Contemporary Art: Kill and Go

Visitor at Johannesburg Art Fair 2009. Image by Cobi Labuscagne

In the late 80’s I was nosing around a gallery in Dallas which at that time was making a play against more established Houston as the art capital of the South West USA. Several Dallas galleries had tied into Cologne – then the hot bed of commercially recognized Avant-Garde - presumably trying to transcend JR Ewing stereotypes and pictures of cowboys on horses.

I stopped at a beautiful work. The artist had drilled hundreds of matches into a wall, and then lit them to make a drawing of smoky black lines. The well-dressed guy next to me, similarly transfixed, suddenly got angry and said: “How in the hell am I meant to buy this for my house?” The role of galleries after all was to turn fascination into possession. I told him he should speak to the gallery owner. It seemed to me he could either buy the whole wall, or commission the artist to do another one in his house. He said: “That’s interesting; so art is kind of like the construction industry now?” “Sure”, I said, “you don’t have to take home the bathtub in the showroom, just order one and have the plumber fit it; nowadays art is more like the Sistine Chapel than Dutch easel painting - artists make house calls”.

In the late 60’s Harold Rosenberg wrote that the alienation of the artist happened not because the artist couldn’t be understood by anyone, but rather because, through the disseminations of Academia and Advertising, art could be understood by everyone, but not necessarily in the way an artist might understand his or her own work. Dissemination caused a gap between the artist and the work, much as Freud was not a Freudian, or Marx, a Marxist.

In the sense that art had begun to precede itself as speculative information, Rosenberg’s essay probably marked something like a beginning of what we now call Contemporary Art, as opposed to Art or Modern Art which implied an expectation of the thing in front of your eyes as an experience - what you see is what you get, like it or lump it, “looks like an explosion in a shingles factory”, hang out or move on, kind of thing.

This tendency roughly corresponded with the US State Department assertion in the 70’s that since they could understand history, they could therefore shape history and this would be the end of history itself. Shortly after this universities began to replace art history with art theory as a way of determining output in which academics would play a crucial role.

As a result Contemporary Art operates more like a referencing or indexing system, usually to stronger time-based forms like film, theatre, literature or more ambiguously architecture – the 9-second film loop; the hint of a scene performed; the homily in neon; the landscape-or-urban-art work-space, etc.

Time-based forms have tended to remain more resistant to this tendency because of their make-or-break connection with a reader or an audience. In time-based forms the audience agrees a priori to surrender to the time of the work – often by buying a ticket - so the artist usually feels obliged to live up to the commitment and try to make it worthwhile.

Contemporary Art is generally befuddled by ideas of whom exactly its audience is, or who looks at it other than people with glasses of wine nattering at openings. Art criticism and theory have generally discouraged the idea that a history of compelling and changing beauty was reason enough to both want to make a work and want to look at it. Ideas like “the gaze” and “objectification” went further to suggest that visual art was an historically immoral activity that needed to be under some kind of ideological supervision - an interesting word come to think of it, like superego.

Probably trying to overcome these immoral feelings, Contemporary Art is now also a referencing system to well-trodden social issues, as if these issues rendered art and the artist more meaningful if filled with remorse. The artist gets redemption from immoral pursuits if he or she acknowledges, say, the problems facing health departments or in the case of Africa, whole countries – a bit like a social service sentence - even though art is ineffectual in curing societal ailments and no longer an effective means of mass communication.

Paradoxically, in the hands of Western European and American supervisors saving “other continents” from the immorality of art, Contemporary Art has embarked on the most strident set of classifications based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference, since the Nazis. Attention has swayed completely from the art object or art action, in order to objectify artists themselves as the “rescued”.

Certainly art deals with all kinds of things including catastrophes. In the 19th Century novel a character might die from prevalent TB, but TB was contextual in the narrative, not the prime reason for writing the book. But things fall apart and other centers seem to hold.
Last year I remarked to an artist friend in Amsterdam, that art was the cheapest way of doing nothing about real problems, as many European “other world” funding agencies know too well. To give money to help “develop African art and culture” as a liberal-lefty ideological gesture is a lot easier, say, than persuading European farmers to drop barriers on African agricultural produce.

The European Left wing is under siege enough without taking on the really difficult issues of the uneven global playing field. Fortunately for the liberal-lefties who seem to have fled to softer Ministries like Art and Culture or their sub-sections in Foreign Affairs, the idea of patronage is so endemic to art that art avoids the scrutiny applied to trade and economics. You don’t see William Kentridge’s work having quotas applied because it uses up too much Western art money and causes a trade deficit that might put Western artists out of work. Well, not yet you don’t; but the Europeans have a strange self-interested way of acting in crises, as we know from the 1930’s.
Central to Contemporary Art for the last 20 years have been the new breed of quasi-academic curators – intermediaries or brokers who made themselves indispensable in the proposition that the new value of art, intellectually and monetarily, is achieved through dissemination – art conducted through words - rather than direct confrontation with art itself by both the artist and the public.

Contemporary Art operates in a very similar way to speculative capitalist investment. It has value by being given value. Value is not intrinsic; it is a marketing process in which the value pundits play the most important role. The art object is more like a chip at a Casino – a token to show the buyers have become Playas-with-Value, a bourgeois thrill in itself. Curators, like croupiers, create the atmosphere of expectation, the lights focused on the game and the hushed talk that goes with importance.

The debate about whether photography has earned value enough to be included as Contemporary Art is ridiculous. Of course not. Photography as a form absorbed Contemporary Art as one of its many sