringing theoretical and applied knowledges into
academic purview.
Five, none of the previous propositions can be
addressed in a traditional disciplinary fashion;
engaged theory and theoretically informed reflexive policy requires an interdisciplinary platform
for knowledge generation and innovation. Learning how to become this platform at the University
of Cape Town is the core purpose of ACC.
Key to the advancement of this standpoint was a
belief in fostering live laboratories of knowledge
co-production. This was premised on the assumption that academic knowledge was inadequate to
understand, disentangle and “solve” a variety of
tough urban problems such as structural poverty,
environmental vulnerability to flooding, sprawl, climate change impacts, and so on. In fact, mongrel
knowledges were required that emerged through
structured and choreographed processes of co-production sustained over a substantial length of time,
i.e. 2-3 years. We have now come to the end of the
lifespan of some of the CityLabs, which offers an occasion to reflect on the implications for our original
framing propositions.5 At the same time we have
also been establishing and anchoring a number of
pan-African and global South knowledge networks
on specific urban topics such as urban food security,
5 Anderson, P., M. Brown-Luthango, A. Cartwright,
I. Farouk, W. Smit (2012) “Brokering communities of
knowledge and practice: reflections on the African Centre
for Cities’ CityLab Programme.” Unpublished paper.
Cape Town: African Centre for Cities, University of Cape
Town.
38
the informal economy/sector, planning education
and research, national urban policies and discourses, and cultural-spatial readings of emergent forms
of cityness. Significantly these have all demanded
and involved intense processes of interdisciplinary negotiation and co-production; and in some
cases, the co-production extended well beyond the
academy to include social movements such as Slum
Dwellers International (SDI), and various informal
worker movements enrolled in Women on Informal
Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO).
Looking across these diverse and often provocative experiments in knowledge production to both
elucidate and address tough urban problems associated with the widespread social and environmental
neglect that accompanies “slum urbanism”, a number of questions present themselves: Is there any
point to all this effort in light of the grim readings of
the urban condition as articulated by authoritative
voices such as Mike Davis and David Harvey?6 Or, to
put it more precisely, is there any point to “applied”
urban scholarship if one dares to consider the probability of the decidedly dystopian outlooks on urban
futures offered by Davis or Harvey? Do our modest and discrete interventions—usually in a mode
of co-production—attached to a thematic topic add
up to anything meaningful in the larger scheme of
structural urban change? Do these grounded investigations elucidate something significant about the
specific ordinariness of urban contexts across cities
of the South that can help us discern a novel theorisation of emergent urbanisms? Let me briefly turn
6 Davis, M. (2010) “Who will build the ark?” New
Left Review, 61 (Jan-Feb): 29-46; Harvey, D. (2008)
“The Right to the City”, New Left Review, (SeptemberOctober): 23-40.
to the question of dystopian readings of the urban
present and future.
Looking into the abyss
From the outset it was clear that ACC would have
to balance itself on the rising discursive tide of urban sustainability. By 2008 the urban dimensions of
the larger climate change debate and development
agenda was becoming rather obvious and widely recognised.7 For a moment it seemed as if this agenda
was offering a backdoor for a much earlier set of discourses on sustainable development to finally make
some impact after two decades of “green-washing”.
In the larger development industry there was an unmistakable relief and buzz that a new raison d’être
for the “business” had been established that allowed
for the dusting off and recasting of a plethora of humanist and “alternative development” tropes of the
1990’s and early 2000’s.8 Characteristically, Mike
Davis sweeps in and spoils the party. In an unusually provisional tone, yet hard hitting piece in New
Left Review, he throws down the following gauntlet
for the climate change “believers” that wishes fundamental change on the horizon. Davis opines,
7 Kamal-Chaoui, L. and Robert A. (eds.) 2009.
Competitive Cities and Climate Change. Paris: OECD
publishing; Satterthwaite, D. (2011) “Surviving in an
Urban Age”, in Burdett, R. and Sudij, D. (eds) Living in
the Endless City. London & New York: Phaidon Press.
8 McMichael, P. (2009) “Contemporary contradictions
of the global development project: geopolitics, global
ecology and the ‘development climate’ ”, Third World
Quarterly, 30(1): 247-262.
Of course, there would still be treaties, carbon
credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics,
and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some
European cities and small countries to alternative
energy. But worldwide adaptation to climate
change, which presupposes trillions of dollars of
investment in the urban and rural infrastructures
of poor and medium income countries, as well as
the assisted migration of tens of millions of people
from Africa and Asia, would necessarily command
a revolution of almost mythic magnitude in the
redistribution of income and power. Meanwhile
we are speeding toward a fateful rendezvous
around 2030, or even earlier, when the convergent
impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water,
and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet
will produce negative synergies probably beyond
our imagination.9
It is very difficult to step away from this polemic and
not be haunted by the profound “truth” of this injunction… That is to say, all the evidence of doubletalk, governmental inertia, rising emissions above
the worse-case scenario trend line of the IPPC confirm that the powerful vested interests that dominate
global politics and economics are simply not going
to come close to doing what is nominally required
to meet the “modest” ambitions of the international
community as reflected in the Kyoto protocol.10 A
9 Davis, op cit., p. 38.
10 The work of the International Panel on Climate
Change is clear that if the world is to avoid a 2 degrees
rise in temperature, carbon emissions will have to be cut
by half of current levels by 2050, which further implies
an 80% cut by developed nations. This means that a lowcarbon future is simply a non-negotiable even though
Figure 2: Projected GDP/capita per region, 2000-2050
Figure 1: Population below the $2.15 poverty line*
* Data from the International Futures model of the
Pardee Centre and Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
Data supplied to the author by the ISS on 25 August 2011.
scenario simply rendered more dystopian by the real
politik peddled by emerging powers such as China.
If one then overlays this bleak assessment of the
environmental agenda with the Marxian diagnosis of David Harvey, read alongside the profound
economic crisis of the 2008-9 and all of the ultra
conservatism that it induced, a deep pessimism is
almost unavoidable. Add to this the predictive work
coming out of the Africa 2050 diagnosis which demonstrates that even with robust economic growth
over the next few decades, large-scale income poverty and material deprivation will remain the norm
for very large proportions of the population in
most African countries. Figure 1 and 2 reflects the
how we will achieve these reductions remain a mystery
given the current patterns of real politik. For an insightful
overview on the imperatives of a low-carbon future, see:
Flavin, C. (2008) “Building a low-carbon economy”, in L.
Starke (ed) State of the World 2008: Innovations for a
sustainable economy. London: Earthscan.
International Futures model on income poverty and
GDP/capita for different African regions between
2000-2050.
Contemplating the prospect that by 2050 at least
730 million Africans will still attempt a life on less
that two dollars a day is not only sobering but also
dispiriting. As intimated before, this projection assumes that the current dynamism across African
economies will more or less remain on track given
the feeder function of these economies into the
combustion of the high growth economies across
the global South.11 It is then not that surprising
11 Africa is the only world region that will continue
to have a robust population growth momentum by mid
century. In particular, East and West Africa will more
than double its populations from 250 million to almost
700 million respectively. Over that period of time,
Africa’s share of the global population would have grown
from 15 percent in 2010 to 23 percent in 2052. However,
despite this dramatic increase in its share of the global
population of 9 billion, it will remain largely peripheral
in economic terms. In 2010, Africa accounted for 3.5%
of global exports and slightly less of FDI. This merely
grows to 5.8% of exports and 5.3% of FDI by 2050. See:
Cilliers, J., Hughes, B. and Moyers, J. (2011) African
39
that UN-Habitat projects that the majority of urbanites in sub-Saharan African cities will remain
slum dwellers for the foreseeable future. Swilling
and Annecke concur with the diagnosis of a pending polycrisis as suggested by Davis and delineate
the following dimensions of it: eco-system degradation, global warming, oil peak, rising inequality, urban poverty, rising food insecurity, and increasingly
unviable levels of primary resource (biomass, fossil
fuels, metals, and industrial and construction materials) consumption.12
Whilst Mike Davis and David Harvey are drawing our attention to the ineluctability of a truly grotesque and brutal urbanism, Ash Amin strikes a
completely different note in his recent challenge to
the planning discipline. Amin, building on his work
with Nigel Thrift, suggests that while the stakes have
been rising in terms of the futures of social life, political vibrancy, security and risk, progressive academics have retreated into a discursive safe heaven
where the only politics that really matter is: “process” or deliberative democracy. He puts the challenge in these provocative terms:
Their [deliberative planners] emphasis, instead,
falls on motivating visions, scenarios, and diagrams of possibility placed under democratic
scrutiny. The strategic role of the planner is not to
draw up a plan for implementation, but to offer a
vision, to map alternatives. I wonder, however, if
Futures 2050: The next forty years. ISS Monograph 175,
Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies.
12 See Chapters 2 and 3 in: Swilling, M. and
Annecke, E. (2012) Just Transitions: Explorations of
sustainability in an unfair world. Cape Town & Tokyo:
UCT Press and United Nations University Press.
40
something has been lost of the knowing tradition
in this otherwise laudable attentiveness to urban
complexity and multiplicity; a certain programmatic clarity over the overall aims and priorities
of urban living, made all the more necessary in a
context of radical uncertainty. […] Has the attentiveness of deliberative planners to procedures of
decision-making compromised the necessity to
know about substantive matters of urban change
and wellbeing?13
Of course, Amin does not address himself directly to
the prognosis of Davis and Harvey, but in his challenge to the deliberative democratic current that
has come to dominate planning theory, he allows
us to think from a different angle. In order to make
sense of these opposing sensibilities—one suggesting large-scale interminable misery and the other
intimating a real prospect for projecting substantive
alternatives to effect change—I need to step back
and take in a larger debate on the knowledge foundations of theoretical perspectives on the nature of
emerging urbanisms in the global South. This will
also help to reread the necessarily naïve plodding
away at specific urban problematics that characterise ACC; a practice that we believe is a vital step
in a propositional vein. The next sections offer an
account of how to map and inhabit the theoretical
landscape of contemporary urbanism as it resonates
in the global South but certainly flowing from and to
multiple directions.
13 Amin, A. (2011) “Urban planning in an uncertain
world”, in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds) The New
Blackwell Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, pp. 637-8.
Figure 3: Critical Urban Theory Landscape
Emergent Knowledges on the Urban
Western-centric urban theories are now thoroughly
untenable in the wake of postcolonial critiques that
have masterfully demonstrated the partial, biased
and imperious assumptions embedded in the DNA
of these edifices.14 However, these moves to render
cities specific on their terms has also had a liberating effect on the study of cities in the North, most
14 Edensor, T. and Jayne, M. (2011) “Introduction:
Urban theory beyond the West”, in T. Edensor and M.
Jayne (eds) Urban Theory beyond the West: A world
of cities. London & New York: Routledge; Robinson,
J. (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and
Development. London: Routledge; Roy, A. (2008) “The
21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory”,
Regional Studies, 43(6): 819-830; Roy, A. (2011)
“Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism”,
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
35(2): 223-238; Watson, V. (2003) “Conflicting
rationalities: implications for planning theory and
ethics”, Planning Theory & Practice, 4(4): 395–407.
Watson, V. (2009), op cit.
notably captured in the theoretical manifesto of Ash
Amin and Nigel Thrift in their Reimagining the City.
It is exactly at the intersection of scholars working on Northern cities with a non-teleological and
emergent ontology that shared concerns are found
with theorists attempting to bring the specificity of
emergent urbanisms in the South into the frame.
This is an exciting and productive development. In
this section I want to take some time to explicate a
theoretical landscape that allow for a heterogeneous
range of scholars and topics to flourish, all in service
of explicating the unique dimensions, folds, temporalities and emergent pathways of ordinary cities.
Field 1: Southern Urbanisms
In one sense, the entry point for acknowledging
the field of Southern Urbanisms is the sheer demographic momentum that is not only driving the
growth of existing and new cities, but also effectively eclipsing the centrality of traditional Northern
megacities in both the imaginary and economics of
the urban. Of course, this demographic shift is the
primary preoccupation of urban policy institutions
such as the UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance, sections
of the OECD and so on. In fact, an ever increasing
number of volumes are appearing that seek to connect the demographic fact of urban intensification
with the variety of socio-economic and ecological
problems that it will leave in its wake given weak
state capability, inadequate infrastructure systems,
and limited planning capability. This developmentalist literature is increasingly being reinterpreted
and extended to tell a very compelling story in the
parlance of global capital about the fact that the
future of wealth generation lies in the cities of the
Figure 4: Top 25 cities by various categories in the 2025*
* Dobbs, R. et al (2011) Urban world: Mapping the
economic power of cities. Boston: McKinsey Global
Institute.
41
global South. A think piece by the Boston Consulting
Group points out that urban consumers in Northern
cities will only grow by about 100 000 million people by 2030 compared to a growth pool of 1.3 billion
in cities of the global South.15 Similarly, McKinsey
Global Institute has been hard at work at setting the
pace in becoming the “thought leader” on what the
urbanization opportunity actually means for the investment priorities and geographical orientations of
multinational corporations. An emblematic example
of this worldview is the following table from their recent report, Urban World:
Figure 4 demonstrates graphically that the top
twenty-five cities in 2025 in terms of GDP growth
will by and large be in the global South.
In contradistinction, theorist Ananya Roy suggest that there are far more important theoretical
work to be done instead of simply pointing to the
self-evident demographic and economic shifts underway. Instead, Roy “Seeks to articulate new geographies of urban theory.” She argues that
Doing so requires ‘dislocating’ the EuroAmerican centre of theoretical production; for it is not
enough simply to study the cities of the global
South as interesting, anomalous, different, and
esoteric empirical cases. Such forms of benign
difference-making keep alive the neo-orientalist
tendencies that interpret Third World cities as
the heart of darkness, the Other. [Instead,] It is
argued that the centre of theory-making move to
the global South; that there has to be a recalibration of the geographies of authoritative knowl15 Jin, D. (2010) Winning in Emerging Market Cities.
A Guide to the World’s Largest Growth Opportunity.
Boston: Boston Consulting Group.
42
edge. As the parochial experience of EuroAmerican cities has been found to be a useful theoretical
model for all cities, so perhaps the distinctive
experiences of the cities of the global South can
generate productive and provocative theoretical
frameworks for all cities.16
She then proceeds to provide a suggestive overview
of key theoretical traditions in various Southern regions; traditions that, through genealogical excavation, can prove useful to this vital theoretical project.
Roy also picks out a number of conceptual themes
that has served the Southern urbanism theoretical
project well. A number of volumes have appeared
over the course of the past few years with the explicit intention of mapping the import and relevance of
theoretical interpretations that arise from Southern
contexts.17 An important seam of this emerging body
16 Roy, A. (2009) op cit, p. 820. This injunction may be
true, but the stubborn patterns of the political economy
of knowledge production will mean that in practical
terms more than 90% of “recognized” scholarship
associated with leading journals and publishing houses
will undoubtedly emanate from Northern universities.
However this is a dilemma for consideration on another
occasion.
17 For example: Edensor and Jayne (2011), op cit.;
Enwezor, O. et al., (eds.) (2004) Under Siege: Four
African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa,
Lagos. Ostfildern-Ruit: Dokumenta 11_Platform4,
Hatje Cantz; Huyssen, A. (ed) (2010) Other Cities,
Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing
Age. Durham: Duke University Press; Meyers, G. (2011)
African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and
Practice. London: Zed Books; Robinson, (2006), op cit.;
Simone, A. (2004) For the city yet to come: Changing
African life in four cities. Durham and London: Duke
University Press; Simone, A.M. (2010) City Life from
of work is the focus on detail, specificity, molecular urban practices, and the co-constitutive nature
of plural subjectivities and harsh living conditions
amidst widespread informality and precarious living
conditions.
Field 2: Everyday urbanisms
In contrast to the demographic, regional and epistemological interests of Southern Urbanisms, everyday urbanism seek to take subjectivity and multiple
social assemblages seriously on their own terms.
Over a decade ago work in this field was preoccupied with informality as a dominant context for both
economic and social reproduction. Numerous studies and policy networks were mounted to generate
a reasonably complete and fleshed-out account of
informality, sometimes rooted in the livelihoods
literature of development studies, and other times
powerful ethnographic accounts associated with
subaltern and/or postcolonial urban anthropology.
However, much of the livelihoods oriented work remained trapped in a developmentalist instrumentality within which the real purpose of research was to
understand the obstacles to formalisation, breaks on
entrepreneurialism, and address those through effective policy and managerialism.
One the leading theorists in this epistemic field
is AbdouMaliq Simone who has for the past three
decades painstakingly documented and theorised
the centrality of everyday life to a larger appropriation of the urban and cityness. In his oeuvre he has
always been less interest in the preoccupation with
Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads.
London and New York: Routledge; Swilling and Annecke,
op cit.
informality but rather insisted that a more agnostic
sensibility was required. So, for Simone,
…the point is to pursue the dogged work of trying to understand the implications of what people
do, particularly as it is clear that residents, even
in the desperate ways they may talk about their
lives, usually think about them as more than survival alone. Yes, survival is the overwhelming preoccupation of many. But the pursuit of survival
involves actions, relations, sentiments, and opportunities that are more than survival alone. It is
these thousands of small excesses which also act
on the city, remaking it ever so slightly into something different than it was before. These changes
are not measured by any easily discernable standard that would allow one to say that the city is
becoming more just, equal, cutthroat, revolutionary, messianic, or hellish. And thus the important
work is perhaps simply to document these efforts
on the part of the poor to give rise to a new moral
universe, a sense of value, of potential, and of the
unexpected to which people’s attention, no matter how poor, is also paid.18
Here one can sense Simone’s methodological obsession with the infinitesimal pluralism of ordinary life
and aspiration, excavated on their own terms, but
also with a reluctant normative intent; a recognition that values, (spiritual) practices and mores
suture everyday life but these are also profoundly
unstable and malleable and therefor to be understood and projected with great care and provisionality. Simone’s work intersects with the suggestive
18 Simone, A. (2010) op cit., pp. 38-39.
theoretical account of Asef Bayat on the cumulative
impacts of mundane transgressions of space, infrastructures, and buildings as the urban poor enact
survival.19 Bayat suggests that we see these often
non-ideological and apolitical practices as a form
of encroachment or canabilization that is simply
too pervasive and tenacious to be done away with
or repressed through any kind of simple or complex
regime of governmentality. By dint of presence and
numbers, everyday acts become a shape and spaceforming dynamic that lives deep in the reproductive patterning of Southern cities. In this moment,
Bayat’s work offers a powerful illustration of Ananya
Roy’s thesis that informality has become a dominant
mode of urbanization of much of the global South.20
These lines of argument are compatible with Solly
Benjamin’s theorisation of “occupancy urbanism”
but arguably in a different political key than the
work on “insurgent citizenship” that comes from the
Latin America region.21 The practices that come into
view in terms of either the occupancy urbanism or
quiet encroachment frames do not project rightsbearing citizens as the literature from Latin America
projects.
However, reading across these contexts and
theoretical genres, it is certain that an incredibly
rich and protean research programme can both be
19 Bayat, A. (2000) “From Dangerous Classes to Quiet
Rebels. Politics of Urban Subaltern in the Global South”,
International Sociology, 15(3): 533-557.
20 Roy, A. (2005) “Urban informality: towards an
epistemology of planning”, Journal of the American
Planning Association, 71(2): 147–158.
21 Benjamin, S. (2008) “Occupancy urbanism:
radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and
programs”, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 32(3): 719–729.
imagined and mounted across cities everywhere.
However, as more and more carefully crafted, often
ethnographic, accounts of everyday urbanism start
to amass, it is pertinent to draw inspiration from
non-representational theorists and begin to question the often human-centred assumptions of both
Southern and everyday urbanism perspectives.
Field 3: Vitalist ontologies
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift first explored the implications of a nonessentialist vitalist ontology—indebted to Deleuze and Guattari—for a rethinking of
cities in their volume, Cities: Reimagining the urban. Lorimer explains vitalism as a “tradition in philosophy that believes in the existence of a life force
in material assemblages that cannot be explained
through mechanistic approaches. As an ontology, it
argues for the immanent emergence of form, rather
than the existence of transcendent archetypes.”22
This grounding is a dead give-away that the leading lights of actor-network theory such as Haraway,
Latour, Law and Serres are all closely aligned with
this standpoint.
In a recent intervention by Amin cited before, he
reminds us that this approach induces an expansive
understanding of cities and cityness:
…cities might be thought of as machinic entities; engines of order, repetition, and innovation
(sparked by the clash of elements and bodies)
that drive the urban experience, including what
22 Lorimer, J. (2009) “Posthumanism/Posthumanistic
Geographies”, in R. Kitchen and N. Thrift (eds)
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography.
Volume Eight. Amsterdam and Oxford: Elsevier, p. 344.
43
humans make of themselves, others, and their
environment. The urban environment is a meshwork of steel, concrete, natural life, wires, wheels,
digital codes, and humans placed in close proximity and it is the rhythms of the juxtapositions
and associations – coming together in symbolic
projections, cultural routines, institutional practices, regulatory norms, physical flows, technological regimes, experience of the landscape,
software systems – that surge through the human
experience. The machinic rhythms of the city, I
would argue, blend together the human and the
urban condition, making people subjects of a specific kind, with their demeanor and outlook (compared to that of humans in other time-spaces)
formed by their inhabitation of the urban environment and, most importantly, its inhabitation
in them, fixed through these rhythms.23
This relational ontology is coupled to an affective
understanding of subjectivity. Again, Lorimer clarifies that affect “refers to both material, ecological
properties of a body and the forces and processes
that link them together. It describes prediscursive,
embodied experiences that are subsequently codified into subjective emotions.” These theoretical orientations are decidedly critical of textually oriented
poststructural deconstruction on the one hand, and
neo-Marxist structuralist accounts of inert and singular materialities, on the other. Instead, this relational ontology is interested in a much deeper and
fuller account of how agency is enacted through particular configurations and emergences of both human and non-human actants in ways that tune into
23 Amin, op cit, p. 634.
44
the affective dispositions of people and the atmospheres of places that they inhabit or transit.24 The
net effect is an account of cities that emphasises the
fragility of all that seem stolid, stable, gargantuan,
immutable and thoroughly routine.
An insightful example of how this ontological
account offers a fresh and dynamic perspective on
one of the basic elements of urban life—infrastructure—shines through in the suggestion of an “infrastructural turn” in urban theory, made by Stephen
Graham. He asks of us “to consider urban infrastructures as complex assemblages that bring all manner
of human, non-human, and natural agents into a
multitude of continuous liaisons across geographic
space.”25 This approach forces an engagement with
the larger economic, cultural and social roles of infrastructure discourses, rationalities and practices.
In my mind, since infrastructural investments occupy central stage in the imagineering and mobilization work of urban elites across the global South, it
is vital that we deploy vitalist ontologies and related
insights from relational understandings encapsulated by the notion of “assemblages” to theorise more
broadly about the emergent practices and consequences of city building. This, Jane Bennet argues,
will open us up to look for and recognise the constitutive turbulence of materialities that on the surface may appear stable and solid.26 Since turbulence
24 Pieterse, E. (2011) “Grasping the unknowable:
coming to grips with African urbanisms”, Social
Dynamics, 38(1): 5-23.
25 Graham, S. (2010) “When infrastructures fail”, in
Graham, S. (ed) Disrupted cities: When Infrastructure
Fails. New York and London: Routledge, p. 11.
26 Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter. A Political
Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke
implies instability and risk, it also opens up spaces
for problematizing taken-for-granted technical and
financial assumptions that unpin the “technological
unconscious” of cities.
Given the “incomplete” and “under-construction-ness” of cities in the South, taking on board
this relational stance to reality-in-the-making and
knowledge, can only contribute to a more plural and
dynamic conception of city-making and cityness.
More importantly, it allows us to connect the unjust
and cruel pathways of our cities to a clearer set of
analytical programs to speak into the challenge of
proposition intimated by Amin. The notion of proposition takes me to the final field of theory building.
Field 4: Ecological urbanism
In keeping with a vitalist ontology and recognising
the variable assemblages of actants that supports the
unremitting social-natural reproduction of the city,
it is clear that the central concern of a group of urbanists is turning towards the longer-term viability
of contemporary models of urban development, design and material reproduction. It demands a careful
and systematic consideration of multiple pathways
towards alternative, more resilient and more liveable forms and modalities of habitation.27 Central to
this concern is an interest in the natural-social assemblages of the city as mediated by infrastructure
University Press.
27 NSFWUS [National Science Foundation
Workshop on Urban Sustainability], (2000) “Towards
a Comprehensive Geographical Perspective on Urban
Sustainability.” Final Report of the 1998: National
Science Foundation Workshop on Urban Sustainability.’
Rutgers University. Swilling and Annecke, op cit.
networks and the built environment. As Stephen
Graham explains: “…energy, water, sewerage, transport, trade, finance, and communication infrastructures allow modern urban life to exist. Their pipes,
ducts, servers, wires, conduits, electronic transmissions, and tunnels sustain the flows, connections,
and metabolisms that are intrinsic to contemporary
cities. Through their endless technological agency,
these systems help transform the natural into the
cultural, the social, and the urban.”28 Similar observations can be extended to the role of the built
environment as mediators and embodiments of urban functionalities, form, symbolic projection and
desires of control.
Mohsen Mostafavi argues that these readings, set
against a backdrop of environmental risk and crisis,
open up an opportunity to project new imaginaries
of alternative urbanisms. Such visions or projections
should not arise from a technocratic eschewing of
structural crisis, but rather stem from a perspective
that views “the fragility of the planet and its resources as an opportunity for speculative design innovations rather than as a form of technical legitimation
for promoting conventional solutions.”29
In mainstream, neoliberal inflected discourses,
speculative design translates into an agenda about
environmental security and the promise of a technological fix. An instructive development can be seen in
the scramble amongst various insurance, engineering and financial service companies to understand
what the investment potential and risk profile of
28 Graham, op cit, p. 1.
29 Mostafavi, M. (2011) “Why ecological urbanism?
Why Now?”, in M. Mostafavi and G. Doherty (eds)
Ecological Urbanism: Boston: Harvard Graduate School
of Design & Lars Müller.
so-called sustainable infrastructures are. This fraction of the knowledge-driven service economy, intermarried with the engineering manufacturing sectors, coalesce to produce ecological urban utopias
unmoored from the messy and leaky materialities
of most places. A good example is the design conceit that is Mosdar or the proposals for similar, free
floating, technological dreams of transcendence.
But, in this yearning for technological remedy, rooted in reductionism, there also lies an unprecedented
opportunity for developing and projecting a radically different imaginary to frame prospective ecological urbanisms. I will return to this suggestion a
little later on.
Works in this epistemic field counter-balances
the obsession with only the everyday; but in thinking about longer temporalities, it also remains modest and provisional by keeping in view the constitutive dynamic of uncertainty and risk; and the-always-present potentiality of unforeseen emergences
and assemblages of actions. This brings me to the
connective tissue between these deliberately stylised
categories of scholarship.
Connective tissue
The necessarily over-simplified diagrammatic
sketch suggest that on the vertical axis there is a
continuum between quantitative research that can
help us to understand the dimensions, patterns,
and categories of city formation unfolding across
the global South. This foregrounding is important
because it asks of us to move beyond the obsolete
pitching of qualitative against quantitative methods, especially in the wake of the poststructural and
postcolonial turns. That said, it also reinforces the
idea that without much more investment in carefully crafted accounts of the intimacies of everyday
lives, practices and dispositions of urban majorities,
we are unlikely to deepen and evolve the emergent
theorisations of everyday urbanisms. But in this recommitment, we must also embrace an imperative
to broaden our ontological assumptions to really
begin to look beyond, either, individual or collective
agency and situate such practices in more affectively
attuned accounts of various assemblages of chains
of actors and emergent intensities.
The second, horizontal axis, speak to the political
sensibility that arises from the movements between
these overlapping and mutually enriching fields of
enquiry and theoretical curiosity. On the one hand,
in light of the abyss so powerfully drawn by Davis
and his like, we do not give up on the possibility of
being able to identify a concrete and precise politics
of action and intervention; but of course, rooted in
a heightened reflexivity and sense of provisionality.
At the same time, looking across this spectrum
that range from a concern with pragmatic intervention in the now, there is an acknowledgement that
the excess produced by the abyss, leave us yearning
for answers, consolation, a basis for hope. Amidst
the impossibility of political relief in philosophical
terms, it is inevitable that one turns to the ethical
underpinning of this political and epistemological
stance: This ethics, I believe must draw its inspiration from a continuous exploration into the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of unexpected moments
of beauty, generosity, invention and care within the
everyday and imponderable futures… and how such
futures are always met in one way or another with
a determination to act; a refusal to cede ground to
hopelessness and defeat. But because we are talking
45
about debates and questions that are beyond rational resolution, there is a vital requirement to conjure
a deeper, and more affectively attuned conception of
the experience of the impotence of the moment and
how that experience, potentially, gives rise to a determined search to transcend; and in this it is not
the transcendence that is important but rather the
aesthetic and poetic “resolution” of that yearning.
Crucially, in this case resolution may indeed mean
an effective way of meditating on the impossibility
of a “solution”. Here my interviews with artists who
engage with the contemporary urban condition are
instructive. These artists all suggest that the moment of resolving an art work—albeit a painting, or
musical score, or poem or public art intervention—
is experienced as a breakthrough. This arrival is of
course a uniquely individualised moment of clarity
and release—which may only play itself out in the
affective realm, triggering various emotional states,
but without necessarily delivering a rational understanding or clarity; yet, it feels like something has
been resolved, allowed to unmoor itself from the
weight of hopelessness, despair and pain. Moreover,
for artists that I engage with on a sustained basis,
when the resolution taps into a broader affective and
emergent sensibility or emotional current that connects the art work, and the experiences of those who
consume the work, the artistic manifestation is particularly powerful.
Zone of Overlap: Reconsidering the Political
One of the benefits of this simple diagrammatic
conceptual frame to assess theorisations of the
emergent urban in the South is that it forces one to
recognise a variety of political moments, interfaces,
46
dynamics and opportunities. In this section I want
to extent earlier work on a relational approach to
politics that delineates a fluid and dynamic set of
(potential) interactions between five domains of
urban political practice: (1) representative political
forums and associated participatory mechanisms;
(2) neo-corporatist political forums such as the ones
that develop city development strategies, which are
comprised of representative organisations, typically
the government, the private sector, trade unions and
community-based organisations; (3) direct action or
mobilisation against state policies or to advance specific political demands in the public sphere; (4) the
politics of development practice, especially at the
grassroots; and (5) symbolic political contestation
as expressed through discursive contestation in the
public sphere.30
It is striking how much of contemporary scholarship concerned with the political opportunity structure and state-civil society interface is obsessed with
the “now”; with the contemporary dynamics of exclusion and differential inclusion. However, returning to Amin’s earlier injunction for a more propositional and programmatic agenda that substantively
address how different futures could be induced, his
pointed question is telling: “Is it not possible for
planners to draw up an urban program without the
pretensions of total vision, teleological fulfilment
and systemic certitude, offering a clear diagnosis of
the threats that cities face, the matters of collective
concern that must be addressed, the goals that must
be defended to improve urban living for the many
30 The fuller argument on this relational model of
urban politics is set out in Chapter 4 of: Pieterse, E.
(2008) City Futures: Confronting the Crises of Urban
Development. London: Zed.
and not the few?”31 It seems to me that the re-reading of the theoretical landscapes also offers some
clues for how to transcend the obsession with the
contemporary and move towards a consideration of
multiple temporalities, scales, and socio-technical
configurations and patterns.
In my reading of the literature on urban politics
it seems that the general assumption is that neoliberal programs of urban entrepreneurship forms the
context for collective struggles. These struggles are
typically about “recognition” by powerful vested interests (typically urban growth coalitions) in order
to “access” some basics of urban life—land, sanitation services, electricity, transportation, safety and
security, affordable building materials, and so on.
And in contexts where these struggles are relatively
matured or marked by periodic “victories”, these
material claims are increasingly connected to larger
discourses about accessing “rights”. In some contexts, depending on postcolonial political traditions,
the rights discourses may prefigure these material
struggles and serve as a backdrop for these kinds
of claim-making and encroachment. Alongside
and/or before these materially-based processes of
claim-making there is often a need for elementary
claims to ensure the seizure or moderation of violent repression which can take the form of extortion,
forced removals or the constant threat thereof, or
wilful withholding of access of services when local
populations are deemed to have transgressed the
realm of the politically acceptable in the eyes of the
state, or local power brokers.
Central to most accounts of these wide-ranging
social struggles is a deep belief that (local) states are
31 Amin, op cit., p. 638.
absolutely guided by a program of neoliberal governmentality. Evidence of this is provided through
exhibits that demonstrate a fiscal predilection for
economic boosterism projects at the expense of more
equitable and just priorities. Or institutional reform
measures that introduce market-based operational
systems and incentives, which either manifest in the
corporatisation of a municipal utility, or its outright
privatisation. These kinds of reforms typically reinforce patterns of splintered urbanism and an effective withdrawal of the local state from the lives and
neighbourhoods of poor citizens. Another tell-tale
sign of neoliberalization of city governments is the
penchant for institutional and investment reforms
that fall in line with aspirations to become world
class and globally competitive. It is not the focus of
this paper to explore the rich literature that traces
the various locally-specific adaptation and extension
of basic neoliberal precepts that inform urban management.32 All I want to signal is that there is now an
important debate about how useful and historically
accurate these taken-for-granted assumptions are
about the widespread adoptions and execution of
neoliberal intentionality. Here I am referring to the
suggestive recent work by Jennifer Robinson and
Sue Parnell on this topic.33 All I want to signal for
now, in the interest of space, is that this questioning
32 Theodore, N., J.Peck and N. Brenner (2011)
“Neoliberal Urbanism: Cities and the Rule of Markets”,
in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds) The New Blackwell
Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
33 Robinson, J. and S. Parnell (2011) “Travelling
Theory: Embracing Post-Neoliberalism through Southern
Cities”, in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds) The New
Blackwell Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
is opening up a much needed clearing to understand a variety of logics, intentionality and assemblages that fractions within local states and elites are
caught up in, no least of which is the force of law,
in navigating the routine dynamics of city administration, management, symbolic articulation and
constant ideological recalibration of highly mediadriven publics. But let us hold that thought for now.
Going back to an earlier point, my central contention is that investigations into the terrain of the
urban political are overly obsessed with the NOW;
contemporary struggles over incredibly fundamental and crucial questions of basic protection against
state (sanctioned) violence, access to essential amenities and services, and the fundamental right to
simply be in the city. These are of course vital and
highly relevant foci of scholarship. But, is it adequate to fully comprehend the wide-ranging surges
of intent, fear, desire, aspiration, and technological
imperatives that suture the variety of human and
non-human assemblages that underpin the built environment and the urban social?
In light of the earlier discussion on redrawing the
theoretical landscape that can inform city studies, I
want to suggest that we can respond to the injunction of Ash Amin by opening a relational political
field that is not only multi-scalar, but also alert to
multiple folds of time that co-exist and constitute
the present. For example, a decision to compete for
a mega event locks a city into all manner of predetermined choices in order to comply with the stringent global standards that accompanies the paid-for
“honour” to host these boosterism parties. It also
changes the order of public investment priorities
with a knock-on effect of probably 10-20 years, if not
more.34 Similarly, the continuous decision-making
apparatuses that bind together municipal managers,
engineers, professional bodies, academic knowledges about technological preferences and system
maintenance imperatives, particular financial instruments and markets, client expectation, etcetera,
lead to investment framings and priorities that carve
varies lines of path-dependency. These may or may
not conform to explicit neoliberal calculations, but
most importantly, they are instantiated into the reproductive dynamic of the city through largely invisible and therefore unproblematised processes.
There are two kinds of routine decision-making and implementation assemblages that I would
suggest need critical scrutiny. Following, Stephen
Graham, the first pertains to the ubiquitous role of
network infrastructures in structuring urban opportunities and potentialities for citizens of various
classes and locations, firms of various sizes and sectors, and of course nature in its diverse systemic layers and intersections. The second is the built form,
understood as a dynamic amalgam of land-use,
transportation, built form and typologies, spatial
lay-out and density.35 If our political gaze would lift
its eyes from the compelling immediacy of urban
struggles of the poor and turn to the ways in which
framing discourses and assumptions about key
operating systems of the city, a series of different
political claims and imaginings can present itself.
34 Pieterse, E. (2012) “World Cup Promise & Cold
Comforts for South African Cities”, in Asmal, Z. (ed)
Designing South African Since 2010. Johannesburg:
DesignZA.
35 Jenks, M. and Jones, C. (2010) “Issues and
Concepts”, in M. Jenks and C. Jones (eds) Dimensions of
the Sustainable City. Dordrecht: Springer.
47
the provincial government of the Western Cape,
and metropolitan governments of Johannesburg
and Cape Town. The conceptual device animates
the ubiquitous computer metaphor of operating
systems.
The starting point of this programmatic thought
experiment is the interlinked imperatives to progressively achieving resilient and inclusive growth.
In other words, imagining and pursuing urban economic priorities, investments and production processes that can address the environmental dimensions of the polycrisis Davis warns about. However,
this agenda only makes sense in relation to a series
of inter-dependent transitions in other domains of
social, economic and material reproduction. I want
to suggest that an interest in understanding pathways to more sustainable urban dynamics requires
one to think about three critical meta domains of
urban transition that need to be pursued simultaneously. These domains are: sustainable infrastructure, the inclusive economy, and efficient spatial
form, glued by processes of democratic political decision-making—a forth domain. Put differently, one
way of thinking about cities is that they require various “operating systems”. Figure 5 highlights three
critical operating systems that apply for all cities: i)
infrastructural, ii) economic, and iii) spatial, which
implicates land-use and the built form. At the regulatory heart of these operating systems live the decision-making and regulatory force of the state and/
or a plurality of powerful actors that can usurp the
power of the state and/or exercise partial control.
The infrastructural operating system can further
be divided between social-cultural and bio-physical
network infrastructures. The latter refers to roads,
transportation, information-communication technology, energy, water and sanitation, food and
ecological system services that underpin the built
environment and make urban life and movement
possible in a concrete sense. The concept, ‘flow management’, provide a useful lens on how these infrastructures can be viewed as conductors of resource
flows. “Central to the concept is the notion of flows
of materials and energy, reusing resources or substituting non-renewable resources.”37
Socio-cultural infrastructures refer to the social
development investments that forge identity and
community, e.g. cultural services, education, health,
public space, libraries, food gardens, green spaces,
housing and the arts. Social infrastructures by definition need to be tailored to the molecular street
and neighbourhood-scale dynamics which implies
a substantial degree of community involvement and
control in the execution and maintenance of these
infrastructures38; critical moments of democratic
36 This section is a summary and adaptation of:
Pieterse, E. (2011) “Recasting urban sustainability in
the South”, Development, 54(3): 309-316; and Pieterse,
E (2011) “Building Brave New Worlds: Design and the
Second Urban Transition”, in Cynthia Smith (ed) Design
for the other 90%: Cities. New York: Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum.
37 Moss, T. (2001) “Flow Management in Urban
Regions: Introducing a Concept”, in S. Guy, S. Marvin,
and T. Moss, (eds) Urban Infrastructure in Transition:
Networks, Buildings, Plans. London: Earthscan, p. 10.
38 For innovative examples of this in Latin America,
see: Rojas, E. (ed) (2010) Building cities: neighbourhood
upgrading and urban quality of life. Washington DC:
Concretising Struggles for Alternative Futures36
Figure 5: Operating systems of (sustainable) cities
Similarly, if we desist from only obsessing about the
neoliberal betraying sign in urban managerial discourses and actually delayer and deconstruct the
operating dynamics and inter-dependencies in various infrastructural networks and assemblages, we
can almost certainly draw a very different map of
political openings and resistances. This implies institutional ethnographies in the nooks and crannies
of bodies and decision-making forums that are often
predefined as the “enemy of the poor” in our conceptual registers. (In this vein, it is important to appreciate that the rich literature on everyday urbanisms
that have emerged over the past two decades need to
be matched with similar accounts of the routine and
often idiosyncratic and adaptive dynamics within
various bureaucracies that impinge on the lives of
urban majorities.)
Here I cannot go further in making the case for
how we can enlarge the political. Instead, I now want
to turn to a heuristic device that we had to develop
to facilitate deliberation and research in various coproduction settings where ACC engages the South
African state at various levels: national government,
48
enrolment and citizenship enactment. To ensure
such local ownership and control it is important to
safeguard the capacity for local spatial literacy and
purposive capacity, alongside practical communityorganising skills and dense institutions.39 Recent
experiences from some Latin American cities such
as Medellín, Bogotá and Curitiba suggest that even
though social infrastructures by definition need the
fine-grain of community life to truly come to life, it
is also equally important for it to articulate with a
city-wide system of publicness and connectivity,
especially in spatially and economically divided cities. Social infrastructure investments can send a
powerful signal that public infrastructures for all
class and cultural groups can and should be of the
same quality, especially since the poorer citizens are
much more reliant on them. The work of Alejandro
Echeverri and his colleagues in Medellín is a particularly good example of what I have in mind here.40
Network infrastructures on the other hand, often
imply scale-dynamics that covers the larger urban
system in all of its territorial expansiveness. This in
turn holds profound implications for how political
engagement is defined, structured and connected
Inter-American Development Bank.
39 Johnson, H. and Wilson, G. (2009) Learning
from development. London: Zed Books; Narayan, D.
and Kapoor, S. (2008) “Beyond sectoral traps: Creating
wealth for the poor”, in C. Moser and A.A. Dani (eds)
Assets, Livelihoods, and Social Policy. Washington DC:
The World Bank.
40 Echeverri, A. (2010) Urbanismo Social en Medellin
2004-2008. Talk at 361 degrees Design and Informal
Cities Conference, 22-23 October, Mumbai, India. Also
see: Kimmelman, M. (2012) A City Rises, Along With
Its Hopes. New York Times, 18 May. Online version.
[Accessed on 25 May 2012]
downward to the neighbourhood or communityscale. In fact, as the work on splintering urbanism
demonstrates, the lack of appropriate democratic
oversight and engagement on ‘invisible’ network
infrastructures produce conditions where city-wide
infrastructures are tailored and routed to only service those sections of the population and economy
that can contribute to the investment and maintenance of these systems.41 This is undoubtedly one
of the primary drivers of large-scale service deficits
across cities of the South.42
The economic operating system involves production, consumption and market systems that underpin the exchange of goods and services. Importantly,
these systems span formal and informal institutions
and commonly involve their entanglement, especially in an era of intensifying globalization. However,
one of the most challenging problems confronting
cities in the South is that formal economic systems
only absorb less than half of the labour force. The
rest have to eke out an existence in the informal
economy or completely disconnected from any gainful economic activities.43 Those ‘lucky’ enough to engage in informal work have to put up with extremely
low and often irregular income, which puts them in
41 Graham, S. and S. Marvin, (2001) Splintering
Urbanism. Networked infrastructures, technological
mobilities and the urban condition. London and New
York: Routledge.
42 McFarlane, C. (2010) “Infrastructure, Interruption,
and Inequality: Urban Life in the Global South”, in
Disrupted cities: When Infrastructure Fails, edited by S.
Graham. New York and London: Routledge.
43 UN-Habitat (2010) State of the World’s Cities
Report 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide. London:
Earthscan.
the category of the working poor.44 In a broader context of ever deepening global integration of national
economies and value chains, it is becoming more
difficult for national governments to protect jobs,
provide support to the working poor and induce
employment because such actions are, ironically,
perceived as undermining competitiveness.45 And as
long as the intensifying financialization of economic
value generation continues apace, it will be difficult
to promote labour-absorptive and equalizing economic policies.
In the face of these powerful trends, it is essential that cities find creative ways of redefining and
boosting local economies in order to broaden the
base of those who are included in economic life. The
urban development challenge is not just about enabling the generation of more formal economic jobs.
On the contrary, the biggest and most urgent challenge is to target and absorb young adults between
the ages of 15-24 in various categories of social and
environmental public good activities that can reconnect them to society, nature and their surroundings.
Community-based ecosystem restoration and management is one pertinent example. For instance,
river systems and canals in developing countries are
often highly degraded because of upstream pollution and downstream neglect, sometimes combined
with the invasion of alien species. Restoring these
vital services is an essential part of improving the
44 Chen, M. (2008) ‘Addressing poverty, reducing
inequality’, Poverty in Focus, 16: 6–7. Brasilia: UNDP
International Poverty Centre.
45 UNRISD [United Nations Research Institute
for Social Development] (2010) Combating Poverty
And Inequality. Structural Change, Social Policy And
Politics. Geneva: UNRISD.
49
overall well being of cities and communities. Also,
if done cleverly through arts-based programming, it
can serve as a gateway to reconnect young people at
risk to more positive and enriching ways of connecting with nature, community and their peers. There
are literally hundreds of examples that one dream
up if this logic is pursued.46
The other equally important dimension of rethinking urban economic life is the imperative to
confront the challenge of raising growth, improving
the distributive aspects of growth, and improving the
environmental impacts of economic processes that
generate growth; or stated in policy parlance: decarbonising growth which is closely tied to imperative
of decoupling.47 This is a particularly difficult challenge for economies and cities in the global South
where economic growth and labour absorption cannot keep pace with social changes (e.g. more women
joining the labour force as education attainment improves), population growth and in-migration.
This highly stylized and summative overview of
a series of entry points to rethink and remake urban
futures through substantive programmatic ideas
and agendas illustrate the scope that exists to conduct (southern) urban studies in a very different key
to the narcissistic obsession with the urban abyss.
46 A variety of examples from across the global south
are presented in: Smith, C. (ed) (2011) Design for the
other 90%: Cities. New York: Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum.
47 Swilling and Annecke, op cit.; Suzuki, H., Dastur, A.,
Moffatt, S. and Yabuki, N. (2010) Eco2 Cities: Ecological
Cities as Economic Cities. Washington DC: World Bank;
UNEP [United National Environment Programme]
(2011) Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to
Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication.
Paris: UNEP.
50
It responds to the rich and continuously emergent
potentialities of the city as it pulsates with a wide
variety of agendas, interests, varying assemblages
and possibility. This does not suggest we elide or
obscure the emergency nature of systemic violence
and exclusion that so patently mark the contemporary era. Instead it proposes that we use an affective
and multi-dimensional engagement with the lived
meanings and compensations of such dynamics
and continuously adjust our balance to decipher the
pragmatic prospect for effective intervention, whilst
confronting the unassailable pain that travels with
injustice and mendacity.
In closing
In this admittedly wide-ranging and exploratory
paper I have worked to elucidate that attempting
to function as a knowledge institution focussed on
emergent cities in global South is nothing short of a
hire wire act. In learning our craft of becoming adept at walking the tightrope, we need to understand
the various ontological and epistemological dimensions of the overall knowledge project that has to
simultaneously provincialize western-centred urban
theories, enact a profound account of the deep socialities and attendant assemblages that make these
cities emergent spaces, and squarely address the
imperative to propose, no matter how provisional,
substantive arguments for how life and times can
be fundamentally different with as much specificity
and historical groundedness as possible.
This agenda implies a number of specific political imperatives. One, we are effectively talking about
the politicisation of everything, especially the future
and regional city dynamics; not just the everyday
struggles around social reproduction. Two, the need
to continuously pay attention to the imperative
to reorder and re-articulate diverse political “moments” and openings in order to instigate a vibrant,
agonist and adaptive politics. Three, the urgent need
to rethink and recast social networks and political
coalitions of diverse urban actors with a shared
interests in the “public”, the commons and social
justice, however this may articulate for a particular
community of interest. Four, a serious engagement
with institutional retrofitting, especially of the local
state, but also the various institutional value-chains
that play a part in reproducing the city. Practically
this requires an account of how institutions in the
city learn, or chronically fail to do so. Learning is
tied to the imperatives of co-production, adaptive
skills, and fundamentally, meaningful accountability. Finally, a new kind of attentiveness to the full
spectrum of urban political life will lead us to appreciate the still largely untapped potential of a “design” sensibility in moving from analysis, to critique,
to understanding, to proposition, to intervention,
and possibly even, bring a little more aspiration,
freedom, desire and justice into the urban world.
This political horizon is the only one that can bring
the requisite focus and balance to our experimental
lives of learning the art that the high wire demands.
EPISTEMOLOGIES OF DECEPTION:
Topologies of the Extra/Ordinary
David Theo Goldberg
(University of California - Irvine)
Three sites. Solidere, Beirut’s reconstructed
central district. Dahiyeh, the Lebanese capital
southern neighbourhood, adjacent to the infamous
Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps
and the site of Hezbollah residential and political
strength. And El-Ghajar, a Lebanese village at the
borderland crossroads at which Lebanon, Syria,
Palestine’s West Bank, and Israel abut. David
Goldberg describes these locations as wobbles
in the structure of contemporary sociality and
politics and uses them as a springboard for a
reflection on what he calls ‘the epistemologies of
deception” – the moment when surface and depth
collide, even collapse, in spatio-temporal warping
and bending, in swirls of dust.
In “The Adjustment Team,” his 1954 short story
(that formed the basis of the movie The Adjustment
Bureau with Matt Damon now playing on a plane
near you), Philip K. Dick has Ed Fletcher remark that
“I saw the fabric of reality split open. [S2] I saw—
behind. Underneath. I saw what was really there.
And I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to see dust
people [S3] ever again.”
This notion of a “fabric of reality” splitting open
is suggestive in thinking about the everyday, even as
it suggests older analytics of deep structure. What,
and indeed what horrors, it asks, may be revealed
behind, underneath the ordinary and everyday once
split open, its fabric slicing apart to give a glimpse of
EPISTEMOLOGIES OF DECEPTION
[S2], [S3]
the behind and the beneath? What can be seen and
known about social make up both as constitution
and as cover-up? These are the sorts of questions
that have fueled social theory not only since Dick so
unnervingly conjured “The Adjustment Team” but
perhaps all the way into and out of the underworld
of Plato’s Cave.
I want to suggest another, perhaps complementary, way into thinking about these issues than that
conjured by structural and symptomatic reading.
The notion of “dust people” and the condition of
dust as a socio-natural condition of life and its limitations conveys something both metaphorical and
existential about social standing, possibilities, and
challenges variously facing social subjects. It also
suggests ways in which, in the face of conditions of
extreme precariousness, and in the wake of what
Achille Mbembe has characterized as the abolition
of the limit and of taboo, social subjectivity faces
dissolution, and is forced to negotiate what it means
and takes to live in a critical condition today.
A workshop I recently convened in Beirut drew
together colleagues from the University of California
and American University, Beirut with local and regional intellectuals and artists. The engagement
prompted reflections on the more general questions
conjured by living in a critical condition, of social
making and make-up, of the knotting of social ontology and its politics of the epistemological, of sovereignty and its limits and resistances, notably of the
conditions of social deception and its revelations.
Solidere, Beirut’s reconstructed central district, is
located at the edge of the yacht harbor and the near
end of Corniche, the famous seaside promenade. An
urban clone of neoliberalizing central city developments globally, Solidere is designed to promote local elite and tourist circulation. [S4] Initiated by
Prime Minister Rafik Hariri before his assassination, it was completed in his name and honor afterwards. Sollidere is anchored by the towering new
Mohammad Al-Amin (more popularly known as
the Hariri) Mosque [S5] that the Premier had personally financed from the fortune he had accrued
51
[S4], [S5]
[S9], [S10]
[S6], [S7], [S8]
52
mixing business with politics, and aside which he is
now buried. Its stores and apartment buildings are
built of matching stone, the streets paved in bricks
of a common pastel color. Public property has been
privatized with government blessing in the name of a
joint stock holding company controlled by the Hariri
family. The neighborhood boasts French patisseries
and generic global retailers, sugary memorials and
clichéd historical excavations, all closely monitored
by private security guards and militarized patrols.
Solidere is globally conventional urban space today,
commonplace in its local watered down color and
culture, trading local place for generically recognizable space.
A number of deeply local Lebanese sites stand in
sharp contrast. Their edginess and their inexplicability, their illegibility or partial legibility, at least in
terms of the prevailing conceptions of contemporary
social and critical theory, place in sharp relief the
pressing questions of contemporary social theory
referenced above.
Dahieh is Beirut’s southern neighborhood, adjacent to the infamous Sabra and Shatila Palestinian
refugee camps, and the site of Hezbollah residential and political strength. It was heavily bombed
by Israel in their most recent invasion of Lebanon
in the summer of 2006. [S6] Two hundred and
sixty residential apartment buildings were completely destroyed, and another 750 partially damaged. [S7] In the following four years the Hezbollah
Reconstruction Agency completely rebuilt all the
destroyed buildings and renewed the damaged ones.
[S8] That’s effectively clearing and completely replacing 5 buildings a month every month for four
years, and renovating something like 15 buildings a
month in addition.[S9] Quite a feat in itself.
Now none of this could have been achieved, certainly not within the telescoped time frame, under
the regulatory regime of Lebanese state requirements. Hezbollah ran a competition among all
Lebanese architectural and contracting firms no
matter their religious or political affiliations, and
ended up contracting with 33 of them to do the
work. The work of reconstruction and its employment opportunities were thus widely distributed
across Lebanese society. Members of the Hezbollah
community who had been residentially displaced as
a result of the war destruction could purchase into
cooperative ownership of their newly constructed
or renovated buildings at predefined prices or take
a modest pay out and pursue residential opportunities elsewhere. While the buildings and their service
infrastructure were built to Hezbollah defined construction codes, no permits were sought from municipal or state governments, no right to construct or
state financing pursued. When Lebanese authorities
tried to assert themselves politically or regulatorily,
Hezbollah simply flexed its militarized and political
clout, marched downtown en masse, and issued the
same warning directed at Israel through and after
the war: don’t mess with us. At the same time, they
have committed to preserving an old local church
close to Hezbollah’s nerve center in Dahiyeh. [S10]
In effect, Hezbollah was both refusing its appointed place and role, flouting state sovereignty,
conveying to Lebanon and Israel that it could not
be curtailed, and indicating perhaps in classic neolibaralizing terms that it was far more effective in
servicing a significant portion of the population than
the Lebanese state. It was at once fulfilling Soliderelike neoliberalizing state policy while providing
for the neighborhood and community the sorts of
protections against crime and mistreatment so often
reserved to the state.
A second site runs to Lebanon’s most southern
border area with Israel along the Hisbani River. The
center of the river marks the official border line between the two perennially warring countries. Given
the unpredictability of moving water, Israel has
marked the southern river bank with barbed wire
fence and military patrols, effectively inscribing the
border on its side of the river. On the Lebanese side,
marked by desert dust, a Lebanese businessman
who had acquired his wealth in Sierra Leone and returned to his homeland as things fell apart in his adopted African country, was in the midst of building
a vacation resort hotel designed somewhat incongruously as a Sahelesque fortress along the river’s
edge. [S11] Here too state permits were of no consequence in one of the most tightly controlled and
intensely patrolled political geographies across the
globe. Non-Lebanese require military permission
just to visit the area within 20 km of the Israeli border. Three military forces oversee the borderlands,
those of Lebanon, Israel, and Unifil. Nothing goes
unmarked or unremarked, no movement unseen,
no construction unknown. Indeed, Israel military
patrols often stop on their side of the fence to cast
stones across the river at the resort-in-the-making.
And yet, within this highly compacted militarized
landscape, where every moment and movement is
noticed and noted, a businessman builds a completely anomalous public accommodation and use
structure. He builds out into the center of the river a
cement and stone picnic structure, [S12] oblivious
to whether it abuts or overflows the imagined border line running down the river’s shifting middle.
So, a Lebanese businessman, with no bureaucratic
53
[S14], [S15]
[S16], [S17]
[S11], [S12], [S13]
54
license, could call into question not just whether
the picnic structure exceeds the border but the very
grounds of jurisdictionality itself. In effect, a private
recreational picnic spot challenges state sovereignty, authority, and command.
These slippages of sovereignty, its warping,
marks the terrain on which dust people come into
view. El-Ghajar is a Lebanese village at the borderland crossroads at which Lebanon, Syria, Palestine’s
West Bank, and Israel abut. [S13] Sitting at the foot
of the Golan Heights in the Shems Farms valley, a
couple of kilometers from the resort hotel, the village is completely surrounded by Unifil troops and
barbed wire. [S14] Access is controlled by guard
posts and armored vehicles. The United Nations
solomonically drew the bordering blue line between
Lebanon and Israel clear down the center of the
village. [S15] Control of the northern half was left
nominally to Lebanon; the southern half was ceded
to Israel. No sooner than the cartographic lines
were drawn than Israel invaded the Lebanese portion in order to secure to itself the access roads to
three military observational towers peering out from
the heights of Golan peaks. [S16] The observational
towers not only look out across southern Lebanon;
they effectively allow Israel to monitor any conversation it chooses to target in Syria’s Damascus.
While they later returned Lebanon’s village half
to the nominal control of the Lebanese, Israel’s
Defence Forces have asserted on the ground control
over the townspeople. [S17] The village is inhabited
curiously by Syrian migrant workers who are transported each day to do whatever dirty work needs attending in Northern Israel. Yet El-Ghajar, it turns
out, also provides the perfect principal trade route
for hash transportation from Lebanon into Israel,
in full knowledge and acquiescence of all the parties
involved. As a consequence, the village is relatively
well off.
These sites confront us, then, with shifting notions of make believe, in the senses of both fantasy
and compulsion. What can be comprehended about
sociality in the everyday and ordinary activities and
arrangements in which we find and lose ourselves,
the creases and folds of which reveal and lose (or lose
sight of) its inhabitants? This way of composing the
analysis suggests a shift; it is complementary though
not simply reducible to a notion of deep structure,
and it certainly is not merely a matter of the various
meanings ascribable to “surface reading.”
The three locations described here are dislocations. They are neither anarchic nor sovereign,
not states of exception nor even declarations
of emergency, perhaps law-like but not quite
straightforwardly legal
The three locations described here are dis-locations,
and in a sense dis-locutions. They are neither anarchic nor sovereign (though not exactly non-sovereign either), not states of exception nor even declarations of emergency, perhaps law-like but not quite
straightforwardly legal. They are places the coordinates of which are at once absolutely specifiable in
terms of their cartographic identification and completely lacking location, or more precisely locatedness, in terms of their juris-dictionality and so too
their comprehensibility. Nor are they nearly unique.
These are spaces Ackbar Abbas characterizes as
dis-appointments. They fail to comply or to live up to
pre-ordained expectations. But they are dis-appointments in the non-standard sense of not conforming
[S18]
to their appointed places, to appointed modes of being and doing, to conventional sociality. It may be
better perhaps to understand them as wobbles in the
structure of contemporary sociality and politics. At
once states of ordinariness with recognizable everyday markers—residential, recreational, resourceful,
socially containable, exploitable--they nevertheless
are out of the ordinary, refusing their appointed and
so anticipated sites or roles, unrecognizable as and
in their everydayness. They are dis-locations and
in a sense dis-locutions, appearing where least anticipated and expressing themselves in unexpected
and unpredictable ways. [S18] They accordingly
lack location, or more precisely locatedness, thus
casting adrift their signifying source and so also any
recognizable touchstone as the stabilizing basis for
their comprehensibility. In being the not-Solideres,
they nevertheless place the likes of Solidere in sharp
relief.
55
The dis-appointedness of sites such as these is the
source and expression of their illegibility, spawning
perhaps a crisis of social representation and control.
The social conditions of everyday life in these sites,
as perhaps more generally, can no longer be taken for
granted, assumed to deliver or underwrite or guarantee—as the state once did—the baseline daily conditions of existence, more than mere survival or the
staving off of bare life. What these dislocations and
–locutions, among proliferating others, now point to
is the generalizability of precarity, the proliferation
of the conditions of precarious possibility, their conditions of possibility prompted by those erasures of
social limits and taboos mentioned earlier and the
shame they sometimes effectively prompt. A precarity as much epistemological as ontological, though
the former not simply epiphenomenal of the latter.
Now, epistemology, conventionally understood,
concerns how we know what we know. It follows
that the issues most directly and deeply challenging
conventional epistemological standing—that which
it is constantly at lengths to hold at bay--are the twin
dangers of deception and self-deception. Conceived
in terms of reality torn asunder, split open, hidden
and revealed, though, suggests that epistemology
and deception may not be so opposed. Rather, there
may indeed be an epistemology of deception. [S19]
“Deception,” under certain conditions, paradoxically, may amount to a mode of knowing. Knowing
at an angle, obliquely, a kind of – if inadvertent –
revelation”.
“Deception,” under certain conditions, paradoxically, may amount to a mode of knowing. Knowing
at an angle, obliquely, a kind of – if inadvertent
56
[S20]
[S19]
– revelation. A seeing not just behind and beneath
in those older structural models, but a being, an
inhabitation that is fast becoming ontological, of
the condition of the behind and the underneath, of
subjectivities that emerge from the experience of
dust conditions. Not so much a “know thyself” as a
knowing in and through denials, misdirections, and
threats, as Virilio suggests if in limited reference to
the socialities of warring. A condition as much social
as natural, indeed, fully socionatural—one of dissolution and its imminent threat or at least constant
possibility. Here “symptomatic reading” is but a first
step, springing the door open to such in-habitations,
a passing through the (looking glass of) particles of
dust actually to confront this counter-sociality more
or less directly in the conditions of its possibilities
and in the very being of its inhabited expression,
in all its dusty swirling, rather than just, or only,
symptomatically.
Surface and depth collide, even collapse, in the
spatio-temporal warping and bending, in the swirls
of dust. The condition of precarity, of living in and
traveling through the dust, ontologically speaking, is
a condition of knowing epistemologically, a dis-position. As too must be the counter-condition, which
metaphorically I will call (for want of a better name)
a “green” life.
It is not that now for the first time we find the deceptive, the false, the aberrant, and the make-believe
seemingly everywhere. [S20] Deception may indeed just be a banal fact of life, the outrage to which
it gives rise often not much more than a psychic reflex. That phantom of a world, as Mbembe puts it,
without strangers. The generalizability of that fantasy across time and geography notwithstanding, every time (or age), it seems, has its own specific forms
and modes of deception. If so, it is suggestive to
press the point: to comprehend an epoch, as Abbas
says, attend to its deceptions, its fakings, its makings
in and through its fakings, its make-believe. History,
as he has put it, in—but also of--the faking. Neo-conliberalism—the hyperextenuation of neoliberalism
[S22]
[S21]
I have elsewhere called neo-neoliberalism—at its
heart (if it has one) rewrites the historical script as
make-believe, as fakery. The “make believe” serves
both as compulsion, as forced imposition no matter
the consequence, and as cosmetic covering over of
the deformities and dust-worlds thus produced.
The epistemological endeavor here is not that of
exposing and correcting deceptions, of rehabilitating the truth and our modes of knowing, of giving
the surface depth. The concern is to locate the deceptions of the time, of our time and place, in all their
specificity: what prompts them; what work they do
socially, politically, economically, culturally; what
interests they serve; what they hide from view; what
they avoid and evade, void, and evince, what social
ordering and modes of governance they enable.
All that is still at the level of the surface-depth
model. The focus on deceptions and their conditions of possibility also helps to discern what modes
of inhabitation they prompt, what ways of being in
accommodation and refusal, acknowledgment and
disavowal, being and counter-being (I am tempted
to say non-being, alienage and not simply or only
alienation). In short, what shape they give to subjectivity and modes of subjection, what violence
they make possible or stave off. It should not surprise that games have taken on so central a place in
economic and social life today (e.g. massive multiplayer online games), nor that (online and televised)
poker has become so popular.
In short, the challenge is to read deceptions as a
way around the analytic and conceptual inadequations of the critical terms currently available to us:
What are the significance and value(s) of deceptions,
of deception as such? Through the warpings of deceptions, an other history, other ways of being, their
readings and meanings come into view, become socially compelling, those that may other-wise remain
indiscernible.
Information and its exercise, perhaps obviously, become key in this scheme (and scheming) of
things. It has often been remarked that ours is the
Age of Information (there are books by that title, of
course: think Castells or Seely Brown and Duguid)).
Information flows globally, and instantaneously.
They who control its flows and expressions, who
package its dissemination, are said to hold power.
But information has many sources, and multiple circuits, the control of its formations, formulations, or
circulations never totalizable. Indeed, the singularity of the notion—information—is itself misleading.
As the various Middle Eastern and Occupy movements reveal, it is more readily comprehensible as
process than as substance; [S 21] as the more or
less fleeting—im-mediate—effect of networking as
instantaneously in dissolution as evolution; in being
ceaselessly reconstituted rather than securing resolution, or in fact solution; as available to mashup,
remixing, and redirection as to manipulation and
misdirection.
So, it might be better to think of the time we inhabit less as an Age of Information (or for that matter of mis- or disinformation) as one of collapsing
certainties [S 22], and their more or less “unbearable” ordeals of negotiation. Collapsing certainties
proliferate as deceptions proliferate and circulate,
undercutting the contrast between truth and falsehood. The politics of the secret functions through
the holding and measured revelation of information. This calculated revealing of secret information,
of leaks--think here Wikileaks—is best conceived in
terms of its secretion, the secreting of information
running together the withholding and revealing of
information instrumentally or inadvertently, by design (de-sign) or by default (de-fault). [S23]
Information, as we know so well, does not circulate everywhere at the same speed or with the same
force or at the same time. The result is not just the
relativities of various “space-time compressions,”
so commonly remarked upon today, but more their
57
[S23]
respective and related warpings and twistings,
the bending and buckling of space and time. (De
Chirico’s paintings, and a good deal of Surrealist art
more generally, perhaps best signals these issues.)
What, it could be asked, is revealed in their bending
and buckling, their warping and twisting, together,
in concert if hardly in unison? What more generally
can we learn from the bent, warped, creased spaces
of Beirut and the borders of South Lebanon? What
do they reveal about the very being of these alterworlds and under-worlds (not just their structure),
in their counter-everydayness, their un-ordinariness? And by relation and negation about the social
being of the everyday and the ordinary? What do
their ana-chronic--their anachronistic--moments
reveal about social time more generally; their anamorphic configurations about social space; the
catachrestic and malapropian formulations about
language, reference and “the real”? What do their
counter-form(al) and pointedly non-universal singularities say about social formulation, signification,
and generalizability?
Is it possible, even imperative, today to think
about these apparently aberrant but proliferating
58
forms, formulations, slippages and deceptions not
in terms of departures from or falling short of the
norm—as exploitation, say, or corruption, alienation or profanation; as malformed or misshaped;
as misstated or missing their mark or as out of time
or of a time gone or before its time, or out of touch
even with reality? But as evidence, insight into—
more than symptoms but perhaps that too--how the
norms and paradigms, the ordinary and everyday,
are in the process of morphing from one set of singularities and what they are morphing to, towards?
Here the slippages may reveal between the gaps
and creases something otherwise unseen about the
directions or workings or effects--the processes--of
social arrangement and their implications, their angles. Not just the extraordinary and unusual in the
everyday but its other ordinariness, its unseen, unregistered, and taken-for-granted usualness shaping
ordinary life.
Might it be that some sites—those less conventionally bounded in the ways the examples cited
suggest--make it possible more readily to recognize
that there is no (longer a) future, as once we knew or
had come to expect it [S 24]? That just might be the
impact—the effect and affect—of living in a critical
condition. The proliferating—endless? eternal?—
repetitions dis-appoint not only in dashing the prediction of the yet to come but also in the sense of
spawning the refusals of the deadening drudgery,
invigorating spaces however fleeting not reducible
to the assimilative. [S 25]
Waiting is always a leaning away from a past
towards a time perhaps intuited but not yet
discerned, outlined but barely cognized in its
embodiment
[S24], [S25]
Waiting for the messianic moment so definitive
of the modern now gives way to a mix of social experimentation and micro-preparations in the face of
ever-pending danger (extreme everything). Waiting
is always a leaning away from a past towards a time
perhaps intuited but not yet discerned, outlined but
barely cognized in its embodiment. Living in a critical condition is less this living between times and
spaces—a present past and a future--as living in
overlapping times and spaces and yet unmoved by
the lure of each so much as finding in their intersection the fuel for going on. Ruins are less sites for
monumentalization than resources for repurposing,
less prompts for nostalgia than for experimentation
and improvisation.
Do the uncertainties sitting just aside or askance
the confidence of certainty, that on which the latter
rest, operate to obscure these shifts and epistemological porousness in (and not merely behind and
beneath) the bends, warps, creases, and twists? Do
the everyday and the ordinary, in their affectation
of regularity and repetitiveness, solidity and predictable certitude, labor to hold at bay the rumblings of
uncertainty and insecurity, the spiraling unpredictability and social splintering: the maintenance of
upward mobility increasingly a pyramid or Ponzi
scheme, insider trading or the auctioning of everything potentially on ebay; news of the world the now
purchased and punctured worldmaking of hacking,
deleting, deception, and denial?
Where in each of these instances confidence is
revealed to be, as Ackbar Abbas has put it, a confidence trick. [S 26]
Are we to think of these cases and those like
them, in short, then, in terms of an epistemology
of deception? Modernity not as progress but as the
social folding in on itself to stave off the polluting
if ceaselessly fascinating and so enticing horrors of
dust people. Literatures, travelogues, and commentaries referencing dust have long dotted modernity.
Dust is the bearer of dirt and disease, contagion and
the clogging of breath and life, obscuring perception
and clarity, covering over the dangers and dis-ease of
the unseen and the yet to come. Bourgeois interiors
[S26], [S27]
were to be daily dusted against disease. Travelers
from the global north continue to comment on dustcovered dwellers of the street in Africa and India,
threatening harm and health to the unsuspecting bypasser. They might look closer to home. [S 27] The
threat of dust is succinctly captured by Benjamin in
The Arcades Project (p. 104) when in quoting Louis
Veuillot he draws the connection between dust and
blood, dirt and the diseased body: “To give this dust
a semblance of consistency, by soaking it in blood.”
Dust represents the polluted air of the urban everyday, into which the dreams of modernity fade, dissolving with them the sharp delineation of modern
subjectivity into the sea of indistinguishable similitude and differentiating heterogeneity.
The dissolution of modern subjectivity represented by the microbic molecules of dust is exacerbated
in the late modern proliferation of geographies of
walking: displaced subjects moved to traversing
great distances to escape war, the effects of dramatically unsettling natural disaster and extreme economic difficulty, genocidal threats and catastrophic
political expulsions. Dust people literalized and
metaphorized in the falling swirl of bombed buildings and long dirt roads, climatic storms and fields
of fading dreams, in the dirty glitter of death ridden
mines and maquiladores sweat shops, between late
modernity’s projected promises (and premises) and
its gashed and deeply dashed hopes.
This relation between deception and the dissolution of subjecthood [S 28], suggested by Dick’s
notion of “dust people” and produced in the social
swirl of the hyper-neoliberal late modern conjures
a rethinking of race as modes of deception, as the
theological creation of peoplehood and its evolution
[S 29]. Race can be conceived in these terms as the
secreting of identity, of distinction and contrast, in
this doubled and ambiguous sense, as seeping into
and molding personal, social, and political formation while also conjuring (public) secrets, even banalities, of belonging, banishment, beleagurement,
and belligerence. Behind and beneath the dust, all
is race: subjectivities dissolved in indistinguishability and indiscernibility, in paranoia and (imagined)
threat, in the impossibility of identification and the
collapsing of identity. The comforts of homogeneity
59
[S28], [S29]
60
collapse into the seething mass of heterogeneous
swirl.
Can such an expanded notion of epistemology—
of epistemologies as open source incessant re-formations and re-formulations--help find the productive terms for discerning and describing emergent
cultural sites and political possibilities, which more
often than not tend to look derivative, inferior, false,
or duplicitous—until we have learned how to read
them in all their duplicity [S 30], in their warping,
bending, creasing, twisting multiplicities? [S 31]
Looking not for alter-times and other spaces but
for the resources in the multiplicitous spacetimes
to negotiate the complexities and challenges of our
inhabitations for which there is no constitutive outside that is not fabricated (in both senses) and from
which there is no even momentary escape. At the
very least, such a sense of the epistemological would
encourage us to attend to rather than to ignore those
elements of the social that look aberrant because
they are not yet adequately symbolizable.
What, finally, might all this suggest for critique?
Might it suggest, under the critical conditions of our
time, that critique cannot be a matter merely of separating true from false, of knowledge from deception, but a concern about finding a relation to what
we don’t know, of coming to terms for and with the
social twists, warps, creases and bends of the social? Of working, in short, through deception to the
intertwined precarity ontologically and epistemologically, economically and politically, culturally and
symptomologically defining us today.
The Politics of Hope [S 32] is almost always-perhaps inevitably--frustrated, even dashed. The
consternation following from the perceived cynicism or at least passivities thought inherent to
dis-appointments I think deeply misplaced. The
politics of dis-appointment slip into the breach following from the slippages and failings of a Politics of
Hope. Dis-appointment concerns the refusals precisely of appointments positivistically (etymologically) understood. It is a refusal to be pinned to the
frustrating constraints and delimiting obligations of
assuredness and expectation.
So the politics of dis-appointment is not the
product of a sense of uselessness. It perhaps is better characterized as a politics of irritation, [S 33]
of getting under the skin of privilege and its complacencies. It is, in short, the ornery refusal of the
constraints, injustices, exploitations, frustrations,
and limitations produced and reproduced in and
by the precarities of the ordinary and the everyday.
It was spiraling irritation at grinding abuse and arrogance of unqualified claims to power in the face
of persistent disenfranchisement and its attendant
impoverishment that underscored the flowering of
the Arab Spring, after all. And it was the layers of
irritation compounded into mobilization that proliferated across the social landscapes we have come to
identify as the Occupy sites. [34]
Hope is dashed not just in the face of uncertainty, even lingering uncertainty. It is dashed when
the uncertainty is never addressed, becomes ceaseless, and as Zygmunt Bauman remarks in In Search
of Politics (pp. 23-4) when all one can hope for is
more uncertainty. What started out as an irritation
becomes irksome, then anger in the face of the iterability. Iterable irritation eventually will likely
become shared, and once the common grounds of
the prompted conditions are identified cause for
mobilization, for the rising up not simply of a social
movement conventionally understood (with leaders
[S34]
[S30], [S31]
[S32], [S33]
61
and identified goals) but more distributively of the
messy proliferating diffusion of refusal. The moment of enough!
That moment of proliferated refusal becomes expressed not so much in conventionally coherent politics but in the diffused and dis-appointing commitment not to do things conventionally, as expected.
Irritation as a politics insists on getting under the
skin of, in dis-appointing, power. [S35]On making
power vulnerable by occupying its most protected
spaces and refusing to toe the line. And once removed dispersing uncontrollably while continuing
to network virtually. Irritation—being irritated and
becoming irritating in turn—is the politics of calling
make believe into question, of standing in the name
of participatory politics and democratic possibility
against sovereign power’s political claim to inevitability and too-big-to-be-brought-down.
Between hope and hopelessness, hopeless optimism and optimistic hopelessness, then, lies irritation. The felt irritation of disappointment in one direction, and the displacing irritation of dis-appointment, in the other. In the compulsions of that divide
lie the politics (now pluralized) of irritation, of irritating. The Wall Street Occupiers understand this
as well as the square and street resisters throughout
the Arab world. [S 36]
62
REFERENCES
Francis Alys 2006 A Story of Deception.
Patagonien 2003-6. Buenos Aires: Revolver.
Francis Alys 2005 When Faith Moves
Mountains. Madrid: Turner.
Benjamin, Walter 1999 The Arcades Project.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Philip K. Dick 1954/1992 “The Adjustment
Team,” in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
Vol. II: We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.
Carol Publishing.
Marlene Dumas 2010 Against the Wall. Sante
Fe: Radium Books.
Paul Virilio 2000 Strategy of Deception.
London: Verso.
Is Fanon Finished?
/ Fanon. Et après?
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
(Université Paris Nord/13, Experice)
Ce court essai prend au sérieux ce que veut dire «
être mort algérien » dans le cas de Frantz Fanon,
homme noir descendant d’esclaves, né aux Antilles
françaises avant la départementalisation, et mort
avant l’indépendance du pays dont il adoptera la
nationalité. Il recense des loyautés et des distances
telles que Fanon les a exercées à l’égard de son
pays d’adoption et en soupèsera l’actualité et
l’inachèvement. En outre, il considère ce que veut
dire être un homme noir, et comment, tout en
déconstruisant définitivement les attendus et les
impensés de la blanchité/blanchitude, fournissant
ainsi un ensemble conceptuel intact et actif aux
militant-e-s et aux chercheur-e-s de ce temps, sa
situation de genre, masculin et hétérosexuel, a
en partie échappé à sa puissance d’élucidation,
désignant un vide qui a été comblé par d’autres
voix cependant moins audibles ou moins
immédiatement mises en résonnance.
Fanon est mort algérien…
Algérien : nom commun ou adjectif masculin, singulier, désignant, qualifiant une personne de nationalité algérienne, cette nationalité ayant été instituée au
lendemain de la guerre d’indépendance de la colonie
Algérie. Ceci est, je le précise, une définition possible, et non canonique, telle que les dictionnaires la
fournissent. Elle n’a pas vocation à les rejoindre ou
à les contester, mais plutôt à les compléter en déplaçant leur point d’appui.
Cet assai prendra au sérieux ce que veut dire être
« être mort algérien » dans le cas de Frantz Fanon,
homme noir descendant d’esclaves, né aux Antilles
françaises avant la départementalisation, et mort
avant l’indépendance du pays dont il adoptera la
nationalité. Elle recensera des loyautés et des distances telles que Fanon les a exercées à l’égard de
son pays d’adoption, elle en soupèsera l’actualité et
l’inachèvement. En outre, elle considèrera ce que
veut dire être un homme noir, et comment, tout en
déconstruisant définitivement les attendus et les
impensés de la blanchité/blanchitude, fournissant
ainsi un ensemble conceptuel intact et actif aux militant-e-s et aux chercheur-e-s de ce temps, sa situation de genre, masculin et hétérosexuel, a en partie
échappé à sa puissance d’élucidation, désignant un
vide qui a été comblé par d’autres voix cependant
moins audibles ou moins immédiatement mises en
résonnance.
Ce manque à penser et à comprendre peut ainsi
baliser la place encore à prendre par d’autres luttes
et d’autres explorations en cours qu’il est proposé
d’esquisser et de cartographier, entre ligne de couleur et détour sexuel, entre racialité invisible et universalité symétrique.
La sérendipité, cette sagacité accidentelle, nous
fait découvrir que logé dans le corps de Fanon, comme ce fut le cas au même moment ailleurs, dans le
corps de ces autres algériens, nés indigènes eux, comme mes parents par exemple, ou comme un certain
Sayad longtemps ignoré, l’étrangeté est bien là. Et
avec cette étrangeté, charriée et travaillée, odorante
et orageuse, se déploie une sorte d’émerveillement
qui fait l’étoffe ondoyante des pensées sauvages,
loin de Lévi-Strauss et entre les lignes d’un Leiris
en quête de la couleur du sacré. Tout contre du Bois
et dans les yeux de hook, Lorde, Moraga et Djebar.
Avec Haraway et en attendant Whitehead.
Cette étrangeté, entendez cette queerness
(« queer : early 16th cent.: considered to be from
German quer ‘oblique, perverse,’ but the origin is
doubtful ». An observation that leaves us free to
imagine any fruitful bricolage) n’a pas toujours besoin de se dire, d’être dite et patentée pour exister et
se mouvoir, dessous ce qui fait écran épidermique,
sous cette surface réfléchissante qui a fourni l’alibi,
le mobile d’une entreprise hégémonique faisant remonter la race de ses humeurs sexuées et son sang
d’exception à la surface de la peau.
Dans cette possibilité de penser l’oppression,
l’aliénation, ses régimes combinés et ses fauxsemblants composites, gît, oui, un émerveillement,
une respiration qui sauve de l’étouffement, et de
l’effondrement. Après avoir eu le souffle coupé, puis
le souffle court en lisant, haletant, certains passages,
parce qu’ils conduisent vers une incertitude inouïe
en défaisant tout sur leur passage, voici que la respiration reprend son rythme, ralenti, ample, au bord
du soupir, pointant vers une pensée déployant ce
que n’était pas là, juste avant, ce qui devra être pris
et repris pour parvenir à se formuler finalement.
Et c’est ce qui reste à penser en respirant,
promesse et perspective, pour comprendre ce
qu’implique qu’un homme né noir aux Antilles françaises est mort révolutionnaire d’une Algérie pas encore née. Ce que veut dire la combinaison hommenoir au regard de l’étrangeté en suspens et en attente
de formulation dans sa version queer : l’aberration
d’une liberté acquise à un homme dont la couleur de
peau contredit toute tentative de libération, dont le
63
sexe contrevient à toute velléité d’égalité, est exploré
à rebours de toute présupposition.
En faisant face à cette pensée du tragique et en
participant à sa nécessaire torsion, chacun-e conçoit une sub/alternative qui porte en germe une
puissance d’agir. C’est aussi en devenant algérien et
en mourant algérien, qu’il fut possible à Fanon de
ne pas être réduit à sa peau, à son sexe, à sa postérité arrêtée, et qu’il échappa ainsi aux assignations réitérées d’un monde en train de mourir (a
dying colonialism est la traduction anglaise de l’an
V de la révolution algérienne). Pour reprendre les
mots d’Elsa Dorlin : « A la mythologie de l’origine,
Fanon substitue une généalogie de la violence, qui
travaille l’origine comme ce à partir de quoi il fût
possible d’effectuer cet « acte cathartique destiné à
révéler la charge politique du monde » (comme le
note Barthes), ce à partir de quoi le sujet politique, le
« Nous », n’est autre qu’un agir éruptif, contingent
mais puissamment réel. ». Ainsi en mourant algérien, Fanon échappe à son origine, à toute origine, et
à l’obligation de s’expliquer sur son origine, dès lors
que seul compte pour lui ce vers quoi il est tendu :
non pas être, comme il y insiste, mais exister. C’est
dans cette ex-tension devenue une ex-position de soi
qu’il parle aux sens en expectation, qu’il s’adresse
aux attentes impératives du présent.
Ce voyage durable et ininterrompu qu’il a commencé en devenant ce qu’il a compris être dans le
regard de l’autre fait de lui un étranger à toutes les
conditions qui lui furent faites et aux nationalités
qui lui furent imposées et offertes. Il les excède,
annonçant ainsi le sort prochain de ses successeurs
dans ce monde disloqué par la colonie en voie de
recomposition. En cela, il est français puis algérien,
français et algérien. Et puis non, il n’est ni français,
64
ni algérien, ni possession, ni trophée, ni butin de
guerre, ni ancêtre encombrant. Monument tagé,
lieu de mémoire chahuté, figure tatouée, comme le
visage des femmes qu’il a croisées sur les chemins
retirés d’Algérie. Cette trace biographique devenue
un tracé sensible dans les séismes de la pensée du
20ème siècle et après, reste encore à cartographier là
où elle est passée, France hexagonale, Algérie indépendante, alors que sous d’autres latitudes, elle est
déjà balisée dans les itinéraires théoriques, répertoriée dans les syllabus d’initiation à toutes sortes
de pensée, indexée dans les cumuls de crédits universitaires. Que s’est t-il passé, ou pas, sur les deux
rives, pour que rien ou presque ne transpire de cette
palpitation. Pour que ce chemin se perde, s’ensable
quelque part entre le passé et le présent. En privant
ainsi l’avenir de pensées en cours d’échafaudage.
Car la mythologie dont il est objet dans le pays
qu’il a adopté, porte à reconnaître, que si Fanon
est mort algérien, il est mort une deuxième fois à
coup d’encensoir et de dithyrambe, d’usage réservé,
d’invocation éthérée et de citation limitée.
Car la mythologie dont il est objet dans le pays
qu’il a adopté, porte à reconnaître, que si Fanon
est mort algérien, il est mort une deuxième fois à
coup d’encensoir et de dithyrambe, d’usage réservé,
d’invocation éthérée et de citation limitée. Le silence
respectueux et distant qui l’entoure, en Algérie et en
France, le tue plus sûrement que ne l’a fait la maladie qui l’a emporté. S’il est vivant, ailleurs, très loin
des cercles qui ont jalousement gardé le secret pour
eux, il reste à réanimer au cœur du monde commun
qu’il a contribué à fonder, sur les chemins qu’il y a
arpentés.
Son parcours aurait été tout autre s’il n’avait
pas rencontré l’Algérie. Et pourtant, je ne puis
m’empêcher de penser que l’incroyable transformation personnelle et production intellectuelle qu’a généré cette rencontre pour lui et pour toutes celles et
ceux qui y ont pris part, n’est pas étrangère au maintien à distance dont il a fait l’objet en France, puis
en Algérie, puis en France, en une lente oscillation.
Une distance polie, qui sait se tenir, impeccablement doublée d’un respect inquiet.
Fanon est coincé, lui et ses écrits, dans la porte
mal fermée de la fin toujours rejouée de la guerre
d’Algérie. Elle fut unilatéralement qualifiée de révolution, et il y détient une responsabilité. Par la voie
de ses textes, il poursuivit son chemin vers d’autres
latitudes, d’autres continents, et il en a fomenté de
son vivant la nouvelle cartographie. Que sa voix résonne si bien et si fort ailleurs, contraste avec son
étouffement en France, tout comme en Algérie. Les
effets de connaissance, de révélation, d’apparition
que ses mots provoquent semblent plaider en faveur
d’un barrage idéologique bien étanche tout particulièrement dans les zones où la blanchité trouve
encore à s’exprimer par blanchitude interposée, escamotant ainsi l’opération par laquelle la race fait
d’abord disparaître le blanc et son incarnation pour
faire dire tant et plus à la peau noire et colorée qui
sinon ne dirait rien, en tout cas pas ce qui en est attendu. Les édifices de signification raciale rejetés
sur les épaules des autres, pas blancs, sont toujours
debout, presque intactes, et attendent d’être disloqués, non pas dans le bruit et la fureur de guerres
justes, mais par la simple puissance d’un regard
nouveau. La phénoménologie de la peau blanche et
des asservissements qui s’opèrent en son nom nous
est rendue palpable, par notre toucher, main contre
main, et active sous nos yeux, regard dans regard,
par Fanon. Pourtant le vocabulaire de cet effort est
loin d’avoir acquis un droit de cité. C’est donc bien
à le faire advenir qu’il faut s’atteler en commençant
par le mettre en circulation, en contrebande, ou pas.
C’est alors que revient le sens de cet emboîtement
d’aversions égrainé dans « Peau noire, masques
blancs » (p83) :
« Il y a de cela une dizaine d’années, nous fûmes
étonnés de constater que les Nord-Africains
détestaient les hommes de couleur. Il nous
était vraiment impossible d’entrer en contact
avec les indigènes. Nous avons laissé l’Afrique à
destination de la France, sans avoir compris la
raison de cette animosité. Cependant quelques
faits nous avaient amenés à réfléchir. Le Français
n’aime pas le Juif qui n’aime pas l’Arabe, qui
n’aime pas le nègre… (c’est surtout cette phrase
qui est le plus souvent citée) A l’Arabe, on dit :
« si vous êtes pauvres, c’est parce que le Juif
vous a roulés, vous a tout pris » ; au Juif on dit :
« vous n’êtes pas sur le même pied que les Arabes,
parce qu’en fait vous êtes blancs et que vous avez
Bergson et Einstein » ; au nègre on dit : « vous
êtes les meilleurs soldats de l’empire français, les
Arabes se croient supérieurs à vous, mais ils se
trompent. » D’ailleurs, ce n’est pas vrai, on ne dit
rien au nègre, on n’a rien à lui dire, le tirailleur
sénégalais est un tirailleur, le bon-tirailleur-àson-capitaine, le brave qui ne-connaît-que-laconsigne. (…) puis il conclue : « Moi j’appelle ce
processus : la répartition raciale de la culpabilité ».
À la relecture, ces lignes ne cessent de pointer vers
une expérience du racisme ordinaire en Algérie, qui
trouvait dans les Noirs, surtout absents, un objet de
prédilection. Comment dès lors éviter la question de
la nationalité algérienne d’un Noir qui avait compris
dès son premier passage qu’il était la surface réfléchissante d’un racisme trouvant ses ressorts dans
un passé esclavagiste oublié, escamoté, et dans un
présent qui en réverbérait les échos encore tenaces
venus s’emmêler avec l’expérience commune d’une
oppression colonisée. Cela ne suffit pas à expliquer
pourquoi, Fanon, l’homme noir antillais n’est pas
connu en Algérie à la hauteur de ce qu’il a accompli
là-bas, mais cela permet d’entrevoir une difficulté,
celle d’une méconnaissance d’un frère en raison de
sa couleur de peau, comme si elle contredisait le
fait qu’il soit algérien, et ceci n’ignore évidemment
pas, ni n’épuise le fait qu’il y ait des Algériens noirs,
notamment dans le sud. Cela redouble par contre la
force présente dans la litanie raciste qu’il rappelle,
dont nous voyons résumée ainsi la répétition : « un
antisémite est forcément négrophobe » et arabophobe, serait-on tenté d’ajouter. Ce sont ces notations qui semblent avoir perdu toute présence, et
surtout manquer de toute présence d’esprit dans
une France encore aux prises avec son passé collaborationniste et prompte à se convaincre que seuls les
Arabes, et les Noirs, sont antisémites aujourd’hui.
Au point de leur en sous-traiter la performance.
Pourquoi Fanon a quasiment disparu des radars français et algériens ? Par quelle éclipse
de la mémoire d’abord, de l’histoire ensuite, de
l’épistémologie enfin est-il tombé dans un trou noir
de la pensée et de l’action des héritiers directs de sa
vie et de sa lutte ? Par quelle erreur d’aiguillage ou
manœuvre délibérée, ses textes ont déraillé vers le
postmodernisme, hypothéquant ainsi tout retour,
du moins en France et en Algérie, vers le champ
des sciences sociales où ils avaient toute leur place
puisqu’ils avaient commencé à le labourer, le féconder ? En quoi ces deux disparitions, politiques
et épistémologiques se répondent et se confondent ?
Dans un programme de colloque qui invite à quitter
la vision locale, francophone-française et à se projeter vers des ailleurs plus productifs et plus résolus
dans leur lecture et leur usage de Fanon, en d’autres
langues et à d’autres fins, que peut bien apporter la
reprise du face à face stérile et confondant de tristesse entre les anciens protagonistes de sa guerre
révolutionnaire ?
L’absence de Fanon, comme son urgente nécessité, demeure à plus d’un titre toujours d’actualité.
Ainsi, à ses esquisses sociologiques, dont au fil du
temps on a vu le titre du volume les regroupant
« sociologie d’une révolution » (édition Maspero
de 1968) laisser la place à son sous-titre « l’an V de
la révolution algérienne » pendant que sa traduction en anglais, « a dying colonialism », se tourne
déjà vers une autre lecture, la postérité académique
préfèrera celles d’un autre visiteur de l’Algérie, plus
tard regroupées sous un titre dénotant la visée universalisante, non sans réification des objets décrits,
condition de l’entrée dans le panthéon scientifique :
« esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique ». En
effet, au jeu de la meilleure étude sociologique
de l’Algérie d’alors, c’est le Bourdieu appointé
au gouvernorat général d’Alger, qui gagnera et
qui publiera en 1958, un an avant le recueil de
textes de Fanon, l’ouvrage générique devenu
le seul classique sur la question, aux éditions
« PUF-que sais-je » sous le titre « sociologie de
l’Algérie » ainsi qualifié, encore ces jours-ci,
sur un site dédié ; je cite : « Premier ouvrage
65
publié de Pierre Bourdieu, cette lumineuse étude
sociologique annonce l’œuvre à venir d’un géant
de la sociologie ».
Que peut-t-il bien rester en effet d’un damné de la
terre, entré en révolution, face à cette considérable
stature ? Exit donc la capacité d’observation au
plus près, au cœur même des séismes imposés par
la mécanique guerrière, aux corps et aux vies démembrés des colonisés regroupés dans des camps
ou aux familles disloquées par la lutte dans les
maquis du docteur Fanon, du militant Fanon, du
théoricien Fanon. Tous trois seront balayés, l’un
servant à avoir raison de l’autre, ne faisait pas, en
définitive, le poids face aux grandes œuvres sociologiques qui fixeront une bonne fois pour toute le
papillon Algérie alors qu’il agite encore ses ailes, sur
le fond de velours de la boîte épistémologique. C’est
là qu’une place lui est réservée, place de choix, pour
illustrer la rubrique « immuabilité de l’ordre du
monde figuré dans l’ordre de la domination masculine en son lieu de prédilection : la maison kabyle».
Fanon et ses observations sur le vif d’une société en
pleine transformation seront ainsi les jouets d’une
rupture épistémologique qui ne souffre aucune
dérogation. Qu’est-ce qu’un révolutionnaire acquis
à la cause qu’il défend peut bien livrer d’exploitable
sur les conditions de vie et les modes de représentation de celles-ceux auprès desquels il combat et qu’il
inspire par ses écrits. La neutralité axiologique, la
lutte contre l’illusion de la transparence sont offensées par un positionnement aussi situé et pourraient
aisément être retournées, encore aujourd’hui, contre les écrits du militant-médecin psychiatre qui, on
peut au moins lui accorder cela, savait utiliser à bon
escient les outils de la clinique, la sémiologie et les
66
techniques d’établissement d’une étiologie.
Curieuse coïncidence, cette fixation pour la bonne
cause scientifique sera concomitante de l’entrée
progressive puis brutale dans l’ère algérienne de la
glaciation militaire, entre constitution d’une élite
choyée et consolidation d’une police soignée, autre
mode de fixation d’une population encore animée
par les ressorts d’une révolution si proche et déjà si
lointaine.
Oubliées donc, les notations précises et inédites
d’un Fanon, fin ethnographe, sur les bouleversements à l’œuvre dans les rapports entre sexes, entres
générations, dans le couple, et toutes les entorses,
les aménagements, les distances que la guerre incite
à, permet de, prendre avec les règles patriarcales et
tribales. Même s’il n’a pas eu le temps de constater
qu’elles n’auront été qu’une parenthèse avant la reprise en main politique et organisationnelle, il a su
les consigner et les livrer à un lectorat attentif. Il est
probable qu’il ait anticipé, comme d’autres révolutionnaires tel Larbi Ben M’hidi, ce qu’un pouvoir
de plus en plus arcquebouté sur sa légitimité révolutionnaire allait faire, jusqu’à dévitaliser la lutte
d’indépendance du flux révolutionnaire traversant
un peuple algérien désormais débarqué du sens de
l’histoire. Reste maintenant à reprendre le fil de ses
notes et à en comprendre la portée et les enseignements au regard de la société algérienne contemporaine d’une part et d’autre part des circonstances de
mise en circulation de ses textes, qui ont curieusement évité les lieux de ses premières publications.
Pour ma partie, celle de la sociologie des mobilités
postcoloniales et des constructions minoritaires, je
trouve dans ses descriptions tout une résonnance
avec l’expérience du démembrement et de l’exil, el
ghorba, irréductible à la catégorie administrative et
bureaucratique du migrant mise en fiche et en pièce
par les politiques de contrôle hightech diligentés
par les état-nations européens. Dans la privation
des rites du désespoir, dans les entorses aux règles
matrimoniales, je retrouve les échos de rages et de
colères qui ne peuvent être articulées dans une société française postalgérienne, en constante quête
de ses prochains terroristes, et je décèle l’incrédulité
face à des bricolages matrimoniaux presque aussi
inintelligibles à celles et ceux qui les mettent en pratique qu’à leurs spectateurs inquiets.
Écoutons-le: « Et d’abord le fameux statut de
l’Algérienne. Sa prétendue claustration, sa radicale
mise à l’écart, son humilité, son existence silencieuse confinant à une quasi-absence. Et la « société
musulmane » qui ne lui a fait aucune place, amputant sa personnalité, ne lui permettant ni épanouissement ni maturité, la maintenant dans un perpétuel infantilisme. »
« De telles affirmations, éclairées par des
« travaux scientifiques » (les guillemets sont les siennes) reçoivent aujourd’hui la seule contestation
valable : l’expérience révolutionnaire. » (p 300 annexe de « l’Algérie se dévoile », nouvelle édition)
Comme cette contestation de la véridicité scientifique résonne étrangement à nos oreilles de contemporains d’un positivisme chagrin. Comme si elle
nous fournissait une clé d’historicisation d’une description de la maison kabyle réifiée à force d’être
renvoyée par son interprète savant à l’immuabilité
du temps qu’elle habite.
il faut n’avoir pas connu l’odeur de la poudre
et du sang, de la pourriture des corps et de
leur ensevelissement, il faut n’avoir pas senti
l’inquiétude croître alors qu’enflent les vibrations
de l’ennemi qui avance ... pour s’en tenir à une
critique dogmatique et pointilleuse du vocabulaire
utilisé en vue d’aboutir à la conclusion de la
misogynie et l’homophobie de Fanon.
Il serait trop simpliste de penser tout cela en des
termes strictement héroïques. Nous n’en sommes
plus là, à supposer que ce fut alors le cas. Pourtant,
il faut n’avoir pas connu l’odeur de la poudre et du
sang, de la pourriture des corps et de leur ensevelissement, il faut n’avoir pas senti l’inquiétude croître alors qu’enflent les vibrations de l’ennemi qui
avance, et je m’inclue dans cette méconnaissance,
pour s’en tenir à une critique dogmatique et pointilleuse du vocabulaire utilisé en vue d’aboutir à la conclusion de la misogynie et l’homophobie de Fanon.
Les « la femme algérienne, le père, le fils, les frères,
la mère, la femme noire et l’homme blanc, l’homme
noir et la femme blanche » qui activent ses analyses
et ponctuent ses écrits sont trop facilement mobilisés pour brandir un droit opposable aux sédiments
d’aliénation sexuée qui persistent dans ses textes.
L’urgence était ailleurs et à trop mettre les points
sur ces is là, on ne lit pas ces passages-ci ; je cite:
« La femme algérienne dévoilée, (…) la liberté du
peuple algérien s’identifie alors à la libération de la
femme, à son entrée dans l’histoire. (…) Cette femme
qui, dans les avenues d’Alger ou de Constantine,
transporte les grenades ou les chargeurs de fusilmitrailleur, cette femme qui demain sera outragée,
violée, torturée, ne peut pas repenser jusque dans
les détails les plus infimes ses comportements anciens ; cette femme qui écrit les pages héroïques de
l’histoire algérienne fait exploser le monde rétréci
et irresponsable dans lequel elle vivait et conjointement collabore à la destruction du colonialisme et à
la naissance d’une nouvelle femme. (…). La femmepour-le-mariage disparaît progressivement et cède
la place à la femme-pour-l’action » (la famille algérienne, p 92-93, édition de 68, « sociologie d’une
révolution, l’an V de la révolution algérienne »)
La suite lui donnera tort, non pas parce qu’il aurait
mal compris ce qu’il s’est évertué à voir, à regarder
en face, mais bien plutôt parce que ce qu’il voit en
gestation et qu’il n’est pas seul à observer sera trahi
par ses successeurs, ses anciens alliés, ses exécuteurs testamentaires. Ceux avec lesquels il a lutté,
aux côtés desquels il s’est tenu durant la guerre, seront les premiers à oublier ce qu’il énonce dans ces
études saisies sur le vif. Eux, ou leurs adversaires,
en un enchevêtrement de tensions et de rétentions,
renverront les femmes au foyer, y compris les poseuses de bombe voilées ou dévoilées et les femmes
torturées pour leur engagement, celles-là mêmes
qui ont inventé le camouflage urbain, l’assemblage
improbable d’accoutrements, aujourd’hui retrouvés
et commentés par des chercheures, Jaspir Puar et
Nirmal Puwar par exemple, sous d’autres latitudes
et à d’autres fins.
Il atteint les limites interprétatives des transformations qu’il décèle lorsqu’il ajoute : « Dans ces conditions, le divorce, la séparation des deux conjoints
emprunte des modalités différentes. La répudiation
qui pouvait à tout instant être immédiatement proclamée et qui exprimait la fragilité du lien conjugal
n’est plus automatiquement légalisée. Le mari doit
expliquer pourquoi il divorce. Il y a des tentatives de
réconciliation. De toute façon, la décision dernière
reste au responsable local » (p 348 nouvelle édition 2011). Par cette dernière phrase, il laisse donc
entendre, que les assignations patriarcales ne sont
pas si faciles à ébranler, comme le mettra en lumière
la notion de néopatriarcat, développée par Hisham
Shalabi, appliquée à l’Algérie postindépendance.
Outre la sagacité avec laquelle il écoute de près le
poste de radio durant les années de guerre pour en
comprendre les usages cruciaux, il desserre l’étreinte
tragique par cette notation sur l’humour, si peu dans
le ton austère qu’il faut lui attribuer (malgré les
traits d’humour qui ont fait vibrer la salle accueillant la revue Présence Africaine, où il a prononcé en
1956 son discours « racisme et culture »), et entre
en exacte résonnance avec les échos de révolutions
récentes, comme autant de projections différées sur
des terres algériennes et tunisiennes qu’il a assidûment fréquentées. Je cite :
« Nous parlerons aussi du fatalisme de la femme, de
son absence de réaction devant l’adversité, de son
inaptitude à mesurer la gravité des événements. Ce
qui est maintient inconditionnel du sourire, persistance d’un espoir apparemment infondé, refus de
plier les genoux, est assimilé à une inintelligence des
faits.
L’humour qui est appréciation rigoureuse de
l’événement est inaperçu de l’occupant. Et le courage que manifeste la femme algérienne dans la lutte n’est pas une création inattendue ou le résultat
d’une mutation. C’est la réplique de l’humour dans
la phase insurrectionnelle. » (annexe l’Algérie se
dévoile, p 301, nouvelle édition)
Toutes ces citations cartographient une lecture complexe et nuancée des multiples régimes d’existence
et d’apparition des femmes dans la révolution algérienne qui continuent de parler au régime de
67
Comprendre le contexte dans lequel Fanon expose
le rapport entre blancs et noirs, entre colonisées
et colonisateurs, entre opprimé-e-s et oppresseurs, dispense d’en tirer des conclusions hâtives
sur sa perception des protagonistes du rapport
d’oppression.
se dévoile » fournit l’homologie entre une lutte révolutionnaire et une expérience située de femmes en
lutte ou empêchées de lutter, par son dernier préfacier, Achille Mbembe, et ses interprètes récent-e-s,
parmi lesquelles Houria Bouteldja, Neil Mac Master
ou Elsa Dorlin.
visibilité contrainte actuel. Elles permettent
d’opposer à la misogynie et l’homophobie, imputées
à Fanon, la mise en perspective d’une critique de
l’ethnocentrisme et de l’anachronisme, qui président
à ces mises en causes. Comprendre le contexte dans
lequel Fanon expose le rapport entre blancs et noirs,
entre colonisées et colonisateurs, entre opprimé-e-s
et oppresseurs, dispense d’en tirer des conclusions
hâtives sur sa perception des protagonistes du rapport d’oppression. C’est en faisant dialoguer la figure double de la femme voilée qui tantôt se dévoile
pour agir dans la révolution, tantôt est dévoilée pour
servir un régime colonial en mal de justification civilisationnelle, avec les femmes voilées et dévoilées
par la force de la loi dans un moment (post)colonial,
soit en France, postalgérien, comme le nomme Todd
Shepard, qu’il devient possible d’envisager les circonstances particulières d’exercice d’une hégémonie
blanche qui perdure au fil de ses métamorphoses.
Entre régime, blanchité, et expérience, blanchitude, ces reprises de la conversation avec Fanon,
par textes interposés, permettent de saisir les opérations de blanchiment qu’autorisent et fondent le
vote et l’application de lois prohibant le port du voile
en France. Dès lors, le manque à penser de Fanon
n’est plus tant un déficit qu’une possibilité ouverte,
offerte à d’autres de poursuivre et de parachever ce
que son analyse inaugure. C’est bien ainsi qu’a été lu
et repris le texte de Fanon, dont le titre, « l’Algérie
Plutôt que de reprendre des poncifs gayfriendly,
mis au service d’un pinkwashing dirigé ces temps-ci
contre les société arabes et/ou musulmanes, ou de
lire ces textes à l’aune du féminisme différentialiste
ou même libéral désormais dépassé ... il serait plus
stimulant de suivre la jonction opérée entre les
approches queer et subalternistes.
68
De même la formule « homophobie » objectée à
Fanon, dénote d’abord un regard euro-atlanto-centré anachronique sur des pratiques et des expériences, que ce soit en contexte antillais ou nord-africain,
qui ne sont pas réductibles à l’homosexualité patentée et estampillée selon des normes de l’a/normativité sexuelle inventées sous le signe d’une modernité chrétienne au dix-neuvième siècle. Que ce soit
dans « Peau noire, masques blancs », « L’an V de
la révolution algérienne » ou dans « Les damnés
de la terre », l’objection ne tient pas, sinon, comme
un subterfuge qui tente d’affaiblir la critique de la
virilité, l’érection et de la rectitude masculines hégémoniques qu’entreprend Fanon. Plutôt que de reprendre des poncifs gayfriendly, mis au service d’un
pinkwashing dirigé ces temps-ci contre les société
arabes et/ou musulmanes, ou de lire ces textes à
l’aune du féminisme différentialiste ou même libéral
désormais dépassé, pour prendre congé d’arguments
pourtant utiles et qui continuent de porter juste, il
serait plus stimulant de suivre la jonction opérée
entre les approches queer et subalternistes. Les
précéder dans les distorsions qu’elles introduisent
au cœur même de la chair mise à nue et révélée, mise
en forme et performée. Je m’y suis employée, aux
côtés d’autres auteurs, comme Joseph Massad, par
exemple. Bien d’autres possibles promettent ainsi
d’être explorés.
C’est tout cela, entre autres, qui a été éclipsé et
nous manque aujourd’hui. Tout cela dont l’absence
appelle des retrouvailles, livresques, analytiques,
certes, mais surtout expérientielles, vitales, vivantes, cette pensée sauvage… Une absence qui enfin résonne de tous les silences qui l’ont meublée. En
français.
Comme ce silence-ci, rapporté d’Alger qui nous
achemine vers notre présent.
Usuellement, les actes de colloque ont du mal à
paraître en Algérie, c’est à cela d’ailleurs que l’on
reconnaît l’importance de ce qui s’y dit. C’est un régime de véridiction quelque peu paradoxal mais qui
a ses vertus : créer des mythes, alimenter des légendes, forger des notoriétés, et assurer des immunités. C’est ce qu’il est advenu du seul colloque jamais
organisé autour, sur, après Fanon en Algérie (après
confirmation, je dois préciser qu’il s’en est tenu un
autre en 2009, sans public ou presque). Seul demeure un bref texte, que grâce à Mustapha Laribi,
qui en était un des coordonateurs technique, j’ai pu
lire ces jours-ci, des années après y avoir assisté.
C’était en 1987, « l’an XXV… de l’indépendance »,
pour reprendre en partie le titre clin d’œil de son auteure, Christiane Achour. Pour moi, ce fut une révélation, une surprise, un étourdissement tant le nom
Frantz Fanon, le personnage clairement identifié
par les noms de collège, de lycée, et ainsi clairement
neutralisé, ne me disait rien et en même temps recélait tout ce dont j’avais besoin alors pour comprendre une part oblitérée de l’Algérie et de mes multiples histoires. Je savais que je ne comprendrai pas
tout, et en même temps, j’étais aimanté vers le lieu
où il se déroula, pendant trois trop brèves journées.
Les conversations vives, agitées d’interpellations
et de grands éclats de voix et de rire, se sont succédées, comme entre parenthèse dans ce monde qui
ne savait pas qu’il serai réveillé l’automne suivant,
par des émeutes populaires qui allaient décider de
son sort pour les deux décennies suivantes. Fanon
n’est pas une figure de la révolution familière aux
Algériens-Algériennes. Sa place et son rôle local et
transcontinental sont méconnus. Ses écrits étaient
à l’époque introuvables en français, comme d’autres
certes, mais bien comme d’autres, comme s’ils
n’avaient pas plus d’importances que ces littératures
distillées au compte-goutte et qu’ils ne parlaient
de et à l’Algérie indépendante. Il était donc connu
que de quelques uns, celles et ceux qui l’avaient côtoyés, celles et ceux qui savaient de quoi il parlait, et
d’autres comme moi, qui devinaient que se jouait là
quelque chose de rare, d’inédit et qui n’aurait pas de
suite, puisque certains mourront, d’autres retourneront à leur silence nostalgique, d’autres encore,
comme moi, mettront du temps à retrouver Fanon
à la croisée d’autres chemins. Ce fut une réunion
entre anciens combattants, moudjahidin et moudjahidat, comme le veut la terminologie consacrée qui
s’applique aussi à Fanon, entre anciens militants venus du tiers-monde, de l’Afrique du Sud encore en
apartheid, aux amis Kanak de Nouvelle-Calédonie,
jusqu’aux Amériques, nord et sud, toutes régions
du monde en résistance, ainsi que des chercheurs
jeunes et moins jeunes, venus des Antilles, d’Afrique,
de France, entretenant une familiarité avec l’œuvre
si ce n’est avec l’homme.
Une fois retrouvée cette vibrante atmosphère
d’émotion et de retrouvailles dans un des rares
textes qui en rend compte, ce qui me frappe 25 ans
plus tard, c’est l’indifférence relative dans laquelle
s’est tenue cette rencontre, et la non moins grande
indifférence dans laquelle elle ne pouvait que laisser
les algériens-algériennes alors. Personne des familiers que je côtoyais alors n’était attaché à ce nom
ou à ce qu’il représentait, n’avait lu les textes qu’il
avait écrits en vivant dans leur société encore à venir. Justement, s’ils n’avaient pas le temps de faire
sa connaissance, c’est qu’ils et elles étaient bien trop
occupés à se débattre dans une existence résultant
de l’indépendance, que Fanon appelle pourtant
avec toute son énergie, mais qui n’est qu’une routine affaissée conduisant à s’affairer sans but. Il ne
comptait pas parmi les noms connus des révolutionnaires, seuls ceux qui étaient présents à ce colloque,
savaient ce qu’ils lui devaient et ce qu’il leur devait
aussi. Tenues à juste titre en dehors de cette comptabilité affective et politique, les jeunes générations
étaient ainsi tenues à l’écart de la mémoire que
Fanon active, de l’énergie qu’il instille, pour quiconque l’a connu ou lu. Et c’est bien là que se posait
alors, comme maintenant, le problème de l’absence
de Fanon, le problème d’une disparition paradoxale.
Faire-valoir de l’Algérie aux yeux du monde, une
Algérie qu’il a contribué, avec d’autres, et indéniablement mieux que d’autres, à constituer comme
matrice de la pensée révolutionnaire et subversive,
il est étouffé, ou du moins éludé, chez lui, dans son
pays d’adoption, celui qu’il a choisi pour la lutte et
pour la vie, jusqu’à sa mort.
Dans la relation du colloque qu’en fait Christiane
Chaulet-Achour, elle n’entre pas dans le détail
des communications, elle dresse un portrait de
groupe autour du héros, ami, compagnon, inspirateur absent parce que disparu, disparu parce
qu’absent. Elle souligne les tensions et les tentatives
« d’exécution » (je cite), testamentaires ? suis-je tentée de m’interroger.
« Une matinée houleuse, inaugurée et clôturée
par deux universitaires algériens qui ont plus ou
moins “exécuté” Fanon! ». Mais elle ajoute plus loin,
relatant un moment de « bonheur intense » : « Les
“Historiques” et les “jeunes” faisant jonction. A mon
sens, ce fut le moment le plus fort de cette rencontre. »
Après avoir appris que je participerai à ce colloque, j’en suis venu à me demander ce qui m’avait
pris de proposer un texte, comment j’en étais venu
à penser que le temps était venu pour moi de parler
de Fanon, à la première personne subjective et sociologique. Une certaine fébrilité s’est alors installée,
un inconfort à parler maintenant, de et avec Fanon,
si tard, pour qu’enfin, ce soit si près.
Je n’aurais pas pu écrire et dire cette communication en anglais. C’est au français que devait
revenir cette interrogation en même temps que
ce récit. Cette langue que j’investie et à laquelle je
tente de faire dire des choses qui la malmènent ou
l’importunent, c’est sur son terrain que je me retrouve, surtout me retrouver avec, en face de Fanon.
Mort algérien comme mes parents.
Car il y a bien des raisons et bien des façons
d’être algérien. Qu’y a t-il de commun entre Fanon,
Frantz, et ma mère, mon père eux aussi morts algériens après être nés indigènes ? Rien, il faut bien le
reconnaître. En tout cas rien a priori : de leur commune nationalité née d’une histoire partagée, tout
69
reste à bâtir, à penser, à imaginer, à ce jour. Si peu
connu là-bas, sinon comme un moujahid de plus, il
leur était totalement inconnu. Si peu compris ici, sinon, comme un étrange antillais apologue d’une violence présentée sous un jour peu amène, une arme
anachronique, il reste à explorer et à comprendre
au-delà des cercles restreints où sa pensée est tenue
en respect. Il reste à lui rendre ce qu’il a donné sans
compter, ses dangereuses percées, ses malentendus,
ses tensions, ses espoirs.
70
Monsoon Fever
Pamila Gupta
(University of the Witwatersrand)
The monsoon provides a useful spatial template
for thinking more generally about the future
direction(s) of Indian Ocean studies. Precisely
because of its defining character—it connects
water and sky, and links geography (specifically
climate and climate change) with politics and
development—, it allows us to engage with the
‘oceanic’ more seriously. In addition, the monsoon
offers a point for reflection on connectivity—that
is, on how people, things, and ideas travel in a
changing Indian Ocean world.
Introduction
On 26 July 2005 the rain gods attacked Mumbai
with relentless intensity. Nearly thirty inches of
monsoon rain lashed the city within a twentyfour hour period. Water flooded many neighborhoods and clogged the city’s drains, roadways,
and suburban rail network. Transportation came
to a standstill, flights were cancelled, the stock
exchange closed, schools and colleges shut down,
and people waded or swam to safety. The flood
evoked a primeval image. The idea of city under
water is the stuff of myths. It was nature biting
back, punishing humans, its fury leveling their
prized creation—the city. Just a few months earlier, the business and political elites had been
retailing dreams of turning Mumbai into a world
class city, of transforming it into another Shanghai. But those dreams literally went down the
Monsoon Fever
clogged drains. People recalled the experience
with a shudder. Monsoon waterlogging was commonplace, but this was a frighteningly different
sight—this was the city itself sinking, inch by inch.
It produced a sense of being choked and trapped.
Many described having walked for hours through
water, negotiating past floating garbage, debris,
and animal carcasses to reach their homes, only
to find them inaccessible or inundated. Others
recounted having been marooned in office buildings, frantically calling their relatives to reassure them and to inquire about their well-being.
Phones went dead and the mobile networks were
jammed. Stalled traffic marooned buildings and
neighborhoods, stranded families and a powerless administration conjured up a frightening image of chaos and dysfunction. Mumbai appeared
imperiled. It was an urban dystopia—not a dream
city, but a nightmare (Prakash, 2008: 181-182).
Gyan Prakash’s opening passage, of the monsoon
as nature writ large, a ‘spectacle of turbulence’ in
the words of Robert Kaplan(2010: xiv), as it broke
over Mumbai in the summer of 2005 is a telling
one; it invokes some of the nuanced points I want
to elaborate in the following paper concerning the
monsoon as a distinctly Indian Ocean weather pattern that arrives every year with serious geopolitical
consequences. Thus, is it possible to conceptualize
the monsoons as part of an Indian Ocean network
(following Latour 2005) that creates rhythms and
patterns—that is, as having a role in creating a fundamental sense of oceanic being and place— but also
as a space of future disjunctures (or creating a sense
of non-place) in relation to a dramatically changing
physical ocean such that Prakash’s dystopic version
of Mumbai during the seasonal rains is frighteningly
real and close. Here I want to suggest that the monsoon provides a useful spatial template for thinking more generally about the future direction(s)
of Indian Ocean studies. Precisely because of its
defining character—it connects water and sky, and
links geography (specifically climate and climate
change) with politics and development—, it allows
us to engage with the ‘oceanic’ more seriously. In
addition, the monsoon offers a point for reflection
on connectivity—that is, on how people, things, and
ideas travel in a changing Indian Ocean world. What
follows then is a discussion of the monsoon in its
many affective registers—as an annual storm system
unique to the Indian Ocean; as a (lyrical and embodied) aesthetic that provides a way to trace what is
in the process of being lost in the face of dramatic
environmental change; and finally as a security measure, or ‘development discourse’ (Kaplan, 2010) in
a changing political and economic climate wherein
the Indian Ocean is poised as the next strategic arena in a post-American world (Hofmeyr, 2009). Each
register, in turn, will have consequences for thinking
anew about the temperate future(s) of Indian Ocean
studies by asking conceptual questions about the
vestigial and the imminent.
Act I: History and Geography
A line of spectators had formed behind the
Kovalam[Kerala] beach road. They were dressed
with surprising formality, many of the men wearing ties and the women fine saris which streamed
and snapped in the wind. Their excitement was
shared and sharply focused, like that of a committee preparing to greet a celebrated spiritual lead71
er, or a victorious general who would come riding up the beach on an elephant; all they lacked
was welcoming garlands of marigolds. As I joined
them they greeted me with smiles, a late guest
arriving at their function. The sky was black, the
sea white. Foaming like champagne it surged over
the road to within a few feet of where we stood.
Blown spume stung our faces. It was not hard
to imagine why medieval Arabs thought winds
came from the ocean floor, surging upwards and
making the surface waters boil as they burst into
the atmosphere…More holidaymakers were joining the line. The imbroglio of inky cloud swirling
overhead contained nimbostratus, cumulonimbus, and Lord knows what else, all riven by updraughts, downdraughts and vertical wind shear.
Thunder boomed. Lighting went zapping into
the sea, the leader stroke of one strike passing
the ascending return stroke of the last so that the
whole roaring edifice seemed supported on pillars
of fire. Then, beyond the cumuliform anvils and
soaring catellanus terrets, we saw a broad ragged
ban of luminous indigo heading slowly inshore.
Lesser clouds suspended beneath it like flapping curtains reached right down to the sea. “The
rains!” everyone sang (Frater, 1990: 59-60).
If we think about geography as a way to forge a pathway through history (Ho, 2006: 28)1, then perhaps
the monsoon can be considered one of the first nonhuman actors (Latour 2005) operating in an Indian
Ocean network.2 According to Michael Pearson, it
1 These pathways are discourses that mobilize places,
texts and persons in meaningful narratives of travel (Ho,
2006: 28).
2 For French social theorist Bruno Latour(2005), ANT
72
is one of the few ‘deep structure elements’ (2003:
19) of the Indian Ocean that historically has constrained human movement.3 The author notes that
for ‘those who ignored the monsoons, or were ignorant of them, came grief’ (ibid: 21). It is a complicated weather pattern, according to this Indian Ocean
historian. He writes:
the monsoons are generated by the rotation of the
earth, and by climate. Heat during the summer
warms the continental landmass in the north of
the ocean. Hot air rises and creates a low pressure zone at the earth’s surface. Moisture-laden
air from the sea then moves in to this low pressure area, rises in the upward air currents, cools
and so produces clouds and rain. In winter, the
(Actor network theory) assumes that all the elements in a
network can and should be described in same terms, and
function as part of a principle of generalized symmetry.
Actants(to denote human and non-human actors) in a
network take the shape that they do by virtue of their
relations with one another, and that nothing lies outside
the network of relations. In other words, geography,
climate(including the monsoon), the ocean, and politics
are inextricably part of a larger Indian Ocean world of
actors, ideas, and things, and wherein the material and
the semiotic are always engaged with each other.
3 Françoise Vergès also points to the monsoons as one
of the defining traits of the Indian Ocean. She writes:
‘From early on, the Indian Ocean presented elements
of unity: the role of the monsoon winds, the creation of
cosmopolitan port cities with a large degree of autonomy
for their hinterland, the kind of ships that sailed the
ocean, transcontinental trade, and piracy. It was a world
of encounters and flows between the Islamic world
and Africa, Africa and Asia, between Asian and African
continents, and the islands of the Ocean’(2003: 247-48).
reverse occurs; as the sea cools more slowly than
land, winds flow out from the land(ibid: 19).
As a traveling phenomenon, there is ‘something
truly mathematical about it’ writes Robert Kaplan
(2010: 137) as the monsoon’s two branches (from
the Arabian sea and the Bay of Bengal) reach Cape
Comorin and Bangladesh around June 1 respectively, Goa and Kolkata five days after that, and then
Mumbai and Bihar five days after that, Delhi in mid
June and Karachi around July 1 (ibid: 137). In other
words, it marks both time and space in a cyclical
pattern. That the monsoons account for 80% of the
rainfall for India alone (and 90% of its water supply), suggests its political, economic and ecological
importance, including its reliability and dependence
for agriculture and local economies, particularly
in South Asia, but also for other regions within its
reach.
Geologically, the monsoon made its first visit
to the Indian Ocean during the Miocene epoch between 600 million and 800 million years ago. Its
cause ‘seemed to have been the mighty uplift of the
Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, a process begun several million years earlier when the northward moving Indian subcontinent collided with the
Asian plate’ (Frater, 1990: 70). Geological core sampling indicates that the earliest winds blew when
the Himalayas had achieved a height commanding
enough to ‘beckon them in’ (ibid: 70). However, it
was only with the ‘cracking of the code’ of the monsoon (from the Arabic mausim meaning season) in
the 7th century that according to Sugata Bose, ‘dramatically extended the range of human movement
across the Ocean, making possible increased direct
contact between the Middle East, South Asia, and
South East Asia’ (2006: 6). The world of Indian
Ocean commodity trade(first in luxuries and then
basic goods) had opened up, one very much governed by the monsoons. Knowledge of the monsoon pattern was also helped by the research of one
Edmond Halley, Secretary of the Royal Society of
the United Kingdom and discoverer of the comet,
who in the 17th century, produced the first monsoon
flow chart (Frater, 1990: 31) which of course aided
Portuguese, British, and Dutch ships in navigating
the long journey from Europe to Asia, including
their safe and cargo- laden returns. There is still
much more to learn about this complex storm pattern; even as the monsoon winds ‘constitute one of
the greatest weather systems on earth and an enormous amount of research has been carried out since,
many questions remain shrouded in mystery. It’s
like the human brain. We know it but we don’t know
it’ (ibid: 31). This brief history of the monsoon suggests, on
the one hand, that we need to revisit the role of geography in conceptualizing the Indian Ocean.4 We
4 As we increasingly focus on people, things and
ideas circulating in an Indian Ocean world, we also
need to revisit role of geography and climate(not only
the monsoon, but also pollution and tsunamis, like
the one that took place in 2004). See Sugata Bose’s
unforgettable description of this tsunami, which opens
his Indian Ocean book. He writes: ‘On December 26,
2004, giant tsunami waves triggered by a magnitude
9.0 earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra
devastated communities around the Indian Ocean rim.
The quake at the interface between the India and Burma
tectonic plates lifted up the sea floor in its vicinity by
several meters. A massive displacement of water above
the sea floor generated the tsunami that swept westward
across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa,
Monsoon Fever
need to return to its visceral role as a ‘deep grammar’ (Raffles, 2002) and ‘natural logic’ (Ghosh and
Muecke, 2007)5 in fundamentally shaping an Indian
Ocean world, and as well peoples’ tenuous relationships to space and place. On the other hand, however, it serves as a reminder that while the monsoon
acts as a nodal point of connectivity for some (an
‘imagined’ monsoon community in some sense for
South and South east Asia), it is also a non-factor
for those living outside its geographical reach, i.e.
those located in a Southern Indian Ocean (including South Africa and Mozambique for example). In
other words, we must take care to not overlook geography as fundamentally shaping a way of being and
imagining in the world. Here Jeremy Prestholdt’s
(2010) distinction between shared historical experiences vs. shared histories is an incisive one for thinking about different monsoon communities operating
within the Indian Ocean network. As Kai Kresse and
wreaking havoc in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand,
Somalia, Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Tanzania,
Bangladesh, and Kenya. It left a staggering death toll
of over 200,000 and destroyed the livelihoods of many
more victims. The tsunami took about half an hour to
reach the Indonesian island of Sumatra and crashed
into Thailand in less than two hours. It traveled the
approximately two thousand kilometers to Sri Lanka
and the southeast coast of India in less than three hours
and was pounding the coats of East Africa, some five
thousand kilometers away, within seven hours. The unity
of the Indian Ocean world had been demonstrated in the
most tragic fashion by a great wall of water moving at the
speed of a jet aircraft’(2006: 1).
5 Ghosh and Muecke provocatively suggest: ‘we
always knew that nature had laws, but it seems now
is the time to start to interpret them. Listening to the
ways nature tells of its laws is a way of listening to its
arguments’(2007: 152)
Edward Simpson also remind us (2008: 14), the idea
of the Indian Ocean (and by implication the monsoon) is a hollow idea if we don’t recognize its intrasocial diversity, as well as the fact that this social
diversity is just as important and recognizable to the
region’s inhabitants as they move through space and
time. This is an important factor in recognizing the
monsoon’s ability (as well as its non-event) to shape
a people’s sense of self (somewhere between space
and place) within a shifting Indian Ocean arena.
Lastly I want to conclude this section on a conceptual note with regard to the monsoon, wherein
exploring an Indian Ocean imaginary is, following
Françoise Vergès, a project of ‘writing on water’
(2003: 247). According to Sarah Nuttall (2009),
we have yet to fully understand the liquid part of
the Indian Ocean, that is, what its liquid elements
amount to. If its status as a non-barrier is seen as
its most salient feature, then perhaps we haven’t
fully understood the ‘oceanic’ as a memory, as a
place figuring significantly in constituting subjectivities (Nuttall, 2009). Have we, following Lindsey
Bremner (2010), in our haste to locate the connectivities holding up the ‘idea’ of an Indian Ocean, in
fact lost sight (and site) of the place of the ocean itself in our analyses? And as well, its crucial role in
place-making? In other words, let us return to the
role of geography to ask how much specific Indian
oceanic geographies (not only the monsoon but also
warm waters, cyclones, typhoons, and temperate
climate zones) create specific South-South links by
virtue of their own geological pathways, and function as part and parcel of negotiating new forms of
‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) operating in the
Indian Ocean.
73
Act II: The Aesthetic, Lyrical, and Embodied
As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it
all, the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened
expectations, the kind of beauty that made your
heart miss a beat—well that remained the monsoon (Frater, 1991: 228).
In his popular travelogue, British journalist
Alexander Frater starts out as a depressed middleaged man living in perpetually rainy and grey
London, lamenting his chronic neck pain in a
British hospital and ends up ‘chasing the monsoon’
(literally) as it breaks over the Indian Ocean in the
year 1987. As we see from his above description,
what follows is an adventure- detective novel that
invokes the ‘sexiness’ and seaboard romance of the
monsoon (ibid: 21) in all its colours, textures, and
smells. In the following section, I first trace how the
monsoon has historically functioned as an Indian
Ocean aesthetic that is lyrical and embodied at the
same time. However, the monsoon is also a romantic
(romanticized) discourse that we increasingly rely
on and invest with historical weight (and imaginary)
as we steadily lose site of its reliability(as a marker
of time and space), as it becomes more turbulent,
‘capricious and spiteful’ (ibid: 23) in the face of
dramatic global climate change.
Frater recounts the first time he experienced the
monsoon rains. He writes: ‘heaving a door open I
stepped outside. Soaked to the skin within seconds I
felt a wonderful sense of flooding warmth and invigoration; it was, indubitably, a little like being born
again’ (1991: 87). ‘We Indians are obsessed by it[the
74
weather]’ (ibid: 100), recounts one man to Frater as
he continues on his journey to chase the increasingly elusive monsoon in the face of an incredibly long
and rich history. As early as 1000BC the Indian poet
Kalidasa wrote a poem in honor of the monsoon:
The sky on every side is shrouded by rain-clouds,
Which wear the beauty of deep blue lotus petals,
And here look like heaps of made up eye-salve,
and there Possess the charm of breasts of women
with child (quoted in Frater, 1991: 21).
For Kalidasa, also the author of a book about clouds
entitled Meghaduta, and an epic work entitled (in
translation) The Seasons, it is the meeting of the
earth and the clouds in the monsoon that becomes a
form of lovemaking that is at once life-giving and life
affirming (ibid: 21). Miniature paintings and musical ragas have also very much been inspired by the
monsoon, especially ones that evoke ‘distant thunder’ and ‘falling rain’ (ibid: 63).
The monsoon, with its cyclical rhythm playing
itself out once a year from June to September, also
serves as the calendar date for many activities, both
religious and secular. Particularly for those communities dependent on the seasonal rains for their livelihoods, there are religious festivals dedicated solely
to the monsoon. For example, the monsoon festival
of Haridwar sees 6 to 7 million pilgrims set out to
carry water taken from the holy Ganges River to offer it in temples of the God Shiva who will then assure that the rains will arrive on time.6 In yet another
6 ‘Security beefed up in Haridwar ahead of monsoon
festival’ http://www.newspostonline.com/nationa/
security-beefed-up-in-haridwar-ahead-of-monsoon.htm
accessed on February 15, 2011.
Heavy monsoonal clouds formed over Nalban, Kolkata followed
by rain.
Biswarup Ganguly
state of India, the monsoon’s arrival is joyfully celebrated on the 20th of June, a date that coincides
with the Catholic feast day of St. John and which
gives ample time for the wells to have filled up with
rainwater(ibid: 131). Its significance for Goa cannot
be underestimated for as one well jumper attests:
‘no monsoon, no full wells; no full wells, no food; no
food, no culture’ (ibid:131). Secular activities, such
as the re-opening of schools, are also coordinated to
coincide with the onset of the monsoon (ibid: 49).
Traditionally, this annual storm casts away all inhibitions, for as one commentator remarks to Frater,
‘affairs are embarked on, and lovers taken’ (ibid: 22).
A higher number of illegitimate babies are born nine
months later, while the rains serve to rejuvenate
body and soul (ibid: 22). Many Indians head south
during this time for Kerala’s ‘very fashionable’ annual monsoon cure based on 5000 years of Ayurvedic
knowledge, which includes a specialized diet, and
regular massages rendered from boiled rice, certain
powders, and oils mixed with herbs and medicinal
plants (ibid: 44). The sale of raingear—umbrellas,
galoshes, etc. or rather ‘panic buying’ goes up during the monsoon according to one Goan salesman
(ibid: 84). Radio programmes concerning the topic
of personally hygiene during the monsoon are a regular occurrence, including warnings against ‘excessive perspiration’ that result in body odours mixing
with surface bacteria, resulting in stained clothing,
or more seriously, tuberculosis (ibid:124). Through
his various engagements with an equally fascinating
number of characters and ideas all centered on the
idea of the monsoon, Frater himself becomes a sort
of monsoon expert, perhaps unlike any other.
Goa, like many other parts of India during the
monsoons, is packaged exclusively for tourist
honeymooners who want to indulge in the romance
of the seasonal rains.
Goa, like many other parts of India during the
monsoons, is packaged exclusively for tourist honeymooners who want to indulge in the romance of
the seasonal rains. One such advertisement from a
local newspaper, the Panjim Herald, entitled “come
to Goa when it Drizzles” entices the visitor: ‘Get high
on the humid smell of the mucky mud. The croaking
of the frogs at midnight, the buzz of the fireflies crisscrossing the sky, the millipedes crawling on the cow
dung floor nearly and a sight of a thousand things is
too beautiful to put into words. Que bonita este Goa’
(ibid: 117). Many Bollywood films are inspired by
the monsoon, including director Mira Nair’s recent
and popular Monsoon Wedding (2001), which centers on the romantic entanglements of an extended
Indian family, leading up to an arranged wedding set
amidst the impending Delhi monsoons. The trope of
Monsoon Fever
rain in Indian mythology, classical music, literature,
and film, according to Teshwanti Ganti has always
been invested with ‘erotic and sensual significance,’
wherein anticipation of the monsoon rains is ‘likened to the anticipation of one’s lover’ (Ganti, 2004:
81). That is, the highly erotic sequences in Bollywood
movies that involve rain, with wet clothes clinging to
bodies, serve as an allusion to sexuality and physical
intimacy in the face of a larger perceived moral conservatism in India (ibid: 81).
The monsoon that Frater so clearly falls in love
with is infectiously passed on to his readers. There
is one such scene of intimate and delirious happiness when the monsoon finally arrives in Kerala. He
writes:
Buffeted by the gusts, unbalanced by the waves,
the Spices Board executives[in Kerala, India]
clung to each other with water in their eyes and
looks of sublime happiness on their faces. A
young woman in a soaked and flapping gold coloured sari laughed at me and clapped her hands.
‘Paradise will be like this!’ she shouted(Frater,
1990: 88).
However, lurking underneath this seeming ‘paradise’ that arrives every year in the form of seasonal rains is a frightening reality of dramatic climate
change, one that Frater catches fleeting glimpse of,
back in 1987. Thus, on the one hand, Frater witnesses and reinforces in some sense the sublime
quality of the monsoon. On the other, his ‘reading’
of the monsoon also reminds us once again that this
romanticized version of the monsoon (and that we
dearly cling to just as we do the rain itself) is slowly
being replaced with a more disturbing and dystopic
reality. He writes:
It was odd to be taking an interest in the weather
again. Some dormant cell seemed to have woken
and fired up a whole constellation of others which
began rising above the mind’s horizon with a
soft, nacreous glow. My reading, though, soon revealed certain disturbing behavioural changes in
the monsoon. During the past two or three years it
had grown capricious and spiteful. Some areas of
India were paid only fleeting visits, some no visits
at all. This willfulness puzzled the weather men
and frightened the politicians; a failed monsoon
could mean riots and lost elections. But most of
all it frightened the ordinary rural people whose
crops and lives depended on it. They, long accustomed to its ancient rhythms and sturdy reliability, found its absence as shocking as, perhaps, a
death or madness in the family (ibid: 23).
Frater only needs to glance at the newspaper headlines to see warning signs of serious water shortages to come, with some places not having experienced rain in four years, of others desperately
praying for water via hired yogis who prove to be
unsuccessful(ibid: 23) in cultivating the onset of the
monsoon. For the year 1987 alone, two fifths of rural
India and a hundred of her largest cities were suffering an acute scarcity of water. In Madras, supertankers were being converted to ship water in from
Orissa. The gardened city of Bangalore was withering and dying(ibid:116). The monsoon is increasingly an ‘unreliable, treacherous companion’(ibid:
62) laments a woman at a dinner party that Frater
attends. She claims that deforestation is one of the
75
main reasons, for trees play a crucial role in assuring the monsoon cycle. Without forests to serve as
natural reservoirs, she tells him, 80 percent of the
monsoon rainfall runs into the sea. With it comes
great personal suffering, with people going thirsty
and hungry. Agricultural output drops by 40 percent
and everyone is affected—from the state treasury to
the humblest peasant (ibid: 66).
It is now more than twenty years later since the
time Frater lyrically ‘chased the monsoon.’ This annual storm system is changing how people and communities live in stark ecological ways that go way
beyond Frater’s fleeting glimpses of its diminishing
regularity. Specifically, Indian Ocean based cultures
are being greatly affected by hyper development and
are witnessing dramatic changes that can only be attributed to global warming. More recently, a weakened monsoon season was predicted for the year
2009 with serious concerns over rising temperatures, delays in the start of the monsoon, less rainfall
and longer breaks between rainy seasons.7 Future
predictions are even more bleak and include a rise in
water temperatures, changes in oceanic circulation,
more frequent storm surges, increased cyclone and
wave action, rising sea levels, and severe droughts
(Bremner, 2010). With all these factors escalating
to such a degree, we have to seriously contend with
this form of ‘ecological transmutation and its consequences,’ according to Lindsay Bremner (ibid). And
it will not go away. Yet we are in denial. It is perhaps for this reason and more, that we, like Frater
(or Nair for that matter), hold onto the (romance of
the) monsoon. Thus, on the one hand, the monsoon
historically is a powerful aesthetic, both lyrical and
embodied, and that still retains it allure. Yet, on the
other hand, the monsoon allows us to trace(and reinscribe) in some sense what we are in the process of
losing, geographically, geologically, and lest we not
forget, aesthetically.
7 ‘Weakened Monsoon Season Predicted for South Asia,
Due to Rising Temperatures.’ http://www.sciencedaily.
com/releases/2009/02/090227112307.htm Accessed on
April 20, 2011.
8 Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New
American Security in Washington and a national
correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. He is also the
author of several books: The Coming Anarchy, The
76
Act III: Geopolitics, Development and
the Idea of the Indian Ocean
The “monsoon” of which I speak is more than just
a storm system(which it sometimes comes across
as in the English-language lexicon); it is, too, a
life-affirming and beneficial climatic phenomenon, so necessary over the centuries for trade,
globalization, unity and progress. The monsoon…
suggests the effect of the environment on humankind living in increasingly crowded and fragile
conditions in places like Bangladesh and Indonesia. In a densely interconnected world, America’s
ability to grasp what, in a larger sense, the monsoon represents and to recognize its manifold
implications will help determine America’s own
destiny and that of the West as a whole. Thus, the
Indian Ocean may be the essential place to contemplate the future of U.S. power (Kaplan, 2010:
xiv).
It is no accident that U.S. conservative and political writer Robert Kaplan entitled his recent book
Monsoon.8 As a policy document that exposes the
rising significance of the Indian Ocean as the future
stage for American imperialism and global relations,
Kaplan uses the monsoon to capture (and reinvigorate) the idea of the Indian Ocean in relation to
geopolitics. In the following section, I look at how
the monsoon has been poised to become a security
discourse, one where American ideas (and ideals) of
‘development’ shape a new Indian Ocean, one where
fossil fuels and petroleum are to be sourced and
mined. I also look at how the ‘oceanic’, as a direct
result, has been recalibrated as an exploitable ‘territory’ (Bremner, 2010) under constant surveillance.
Lastly, I use the fact that the monsoon connects
water and sky to suggest a new direction for Indian
Ocean studies, one that, following Michael Pearson,
recognizes the aerial (over a receding sea) as a place
and space of heightened connectivity (Vergès, 2003;
Prestholdt, 2010).
For Robert Kaplan, Monsoon becomes a discursive place to demonstrate the strategic location of
the Indian Ocean in the midst of a global war on terror and dwindling natural energy resources. In his
preface, he writes:
The Indian Ocean region is more than just a
stimulating geography. It is an idea because it
provides an insightful visual impression of Islam,
and combines the centrality of Islam with global
energy politics and the importance of world navies, in order to show us a multi-layered, multipolar world above and beyond the headlines in
Iraq and Afghanistan; it is also an idea because
it allows us to see the world whole, within a very
Arabist, and Balkan Ghosts. He is also a member of the
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.
new and yet very old framework, complete with
its own traditions and characteristics, without
having to drift into bland nostrums about globalization(2010: xiii).
For economists and military strategists alike, the
‘embayed’ (ibid: 136) Indian Ocean is the new ‘heart
of the world’ (Vergès 2003: 251) where Western powers want to protect their access to oil fields and energy resources, all the while controlling their shipping
routes as well. At the same time, it is a place where
regional powers (like China and India) seek a strategy of marginalizing the West through the creation
of new South-South corridors, and old peripheries
are envisioned to become new centers (like Africa
due to its minerals and markets). Kaplan’s book, in
some sense, advocates a role for the US (lest it be left
out of the carving out of the Indian Ocean’s future
spoils), as a non-contentious broker between China
and India, even as it secures the area as safe (for democracy) from Somali pirates and Al Qaeda terrorist networks. At a time when the Indian Ocean hosts
40% of the world’s traffic in fossil fuels, it’s economic, political, and lest we not forget, its military significance cannot be underestimated. If in fact, lost
historical geographies are being re-inscribed with
new imaginaries in the face of expanding political
and economic investments in the Indian Ocean as
Prestholdt has suggested (2010), then perhaps this
is exactly what is happening with Kaplan’s idea of
the monsoon. Precisely because of its rich historical
and aesthetic value (as I have shown in the last two
sections of this paper), its re-inscription in geopolitical terms is highly revealing for future Indian Ocean
trends.
Cartographic practices historically were focused
Monsoon Fever
on demarcating the lines between land and sea.
However, as Bremner has pointed out, now with international law99 increasingly invested in parceling
out the ocean, including its geological traits (waves,
winds, and currents), a new juridical idea of the
ocean has evolved, one that is very much in line with
Kaplan’s argument. Bremner writes, ‘the [Indian]
ocean is no longer a sea, but [instead] abstract parcels of exploitable territory to be tendered off to
the highest bidder. The ocean has been striated,
politicized, and new territorial conflicts unleashed’
(2010). Thus, if it is true that ‘with every spatialization comes new closures,’ (Vergès 2003: 242), we
must continue then to focus our attention on the
Indian Ocean, paying particular attention to its future ‘passages, lanes, routes, choke points, ports,
docks and deposits’ (Bremner 2010), and as a way to
raise new questions concerning ‘sovereignty, interconnectedness and the indiscreteness of continental geographies in today’s world’ (ibid). Thus, rather
than offer monsoon predictions, we must wait and
watch (unlike Kaplan) to see what happens next.
I want to conclude this section (and paper) on a
more conceptual note regarding the future trends
of Indian Ocean studies. Here I want to suggest,
following Michael Pearson (2010), that even as we
cannot lose site of the oceanic, we also need to focus
anew our attention on theorizing the sky. He writes:
‘and if we insist that the sea is not a void, but rather
has a history, or at least can contribute to history,
does this mean that we can write not only maritime
history, but also by analogy, a history of the element
9 The United Nations Convention of the Law of the
Sea, which finally came into force in 1994, divides the
ocean into territorial zones, governed by littoral countries
(Bremner, 2010).
most of us traverse today as we move around, in
other words, aerial history’ (2010: 12). In light of
the fact that the ocean is rapidly receding as a point
of connectivity, while the sky has almost insistently
taken over (the vestigial and the imminent colliding in some sense), we need to recognize the history
and role of flight patterns as quickening travel time,
shaping new waves of oceanic migration and new
patterns of consumption, and contributing to the
high speed at which the circulation of people, goods,
and ideas in a compressed(temporally and spatially) Indian Ocean world is taking place (Prestholdt,
2010; Vergès, 2003). However, at the same time, I
want to put forth the provocative question as to why
leave the oceanic behind as we turn to the aerial?
I suggest that we go one step further—precisely because the monsoon is the place where ocean meets
sky (and quite dramatically at that), it is a space
with much potential to develop different conceptual
tools for thinking about the Indian Ocean, and for
unearthing and excavating new experiences of this
region, as I have tried to show in this paper. I leave
the reader with Alexander Frater’s breathtaking description of flying over the Indian Ocean during the
monsoon. He writes:
Twenty minutes out of Goa, in clear air, the captain switched on the seat-belt sign, flashing it
twice for emphasis. Glancing out of the window,
I saw why. Several miles ahead the horizon was
walled off. The wall seemed to run laterally for
180 degrees and vertically from the sea to the sun.
No path could be discerned around it and as far
as I could judge, none through. This huge black
structure was slab-sided all the way up, giving
off the faint shine of dressed stone and posses77
sion evidently a mass and density to match. In its
shadow small eddies and undertows caused the
737 to flex its wings. When it flew into the wall it
staggered and fell, the violence of the drop suggesting a sudden conflict of forces, gravity matching engine thrust perhaps; then it bottomed out
with a juddering bang and for the first time, I
found myself inside the core of the monsoon. We
were enclosed in a misty cell, faintly marbeloid
and giving off a soft, mysterious brightness. Some
trick of diffracted light produced a glowing pink
corona. This flashed on and off with metronomic regularity and even as I exalted at witnessing
some evidence of the monsoon’s pulse, I realized
it must be the 737’s rooftop beacon. The cloud
chamber enclosing us seemed to lead off into others. There were hints of corridors and hallways,
domed ante-rooms and courtyards going on for
miles. That beguiling radiance permeated everywhere. I observed all this with something close to
elation. Indian Airlines had brought me right into
the monsoon’s lair…..The 737 went banging and
lurching on, subtle tonal changes coming from
its whining turbines. It started its descent, sometimes making lateral slewing motions, sometimes
leaping and diving. All along the cabin’s length the
heads of passengers nodded shook and swayed in
unison Everyone was clinging on. Then, with a final wild flourish, it broke through the murk and
Goa lay below. It was a land of mirrors. Miles of
flooded paddies and puddle roads reflected the
pewtery light in a shining mosaic that rippled
right along the horizon. It looked serenely beautiful, a glass kingdom set in a water garden(1991:
102-103).
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with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the
Western Indian Ocean. New York: Columbia
University.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An
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Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Monsoon Wedding, 2001. Film. Directed by
Mira Nair. USA: USA films.
Nuttall, S. Islands and Cities: Cultural Corridors
in the Indian Ocean, Keynote Lecture and unpublished notes, Intercolonial Networks: Oceanic
Circulations: Rethinking the Indian Ocean
Conference, University of Technology, Sydney,
Australia, March 11, 2009.
Pearson, M. 2003. The Indian Ocean. New York:
Routledge.
Pearson, M. 2010. “Idea of the Indian Ocean,”
in P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr, M. Pearson, eds. Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian
Ocean. Pretoria: UNISA Press.
Prakash, G. 2008. “Mumbai: the Modern City
in Ruins,” in A. Huyssen, ed. Other Cities, Other
Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Prestholdt, J. 2010. Locating the Indian Ocean:
Thoughts on the Historical Reconstitution of
Space, Public Lecture, WISER, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
November 4, 2010.
Raffles, H. 2002. In Amazonia: A Natural
History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Security beefed up in Haridwar ahead of monsoon festival, http://www.newspostonline.com/
nationa/security-beefed-up-in-haridwar-ahead-ofmonsoon.htm Accessed February 15, 2011.
Vergès, F. 2003. Writing on Water: Peripheries,
Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean.”
Positions 11(1): 241-257.
Weakened Monsoon Season Predicted
for South Asia, Due to Rising Temperatures,
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2011.
***A revised version of this piece is forthcoming
in Social Dynamics (2012)
Monsoon Fever
79
The aphorism and the ‘historical
image’: Minima Moralia and
Adorno’s politics of form
Louise Green
(University of Stellenbosch)
This essay focuses on a single aphorism from
Minima Moralia which addresses, in a very
particular way, the question of nature. The
aphorism, Mammoth, takes as it starting point a
newspaper article announcing the discovery of a
‘well-preserved dinosaur in Utah’, and places this
archaeological find in relation to a constellation
of cultural forms, King Kong, the Loch Ness
monster, tigers, zoos, and Karl Hagenbeck, the
animal dealer who designed one of the first ‘open
zoos’ in Hamburg in 1907. For Louise Green, this
aphorism offers a creative way of considering
how it might be possible to talk about nature at
the current historical moment, a moment in which
anxiety about the environment is everywhere and
environmental crisis often seems to supercede,
even obliterate, other forms of crisis.
Mammoth. –... The more purely nature is preserved and transplanted by civilization, the more
implacably it is dominated. We can now afford to
encompass ever larger natural units, and leave
them apparently intact within our grasp, whereas
previously the selecting and taming of particular
items bore witness of the difficulty we still had
in coping with nature. The tiger endlessly pacing back and forth in his cage reflects back negatively, something of humanity, but not the one
frolicking behind the pit too wide to leap. ... The
80
fact however that animals do really suffer more
in cages than in the open range, that Hagenbeck
does represent a step forward in humanity, reflects on the inescapability of imprisonment. It is
a consequence of history. The zoological gardens
in their authentic form are products of nineteenth
century colonial imperialism. They flourished
since the opening-up of wild regions of Africa and
Central Asia, which paid symbolic tribute in the
shape of animals. The value of the tributes was
measured by their exoticism, their inaccessibility.
The development of technology has put an end to
this and abolished the exotic. (Adorno, Minima
Moralia, 115-116)
Aphorisms are the mode of writing that remains
most loyal to the inaccessibility of a wholly objective
perspective: they are not arguments but reflective
understandings and judgments (Bernstein 43).
In his most literary text, Minima Moralia,
German philosopher Theodor Adorno employs the
aphorism to consider, in a unique way, problems
of experience and subjectivity. Written in the mid
1940s while Adorno was in exile in California, the
text is a sustained reflection on the ethics of form,
and the possibilities opened up by juxtaposition as a
combinatory practice.
Composed as a series of fragments, Minima
Moralia reflects upon those minute details of everyday experience that give form to contemporary
life. In the preface Adorno writes: ‘He who wishes to
know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize it in its estranged form, the objective powers
that determine individual existence even in its most
hidden recesses’ (1978:15). Although the objects of
scrutiny here are the ‘objective powers’, in a sense it
is the ‘hidden recesses’ that seem to engage Adorno’s
attention most thoroughly. Like many modernist
writers, he explores the neglected and incomprehensible details of everyday life which form the surface
of day-to-day interactions. What Adorno’s text takes
as its object is not the discovery of the hidden ‘intentions’ of reality, the identification of a concealed
meaning or order, but rather the analysis of overlooked moments of reality, unguarded moments of
what Adorno calls ‘unintentional reality’.
This paper focuses on a single aphorism from
Minima Moralia which addresses, in a very particular way, the question of nature. The aphorism,
Mammoth, takes as it starting point a newspaper article announcing the discovery of a ‘well-preserved
dinosaur in Utah’, and places this archaeological find
in relation to a constellation of cultural forms, King
Kong, the Loch Ness monster, tigers, zoos, and Karl
Hagenbeck, the animal dealer who designed one of
the first ‘open zoos’ in Hamburg in 1907. This aphorism, I suggest, offers an interesting way of considering how it might be possible to talk about nature at
the current historical moment, a moment in which
anxiety about the environment is everywhere and
environmental crisis often seems to supercede, even
obliterate other forms of crisis.
I want to use this aphorism in order to think about the
way form holds certain conversation about nature at
bay and facilitates others, and to consider the aphorism as a form which permits or enables the holding
together of different orders of knowledge. For Gary
Saul Morson the aphorism should be considered in
relation to other forms which fall within the category
of quotations. In a distinctly aphoristic style Morson
makes a number of claims about the similarities and
differences between the various short forms which
fall within this category. Along with maxims, dicta,
witticisms and anecdotes, the aphorism refers to
something already spoken, a wisdom which is at
once startling and familiar, both strikingly singular
in expression yet part of a general public knowledge.
As distinct from maxims and dicta, Morson suggests
the aphorism does not claim to express a generalizable self-evident truth, the solution to a mystery, but
rather ‘asserts the essential mysteriousness of the
world’ (221). Aphorisms he suggest, consist not in
‘solving puzzles but in deepening questions’ (221).
He also asserts that aphorisms seek a specific occasion and that occasion is typically at ‘a conventional
end point that now does not close but opens onto
more mysteries’ (222).
Moreson uses the term ‘wisdom’ to indicate the
aphorism’s tendency to occupy itself with ethical
questions, with questions of conduct. He does not
discuss what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of the aphorism which is its tendency
to cross between different orders of knowledge.
Crossing the conceptual territory of science, traditional knowledge, conventional wisdom, and cliché, the aphorism makes statements about ethical
conduct and personal experience without insisting
on universalizing principals. It offers instead a kind
of short hand, everyday form for provisional ethical
judgment, one that engages directly with experience
and action or conduct.
In a fascinating article, Jakob Norberg suggests
that Minima Moralia conforms to but also subverts
to the genre of advice literature that was very popular in Germany and the US at the time of its first
publication in the 1940s. This form enables Adorno
to consider the relation between experience, conduct
The aphorism and the ‘historical image’
and social structures in a way that opens experience
to critical reflection.
Individual experience, Adorno asserts, can be
relevant to a theorist of the social world, and not
everything the individual does is entirely subservient or perfectly fitted to the inexorable work of
vast collective structures. Yet one can illuminate
moments of insight and incongruence without
denying the individual subject’s social history.
(Norberg 402)
The moments of insight and incongruence
emerge in precisely those areas where the
individual fails to perform his/her ‘scripted
role’ or comes up against an intractable
problem of conduct (Norberg 403)1.
In discussing Adorno’s writing in relation to the
production of an ethics within discourse, Bernstein
links the form of the aphorism to that of the essay.
He writes: ‘Aphorism and essay both begin ‘in the
middle’ with a cultural artifact or practice that is imbued with history, including the history of what has
been said about it. For this focus to be maintained,
aphorism and essay must dispense with definitions,
grounds, first principles; but equally they must dispense with the syntactic markers through which the
legal rational authority of first principles and logical
rules is transmitted to what falls under them’ (356).
The cultural artifact is composed in part by what
is said about it, the historical layers of utterances
1 Norberg writes: ‘The practice of dwelling or
lingering turns out to be a key notion for Adorno, insofar
as it suggests an enduring focus that alone can trace
individual subjects’ loss of their scripted roles in the
social whole’ (403).
Dubai Airport
Photo: Nazeema Akar
which each seek to embed the object within a particular discursive genre. Taking a particular moment
as a starting point, which is not the object’s origin
or definition, the aphorism or essay mimics in its
syntax the kind of relations it wishes to produce in
the world. In other words juxtaposition replaces hierarchy as a method of apprehension and as a way of
composing and arranging sentences.
In the remainder of this paper I want to do
two things. Firstly, I want to look briefly at how
Mammoth, one of the few aphorisms in Minima
Moralia that makes direct reference to nature, deploys cliché, public opinion, science and sentiment
to produce nature as a complex concept, one which
is at once universal and particular. Secondly I want
to use Adorno’s aphoristic method to consider two
contemporary cultural artifacts that are themselves
metonymic instances, synechdocal instances of nature as it is produced by the current environmental
crisis. These cultural artifacts are both which I call
‘natural installation’, pieces of nature produced inside public buildings, one in Dubai airport and the
other in the Natural History Museum in New York.
81
Dubai Airport
Photo: Nazeema Akar
The first ‘natural installation’ I encountered en
route to the US recently, when I spent 8 hours at
Dubai airport. Those of you who are familiar with
this airport will know that it has two more or less
identical wings and in each wing there is an indoor
natural installation, real plants, real soil, green
82
trees, a pathway and a bench, a kind of oasis not only
in the natural desert which is dimly visible through
the windows of the airport but also in the desert
of international travel, the bland standardized abstract world of schedules, boarding passes, airport
sandwiches and security checks. What is interesting
about this for me is not so much that natural forms
are called upon as ornament or decoration but rather that instead of plastic plants, the standard decorative method, nature, in the form of some trees and
shrubs, is reproduced authentically despite the difficulties of maintaining such a natural installation in
an indoors environment.
The second ‘natural installation is housed in the
relatively new ‘Hall of Biodiversity’ in the New York
Natural History Museum. This segment of rainforest partially screened off behind glass, but crowding
assertively out of this containment, is situated in the
centre of the exhibition hall. On the side wall of the
exhibition hall is a brightly lit display of animal specimens from moths to mammals. The Biodiversity hall
is, as its name suggests, devoted to educating people
about species extinctions and loss of biodiversity,
and in one corner a documentary loop describes the
destructive effects of industrialization and population expansion on the environment. These two examples, strangely similar despite their very different
contexts, offer an interesting ‘middle point’ from
which to enter the contemporary problem of nature.
Before considering them in detail, however, I want
to go back to Mammoth, and to consider the way
in which Adorno himself conceptualized the work
of Minima Moralia’s aphoristic fragments, fragments which he called not aphorisms but ‘historical
images.’
‘Mammoth’ as ‘historical image’
Adorno used the term ‘constellation’ to describe
the particular way in which what have come to be
termed his ‘aphorisms’ juxtaposed elements from
different orders of knowledge refusing a hierarchical ordering of the general and the particular.
The idea of the constellation as a form through
which phenomena might be understood originates
with Walter Benjamin and is first articulated in The
Origin of Tragic Drama.2 Brian O’Connor writes
that:
Benjamin’s theory posits the idea of constellations, a metaphor which expresses the practice
of philosophical truth. In this practice the subject
mediates phenomena, striving to arrange them in
such a way, in ‘constellations,’ that they might reveal their idea. Importantly ideas are neither generalizations nor subjective reconstructions in that
they are the very intelligibility and truth of phenomena...In a constellation particular phenomena are not subsumed under universals. Rather
the meaning of any phenomenon can emerge only
when the phenomenon is understood as configured with certain other phenomena. (2000: 4)
What is significant about Benjamin’s conceptualization of the constellation is its emphasis on an arrangement of phenomena which avoids hierarchical
2 In a letter to Adorno in July 1931 Benjamin comments on Adorno’s description of the task of philosophy:
‘I subscribe to this position. Yet I could not have written
it without referring to the introduction of my book on
Baroque Drama, where this entirely unique and, in the
relative and modest sense in which such a thing can be
claimed, new idea was first expressed’ (1999: 9).
ordering. The particular is never simply an example
of a general rule. Phenomena instead become intelligible only in relation to other phenomena. The constellation allows seemingly incommensurable things
to be placed alongside each other without reducing
them to a relationship of equivalence. It makes visible the contradictory aspect of the real; introducing
awkward material complexity into the smooth logic
of any systematic organization.
What is significant about Benjamin’s conceptualization of the constellation is its emphasis on an arrangement of phenomena which avoids hierarchical
ordering
Constellations of phenomena are always provisional, unlike stellar constellations which appear
from the perspective of historical time to be eternal
and unchanging,. The elements are constantly rearranged until the moment when the image emerges.
It introduces what Fredric Jameson refers to as a
‘pseudo-totality’. He writes:
Pseudo-totality: the illusion of the total system is
aroused and encouraged by the systematic links
and cross references established between a range
of concepts, while the baleful spell of the system
itself is then abruptly exorcised by the realization
that the order of presentation is non-binding, that
it might have been arranged in an utterly different fashion, so that, as in a divinatory cast, all the
elements are present but the form of their juxtapositions, the shape of their falling out, is merely
occasional. This kind of Darstellung, which seeks
specifically to undermine its own provisional
architectonic, Benjamin called configuration or
constellation... (1990: 50)
In Adorno’s formulation in 1931, he favours the
term ‘historical image’ over Benjamin’s notion of
the ‘idea’ (Buck- Morss 102). Historical image emphasizes both the contingent and the material quality of whatever might emerge from the constellation
as well as the fact that the image itself is not intuitive or metaphysical but rather produced by human
subjects through analysis. What philosophy takes
as its object, however, is not the discovery of the
hidden ‘intentions’ of reality, the identification of a
concealed meaning or order, but rather the analysis
of overlooked moments of reality. Adorno refers to
these unguarded moments as ‘unintentional reality.’
The phenomenal elements which make up the
constellation are, Buck-Morss suggests, ‘codes’ or
‘ciphers’ of social reality, seemingly insignificant
things like a popular song, fleeting events such as a
concert and easily overlooked details such as certain
fragments, images or metaphors in a philosophical
text. In themselves, she explains, such phenomenal elements have no fixed value. They might be
judged positive in one constellation, negative in
another (1977: 99). They become meaningful/intelligible only in relation to the other elements in the
constellation.
The aphorism Mammoth begins with a reference
to piece of scientific knowledge reported in ‘American
newspapers’: the discovery of a well-preserved dinosaur in the state of Utah. In a gesture which refuses
to acknowledge the sanctity of science, this dinosaur
is placed alongside such creatures as the Loch Ness
monster, an invention of folklore and King Kong, an
invention of popular film culture. All these creatures
have in some way been equalized by their entry into
the public domain. The first assertion, that popular
fascination with the monstrous, with unimaginably
huge creatures such as the dinosaur, giant gorillas
and sea snakes reflects an attempt to assimilate the
‘monstrous total state,’ is tried but found to be inadequate. The dinosaur is not only to be read allegorically as reflecting something about popular anxieties
about the state, it is also to be read metonymically as
a representative of nature. Adorno argues that: ‘the
desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope
that animal creation might survive the wrong man
has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life.
Zoological gardens stem from the same hope. They
are laid out on the pattern of Noah’s ark, for since
their inception the bourgeois class has been waiting
for the flood’ (1978: 115).
The ‘hope’ that dinosaurs and zoological gardens
inspire, Adorno suggests, relates to the sense dimly
acknowledged but not rationally accepted (at least
not in the 1940s) of the damage done to nature in
order to make possible the lifestyle of industrial
capitalism. In this hoped for future ‘man’ would be
sidelined (animal creation would survive the wrong
man has done) and a better species would emerge
which ‘finally makes a success of life’ (115). In a typically Adornian fashion the slightly mocking judgment is contained in the qualifying subclause, the
idea that animal creation might even survive ‘man
himself.’ This reference to the extinction of man is
particularly interesting when considered in relation
to the current sense of environmental crisis that at
the level of popular or media culture has produced
numerous narratives articulating precisely this fear
83
and fantasy of human extinction.3 The zoo, and the
ark in this aphorism can be seen as allegories for
animal creation reduced merely to specimens or
mating pairs, preserved against a disaster. Yet to see
disaster in terms of the extinction of species, misses what for Adorno is the important point which is
that the management of nature, its preservation and
transplantation, as well as its reduction to species
or specimens is already loss, even disaster. A form
of thinking which subsumes animals under the general categories of species, allows them to enter the
discussion only as representatives of a category, as
abstractions. Unlike the tiger pacing furiously or in
bewilderment in the cage, these specimens can not
challenge human conduct, cannot reflect back anything of what Adorno terms at this point ‘humanity’.
Mammoth as aphorism or historical image addresses the problem of nature at a historical moment which bears a strange resemblance to our own.
If the question of extinction nowadays could just as
easily be introduced with a cultural artifact such as
the wild dog shopping bag (which states that only
450 wild dogs still exist in South Africa), this aphoristic critique of the conceptual limitation of thinking about “nature” as a simple concept, is one which
still seems relevant. Now more than ever animals
are consigned to the ‘rule of experts’.
Species
In a recent article, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that
climate change represents a challenge for existing
See for instance the best selling The World
without Us, by Alan Weisman which Chakrabarty
discusses in his article, The Climate of History
(2009).
Dzanga-Sangha Rainforest Diorama, Hall of Biodiversity,
American Museum of Natural History
Photo: Louise Green
explanatory or analytic frameworks for understanding history. He notes that all his ‘readings in theories
of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies and postcolonial criticism over the last
twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization, had not really prepared me for
making sense of this planetary conjuncture within
which humanity finds itself today’(199).
For Chakrabarty, climate change, introduces into
the domain of history a requirement to think again
at the level of the species. He argues that while it is
no doubt the case that industrial capitalism has been
responsible for the conditions which have lead to
climate change, a critique of capitalism is no longer
adequate to the sort of crisis that is emerging. He
writes that:
3 84
It seems true that the crisis of climate change has
been necessitated by the high-energy consuming
models of society that capitalist industrialization
has created and promoted, but the current crisis
has brought into view certain other conditions for
the existence of life in the human form that have
no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist,
nationalist, or socialist identities.
They are connected rather to the history of life
on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another.
Without such a history of life, the crisis of climate
change has no human “meaning.” For, as I have
said before, it is not a crisis for the inorganic planet in any meaningful sense. (217)
While there is not place here to rehearse Chakrabarty’s argument in detail, the point I wish to take from
his argument is both the necessity and the difficulty
of thinking together the two incommensurable narratives of globalization and global warming, human
history and natural history. I say incommensurable
because these two different narratives/epistemological frameworks work with, or have worked with in
the past, different orders of time as well as with different conceptions of agency, event and causation.
He goes on to consider what it would mean to
introduce the notion of species into a historical account of human activity.
Who is the we? We humans never experience
ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the
human species but never experience it as such.
There could be no phenomenology of us as a species. Even if we were to emotionally identify with
a word like mankind, we would not know what
being a species is, for, in species history, humans
are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be any other life form. But one never
experiences being a concept. (220)
In a sense what Chakrabarty seems to be asking is:
what would it mean to recognize the human as one
species among many and not one that, according to
Adorno, has ‘made a success of life’.
Natural Installations
To return to my two examples of natural installations. In each, though in very different ways, nature
is produced as an affective marker, as a texture to
supplement the concept of nature. If in the airport
the motive is, I assume, consolatory and remedial –
nature as a relief from the alienating abstraction of
international travel – it is also most spectacularly a
work of artifice, part of Dubai’s massive project of
self-creation. The green trees and shrubs are certainly not natural to the environment of the desert
any more than the rainforest in natural to New York.
Visually the garden occupies a place alongside a
sign directing travelers to the Spa and Health club
on an upper floor. It is part of the airport’s total design which creates an in environment in which the
individual can take care of themselves, in which the
needs of the body and the mind, perhaps even the
soul, are catered for in the precinct itself. ‘Nature’ in
the abstract (I say abstract because it is not grounded in any actual locality) is called upon, is produced
to provide a concrete experience, the experience of
well-being, associated with being in a place of natural beauty.
The rainforest installation in the museum is
surrounded by a very different kind of text. The notice boards, images, and documentary film all have
an overtly educational intention – the rainforest is
there to supplement the concept of rainforest, to
make real in some sense the loss that is being described. The two installations then illuminate nature
in its two modalities: one - the Dubai airport installation - produced for the individual as soothing,
grounding, particularity; the other – the rainforest
installation – produced for the species as a metonymic reference to nature as universal, that nature
which is already, as a consequence of human action,
lost. Yet ultimately what both testify to in the end is
the ability of human technology to dominate nature,
to produce it on demand, to produce it as something which , as Adorno writes, “is a consequence of
history”.
References
Adorno, T. Minima Moralia London: Verso,
1978
Adorno, T. Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin:
The Complete Correspondence, 1928 - 1940.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Universtiy Press, 1999.
Bernstein, J.M. Adorno: Disenchantment and
Ethics. Cambridge: Cambrideg University Press,
2001
Buck- Morss, S. The Origin of Negative
Dialectics. New York: The Free Press, 1977.
Chakrabarty, D. The Climate of History. Critical
Inquiry 35 (winter) 2009: 197-222.
Jameson, F. Late Marxism. Adorno Or the
Persistence of the Dialect. London & New York:
Verso, 1990. O’Conner, B. The Adorno Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 .
Morson, G. S. Bakhtin, the Genres of Quotation,
and the Aphoristic Consciousness. The Slavic and
East European Journal 50 (1) 2006: 213-227.
Norberg, J. Adorno’s Advice: Minima Moralia
and the Critique of Liberalism. MLA 126 (2) 2011:
398 -409.
85
‘fetish’ in their thinking. More on that in a minute,
but let us first unpack a bit further just what Latour
seems to mean by ‘antifetishism’, when he tackles it
as a failing of critical inquiry.
Hylton White
An Unreal Hybrid
Hylton White takes issue with the way the
ontological turn – in actor-network theory and
more generally through the effects of Latourian
thinking in the humanities – has framed our
understanding of the history of critical theory,
and our sense of both its tasks and its potentials.
In defending a kind of critical theory addressed
to understanding the development of modes of
subjectivity, he “pushes back” against a criticism
that has swept across the humanities with
tremendous rhetorical force in the last ten years.
I think Latour has based his thoughts in important
ways on a deep confusion about the very ideas he
wants to posit as the target of his ‘critique of critique’. The unavoidable sense is that debating Latour
by tackling these claims head-on is to find oneself
playing the wrong game: ‘He says that they say... But
they don’t say that... And then...’ So maybe what is
needed is less a pushing-back than a side-stepping
gesture, back to truer ground.
A side-stepping of what? The term I want to address is one that has driven a line in Latour’s work
since the 90s, and has now taken centre stage again
in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. The
figure, that is, of the fetish. Or more precisely, the
fetish as the obsession, as Latour would have it, of
puritanical modernist ‘antifetishism’. That second
specification is very important. Where does Latour
find the fetish? He finds it, of course – and the irony
will not go unnoticed – in the middle of a kind of
86
The book cover of On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods by
Bruno Latour
subjectivity. In the middle of a paranoid concern,
he says, with drawing the line between people and
things. One way he thinks that line is policed is by
self-important scholarly heirs to theologies of iconoclasm. Wherever it is suggested that things have
agency, ‘antifetishists’ take their task as a calling to
expose the human will that lurks behind the thing,
and thereby to restore the ontological supremacy of
the unentangled subject.
No doubt there are people who have made these
kinds of ‘antifetishist’ arguments. They are not very
good or compelling ones, and more to the point, they
do not have very much to do with the arguments we
normally associate with critics who use the word
Latour tells us that two false propositions come together in ‘antifetishism’. The first is, of course, the
idea that the world of bodies and things is a screen
onto which deceitful representations are cast.
The second tenet: that therefore any attribution
of agency to non-human beings is a misrecognition of representations as real, calling for an act of
demystification.
The devil is in that ‘therefore’. What I want to
suggest is that actually Latour is conflating two very
different – one might even say incompatible – traditions of critique. He fixes a repetitive similarity between two ways of thinking that have much more often found themselves at odds in critical inquiry than
allied in the putative ‘antifetishism’ Latour wants us
to abandon.
On the one hand, then, the idea that the material
world is a screen onto which a variety of representations are cast. Latour is closest to home ground
here, to a way of thinking that runs from at least
Rousseau to Durkheim and on into some varieties
of poststructuralism. The key thing is that this way
of thinking posits or entails a very definite ontology:
one in which the world is split between free material
bodies on the one hand and entrapment by conventions, representations and norms on the other. A
struggle, then, between lively things and deadly conceptualizations. And against the deeper backdrop of
this ontology, a vision of the social world as well, as
a space in which collective representations function
as laws. And finally, then, the task of critique: to expose how representations violate bodies and things
through epistemic violence.
Whatever the insights afforded by this kind of
thought – I would like to suggest that close consideration is not very kind to it – the point I want to
underscore is something else, and that is just how
far this is from the kinds of thought that come to
mind when we think about the usages of ‘fetish’ as
a concept in critical theory. Above all we think here
of Marx, and I want to take us specifically to Marx’s
thought on the fetishism of commodities. But first
let us think in even broader terms about the ontology historical materialism inherits from its ancestors. The freedom of the subject is the key concern
of thinking here, subjectivity being grasped as an
emergent condition, a property of worldly actors
who come into being in the middle of things. In the
middle, that is, of a world of material forces, with
which subjectivity interacts, in processes that join it
to itself and to the other subjects it finds in the world
along with it. In no way, then, is the subject ontologically split from the world here in the essential terms
in which bodies and representations oppose each
other in the tradition of Rousseau. This is important
above all because it means that in the ontology entailed in critiques of fetishism the material world is
always already the underpinning of intersubjectivity
and social life. So the question here is not how representations tie things down. The question here is
what configurations of the (material) world are hospitable to the emergence, in it, of more or less free
forms of subjectivity.
Already it should be clearer how the Latourians
are confused about their object. But what of the
... in the ontology entailed in critiques of
fetishism the material world is always already the
underpinning of intersubjectivity and social life.
‘fetish’ in critical Marxist thinking? Why would such
a materialist ontology of the subject find good company in a critique of so-called ‘fetishism’? What purpose to a term like that, in a way of thinking that
always already embraces materiality as the space in
which subjectivity is convened?
The key thing here is a specification Latour always seems to drop from his account of things when
he talks about ‘antifetishism’. In Marxist thought,
at any rate, fetishism is specifically the fetishism of
commodities. It does not refer in general terms to
the role of things as such in human affairs, which
Latour keeps representing as the paranoid obsession of the modern. Instead it refers to one specific
form of life, to a form of life distinguished not by the
fact that things are vital to it but rather by the specific way they mediate subjectivity in one important
relationship.
There is no short way to sum up Marx’s argument on this issue without distorting it. But his major claim is of course that the form of life in which
we see at work a fetishism of commodities is a form
of life that fails to gather subjects as material actors
implicated consciously and freely in concretely complex chains of material action. To put the point another way, the fetishism of commodities is precisely
not a claim about the conceptual relationships – true
or false – that people have with things. Marx locates
the material relationship between people and things
in the use-value of the commodity. But in capital, as
he goes on to argue, the use-value of the commodity becomes a bearer of something else entirely.
Material things are assembled or convened here in
relation to one another as the media, very specifically, of a form of life that is organized around the
circulation of abstract labour-power. The fetishism
of commodities describes a relationship not between
people and things, in short, but rather a particular
kind of relationship between things, a relationship
that is structured in a specific way that appears to
put the subject to the side.
(Since this is a claim about a form of life, or a
generalized form of social interdependence in an epoch, it does not depend on concrete ties of employment in any particular situation. Marx’s argument
therefore does not lose its grip in contexts of mass
unemployment, where labour-power as social life
impresses its structural presence through the effects
of its concrete absence.)
Mind the Gap
The object of Marx’s critique, in short, is precisely the
separation of people and things in a way that works
to dematerialize conditions for the free creation of
both. This is where the suggestion that Marx is a
Puritan begins to seem particularly off-beam. And if
this is what the ‘fetish’ involves as a term of critique,
then the point concerning Latour should be clear.
The core of the concept of fetishism simply cannot
be comprehended in terms of questions to do with
representation (and therefore, with ‘mis-representation’). The fetishism of commodities is not a misrepresentation of things by people who require a changing of mind so they can be freed from mystification.
On the contrary, for the thing to be so susceptible
to collective (mis-)representation would precisely
require a world of richly elaborated intersubjectivity
87
– the very thing that Marxist thought sees missing in
the world as structured by capital. The fetishism of
commodities is not an idea concerning things – for
its critics, or for anyone – but rather a specific kind
of material relationship in a form of life that constitutes, inter alia, an alienated subject. The claim
is that it makes thinking very difficult, not that it
over-impresses ideas on things. There are no doubt
species of critics who invoke ‘fetishism’ to refer to
a projection of misrepresentations of agency onto
things. But Marx is not among them. Latourian ‘antifetishism’ is thus a label that fails to grasp the very
thing for which it is intended.
The gap between ‘high theory’ and ‘effective
thinking’ can seldom have been wider than it has in
the last generation of critical inquiry.
But what, then, of the intellectual claim Latour most
famously derives from this critique of ‘antifetishism’
– the claim that the obsession with demystification
is why critique has lost its power to shape the world
around it. It is hard to contest his insight here. The
gap between ‘high theory’ and ‘effective thinking’
can seldom have been wider than it has in the last
generation of critical inquiry. It is stretched so far
at this point that we can only assent when Latour
says that it is stretched beyond a point of productive tension, threatening instead to separate thought
entirely from its purchase on a changeable reality.
But what are we to deduce from this? Latour would
tell us the problem lies with us – with the ethics and
the tactics of our thought. But is this not a supremely
unlikely move for an ontological thinker to make?
What of the world in which thinking comes to exist? What if we took the gap between theory and
88
consequence really seriously, instead of trying to
outperform it with more enterprising practices and
better habits of work?
In this regard as well, Marxist critical theory
gives us much better tools for composing a historical
ontology of the problem. Unlike for Rousseau and
his heirs, Marx regards the vantage point of the concrete as an inadequate one for critique in the age of
capital. Instead, he proposes, capitalist development
provides the grounds of its own critique through the
very forms of abstraction that it produces. Thinking
through the device of these historically emergent
abstractions lets us make our thought suspicious of
any concretely existing state of affairs. But this requires precisely that there be a restless movement of
abstractions in potentially contradictory directions.
That is how the development of capital allows us to
point to an outside beyond it, rather than before it or
without regard to the ways it has reconstituted the
ground of all our activity.
One cannot say exactly yet what aspects of our
time have made it so bereft of productive contradiction, of the sort that points beyond a sense of crisis
to a definite hypothetical alternative. But we can discern the effects of this on our thought. Even those
radical theorists who insist on keeping the project of
freedom in mind for critical inquiry can only seem
to talk of new historical prospects at this time by
referring to the metaphysics of acts or events that
would interrupt time – brought to life by a will that
lies beyond history and can thus appear to redeem
it. They seldom turn to the grounded critiques of
historical possibility that once drove critical inquiry,
and in that regard – my final point – their thought
resembles nothing so much as the interwar theory
of thinkers such as Benjamin, who have also seemed
unusually compelling to us in this generation.
Our times are very troublingly like the 30s, to be
sure – and maybe that is really why it seems as if
critique has run out of steam. Perhaps the question
is not so much what is wrong with critical theory,
but rather what is wrong with a world where thought
seems so unreal.
Nature and/as Thing(s) in the
Emergent Literary City
sparrow; a sagging mattress, a laptop and a communal litter box, etc) nest in a condemned apartment
block described as an ‘urban warren’.
The phenomena of the zoos, the animalled or aposymbiots remains deliberately opaque, and may or
may not be symptomatic of the end of nature. What
is apparent is the interconnection and interdependence of human and nonhuman in these collectivities. We are somewhere between Donna Haraway’s
‘companion species’ and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘becominganimal’, while being brought into encounters with
‘vibrant matter’.
Meg Samuelson
In this essay, Meg Samuelson parses four local
novels published during the past two years that
inscribe nature and/as things while producing or
refusing various visions of the future. She starts
with three that compose the urban feral, before
turning to a fourth that zooms in on city things,
particularly cars. Her attention to the urban
is motivated by the demographic shifts noted
by Mike Davis and others, and the consequent
importance of bringing questions of nature into
the city.
I want to attend particularly to how these novels animate the ways in which nature and culture, to quote
Bruno Latour, ‘get churned up’, while performing
what Timothy Morton terms ‘ecological thinking’,
which abandons the idea of Nature ‘over yonder ...
a reified thing in the distance’ in favor of recognizing and thinking through ‘interconnectedness’. At
the same time, I’m approaching proximate, immanent things via Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’ and Jane
Bennett’s conception of ‘vibrant matter’.
*
Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City sets the scene with an inverted opening image: the morning light, so often
cast as metaphoric vehicle, is here conveyed by the
sulphur colour of mine dumps and received as it
bounces off Ponte tower. The nature-culture binary
*
The book cover of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
and its attendant organizations is immediately destabilized, as this reflected ray illuminates protagonistnarrator Zinzi, a woman with a sloth draped over her
shoulder and a talent for finding lost things - she is
able to see and trace the ‘taunt lines of connection’
unspooling between people and their things (a way
of perceiving what Elizabeth Grosz in her Deleuzian
study describes as ‘the nonliving tentacles that extend themselves into the living ... to enable the living
to draw out the virtualities of the nonliving’).
Both talent and animal attached themselves
to her after her (unintentional) implication in her
brother’s murder. Along with others who have been
similarly animalled, Zinzi lives in the eponymous
‘Zoo City’, otherwise known as Hillbrow, in which
various human-nonhuman assemblages (generators and short-wired electricity points; refugees and
other criminalized humans; a mongoose, a sloth, a
Zinaid Meeran’s even more bizarre novel Tanuki
Ichiban opens more fully into the de-territorialized
flows of the becoming-animal as it harnesses
literature to ‘investigate identity as fluid and
fragmented’ while elaborating the unfolding of the
Anthropocene Age. Set in Cape Town approximately
a quarter century from now (one of the characters
drives a vintage Tata Eita 2010), the story develops
against a backdrop of energy wars, geopolitical
shifts and melting ice caps as Meeran, advancing
a ‘post-identity vision of South Africa’, explodes
metaphors into potent proximities and perspectival
intersections while the narrative flows around the
acts of feeding and fucking, intra- and inter-species.
Among the dazzling cast of characters are hunters and smugglers of endangered species for extreme
cuisine; ecologists and animal rights campaigners;
raw food and nature-identical flavor capitalists; foragers of mushrooms, oysters, and discarded greens
in the mountain, harbor and urban refuge heaps; a
man who after eating shark roe is partially chomped
89
by bronze whalers only to be fitted with a new-fangled uniwheel such that, scooting up and down the
beach, he simultaneously recalls the cyborg from
Alien and a Tasmanian devil at the Johannesburg
Zoo; and Lahnee-O, an orangutan who attains human status to avoid euthanasia. We are surrounded by Latour’s hybrids and Haraway’s cyborgs. So
scrambled are the codes that when Corsicana, a human who ‘had never considered dating outside of
her species’ until meeting Lahnee-O, this ‘felluh with
that soulful mischief she had searched for in man after man’, watches him rubbing his feet together, the
gesture reminds her of that made by a past (also human) boyfriend while ‘tucking into a KFC Streetwise
Five and intent on a boxset of Thundercats’.
In all this fervent consumption, we witness humans ‘becoming undone’, to use Grosz’s phrase;
in the eating encounter, says Bennett, we come to
recognise that all bodies are ‘but temporary congealments of a materiality that is a process of becoming,
is hustle and flow punctuated by sedimentation and
substance’.
At one point readers enter the situation of one
of the last ten polar bears during his final hours nosing around the edges of an ice cap in search of
rotting seal carcasses before sharing with him the
realization that he is stranded on a barren, shrinking
berg, which launches a desperate swim into nothingness that concludes when a trawler draws alongside
with the ‘yipping chirping cries of the two-legged
predator’; the ‘water around him grew warm from
his blood, but only momentarily’. Cut to the ‘clink,
glitter, clatter and chirrup of the dinner party’ in
Cape Town where he is devoured.
The approach is antithetical to that of utilitarian
Jeremy Bentham, as elaborated by Jacques Derrida,
90
who asks: ‘does the animal suffer?’ Rather, it aims
for the effect Deleuze finds in Francis Bacon’s painting: ‘Bacon does not say, “Pity the beasts”, but rather
that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat
is the common zone of man and the beast’; this is not
‘resemblance’ but ‘deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound that any sentimental identification... This is the reality of becoming’.
In tune also with Haraway, the novel viscerally creates the understanding ‘that it is a misstep
to separate the world into those who may be killed
and those who may not and a misstep to pretend to
live outside killing’. Certainly, there is no space of
innocence, no outside, in Meeran’s narrative world:
green corporations and oil-guzzlers are presented
as equally fascist and, in a telling juxtaposition,
the shiny happy breed of people frequenting Rip
Roaring Good raw foods, slip ‘organic Kenyan tenderstem and KwaZulu watercress into their spaceage designer shopping baskets’ less than a kilometer
away from bin-pickers scavenging litter.
Mediating between the two is the ‘billionaire science of nature-identical flavor’ food developed in the
corporate campus of Global Flavour. In this ‘makeshift Eden’ in which ‘nature-identical is the new natural’, ‘biochemists frittered about with beakers and
petri dishes extracting the flavour of pomegranate
from a polymer found only in recycled plastic milk
cartons, before applying it to the contents of three silos - solid, liquid and gel - produced out of the grain
that now, post climate change, grows abundantly
in the Karoo. The vision is resonant with those of
Ted Nordhaus and Latour in their recent writings on
Post-environmentalism and the Anthropocene.
Shaping satire into a mode for writing the end
of nature and the post-human and shunning the
apocalyptic register, the novel emphasizes the interconnection of Morton’s ecological thought rather than the separation between nature and society
that the apocalyptic response produces. At the same
time, in its shocking effects and affects it produces
what Rita Felski describes as ‘a somatic register of
response’ that deprived me of my conventional (vegetarian!) pleasure of reading while eating. With rising nausea, I found myself ‘ripped from aesthetic
reflection’ and thrust into ‘the realm of the abject,
floored by the sheer physicality of [my] reactions,
newly conscious of being stranded on the perilous
border of nature and culture’.
*
In Nineveh, Henrietta Rose-Innes also shuns the
apocalyptic register to render instead the porosity of
and interconnection between organisms, while making the skin contract with her creepy crawly things.
This narrative world is filled with things out of place,
pushing against and through the boundaries that
consolidate identity and privilege.
Katya Grubbs’s task as ‘painless pest relocator’ is
to restore things to ‘their proper zones’. Appointed to
rid the immaculately sterile Nineveh (a luxury development that poses as a possible future Cape Town)
from the goggas that swarm in through its elaborate
fortifications, she begins to question her vocation of
‘Putting the wild back in the wild, keeping the tame
tame. Policing borders’. This ‘Great Divide’ between
humans and nonhumans, notes Latour, defines another: that between the moderns and premoderns.
Significantly, Katya stumbles upon the remnants of
the 16th century Bitter Almond hedge that divided
the peninsular in order ‘to keep the Khoisan out of
the old Dutch settlement’.
Along with the ‘teeming wilderness that lies beyond the white retaining wall’ of Nineveh is a shack
settlement that similarly pushes against its borders.
Katya realizes that the luxury apartments under
construction are being dissembled that, ‘[t]his place
is not as impermeable as she had thought. There are
channels, trade routes’: ‘[b]eetles in, building materials out. Its boundaries breached, the materials
of this urban hubris are recommissioned and reassembled: ‘as the substance of Nineveh unravels, the
swamp winds it up like yarn into a ball. Knitting new
patterns, weaving Nineveh into the shacks and the
city beyond’.
After her return to everyday urban life following Nineveh’s collapse, Katya is left with the apprehension that: ‘Everything’s in motion, changed
and changing. There is no way to keep the shape of
things. One house falls, another rises. Throw a worn
brick away and someone downstream will pick it up
and lay it next to others in ... a new wall – which
sooner or later will fall into ruin, giving the spiders a
place to anchor their own silken architecture. Even
human skin, Katya has read, is porous and infested, every second letting microscopic creatures in
and out. Our own bodies are menageries’. Earlier
she had found such an in-between state (‘not wild,
but not civilised either’) in parking lots where she
let ‘her fingertips glide over the sleek flanks of the
cars – metallic shells so like the carapaces of giant
beetles’.
*
In Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood (set in Durban, particularly Umlazi township), these sleek surfaces
disrupt the teleology of a ‘my life in crime’ narrative
that charts Sipho’s descent from school drop-out to
car-thief and accessory to murder only to conclude
with him making good.
Mzobe’s cars display what Bennett calls ‘thingpower’, the subject-object binary repeatedly collapsing as I am immersed in the erotics of driving: the
flirtatious play between car and driver, the caress of
tyre on tarmac... As reviewer Wamuwi Mbao notes,
‘The cars are almost characters; ... under Mzobe’s
pen [their] life-enlarging potential ... comes alive’.
In the potent assemblage of car-driver, he certainly captures something profound about how we live
with things. Objects, says Brown, are what we ‘look
through’ to see ‘what they disclose about us’; the
opacity of the thing, in contrast, ‘names less an object than a particular object-subject relation’.
Not translucent, the cars with and to which
Sipho relates are also not the distorting mirrors Paul
Gilroy bemoans when he demystifies their place as
‘ur commodity’ in black culture. Returning crisp,
clear reflections of Sipho off their surfaces they also
write on others: ‘a few handbreak turns will turn the
streets to pages, with tyres as black-inked pens’, he
boasts. When, soon after, attention is drawn to tattoed skin - ‘everything written on this body tells a
story’ - we start to see what Sarah Nuttall in another
context describes as ‘the manipulation of surfaces
as a means to scramble the categories of person or
thing’.
Of course it is all too easy - and inviting - to demystify the carbon-fueled commodity culture cars
embody. But this would mean piercing through their
glistening carapaces and denying their palpable pull
as actants (even Gilroy acknowledges their dynamic,
agentive force). As Bennett points out as she turns
from the hermeneutics of suspicion: ‘what demystification uncovers is always something human’ while
it ‘screen[s] from view the vitality of matter’.
It’s telling that ultimately, though Sipho turns
away from crime and fast things (as the moral imperatives of the genre dictate), he maintains his attachment to cars: training as a motor mechanic who
will compose, fix, recycle and reassemble them in a
process earlier shown to activate the assemblage of
man and machine when the scene of dissembling
a car is described as: ‘shoulders locked, muscles
strained, bolts and nuts popped’.
And who knows what prospects - if not futures
- await him and cars: maybe he’ll convert petrol guzzlers into the hybrids that zoot across the smooth
surfaces of Tanuki Ichiban? What we can be sure
of is that, as Gilroy rather grudgingly notes of the
practice of customizing cars, he will be ‘opening up
those commodities to ongoing work, ... making them
a process rather than a closed artefact’.
91
Such conceptual objects as ‘necessary antagonisms’,
‘contradictions’, ‘revolution’, ‘the revolutionary
subject’, ‘deconlonization’, ‘third world liberation’
must be clearly defined.
Diren (Chandiren) Valayden
(University of California, Irvine)
A recent article by Brady Heiner, “Foucalt and the
Black Panthers” paints Michel Foucault as a latter
day Menocchio whose works must be brought
to trial because they threaten to contaminate
revolutionary discourse. Foucault does not merely
suffer from theoretical delirium but is actually
professing heretical beliefs. This article exposes the
dogmas of ecclesiastical antiracism.
Antiracism in the 20th century can be summed up
by this quote from Franz Fanon: “To break up the
colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers
have been abolished lines of communications will
be set up between the two zones. The destruction of
the colonial world is no more and no less than the
abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the
earth or its expulsion from the country.”11 This is our
political comfort blanket: it draws the lines between
zones, sets up adversaries that need to be overcome
and provides the promissory force of a future that
buries the past as it moves. The politics of antiracism have for a long time been defined by the categorical clarity of the adversaries and the ability to
name them: settlers, colonizers, Nazism, apartheid,
white supremacy, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, empire, euro-centrism, etc. If the second
half of the 20th century was mostly defined by such
clarity, this is hardly the case today. The adversarial
1 Franz Fanon. ([1961] 1990) The Wretched of the
Earth New York and London: Penguin Books; p 31.
92
model does not reflect the current manifestations of
racism.
Yet, the politics of antiracism, to a large extent,
continues to identify itself based on its ability to define adversaries with such clarity. Those enemies are
then stripped of their historicity, held in metaphysical awe despite the recalcitrance of contemporary
reality in delivering them in such neat packages. If
those (white) devils inspire awe, their opposite as
the force of good, bearer of salvation, conjure up
awe and reverence in equal measure. Such conceptual objects must also be clearly defined: necessary
antagonisms, contradictions, revolution, the revolutionary subject, decolonization, third world liberation, etc. Obviously, one can never be too careful
about possible heresies, contaminations and temptations. And thus the catalog of sins in the Sacrament
of Penance: liberal conceit, humanism and antihumanism (depending on the denomination – by faith
alone or through the sacraments), monumental
reading, death of the subject, poststructuralism,
postmodernism, the cultural turn.
By setting its categories of sins, ecclesiastic antiracism must guard against deviations and appropriations that originate from within the Church. The
target is not so much the racisms in the domain of
the profane (‘the social’ and ‘the political’) but the
policing of the borders of the sacred. If revolution
is not only next to godliness but godliness itself,
clerical power must be mobilized to prevent any
contamination. Ecclesiastic antiracism is thus the
consecrated power of those with the sacred task of
preventing sins from contaminating the hallowed
objects of theoretical enterprise. And this consecration is itself obtained through appeals to the objects
of metaphysical awe, be they revolution or necessary antagonisms. As such, the political theology of
antiracism in the contemporary moment oscillates
between ecclesiastical authority, the adversarial
model and the identification and prevention of heresies (perhaps turning critical theories of race into a
heresiology).
Within the political theology of antiracism,
Michel Foucault has somehow been identified as the
heresiarch whose theories threaten the sacred itself. A recent article by Brady Heiner, Foucault and
the Black Panthers,2 paints Foucault as a latter day
Menocchio,3 whose works must be brought to trial
2 Brady Thomas Heiner. (2007) ‘Foucault and the Black
Panthers’ in City: analysis of urban trends, culture,
theory, policy, action 11:3.
3 Cf. Carlo Guinzburg. ([1976] 1980) The Cheese and
the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
because they threaten to contaminate the revolutionary discourse. Foucault does not merely suffer
from theoretical delirium but is actually professing
heretical beliefs. Compared to blasphemy or apostasy, heresies arise on the same grounds as the orthodoxy being protected, as errors in the interpretation
of the scriptures. The heresiarch and his followers
are never outside the established Church, but they
seek to corrupt from within. Ecclesiatic antiracism
seeks to “expose” and “reveal” these errors to prevent the counter-pastoral power from “appropriating” and usurping the discourse of the true pastor
and misleading the flock.
Subsequently, it is not only the evidence itself
that is important but also the tone of the evidence.
The thesis must then establish the object of metaphysical awe (“Black Power”) from which all the
conclusions will be derived. Heiner’s clerical reading of Foucault reflect the political theology of antiracism; the deployment of ecclesiastical authority to
establish the adversarial model and the subsequent
cleansing of the object of metaphysical awe from
heretical “appropriations.” The political theology of
antiracism thus recruits and recuperates its believers in the process, explaining why Heiner’s article is
widely cited. Thin evidence matters little so long as
one dispels false veneration and reinforces the discourse of the true metaphysics.
Among the many theses that Heiner nails to the
door, two interrelated claims is of particular importance for a politico-theological interpretation:
1) Foucault’s genealogical method derives from the
Black Panther’s theorization of a counter-history of
(trans. John and Anne Tedeschi Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
race struggle and politics as war (in relation to state
racism) 2) Black Power theories “magnetize bullets”
while “monumental” discussions of Foucault is legitimated by “American and European academies.”
According to the clerical reading, such appropriation and subsequent effacement perpetuates the
subjugation of black antiracism, black revolutionary
thought and ultimately any attempts to change the
socio-political conditions that sustain state racism.
Since the heretic makes his departure from within the Church, the Foucauldian conception of power
must be shown to have originated from Black Power
itself, or in this case the Black Panther Party (BPP).
As such, Heiner must make a distinction between
archaeology and genealogy, claiming that Foucault
only elaborated the genealogical method after his
encounter with the BPP literature. Prior to his encounter with “US-style racism,” through the BPP,
Foucault was concerned with “the formation of
enunciative modalities, the historical a priori and
the history of ideas” (321). Given that methodologically Foucault explicitly rejects ‘history of ideas,’ the
task of self-consecration makes light work of this aspect. But not through ignorance, since Heiner proceeds to distinguish his own methodology from that
of the ‘history of ideas’ while reclaiming part of it
(322). The trial as spectacle is more important than
the content.
Heiner’s distinction between archaeology (as
academic, history of ideas, non-explicit theorization of power) and genealogy (explicit theorization
of power, counter-history, “counter-hegemonic”
[sic]) only holds in ecclesiastical antiracism. By default this mode of argumentation denies Foucault’s
explicit theorization of power in The Archaeology
of Knowledge where institutions play a constitutive role in discourse.4 And again in Madness and
Civilization, where he argues that the establishment
of madness and the confinement of ‘madmen’ become the conditions of possibility of the society of
reason and the reasonableness of Bourgeois society.5
4 Michel Foucault. ([1969] 1972) The Archaeology of
Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (trans. A.M.
Sheridan Smith) New York: Pantheon Books.
5 Michel Foucault. ([1961] 2001) Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
(trans. Richard Howard) London and New York:
Routledge Classics; p 234, 246.
93
As for the “historical a priori” and “the formation
of enunciative modalities,” one must note a recurring theme from Madness and Civilization, which
Foucault would later elaborate as his enquiries into
how “modes of objectification” transform “human
beings into subjects.”6 That is, Foucault was explicitly concerned with how modes of knowledge (from
philology to linguistics to economics to biology) act
on acting subjects, to create the conditions of possibilities for subjects to think of themselves and for
themselves. In effect, the much quoted distinction
between the double meaning of subjectivation7 (‘assujetissement’) as both the formation and the regulation of the subject, is already present in these early
works. These themes can also be found in The Order
of Things, though acknowledging this aspect would
militate against the Inquisition’s wish to portray it
as a work divorced from the concept of power.8
And so to the smoking gun that proves that there
exists a radical break between archaeology and genealogy. Heiner produces one quote from Foucault
from an interview during his trip to the USA where
he says that class disparities he witnessed there were
a “second revelation” to him as to the starkness of
the class struggle. To set up his categorical adversaries, Heiner must discard Foucault’s statement from
the same interview where he states that the period of
6 Michel Foucault. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’ in
Critical Inquiry Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer 1982): 777-795:
777.
7 cf. Judith Butler. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power:
Theories in Subjection Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
8 Michel Foucault. ([1966] 1994) The Order of Things:
An Archaeology of the Human Sciences New York:
Vintage Books.
94
The Order of Things was a “period of transition” (i.e.
not a radical break). And hence demonstrate that the
heretic shares the same metaphysical grounds as the
sacred: “It was only after he had witnessed evidence
of the racially fashioned class warfare transpiring in
the USA during that time, and had begun to inform
himself about the radical anti-racist struggles being
undertaken in the context of that war that Foucault
began to theorize power relations in any kind of explicit way” (317).
The rather ambiguous quote from Foucault gains
categorical clarity in Heiner’s interpretation above
because the point is to condemn deviation from orthodoxy, namely that the BPP articulated the truth
of racism. Foucault’s experience of the Second
World War and the Algerian revolution (in terms of
its impact on France), the presence of and response
to the preoccupations of dominant intellectuals such
as Jean-Paul Sartre (e.g. in the contrast to Sartre’s
concept of the “total intellectual”) and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty must be ignored. Hence the claim
from Heiner (from his reading of Society must be
Defended) that Focuault relegates the problem of
racism to the past – Nazism and Stalinism – when
he could (and should) have taken up the concerns
of the BPP. Asks Heiner: “Why, in the College de
France, was black power contorted into a European
mold and suppressed from speaking?” (343).
Indeed. This rhetorical question is the prelude
to Heiner’s 2 Theses. Before we look at the latter,
two interrelated questions should be raised about
Foucault’s so-called relegation (error) – despite the
revelation but before the “appropriation” (deadly
sin) – of racism to the past of Nazism and Stalinism
(in Society must be Defended, Foucault is speaking
more broadly about Socialism, not just “Stalinist
Soviet Union” as Heiner says). On the one hand, and
more narrowly, one could see Foucault reacting to
the tendency among socialists to reduce racism to a
problem of economics, as merely superstructural to
class exploitation. As he argues, Socialism has made
no “critique of the theme of biopower,” so much so,
that racism will continue to persist even under a socialist state or whatever is supposed to replace the
state in the socialist telos. Secondly, by refusing the
economic reductionism of socialist interpretations
of Nazism, Foucault rejects the Trotskyist interpretation of Fascism i.e. the ‘revenge of the petite-bourgeoisie’ thesis espoused by European socialists (even
to this day in some quarters). And on a broader level, the 1976 lectures must be seen within Foucault’s
larger oeuvre and the discussions on racism started
in the previous year’s lectures (Abnormal).
Heiner’s discussion could have turned to this
genealogy of the modern, for example the liberal
concepts of progress, privacy, secularization etc., to
unearth its relation to racism as Foucault begins in
Society must be Defended.9 The rush to condemn
often blinds ecclesiastical readings to the elaboration of the conditions of possibilities for the practice of thinking in modernity with profound lessons
for the contemporary moment. How, for example,
are forms of racisms being refigured, disavowed,
re-elaborated, justified and expressed? What kind
of readings of race and modernity do we get from
Foucault that might be useful to think with about the
current moment?
Unfortunately, such questions are to the political theology of antiracism what lust is to that of
St. Augustine – barriers to true conversion. Once
discarded, and free from “wallowing in filth and
scratching the itching sore of lust,” the professorial
philosophers of the revolutionary subject can now
separate cities of god from those of men. This theological triage necessarily transforms all (mis)appropriations into errors to protect the true Word from
corruption. Deviations are not mere errors that can
be rectified, but they actually threaten and destabilize the consecrated Word as polluting agents.
And so, to Heiner’s first thesis, namely that
Foucault’s genealogical method derives from the
Black Panther’s theorization of a counter-history of
race struggle and politics as war (in relation to state
racism). While Heiner casts the counter-history of
race struggle as revolutionary thought by the BPP,
the argument is rather different in Foucault’s lectures. That is, Foucault does not “praise” this counter-history in the literal sense. Rather, he highlights
this discourse as a strategy. Beyond this aspect,
9 These themes have been taken up by Foucault’s
students. See for example Jacques Donzelot. (1984)
L’invention du social: Essai sur le declin des passions
politiques Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Foucault also says that the ‘counter-history of race
struggle’ contains messianic, biblical, and mythical
themes (returning leader, new guide/empire etc.)
and that it is both a “discourse of bitterness and
the most insane hope.”10 While one might see the
themes of the Third Reich here, it is made clear that
this discourse is radically different to the discourse
of race/racism of the 19th century. In fact, Foucault
highlights that the original discourse of the ‘struggle
of races’ (races in the plural) serves as a critique of
sovereignty in England and France. Meanwhile, the
race struggle of the 19th century is in the singular
(biological race) that refers to the split between race
and class. That is, in the 19th century, the struggle
10 Michel Foucault. (2003) Society Must be Defended:
Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 New York:
Picador; p 57.
of races is recoded as class struggle while biological
race becomes tied to the destiny and progress of the
nation.
It is precisely this marriage of race and nation
that allows the state to intervene into the lives of individuals and collectivities to fulfill the promise of
purity, destiny and protection. Hence ‘society must
be defended’ as promise, task and imperative of
the state. “Counter-history” only serves to indicate
how the dialectical struggle of classes can also find
overlapping interpretations as a race struggle. What
Foucault tries to show is how particular periods of
history produce the conditions for struggles between
groups to be understood in racial terms. “All is race”
as in the Disraelian conception.
That is, Foucault’s conceptualization is radically
different and incompatible to what George Jackson
(as quoted by Heiner) terms race struggle in the US,
in so far as it refers narrowly to a struggle against
a racist state. Moreover, it is not power that is conceptualized “through the analytic of war” (321) as
Heiner says, but rather politics. Foucault theorizes
politics as an agonistic struggle against the consensual emphasis of much political theory (especially
in contract theory). But, Foucault is not concerned
with elaborating politics as war in the Gramscian
sense of a war of position and a counter-hegemonic
practice of revolutionary parties. Yet, Heiner sees no
reason to elaborate on how he came to understand
counter-history as counter-hegemony or more precisely, the role if any, of the concept of hegemony in
Foucault’s theoretical apparatus. Or how he mapped
the BPP’s “counter-hegemonic” (323) theorization
onto subjectivation.11 A broader discussion of the
11 For a discussion of the relationship between Marx
95
relationship between Foucault’s conceptual apparatus and the Marxian notions of contradiction, antagonism, adversaries etc. would also have proved useful especially with regard to Foucault’s discussion of
his intellectual trajectory in The Subject and Power.
Again, such questions might derail the Inquisition’s
desire to establish the heretical appropriation.
In the work of sacralization, the negative cult
(in the Durkheimian sense) must ritualistically
discard any evidence that might pollute the sacred. Henceforth, Foucault would have turned to
Nietzsche only after the Damascene moment in the
US: “If Nietzsche features prominently in Foucault’s
genealogical turn, it is, I argue because the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers led
Foucault both to Nietzsche and to genealogy as a
method of historico-political critique” (314). We
might remind the readers that Foucault’s dissertation – on Kant’s anthropology in 1961 (i.e. before
the Fall) – was described by his advisor as “more
inspired by Nietzsche than it is by Kant.”12 And if
clerical authority had practiced the humility that it
preaches, it might find inchoate forms of the genealogical method in The Order of Things, especially in
the discussions of Cervantes and Sade…
Hence, one can only conclude that addressing
such issues would ruin the second thesis, namely
and Foucault, see Etienne Balibar. (2002) ‘Three
concepts of politics: Emancipation, Transformation,
Civility’ in Politics and the Other Scene London and New
York: Verso.
12 Quoted in Roberto Nigro. (2008) ‘From Kant’s
Anthropology to the Critique of the Anthropological
Question: Foucault’s Introduction in Context’ in Michel
Foucault. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology Los
Angeles, CA: SEMIOTEXT(E).
96
that black power “magnetizes” bullets. Again, the
rhetoric of the question is made to do all the work
here: “why is it that the enunciative force of black
power is met with social, civil and biological death
while that of power-knowledge is subject to canonization in a host of academic disciplines?” (315)
While it is a truism that “black power magnetizes
bullets,” it is hardly the truth of racism. The rhetoric of the question can be summarized thus: Given
that Foucault subjugates the thought of the Black
Panthers, a symptomatic reading of Foucault shows
us that this is a larger pattern that is superstructural
to the racist social and political conditions prevailing everywhere. Given that such racist conditions
rest on the social, civil and biological death of blacks,
anti-racism as race struggle, war and insurrection
cannot appear in academic works. Instead, the latter appear as only the legitimate forms possible i.e.
disciplinary power, normalization and regulation as
a non-revolutionary form.
As such, the desire for pre-lapserian concepts
such as ‘necessary antagonisms,’ contradictions etc.
clouds any serious discussion of contemporary racisms. As I argued above, the political theology of antiracism moves between ecclesiastical authority, an
adversarial model of politics, and the identification
and prevention of heresies. This triple movement reinforces many essentialist concepts through acts of
epistemic purification13 (without ignoring the sociopolitical purifications that it also informs, i.e. ‘the
fear of small numbers’14). Thus it sets up ‘necessary
antagonisms’ between antiracism and capitalism or
any other identified enemies. While departing from
the Marxist conception of race and class, it remains
Marxian (in denial). It might ask into the conditions
of possibility of ‘the necessary’ but never into how we
come to think of certain conditions as necessary (for
example, the necessary and sufficient conditions for
truth15), and whether these conditions hold today.
For all political theologies are by definition ahistorical: they must always protect the truth of the
Word through positive and negative cults. If artistic
13 Bruno Latour. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern
(trans. Catherine Porter) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
14 Arjun Appadurai. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers:
An Essay on the Geography of Anger Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
15 cf. Michel Foucault. (2010) The Government of Self
and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983
(trans. Graham Burchell) London: Palgrave Macmillan.
license is allowed in portraying the Stations of the
Cross, the content must not change. The political
theology of antiracism is no different. It can only
find and assert the eternal ‘modes of production’
of race and racism while ignoring the modality of
that production in different phases of history. And
the latter is exactly what Foucault tried to approach
through his investigations into the production of the
modern and modes of modernization. Just like the
modern carried forms of death (social and otherwise
– what Foucault termed biopolitics), so too does the
postmodern (an elaboration and a critique can be
found in the concept of necropolitics). Foucault’s
discussion of biopolitics and race/racism in Society
must be Defended can be situated within a larger
project of unearthing the different projects that tied
race, nation and progress into the ‘warm embrace’
(as Foucault called it) of the state.
Seen within this larger context, we might start to
investigate how these national narratives and statist
guarantees are being fragmented and de-centered,
making essentialist assumptions redundant. This
makes it all the more difficult to pit adversaries
against one another. Simply put, the line between
friends and foes are becoming increasingly blurred,
where “the enemy is the ally, and the ally is the enemy: enemy mine.”16 Whether we are speaking about
colonialism (in terms of post- or neo-colonialism),
imperialism or contemporary racism, the goal is
not to pursue an epistemic purification that would
yield two groups pitted against each other – power/
resistance, domination/revolution, weapons of the
strong/weak, master’s tool, apartheid/anti-apartheid etc. The contemporary moment perhaps makes
the tendency of the exorcist to find ‘white devils’
in the social world redundant, but that should not
distract critique from attempts to understand the
spectrality of whiteness today. Yet, the re-articulation and re-inscription of whiteness matters little to
a puritanical ecclesiastical authority hell bent (pun
intended) on identifying enemies and consecrating
itself with the sacred task of purging heretical deviations. Thus, pressing concerns over the reorganization of the social under neoliberal policies (which
should make us question again what we mean by the
social construction of race) simply cannot enter the
framework of the political theology of antiracism.
What matters is that, against the ‘white devils’
stands the professorial (and professional) philosopher of revolutionary discourse who refuses, for fear
of contamination, to historicize the very concept of
revolution. Heresy is thus defined as the denial, on
sacred grounds, of the faith (revolution). Once this
framework is established it is easy to find transgressions: misappropriations, deviations, denials, “epistemic injustice,” canonization and so on. The political theology of antiracism (if it is not a broader tendency of the left) applies to a number of situations
today, whether it is in Israel, the US or international
‘justice movements’ (from reparations to indigenous
rights to a dying postcolonialism). If there is to be
any antiracist ‘movement’ left, it has to take the historicity of racism into account and rethink the possibility of antiracism.
16 Katherine Hayles. (1999) How We Became
Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press; p 107, 166.
97
By Kim Gurney
It is hard to compete with the sort of gold around the
neck of Chad le Clos. The country came as close as
seems likely to the “social cohesion” so desired of its
political leaders when on August 1 the 20-year-old
swimmer pipped American rival Michael Phelps to
win the London Olympics 200m butterfly. The medal ceremony was almost as compelling. The athlete’s
lip trembled and tears ran down his cheeks as the
national anthem marked his moment and the country’s second top honours.
You could have been forgiven for missing another South African golden moment simultaneously
rolled out in the British capital. The Department
of Arts and Culture (DAC) was letting Londoners
know of its new strategy, dubbed Mzanzi’s Golden
Economy. It effectively values the arts, culture and
heritage sector by its ability “to grow the economy,
create jobs and build sustainable developments”, according to a DAC spokesperson.
This notion was first mooted at a July 2011 conference in Newtown, before being publicly declared
at the United Nations COP17 conference in Durban
the same year. It was proposed at Newtown that “the
creative economy in South Africa has the potential to
be a leading sector in generating economic growth,
employment and trade as is the case in many advanced economies”.
This arts strategy is rather Olympian in spirit.
The DAC told a Johannesburg conference in May
this year that Mzanzi’s Golden Economy was nothing less than the key to an African renaissance. The
98
London Olympics cultural programme devised to
reflect it was themed as a retrospective with the aim
to showcase talent, reflect South Africa’s rich culture, history and identity and how it is inspiring new
ways. The visual arts element comprised repatriated artworks created during apartheid, and a craft
exhibition.
Back in the heart of Mzanzi’s golden economy,
meanwhile, the most compelling contemporary art
is largely performative, ephemeral or intangible. Its
creators would be hard pressed to issue a price tag let
alone satisfy job-creation measures. Perhaps this increasing incidence of the transient is linked to global
shifting sociopolitical terrain, with artists reflecting
a deeper matrix in flux. Whatever the reasons, this
register defies in various ways an economic lens.
Some of these artists are speaking about apartheid but they are looking ahead, to “temporality,
wounding and consequence” in the words of Farieda
Nazier. Her project ‘After Math’ exhibits in August
at the Apartheid Museum in abstract sculptural installations, collaborative animated video and live
performance. Most however share a trickster approach to subvert the way we see the world.
Take for instance the Sunday synchronised run
by Sober and Lonely Institute of Contemporary Art
(SLICA), which organised a race in Johannesburg
and Los Angeles with the same starting gun: 15h13
in Sandton and 06h13 in Echo Park on 12 August.
This art-meets-life event was timed to coincide with
the middle section of the London Olympics marathon runners completing their epic race, marking
the end of that athletic jamboree. The confirmation
email featured an animated image of two corgis on a
treadmill with the following injunction: “Remember
- Murakami says: ‘To keep on going, you have to
keep up the rhythm’.” Clearly, with a trophy for the
middle runner, the podium was not the point. The
run is a movable visual feast, an example of SLICA’s
“quirky, interesting, funny projects that capture
the imagination”, as one respondent put it on their
website.
And Johannesburg is not short of those. Anthea
Moys is a performance artist who has often poked
fun at striving. She has ‘swum’ in snow, buried herself in a hole she dug at a Gautrain construction site
while decked out in safety gear, participated in the
94.7 Cycle Challenge on a stationary gym bike positioned in the middle of the road and appeared in
Sandton on horseback with a bright red hero cape.
Moys described her practice in a 2008 interview we
conducted: “The point of play is to have no point...
It being useless in itself is useful – for the human
spirit.”
More recently, Moys is in August co-ordinating
a streetgame between Johannesburg and Berlin
where players seek reciprocity in the urban fabric
of both cities. Flipside forms part of a broader festival, ‘AMAZE Interact’, where play in urban space
is a central theme. Thorsten Wiedeman, the director
of AMAZE, similarly speaks about “a playful interaction with city and public space” using gaming technology and design and the idea of play to let something happen.
This kind of strategy was elucidated at a June
2011 seminar by the head of the Wits School of Arts,
Georges Pfruender, entitled Playing the City: Urban
Games. He cited examples of artistic interventions
in urban contexts and how these can inform or inspire new readings of the cityscape and different notions of public art. Regarding play, he said: “It has
no efficiency in economic terms... Although it looks
like it brings nothing, it involves a huge amount of
elements. Investing effort is part of being a player.
The other part is narrative.”
It’s an unconventional price tag but as the role of
the viewer becomes less passive perhaps the idea of
investing in an artwork is also changing along with
the notion of what that investment represents.
Take the work of Sello Pesa, who stirs preconceived notions - of space, of inter-relations, of what is
real and enacted. He often collaborates with Vaughn
Sadie, whose latest art project uses street lighting as
a lens on the cityscape and its dynamics. At a 2011
performance Inhabitant, Pesa rolled his body across
one of the busiest roads that lead into the city and
concluded with an apparent fit inside an empty oil
drum on its verge. The audience, perched on plastic
chairs next to blocked gutters, watched nervously
as he edged himself perilously close to danger and
wondered whether they were supposed to intervene.
Streetlights switched on as dusk set in and pedestrians made their way home. The teatro mundi of
the city became conflated with performance as passersby and urban texture formed part of the work.
Likewise, a citywalk led by Donna Kukama in
May challenged preconceived notions of space,
movement and interpersonal dynamics. It formed
part of ‘Shoe Shop’, a month-long art project broadly themed around walking to explore public space.
Interested parties meandered through Saturday
morning shops that entice customers through performers - dancing, singing and ringing of bells.
Along the way, Bettina Malcomess collaborated at
random public sites for a ‘shoe shine’ performance,
where she transformed into a white-coated polisher
and buffed Kukama’s shoes on the pavement. The
intervention disrupted the accepted everyday script
of public life and triggered much curiosity from
passersby. It also made apparent the often invisible
control mechanisms that underscore supposedly
public space: security guards soon intervened and
brought each performance to a close. Alongside Bree
Street, a Johannesburg City Partnership guard filed
a surreal incident report to the control room: “They
are making art!”
The city streets are also the stage for Mohau
Modisakeng. He is rehearsing in the month of
August for a three-day public performance Dikubu
that will take place in Johannesburg innercity comprising 12 men with sjamboks whipping a synchronised sonic choreography.
These artists are all exploring the shifting public sphere in everyday street negotiations by bringing latent dealmaking to light. They are also demonstrating that public art need not be monumental, tangible or large-scale to be effective or even
commemorative.
For instance: graffiti artist Breeze Yoko in
September last year sprayed the portrait of slain musician Gito Baloi onto a wall on the corner of Nuggett
and Kerk Streets, the site where Baloi was gunned
down in 2004. This was part of a broader public intervention Na Ku Randza (‘I Love You’) co-ordinated by the Centre for Historical Reenactments, based
at nearby August House.
Above the graffiti site stands a large pink elephant, which used to demarcate the Jumbo Liquor
Wholesalers and which was through this project
reimagined as a bearer of memory. The whole intervention was described as “a space in which mutual
recognition can be imagined alongside violent encounters, the slaying of Baloi being one of them”. A
policeman who sidled up in his van alongside was
perplexed but placated by a participant whose task it
seemed was to hand out roses to passersby.
While Yoko created his portrait, others laid out
a trajectory of the bullet that killed the musician by
writing in chalk the seconds left to the fatal moment
from each street corner. During the same intervention, two artists were engaged at a trader’s stall
bearing ritualistic objects in a performance piece
by Kemang Wa Lehulere. Adjacent, the Keleketla!
Library was silkscreening T-shirts bearing an antixenophobic statement: “Foreigners please stay.
Don’t leave us with the tourists.” The T-shirts were
later given away.
99
Indeed, a common thread is that such works are
rarely for sale. Like the T-shirts, they often challenge
accepted notions of value. In another recent work by
Kukama, called Cafe Exchange, staged at the Parking
Gallery in the eastern city premises of VANSA, this
challenge was more explicit. Visitors brought in an
object to contribute to the growing archive and received a cup of coffee in exchange. The strength of
the coffee was determined by the adjudicated “currency” of the object.
So how to fathom the value of art, if not through
its contribution to economic growth?
It has long been argued that not everything that
has value can be measured nor is measure necessarily an adequate way to reflect worth. Take the views
of David Boyle as articulated in The Tyranny of
Numbers (2001) or more recently Charles Kenny in
Getting Better (2011), who proposes there is more
to life than GDP. And indeed, the economic lens as
a whole is itself being re-evaluated with attempts
by politicians, economists and thinktanks to find a
more holistic measure of wellbeing. These efforts
add to established gains by developmental thinkers like Amartya Sen who, with Joseph Stiglitz and
Jean-Paul Fitoussi, articulated GDP’s limitations
with Mismeasuring our Lives (2010).
João Orecchia with his project Invisible Cities
has taken this challenge to a new dimension. Every
month, a transient space in the city plays host to a
multimedia installation of art, music and live performance. This has included the transformation of
defunct musical instruments - a piano, a trumpet,
and a guitar. The piano was burnt on the top of a
vacant innercity building, after handmade microphones were embedded inside it, and an arresting
timelapsed musical video was made of it crackling
100
and burning to ashes.
Orecchia said in an interview we conducted in
December last year: “What you’re left with at the end
is another kind of object, which is a symbol of that
transformation and life, if you can call it that, of this
piano. And all of that is a symbol of the transformation of Johannesburg - not in some grand sense of
gentrification and development but right here, right
now. Things are happening all the time and changing all the time. There is all this space and so much
of it is inaccessible. The whole impetus of Invisible
Cities is just to make a contribution.”
These artists are manifesting affective, ephemeral, intangible and transient work, often in the public
sphere, that Mzanzi’s Golden Economy cannot fathom - and yet they speak of what is enduring about
Mzanzi’s gold. This paradox is perhaps sufficient to
indicate the reductionist challenge of validating the
arts in economic terms.
Let’s turn to James Webb, who makes the audience work a little for their delight. His solo exhibition
‘MMXII’ is currently showing at the Johannesburg
Art Gallery until October 14. It includes 15 of his own
projects, in a part survey of his work, and a reimagining of the gallery’s collection. Above the entrance
is the signage “Know Thy Worth” - an indication that
the viewer completes the work’s meaning - and indeed, no artwork is handed on a platter. On a guided
July tour, he gave an inside track, pointing out a ‘secret’ artwork now part of JAG’s permanent collection. The ceiling light of an outside portico flashes
a message in morse code, to be deciphered by curious onlookers. There is an invisible sculpture embedded somewhere in the gallery that creates a dead
zone for cellphone reception unbeknown to visitors. And a light hidden in the bowels of one room
filters through. “It’s spooky, it’s weird, it’s me,” he
said with a laugh. “A lot of my work is as much about
concealing as revealing. I don’t want to give everything away. I’m not there to give statements but to
propose, suggest and seduce.”
This is a long way from the language of the DAC’s
latest arts strategy, where art is a tool of “social cohesion” and “nation building”. The ANC’s latest policy
documents also emphasise these objectives, along
with “national healing”, in its reference to the arts
sector. It calls for a deepening of the Mzanzi Golden
Economy strategy to increase the sector’s “local content generation, job creation and export potential”.
Notably, a social cohesion conference was held
very shortly after the debacle involving The Spear,
the painting that depicted President Jacob Zuma
with his genitals exposed and ignited a national
controversy for weeks. To reference the problematics, one only has to cite then Arts Minister
Lulu Xingwana, who in May 2010 refused to open
the Innovative Art Exhibition at Constitution Hill,
deeming works on show to be offensive. She invoked
“moral regeneration, social cohesion and nation
building” as the reason to discuss where to draw the
line between art and pornography.
As Andre Le Roux, the general manager of
the Southern African Music Rights Organisation
(SAMRO), said at a May creative economy conference in Johannesburg: “Art, works of the spirit,
products which emanate from creativity, are not that
easily packaged, commoditised and sold ... They are
laden with value -- traditional, contemporary, ornamental and controversial. For some, they may glitter
and be the highlight of cultural expression but for
others they are not as simple as extracting or refining gold.”
Gina Kraft often challenges perceptions of the
female body, from suntanning at Rosebank Mall
in a burqa to a meander through Park Station in a
misshapen bridal gown, leaking sand from her dress
as she walks by bewildered. More recently, a collaboration with Kieron Jina at a goldmine dump in
Ophirton in greater Johannesburg explored themes
around marriage, “creating new ceremonies from
established traditions, diverse cultures and stereotypical roles within a marriage partnership”, she
writes. The work, Stained, showed birthing from the
landscape, travelling through it, and the connection
of the characters through a tea-drinking ceremony.
Now that sounds like something the English
could have related to in London’s Olympic cultural
programme. Mzanzi’s Golden Economy, indeed.
101
AUDIOVISUAL CONTRIBUTIONS
The Zone
(In reference to Yamaneko’s machine)
Juan Orrantia
(Wits School of Art)
When invited to participate in this volume, I saw this
as a possibility of sharing a few experiences of artists/intellectuals in order to really look into, across
and hopefully beyond the borders of geography. But
more so, I wanted this to be a space where we could
engage with works that experiment with both form
and content, and do so through a concern with public intellectual engagement and the way in which
critical practices are shared, communicated or even
made available. So I thought of the Zone, the machine in Chris Markers’ film Sans Soleil, that transforms images, that fractures their iconicity, their
embedded and direct meanings, and opens up again
the possibilities of their true aesthetic capacities to
question history and memory. I thus see this space,
the Zone, as part of the ideal of a possible encounter
for southern voices, something particularly relevant
at a moment when complex associations of critical
thinking, theory, technology, creativity, sensuality
and politics are finally reaching out. In these new
formations (online platforms—see www.sensatejournal.com--, workshops, curated projects—see
South-South. Interruptions and Encounters, curated by Jon Soske--, and to a lesser extent independent publications—Chimurenga) one can find spaces and voices that continue to defy as Chris Marker,
Robert Gardner, Trinh T. Minh-ha and others did
not so long ago, the bounding effects of dominating
tendencies towards creative and critical practices.
102
Through the introduction of audiovisual contributions we seek to strengthen dialogues along nontraditional planes—geographical and disciplinary.
Opening up this space is an effort in the direction of
tackling the exceptionalism that has pervaded much
academic discourse and political practice. Even
though efforts in this direction are not new, the way
critical expressive practices are read is something
that needs to be furthered not only by opening up
parallel spaces for artists in academic discussions
and events, but in the pushing of boundaries that
unproductively tend to separate “the arts” from critical, engaged scholarly work. Through this, we want
to open spaces for those scholars, artists, or media
practitioners that continue to blur these boundaries
in innovative and critical ways.
Wanting to really look into the production of
southern voices, the Zone also seeks an engagement
with the limits of regional and nationalist paradigms that have made horizontal dialogues difficult.
We want to focus on those practitioners based in
non-traditional centers as a means to enable channels of interaction and communication. In places
outside the US and European academy, the conditions of production, imagination and public engagement have been read through an ethnographic if
not geopolitical boundary. This thinking has produced a national(ist) label on many of these works.
This is something that needs to be rethought, and
problematized. Think of this contribution then as
a call for these voices to be heard, literally, and engaged through their own conditions of being, that is
through the poetics and sensualities that sound, image and movement contain.
For this volume we chose four contributions from
Colombia. However, this number does not want to
be read as showcase of “Colombian documentary”,
but rather, as a way of approaching how, in a place
like Colombia, artists, intellectuals and media practitioners working in various mediums have been
reflecting on the experience of life amidst conflict.
The selection is introduced with a text by Maria
Victoria Uribe, one of the most committed scholars
in engaging violence and its implications for the way
we think about ourselves, as well as to how we live
through violence. Her piece provides the context of
the Colombian conflict, and introduces the role of
the arts with/in it. We then have three contributions
each in a different audiovisual medium: a film essay,
an audio/installation, and a photography project.
In Version Libre, Clemencia Echeverri, one of
Colombia’s most well known sound artists, relies on
the use of echoes, repetition and silences to engage
the idea of the phantom that lies within the experience of violence, this time, through the perpetrators themselves. Based on Colombia’s version of a
TRC, the confessions of these former paramilitaries
and guerrillas touches us but also itself. As Gustavo
Chirolla suggests in the catalogue that accompanies
this piece, “In Versión libre a specter has been installed at the same time as the spectral nature of
the medium is pointed out.” The experience of this
sound installation enables one to feel the agony of
those trying to speak behind the mask, that emblem
of the revolutionary that is also in this case been
used as the emblem of betrayal, torture, violence,
rape and massacre. The hidden face struggling to
speak suggests the struggle of the confession, its
fragmented nature, even its repetitiveness. It can
be also read as a critique of the process itself, which
is still being worked out in Colombia, and has also
been limited by political interests.
Re-membranzas is a reflexive work on memory,
violence, ruins and of the role of documentary in
these scenarios. Produced by Catalina Cortes (as a
work in progress), Re-membering is based on years
of following, befriending and visiting groups of
women that are working towards self initiated strategies of remembrance in Colombia. Her work takes
us up close through the silences created by years of
violence, through destruction and ruins, and shows
us the palpability of memory as an intimate, everyday act. But going beyond the representation itself,
and much in the line of Trinh t Minh-ha, Catalina’s
piece is a constant reflection on the documentary
genre. In the structure of a film essay, she constantly
questions the role of the representation, and continuously asks, reflects and pushes the limits of what it
means to represent the legacy of violence, but more
so, the idea of the ruin also as poetic possibility.
The last piece, titled The Afterlife of coca dreams
is my own contribution to the number. In it I have
engaged the specters of violence and the legacies of
shattered dreams through my own memories and
evocations of the aftermath of cocaine production
and paramilitarism as forms of everyday life. For
this, I am developing a photographic series through
which I present the aftermath of lives and dreams
once fueled by the illicit economies of cocaine production. However, these are images that also allow me to depict (and confront) my own imaginary
memories and fears of the violence around this, particularly in places where paramilitaries had a strong
authority, not just as an armed group, but as an everyday existence.
Together, the four contributions present an engagement with concepts, experiences and practices
of representation, truth, silence and memory. What
the zone
we hope to open up here then, is a horizontal look at
what is going on across the Atlantic through the aesthetic, evocative and expressive possibilities of practices that are committed to bringing experiences of
suffering, loss and hope to the forefront of a critical
aesthetic political sphere.
103
REFLECTIONS ON AESTHETICS
AND VIOLENCE IN COLOMBIA
(Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá)
Translated by Eduardo Arques
For Maria Victoria Uribe, the most interesting
questions about social suffering arise from the
interstices that exist between disciplines such
as anthropology, psychoanalysis and cultural
criticism, and random encounters with artists,
murderers and perpetrators – like those that
arose during a brief encounter she had one day
with a hit-man who, before she started with her
interview, told her: “I’d like to have two hearts,
one to deal with good people and another one to
deal with bad people, those having no enemies and
being dangerous because they betray”.
An unintelligible logic, in principle, for someone
who believes in having one heart, like I do. However,
it explains very well why in those societies with
catholic criminals – as Mexico and Colombia – the
only way of circulating between legality and illegality is by avoiding a collision between the good and
evil that everyone carries inside, and by having very
clear notions of friend and foe. From this point, I understood that one could be simultaneously a cruel
murderer and a pious devotee of God, as long as culture allows it. I thus recall something Zizek wrote
paraphrasing Chuang-Tse´s parable about a butterfly – also named by Lacan – where he mentions
a peaceful, kind, decent bourgeois teacher who,
for a moment, dreams about being a murderer. In
104
Colombia, murderers often dream about themselves
being decent people.
With a few exceptions, the Colombian conflict has
been studied from itself and within itself, which has
resulted in a vast volume of information and documentation almost unknown outside the country, and
that only in rare occasions has become part of global
academic discussions. Indeed, there are very few
studies that situate Colombian violence and its effects within the global context and discussions about
this topic.1 Thus, with the intention of inserting, the
topic of the Colombian conflict in global discussions
on contemporary wars and their consequences, I
find it relevant to take into consideration Achille
Mbembe’s text about “Necropolitics”2. I would like
to reuse the concept of “states of emergency”, used
by Mbembe in such an interesting article to refer to
those spaces where rights are suspended and institutions do not operate, a very similar concept to “spaces of terror”, used by anthropologist Michael Taussig
to refer to those abuses and atrocities committed at
the rubber plantations in Colombia.3. Regarding the
Colombian conflict, I consider the concept used by
Mbembe to be useful since many of the death spaces
in Colombia such us massacres, bloody assaults to
villages and massive kidnappings, constitute places
1 Some publications talk about the Colombian issue
within the context of wider discussions. See, for example
Apter, David, Ed. The legitimation of violence. United
Nations Research Institute for Social Development;
McMillan Press, London, 1997. See also Francisco
Ortega, Ed. Veena Das: Sujetos del dolor, agentes de
dignidad. Instituto Pensar Universidad Javeriana and
CES Universidad Nacional; Bogotá, 2008.
2 See Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics” Public Culture
15(1): 11–40; Duke University Press, 2003.
3 See Taussig, 1991.
where the Rule of Law is temporally suspended and
victims are reduced to things. In these contexts,
power is executed by lords of war, that in Colombia
are paramilitary and guerilla groups as well as other
criminal organizations dominating the spaces of terror, and that have the capacity to vanish the distinction between combatants and non-combatants.
For more than thirty years Colombia has been
living at least two simultaneous and uninterrupted
wars. Both paramilitary and guerrilla charge taxes
to the producers and merchants of cocaine and
participate actively in the drug commerce, investing
the earnings in weapons.
For more than thirty years Colombia has been living
at least two simultaneous and uninterrupted wars.
The first one started by 1980 and lived its most critical moment during the 1990s, when government
and institutions were frontally attacked by the drug
cartel of Medellin. The war took place mostly within
big cities and left a large number of deaths – among
them, three presidential candidates, several ministers of Justice, justice officials, left-wing intellectuals, judges, prosecutors, Trade Unions leaders,
journalists, Human Rights activists and citizens
who were killed by means of bullets or because of
powerful bombs. Cali and Medellin Cartels were dismantled and afterwards they were replaced by micro-cartels acting within the underground, without
facing the State, and in alliance with the different
Mexican cartels.
The other war has a lot of edges and it is connected with the first one due to the main armed actors’ financing and benefiting from drug trafficking.
This second war that began in the mid 20th Century,
and has not finished, is an ongoing conflict around
land distribution. Colombia has never had a serious
land reform, which implies the monopoly of land by
a few. The main actors of this confrontation are the
State Armed Forces, two guerilla groups--Colombia Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the
National Liberation Army (ELN), and right wing
paramilitary groups. It is an irregular war where
guerilla groups have had a strategy focused on attacks to police stations and military positions, the
use of non-conventional weapons and the final retrenchment to the mountains. Police Stations are located in the centre of villages and, because of that, a
lot of civilians die because of the use of gas cylinders,
used as mortars by the guerilla. At the same time,
and as a response to the guerilla groups, the paramilitary groups, blessed by active and retired military commanders have massacred in innumerable
occasions, killing those civilians that were believed
to help the guerilla groups.
Both paramilitary and FARC guerilla charge taxes
to the producers and merchants of cocaine and participate actively from the drug commerce, investing
the earnings in weapons; both guerilla and paramilitary groups have ransacked oil and product pipelines. They have also implemented criminal practices such as extortion and kidnapping. Nowadays,
the Colombian State of war against insurgency is
characterized by the partial recovering of the monopoly of force by the military commanders and
the FARC’s tactical retrenchment to jungle areas
close to Venezuela and Brazil. I would not hesitate
to establish a first difference with Mexico, where the
State has not had important insurgent enemies; the
Mexican State, which had the force monopoly until a
decade ago and controlled the national territory, has
been losing that control over the vast areas nowadays dominated by the drug cartels, the Zetas and
the paramilitary groups.
I do not know which will be the dimensions of
the death squads in Mexico, but I can affirm that the
Colombian paramilitary groups, united by the acronym AUC, and acting in alliance with army sectors,
created an armed force divided in 34 structures and
around 34000 fighters, committed 1755 massacres,
36000 citizens disappeared and, according to the
Public Prosecutor Office, they have been accused of
178000 murders.4 The paramilitary groups consolidated their empire at the expense of the smear of a
guerilla, used to the systematic burning of villages,
kidnapping, cattle robbery and extortion – which
in turn facilitated the recruitment of supporters
and followers to the paramilitary cause. The AUC
agenda focused on the violent expulsion of farmers
considered as alleged guerilla supporters and the
consequent usurpation of their land. Due to this way
of proceeding, Colombia has around 4 million internal displaced people surviving in big city slums of
poverty and rootlessness. This strategy of expelling
the population has been sponsored by landlords and
rural businessmen, and has been implemented by
the paramilitary groups looking forward to consolidating strategic corridors to facilitate weapons and
drugs transport, as well as the expansion of their territorial control.
With the recent dispatch of the Law of Victims
and Land Restitution, issued in 20125, President
Santos’ Government is trying to settle the huge debt
4 Data taken from the Public Prosecutor’s Office for
Justice and Peace web page, 2011.
5 LAW 1448 DE 2011. See link: http://www.putumayo.gov.
co/documentos2012/ley_devctimas.pdf
the country has with the victims of this conflict and
with the dispossessed farmers, who continue to live
amidst threats and selective murders of communal
leaders. This Law has become the key test to see if
it is possible to refrain landlords, stockbreeders
and agricultural businessmen from using violent
methods and expedite procedures for the accumulation of capital, or if, on the other hand, they will
impose their law again through the assassination of
those peasants now reclaiming their lands from the
government. Assuming that after the four years of
Santos’ government the goal of allocating 2 million
hectares stolen from farmers all over the country is
achieved, the outreach of this program will be modest compared to the 6 million hectares that were
taken from peasants all over the country. This expropriation of lands with blood and fire is similar to
a land reform but the other way round, benefiting
only a handful of people.
... cruelty, servitude and lack of compassion to the
other have been the predominant characteristics
in Colombia, and many victims have no words to
verbalize what happened to them ...
Although cruelty, servitude and lack of compassion
to the other have been the predominant characteristics in Colombia, and many victims have no words
to verbalize what happened to them, in comparison
to the Holocaust, Slavery or Apartheid 6, it is definitely at a different scale. Although it is impossible
to neglect the existence of State crimes in Colombia,
the extreme forms of violence in the country have
6 Achille Mbembe “African modes of self-writing”.
Public Culture 14 (1): 239-273; Duke University Press,
2002.
105
a located and fragmentary nature. With the exception of the extermination of 3000 members of the
left-wing political party Unión Patriótica (Patriotic
Union) carried out by the state’s armed forces, paramilitary groups and drug lords, the spaces of devastation in Colombia are conscribed to certain locations, small places were thousands of people were
murdered, mutilated or disappeared over the last fifty years. We are talking of a chronic form of violence
at a very slow pace, where in most cases there is no
sense of shared mourning or collective memories.
We are talking of a chronic form of violence at a
very slow pace, where in most cases there is no
sense of shared mourning or collective memories.
Despite the deep social inequalities existing in
Colombia and despite the presence of an important
movement of victims considering the State as the
main violator of Human Rights, Colombian democracy cannot be compared to a military dictatorship
like those of the Southern American Hemisphere
that took place during the 1970s and1980s. The
Colombian State has been traditionally a week
state, with lack of control over the national territory. However, it is far from being a collapsed state
because of having strong institutions committed
to truth, justice and memory. Indeed, most of the
truth behind the war atrocities committed is starting to be known through state institutions such as
the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Attorney’s Office,
the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of
Justice, as well as the testimonies and memories
compiled by organizations of victims and NGOs. The
Supreme Court of Justice has investigated the relationship between the drug trade, paramilitarism and
106
corruption, and has imprisoned a growing number
of Representatives, Mayors and Governors because
of their links with criminal activities. The many Acts
of Memory promoted and carried out by the different organizations have played a fundamental role in
expanding the knowledge about what happened. As
Beatriz Sarlo says, “there is no Truth, but the subjects have become knowledgeable”.7 This is, grosso
modo, the partial result of the evident links of paramilitary groups with Colombian State institutions.
Since the XIX century, there has been in Colombia
a tendency to an almost unlimited practice of amnesty, forgiveness and oblivion; this has produced
a terrible lack of memory among citizens. Today,
that tradition of impunity and silence is encountering tension with the growing internationalization of justice that imposes legal, as well social and
ethical tolerance limits to the rutinary modes that
make everything negotiable, even everyday and organized crime. That is why the Law of Justice and
Peace, promulgated during the first Uribe Vélez
Government and ratified by Congress in 2005 in order to judge the paramilitary groups’ crimes, marks
an important change regarding previous amnesties
through the establishment of a process for transitional justice that sets a maximum of penalties of 8
years for non-reprieved criminal offences—as long
as these offences are confessed by those perpetrators acknowledging the Law. From the 31671 paramilitary combatants who voluntarily demobilized
between 2002 and 2010, only 2700 were selected
by the Government to qualify for alternative penalties stipulated by the Law of Justice and Peace in exchange for the confession of their crimes. They are
the ones giving their testimonies and receiving, in
exchange, subtle, alternative penalties.
After six years of the process, the results are
contradictory. On the one hand, one cannot deny
the empowerment of victims’ movements and the
importance that topics such as reparation and historical memory have achieved among the population. Before the promulgation of the Law of Justice
and Peace nobody talked about victims in Colombia.
It is, therefore, a new social category that has become a central part of the official language. The
uncountable anonymous victims of the war are no
longer with us. However, their families have come
together and their voices become a subalteralterity
with the strength of a defiant memory from which
to face the injustices they have suffered. Their pain
echoes Adorno and Bejamin’s approaches to history
as suffering and the memory of those who suffer as a
subversive dimension of History.8 To date there are
more than 380000 registered victims at the Public
Prosecutor’s Office waiting for the State to repair
their suffering. The victims of State crimes, not recognized by the Colombian State a year ago, enjoy a
better status nowadays compared to the Uribe Vélez
government—who outrageously did not recognized
their rights, for recognizing them would have implied accepting that the State had violated Human
Rights.
Another positive aspect of this process is that it
has transformed Colombians into witnesses of an
7 See Sarlo, 2005: 50-67.
8 Taken from Luis Joaquín Rebolo, 2004.
The Law of Justice and Peace and the
transitional process of justice
unseen accumulation of public revelations coming
from several sources. Firstly, there are the voluntary
confessions from paramilitary leaders within the
free versions (Versiones Libres), which has offered
the Prosecutor’s Office the knowledge and chance to
prosecute more than 178000 murders that ordinary
judiciary did not know about. Although these confessions have been half-truths, built-up from what
the confessing subject wants to remember, or forget,
what s/he intentionally silences, what their cultural
skills allow them to capture from the past, what rhetorical devices are used to argue, attack or defend
themselves, what s/he knows from personal experience and what s/he knows through the experience of
third-parties… regardless of all that, it is undeniable
what these confessions have contributed to truth.9
The second source of public truths has been set
up from the questioning carried out by the Supreme
Court to politicians linked to drug trading and paramilitary groups, something that led to a phenomenon known in Colombia as “parapolitics”. According
to Human Rights NGOs, because of this there are
more than 30 politicians currently in prison, among
them 9 representatives, 2 governors, 5 mayors, the
ex-director of the National Security Office and several public officers, apart from a good number of
other ex-representatives, regional councilors, departmental deputies and public officers who are
being investigated, have warrants of arrest or have
been already condemned.
However, the most distressing aspect of the process of Justice and Peace has been its incapability to
insist in the non-repetition of atrocious acts. Despite
9 See Sarlo, 2005: 80.
the demobilization and the revelations and consequent punishment of criminal acts, paramilitary actions have not disappeared from the national and
local scenario. These groups have been recycled into
the so-called BACRIM or criminal gangs, a fashionable euphemism among military and police authorities to refer to the new expanding paramilitarism. It
imitates again the atrocious practices of their predecessors. Making an analogy with Mexico, we can say
that these criminal bands are similar to Los Zetas
since they are integrated by ex-military agents, ordinary criminals and hit-men keen on extreme violence. Another perverse effect of this process is the
fact that 19000 demobilized paramilitary agents
have been left out by Justice and Peace, their crimes
remaining unpunished. These are non-amnestied
fighters remaining in a juridical limbo.
Despite the efforts made by institutions to reduce and limit organized crime, Colombian society
is now debating between chronic boredom, generalized skepticism, and the urgency to put an end to so
many years of war. The war between the Colombian
State and FARC continues while paramilitary groups
and drug cartels are recycling themselves; that is
why it is difficult to praise the impact and the importance of a process of transitional justice that has
taken place in the midst of war, and that by definition should have influenced democratic expansion.
In a few years, when we have processed the amount
of terrifying truths confessed by the paramilitary
groups and we have a clear view and certainty of
the ways in which Congress and the Chamber of
Representatives participated in the dance of blood,
when we know which companies financed the dirty
war, only then will we have true knowledge of the
dimensions of this universe of victimization. Only
Despite the efforts made to reduce and limit
organized crime, Colombian society is now caught
between chronic boredom, generalized scepticism,
and the urgency to put an end to so many years of
war.
then will we be able to affirm that maybe all the pain
and suffering were worth, because they contributed
to making us a better country.
Although the volume and atrocity of the crimes
committed in Colombia would have warranted the
process, the Law of Justice and Peace did not choose
an extolled judicial truth such as that of the tribunals of Nüremberg, Rwanda and the old Yugoslavia.
Despite the fact that Nüremberg has been, and still
is an obligatory reference for experiments regarding
transitional justice that pursue questions about the
relationships between judicial and historical truth,
in Colombia we opted for a process that has been
unveiling the truth of war at a very slow pace. This
has left us with partial judiciary prosecutions that
did not achieve to delineate the real profiles of what
paramilitarism was, leaving behind what could be a
real historical trial with pedagogical and therapeutic
effects for society.
In the middle of the desolation left in the wake of
violence and war, some Colombian artists have been
concerned with its representation. In general terms,
we could say that artistic representations of violence
in Colombia have used two opposite strategies: a literal one reproducing the experience of violence as
realistically as possible, and a metaphorical one that
renounces the direct reference in favor of suggestion
and evocation. Indeed, violence has been a recurrent topic within the work of two Colombian artists, Doris Salcedo and Clemencia Echeverri. Both
107
ground for the quick and covert disposal of bodies.
Yet, without using images of horror and extreme
cruelty, she achieves, as the water level grows, the
feeling of drowning of those located in the midst of
the scene; only at the end and in an allusive way,
we find traces –rags of clothing-- of a necropolitics
carried away by the river’s current. But this is not
about avoiding such representations because of a
moral shame or caution. Rather, the artist seeks to
achieve something else through the abandonment of
the sensational and the spectacle of death: Treno is
more like the scream or the uproar than the horror.10
of them try to represent the unrepresentable of violence, what has no expression, what anthropologists
and historians are not able to capture in words. In
front of this devastating picture portraying a chronic
violence that has no end, the propitiatory experience
of art has intended to build a bridge between the
representation of the conflict and the unrepresentable suffering, between understanding and feeling,
avoiding the dramatization and the aesthetization of
the victims and the perpetrators.
In a recent work from the artist Clemencia
Echeverri, violence is represented through sounds
making reference to the spaces of terror. It is an
audiovisual work reproducing female voices that
search but cannot find, voices impossible to locate
because they do not belong to the narrative reality.
Indeed, in the audio-visual installation Treno, the
artist located the audience in between two large projections of the Cauca River facing each other. This
river carries a strong connotation in Colombia, because of its use by paramilitary groups as a dumping
108
In the works of Doris Salcedo it is objects such
as chairs, shirts, beds and shoes that refer us to
disappearance, to the destruction without signs that
has characterized Colombian violence.
tools such as metonymy in order to establish links
and analogies between violence, flowers, animals
and certain objects such as chairs, shirts, shoes
and others considered as meaningful. Their work
controverts the effects of the massive infiltration of
bloody images that circulated through mass media
in Colombia for years, and which ended creating
saturation in the audience, what we could call a voyeuristic saturation of horror. We see this saturation
of bloody images today in Mexican newspapers and
magazines publishing without reserve photographs
of severed bodies, replicating the game of terror
and confusion imposed by the war lords. As if the
bloody images could become explanatory texts on
violence and not what they really are, symptoms of
the unspeakable.
In the works of Doris Salcedo it is objects such as
chairs, shirts, beds and shoes that refer us to disappearance, to the destruction without signs that has
characterized Colombian violence. In her most recent work, Shibboleth, the artist broke the floor of
the Tate Modern in London digging a crack of 167m
long from one end of the gallery to another. In this
way, Salcedo transformed her work into a powerful
symbol that stated “racism is not a symptom of the
disquiet the first world society suffers, but the illness in itself”.
In different sound, photographic and visual
works, and through a few elements condensing universes of complex and contradictory meanings, the
mentioned artists refer to violence from an indirect
perspective. For that purpose, they intuitively use
10 Taken from Chirolla, 2010.
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109
REFLEXIONES SOBRE ESTÉTICA
Y VIOLENCIA EN COLOMBIA
(Antropóloga, Universidad del Rosario,
Bogotá)
Las preguntas más interesantes respecto al sufrimiento social surgen en los intersticios entre disciplinas como la antropología, el psicoanálisis y la
crítica cultural y en encuentros fortuitos con artistas, homicidas y perpetradores. Como aquel fugaz encuentro que tuve una tarde con un asesino a
sueldo quien antes de comenzar mi interrogatorio
me dijo lo siguiente: “Yo quisiera tener dos corazones, uno para tratar con la gente buena y otro
para tratar con la gente mala, esa que no tiene enemigos y es peligrosa porque traiciona”. Una lógica, en principio, ininteligible para una persona que
como yo cree tener un solo corazón; sin embargo,
explica muy bien porque en sociedades donde los
delincuentes son católicos creyentes, y tal es el caso
de México y Colombia, la única manera de circular
entre la legalidad y la ilegalidad es evitando que
colisionen el bien y el mal que cada quien lleva por
dentro y teniendo bien claro quiénes son los amigos
y quienes los enemigos. A partir de allí entendí que
se puede ser asesino cruel y devoto practicante de
manera simultánea, siempre y cuando la cultura lo
permita. Me viene a la memoria un texto de Zizek
quien parafraseando la parábola de Chuang-Tse y la
mariposa, que es también una de las referencias de
Lacan, hace referencia a un profesor burgués tranquilo, bondadoso y decente que, por un momento,
sueña que es un asesino. En Colombia los asesinos
sueñan, con frecuencia, que son personas decentes.
110
Con contadas excepciones, al conflicto colombiano se le ha estudiado a partir de sí mismo y en
sí mismo, lo que ha dado por resultado un volumen
considerable de información y documentación que
poco se conoce por fuera del país y que rara vez ha
entrado a formar parte de las discusiones académicas globales. En efecto, son muy pocos los estudios
que ubican el caso de la violencia colombiana y sus
efectos en el contexto y en la discusión global sobre el tema. 1 Por otro lado, y con miras a insertar
la discusión del conflicto colombiano en discusiones
globales acerca de las guerras contemporáneas y sus
secuelas, resulta pertinente tomar en consideración
el texto de Achille Mbembe sobre “Necropolítica.”2
De tan interesante artículo me interesa retomar el
concepto de “estados de excepción” utilizado por
Mbembe para referirse a aquellos espacios donde
quedan suspendidos los derechos y no operan las
instituciones, un concepto muy parecido al de los
“espacios del terror” utilizado por el antropólogo
Michael Taussig para referirse a los abusos y atrocidades de las prácticas de la cauchería en Colombia. 3
En lo que respecta al conflicto colombiano, considero útil el concepto de Mbembe en tanto muchos de
los espacios de la muerte en Colombia, tales como
masacres, tomas sangrientas a pueblos y secuestros
1 Algunas publicaciones se ocupan del tema colombiano
en el contexto de discusiones más amplias. Véase, por
ejemplo, Apter, David, Ed. The legitimation of violence.
United Nations Research Institute for Social Development;
McMillan Press, London, 1997.También véase Francisco
Ortega, Ed. Veena Das: Sujetos del dolor, agentes de
dignidad. Instituto Pensar Universidad Javeriana y CES
Universidad Nacional; Bogotá, 2008.
2 Véase Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics” Public
Culture 15(1): 11–40; Duke University Press, 2003.
3 Véase Taussig, 1991.
masivos, configuran lugares donde queda temporalmente suspendido el estado de derecho y las víctimas son reducidas a cosas. En estos, el poder lo ejercen señores de la guerra, que para el caso colombiano son paramilitares, guerrilleros y demás bandas
criminales, quienes dominan los espacios del terror
y hacen desaparecer la distinción entre combatientes y no combatientes.
Desde hace más de treinta años en Colombia se
viven de una manera simultánea y casi ininterrumpida al menos dos guerras. La primera de ellas comenzó hacia 1980 y tuvo su momento más crítico
durante la década de 1990 cuando gobiernos e instituciones fueron atacados frontalmente por el cartel
del narcotráfico de Medellín. Dicha guerra se libró
principalmente en las grandes ciudades y dejó a su
paso incontables muertos, entre ellos tres candidatos presidenciales, varios ministros de Justicia,
operadores judiciales, intelectuales de izquierda,
jueces y fiscales, dirigentes sindicales, periodistas,
defensores de derechos humanos y ciudadanos que
murieron abatidos por las balas y las potentes bombas del narcotráfico. Los carteles de Cali y Medellín
fueron desmantelados y posteriormente se han visto
reemplazados por micro-carteles que actúan en la
sombra, sin enfrentarse al Estado, en alianza con los
diferentes carteles mexicanos.
La otra guerra tiene muchas aristas y se conecta
con la primera debido a que los actores armados
que la protagonizan también se nutren del narcotráfico. Esta segunda guerra comenzó a mediados del
siglo XX, no ha terminado aún y gira alrededor del
problema de la tierra pues, a diferencia de México,
en Colombia nunca se hizo una reforma agraria
lo que se traduce en el monopolio sobre la tierra
por parte de unos cuantos. La confrontación tiene
como protagonistas a las fuerzas armadas estatales, a dos grupos guerrilleros, las Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia FARC y el Ejército de
Liberación Nacional y a los grupos paramilitares.
Es una guerra irregular en la cual los grupos guerrilleros han tenido una estrategia centrada en los
ataques a estaciones de policía y puestos militares,
con armas no convencionales, y el posterior repliegue a las montañas. Las estaciones de Policía están
situadas en el centro de los pueblos y por ello en
estos ataques con cilindros de gas, acondicionados
como morteros, mueren muchos civiles a manos de
la guerrilla. A su vez, y como respuesta al accionar
guerrillero, los paramilitares, con la anuencia de
militares activos y retirados, han ejecutado innumerables masacres donde han muerto civiles considerados auxiliadores de la guerrilla.
Tanto paramilitares como guerrilleros de las
FARC cobran impuestos a los productores y comerciantes de cocaína y participan activamente del comercio de estupefacientes, recursos que invierten en la
compra de armamento; ambas guerrillas y paramilitares han recurrido al saqueo de oleoductos y poliductos, así como a la implementación de prácticas
delincuenciales como la extorsión y el secuestro. En
su fase actual la guerra del Estado colombiano contra la insurgencia se caracteriza por la recuperación
parcial del monopolio de la fuerza por parte de los
militares y el repliegue táctico de las FARC a territorios selváticos colindantes con Venezuela y Brasil.
Me atrevería a señalar una primera diferencia con
México donde el Estado no ha tenido enemigos insurgentes de consideración; el Estado mexicano,
que hasta hace una década tuvo el monopolio de la
fuerza y el control sobre el territorio nacional, ha ido
perdiendo el dominio sobre extensas zonas que hoy
en día son dominadas por los carteles de la droga,
Los Zetas y los grupos paramilitares.
No conozco cuales serán las dimensiones de los
escuadrones de la muerte en México pero si puedo
afirmar que los paramilitares colombianos, reunidos bajo la sigla AUC y actuando en alianza con sectores del Ejército, conformaron un cuerpo armado
compuesto por 34 estructuras y cerca de 34.000
combatientes, cometieron 1755 masacres, 36.000
ciudadanos fueron víctimas de desaparición forzada
y, según la Fiscalía General de la Nación, hasta el
momento se les han imputado 178.000 homicidios.4
Los paramilitares consolidaron su imperio a costa
del desprestigio de una guerrilla que se acostumbró
a la quema sistemática de pueblos, al secuestro, al
robo de ganado y a la extorsión, lo que facilitó el reclutamiento de simpatizantes y adeptos a la causa
paramilitar. El accionar de las AUC se centró en
la expulsión violenta de campesinos considerados
como presuntos auxiliadores de la guerrilla y en la
usurpación de sus tierras. Debido a este proceder,
Colombia tiene cerca de cuatro millones de desplazados internos que sobreviven en medio de la
pobreza y el desarraigo en tugurios de las grandes
ciudades. La estrategia de expulsar a la población ha
sido liderada por terratenientes y empresarios del
campo e implementada por los paramilitares que
han buscado consolidar corredores estratégicos que
faciliten el transporte de armas y estupefacientes así
como la expansión de sus dominios.
A partir de la reciente expedición de la Ley
de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras de 2012 5, el
4 Datos tomados del portal de la Fiscalía de Justicia y
Paz. Fiscalía General de la Nación, 2011.
5 LEY 1448 DE 2011. Véase el link: http://www.
putumayo.gov.co/documentos2012/ley_devctimas.pdf
gobierno del presidente Santos intenta saldar la
enorme deuda que el país tiene con las víctimas
del conflicto y con los campesinos desposeídos, en
medio de amenazas y asesinatos selectivos de líderes y liderezas. La Ley de Víctimas y Restitución
de Tierras se ha convertido en la prueba de sangre
acerca de si es posible contener a los terratenientes,
ganaderos y empresarios agrícolas que acuden a métodos violentos y expeditos de acumulación de capital o si, al contrario, ellos volverán a imponer su ley
mediante el asesinato de los campesinos a quienes
el gobierno les restituya sus tierras. Suponiendo que
después de los cuatro años del gobierno Santos se
logren adjudicar dos millones de hectáreas, sus alcances serán modestos si se los compara con los 6
millones de hectáreas que les fueron despojadas a
los campesinos en todo el país. Esta expropiación de
tierras a sangre y fuego semeja una reforma agraria
pero a la inversa y en beneficio de unos pocos.
Aunque en Colombia la crueldad, la sevicia y la falta de compasión por el otro han sido las características predominantes, y muchas víctimas no alcanzan
a nombrar lo que les ocurrió, comparativamente
con el Holocausto, la Esclavitud o el Apartheid6 la
escala es definitivamente otra. Aunque es innegable
la existencia de crímenes de Estado en Colombia,
las formas extremas de violencia en el país son de
naturaleza fragmentaria y localizada. Con excepción
del exterminio de más de 3000 integrantes del partido político de izquierda Unión Patriótica, llevado a
cabo por militares, paramilitares y narcotraficantes,
el espacio de la devastación en Colombia se circunscribe a las localidades, a lugares discretos en los
6 Achille Mbembe “African modes of self-writing”.
Public Culture 14 (1): 239-273; Duke University Press,
2002.
111
cuales han sido asesinadas, mutiladas o desaparecidas miles de personas, a lo largo de los últimos
cincuenta años. Estamos hablando de una violencia
crónica, a cuenta gotas, que en la mayoría de los casos no da lugar ni a duelos compartidos, ni a memorias colectivas.
Pese a las profundas desigualdades sociales que
existen en Colombia y a la presencia de un movimiento importante de víctimas que consideran al
Estado como el principal violador de los derechos
humanos, la democracia colombiana no puede ser
equiparada a una dictadura militar como las que
hubo en el Cono Sur americano durante las décadas
de 1970 y 1980. El Estado colombiano ha sido tradicionalmente un estado débil, con escaso control sobre el territorio nacional, sin embargo está lejos de
ser un estado colapsado pues cuenta con instituciones fuertes comprometidas con la construcción de
la verdad, la justicia y la memoria. En efecto, gran
parte de la verdad acerca de las atrocidades de la
guerra comienza a conocerse precisamente gracias a
instituciones como la Fiscalía General de la Nación,
la Procuraduría, la Corte Constitucional y la Corte
Suprema de Justicia y a las memorias recogidas
por organizaciones de víctimas y ONG’s. La Corte
Suprema de Justicia ha investigado la relación existente entre narcotráfico, paramilitarismo y corrupción y ha llevado a la cárcel a un número creciente
de congresistas, representantes, alcaldes y gobernadores por sus nexos con la delincuencia. Los actos de
memoria propiciados por las diferentes organizaciones han sido una pieza fundamental para ampliar
el conocimiento sobre lo ocurrido, actos sostenidos a veces por el estado y de forma permanente
por las organizaciones de la sociedad. Como bien
dice Beatriz Sarlo, “no hay Verdad pero los sujetos,
112
paradójicamente se han vuelto cognoscibles”.7 Este
es, a grandes rasgos, el resultado parcial de los evidentes vínculos de los paramilitares con las instituciones del Estado Colombiano.
Desde el siglo XIX en Colombia ha existido una propensión a la práctica casi ilimitada de la amnistía,
el perdón y el olvido; a ello debemos la desmemoria
rampante que impera entre los ciudadanos. Hoy, esa
tradición de impunidad y silencio se encuentra en
tensión con la creciente internacionalización de la
justicia que impone límites normativos y de tolerancia social y ética a los modos rutinarios de hacer
todo negociable, incluso el delito común y el crimen
organizado. Por ello la Ley de Justicia y Paz, promulgada durante el primer gobierno de Uribe Vélez y
sancionada por el Congreso en 2005 para juzgar los
crímenes del paramilitarismo, marca un cambio importante respecto a las amnistías anteriores al establecer un proceso de justicia transicional con penas
máximas de 8 años para los delitos no indultables,
siempre y cuando estos sean confesados por los perpetradores que se acojan a la ley. De los 31.671 combatientes paramilitares que se desmovilizaron voluntariamente entre 2002 y 2010, únicamente 2700
excombatientes fueron escogidos por el gobierno
para recibir las penas alternativas que estipula la
Ley de Justicia y Paz a cambio de la confesión de sus
crímenes. Son ellos quienes rinden sus testimonios
y reciben, a cambio, penas alternativas muy leves.
A seis años de iniciado el proceso, los resultados
de Justicia y Paz son contradictorios. Por un lado,
es innegable el empoderamiento de los movimientos
de víctimas y la importancia que han adquirido los
temas de la reparación y la memoria histórica entre los colombianos. Antes de la promulgación de la
Ley de Justicia y Paz nadie hablaba de víctimas en
Colombia. Se trata, por lo tanto, de una nueva categoría social que hoy ocupa un lugar central en los
lenguajes oficiales. Las incontables víctimas anónimas que ha dejado la guerra ya no están entre nosotros, sin embargo sus familiares se han agrupado
y sus voces conforman una subalternidad que tiene
la fuerza de una memoria desafiante desde la cual
confrontan las injusticias de las que han sido objeto.
Son seres cuyo dolor hace eco a los planteamientos
de Adorno y de Benjamin respecto a la historia como
sufrimiento y a la memoria de los sufrientes como
una dimensión subversiva de la Historia.8 Hoy por
hoy hay más de 380.000 víctimas registradas ante
la Fiscalía que esperan ser reparadas por el Estado.
Las víctimas de crímenes de Estado, que hasta hace
apenas un año no eran reconocidas por el Estado colombiano, hoy gozan de un mejor estatus respecto
al gobierno de Uribe Vélez quien desconoció flagrantemente sus derechos pues reconocerlas a ellas era aceptar que el Estado ha sido violador de los
derechos humanos.
Otro de los aspectos positivos del proceso de
Justicia y Paz es que nos ha convertido a los colombianos en testigos de un cúmulo inédito de revelaciones públicas que emanan de varias fuentes. En
primer lugar están las confesiones voluntarias de los
cabecillas paramilitares en las versiones libres, confesiones que le han permitido a la Fiscalía conocer e
7 Véase Sarlo, 2005: 50-67.
8 La ley de Justicia y Paz y el proceso
de justicia transicional
Tomado de Luis Joaquín Rebolo, 2004.
imputar más de 178.000 homicidios que no conocía
la justicia ordinaria. Aunque las confesiones han resultado ser verdades a medias, construidas a partir
de lo que el sujeto se permite o puede recordar, lo
que olvida, lo que calla intencionalmente, lo que sus
destrezas culturales le permiten captar del pasado,
lo que utiliza como dispositivo retórico para argumentar, atacar o defenderse, lo que conoce por experiencia y lo que conoce por terceros, es indudable el
aporte a la verdad que han hecho estas confesiones. 9
La segunda fuente de verdades públicas se ha
configurado a partir de las indagatorias hechas por la
Corte Suprema de Justicia a políticos vinculados con
el narcotráfico y el paramilitarismo, lo que ha dado
lugar al fenómeno denominado en Colombia como
“parapolítica”. Según datos de ONG’s de Derechos
Humanos, hay más de 30 dirigentes políticos detenidos, entre ellos 9 congresistas, 2 gobernadores,
5 alcaldes, el ex director de la Agencia gubernamental de Seguridad y varios de sus funcionarios y un
considerable número de ex parlamentarios, concejales, diputados departamentales, ex mandatarios y
funcionarios investigados, con órdenes de captura
vigentes o condenados.
Sin embargo, el aspecto más preocupante del
proceso de Justicia y Paz ha sido su incapacidad para
incidir en la no repetición de los hechos atroces. A
pesar de las desmovilizaciones y de los hechos delictivos revelados y sancionados, el paramilitarismo no
ha desaparecido del escenario nacional y local pues
se ha reciclado a través de las llamadas BACRIM o
bandas criminales, un eufemismo en boga entre las
autoridades militares y de policía para referirse al
9 Véase Sarlo, 2005: 80.
paramilitarismo de nuevo cuño que está en expansión y replica nuevamente las prácticas atroces de
sus predecesores. Haciendo una analogía con México
se puede decir que estas bandas delincuenciales recuerdan a Los Zetas pues están integradas por ex
militares, delincuentes comunes y sicarios muy proclives a la violencia extrema. Otro efecto perverso
del proceso de Justicia y Paz ha sido el hecho de los
19.000 paramilitares desmovilizados que Justicia y
Paz dejó por fuera de su alcance y cuyos crímenes
han quedado en la impunidad. Estos fueron combatientes rasos cuyos crímenes no han sido amnistiados
y permanecen en un limbo jurídico.
Hoy en día y a pesar de los intentos que han hecho
las instituciones por reducir y acotar los límites y los
alcances de la delincuencia organizada, la sociedad
colombiana se debate entre el cansancio crónico, el
escepticismo generalizado y la urgencia por poner
fin a tantos años de guerra. La guerra entre el Estado
colombiano y las FARC continúa mientras los paramilitares y los carteles del narcotráfico se reciclan;
por ello, es difícil ponderar el impacto y la importancia que ha tenido un proceso de justicia transicional que ha transcurrido en medio de la guerra y
que por definición tendría que haber incidido en la
ampliación de la democracia. En unos años, cuando
hayamos procesado el cúmulo de verdades atroces
confesadas por los paramilitares y sepamos a ciencia cierta de que manera el Congreso y la Cámara de
Representantes entraron en el baile de sangre y cuales empresas financiaron la guerra sucia, podremos
conocer a cabalidad las dimensiones del universo de
la victimización, podremos afirmar que quizá todo el
dolor y el sufrimiento valieron la pena porque contribuyeron a convertirnos en un mejor país.
Aunque el volumen y la atrocidad de los crímenes
cometidos en Colombia lo hubieran ameritado, la
ley de Justicia y Paz no optó por una verdad judicial
exaltada a la manera de los tribunales Nüremberg,
Ruanda o la antigua Yugoslavia. Desde el tribunal
de Nüremberg verdad histórica y verdad judicial,
sus diferencias, el abismo que las separa y el juego
de sus recíprocas determinaciones, han sido objeto
de reflexión académica y de decisiones políticas. A
pesar de que Nüremberg ha sido, y continúa siendo,
una referencia obligada para los experimentos de
justicia transicional que se preguntan por las relaciones entre verdad judicial y verdad histórica, en
Colombia optamos por un proceso que ha ido develando las verdades de la guerra a cuenta gotas, con
imputaciones judiciales parciales que no logran delinear los contornos reales de lo que fue el paramilitarismo, y van dejando de lado lo que podría ser un
verdadero juicio histórico con efectos pedagógicos y
terapéuticos para la sociedad.
En medio de la desolación que han dejado a su
paso la violencia y la guerra, algunos artistas colombianos se han preocupado por su representación.
Generalizando podemos decir que las representaciones artísticas sobre la violencia en Colombia se
han valido de dos estrategias contrarias: una literal que reproduce la experiencia de la violencia tan
fielmente como sea posible y la otra, una estrategia
metafórica que renuncia a la referencia directa, en
favor de la sugestión y la evocación. En efecto, la
violencia ha sido un tema recurrente en la obra de
dos artistas colombianas: Doris Salcedo y Clemencia
Echeverry. Ambas se han propuesto representar lo
irrepresentable de la violencia, lo que no tiene expresión, aquello que antropólogos e historiadores
no somos capaces de poner en palabras. Ante el
panorama desolador de una violencia crónica que
113
no termina de pasar, la experiencia propiciatoria
del arte ha pretendido tender un puente entre la
representación del conflicto y el sufrimiento irrepresentable, entre el entendimiento y el sentimiento,
evitando la dramatización y la estetización de las
víctimas y de los perpetradores.
En una obra reciente de la artista Clemencia
Echeverry, la violencia aparece representada a
través de sonidos que hacen alusión a los espacios
del terror. Se trata de una obra sonora y visual y
en ella se reproducen algunas voces femeninas que
buscan y no encuentran, voces que no es posible ubicar porque no forman parte de la realidad narrativa.
En efecto, en su audio-video instalación denominada Treno, la artista sitúa al espectador en medio de
dos grandes proyecciones enfrentadas del río Cauca
y, sin necesidad de recurrir a imágenes de horror y
de extrema crueldad, logra, en la medida que crece
el caudal de las aguas, la sensación de hundimiento
de quien está en medio de la escena; tan sólo al final,
y al modo de una alusión, nos encontramos con rastros –ropas- de una tanatopolítica que la corriente
114
del río arrastra. No se trata de evitar tales representaciones sólo por pudor moral, sino de conseguir otra
cosa abandonando lo sensacional y el espectáculo
de muerte: Treno es más el grito, el clamor, que el
horror.10
En la obra de la artista Doris Salcedo algunos objetos como asientos, camisas, camas y zapatos nos
remiten a la desaparición, a la destrucción sin signos
que ha caracterizado la violencia colombiana.
En su reciente obra Shibboleth la artista rompió
el piso de la Tate Modern en Londres cavando una
grieta de 167 metros de larga que recorre el espacio
de la galería de un extremo hasta el otro, tal y como
se aprecia en la fotografía que sigue a continuación.
De esta manera Salcedo convirtió su obra en un
potente símbolo de “el racismo no como síntoma de
un malestar que sufre la sociedad del primer mundo, sino como la enfermedad misma”.
En diferentes series sonoras, fotográficas y visuales, y a partir de unos pocos elementos que condensan universos de significación complejos y contradictorios, las mencionadas artistas se refieren a
la violencia abordando el tema de manera indirecta.
Para ello, se valen intuitivamente de procedimientos como la metonimia con el fin de establecer asociaciones y analogías entre la violencia, las flores, los
animales, y ciertos objetos como asientos, camisas,
zapatos y otros que consideran significativos. Sus
obras controvierten la infiltración masiva de imágenes sangrientas que durante años circularon por
los medios masivos de comunicación en Colombia
hasta lograr una saturación, algo que podríamos denominar una saturación voyerista del horror. Esa
saturación de imágenes sangrientas la vemos a diario
en los periódicos y revistas mexicanas que publican
sin pudor fotografías de cuerpos cercenados, lo que
no hace más que replicar el juego de terror y desconcierto impuesto por los señores de la guerra. Como
si las imágenes sangrientas pudieran convertirse en
textos explicativos de la violencia y no en lo que realmente son, síntomas de lo innombrable
10 Tomado de Chirolla, 2010.
Libros consultados
Amery, Jean. 2001. Más allá de la culpa y la expiación. Pretextos; Valencia.
Arendt, Hannah. 2003. La Condición Humana;
Editorial Paidos, Buenos Aires.
Chirolla, Gustavo. 2010. Política del grito en
una trenodia En Deleuze and Contemporary Art
Colección, Deleuze Connections; Edited by Stephen
Zepke and Simon O´Sullivan; Edinburgh University
Press.
Das, Veena. 2003. “Trauma and testimony: Implications for Political Community”. En
Anthropological Theory, 3 (3), pp. 293-307.
Levi, Primo. 2006. Deber de Memoria. Libros
del Zorzal; Buenos Aires.
Mardones, José María & Reyes Mate. 2003.
La ética ante las víctimas. Editorial Anthropos;
Barcelona.
Mbembe, Achille. 2002. “African modes of selfwriting”. En Public Culture 14 (1): 239-273; Duke
University Press.
“Necropolitics” En Public Culture 15(1): 11–40;
Duke University Press, 2003.
Mossman, Judith. 1995. Wild Justice. A study of
Euripides’Hecuba. Bristol Classical Press; London.
Ortega, Francisco. 2008. “Rehabitar la cotidianidad”. En Francisco Ortega, Ed. Veena Das: Sujetos
de dolor, agentes de dignidad, pp. 15-69; Instituto
Pensar Universidad Javeriana, CES Universidad
Nacional; Bogotá.
Rebolo, Luis Joaquín. 2004. Memoria subversiva y alternativas sociales”. En Página Abierta, 150,
julio de 2004, pp. 49-51.
Reyes Mate, Manuel. 2003. En torno a una
justicia anamnética. En José M. Mardones & M.
Reyes Mate, Eds. La ética ante las víctimas, pp.100125; Editorial Anthropos; Barcelona.
Sarlo, Beatriz. 2005. Tiempo pasado. Cultura de
la memoria y giro subjetivo, una discusión. Siglo
XXI Editores; Buenos Aires.
Tafalla, Marta. 1999. “Primo Levi y la razón
anamnética”. En Quaderns de Filosofía, Nº 30,
pags. 89-97; Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona;
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Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism and
the Wild Man; University of Chicago Press; Chicago,
1991.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2000. “Melancholy and the act”. En
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26 N° 4, University of Chicago
Press, p. 657-681, Chicago.
2000. Mirando al sesgo. Una introducción
a Jaques Lacan a través de la cultura popular.
Editorial Paidós, Buenos Aires.
2009. Sobre la violencia. Seis reflexiones marginales; Editorial Paidós, Barcelona.
115
The Afterlife of coca dreams
Juan Orrantia
I remember passing through this town many times.
I would get tense as we arrived. It was like a heavy
mantle of fear that would cling on to me and not let
go until I was sure we had already left. The images
of heavily armed young men hanging out at cantinas, or simply patrolling town would settle into my
thoughts of what it was like to live here.
Until a few years ago, people in this small hamlet tucked in the mountains of the northern coast of
Colombia made a living mostly from coca cultivation and cocaine production. It was not that different from many others places in the country, where
coca has replaced cash crops and constituted a way
of building shattered dreams. But this small place
was also the hub of a well-known paramilitary (war
lord) commander. The boss, as he was called, ruled
this region, and to this day people consider him a
father figure, a protector, benefactor and leader.
Nothing was done here without his permission or
supervision. But today he is serving a sentence for
drug trafficking and murder in a US prison. The
army has now set up provisional outposts in the
mountains, erradicating most of the coca crops and
labs. Peasants are wondering what to do, searching
for petty alternatives.
I arrived here in search of frozen memories, of
names that carried stains of blood in them. Glimpses
of the past came about in every corner, and I felt a
kind of thrill as I walked into homes once partially
forbidden to me. Forbidden for the mere act of fear.
The last time I saw this town it was filled with men in
The Afterlife of coca dreams
army fatigues carrying grenade launchers and looking despairingly at me. Behind them, in their homes,
in the fields, were the men and women that also lived
under their gazes, for whom this was simply, life. I
had never really engaged them*.
* Thanks to Santiago Giraldo for his help on
location
117
Is it a place of roughness, or a rough place?
118
Something remains that for some is present
120
122
The hand down of power when the head is removed
124
The other face of fear
126
128
130
There was a time when someone actually bought something
132
Hoping our luck one day will change
134
What I seem to clearly remember
136
There was a time when someone actually bought something (2)
138
A sticky substance called fear
140
The real bloodlines that once were invisible
142
144
146

The Johannesburg Salon - Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and

Transcription

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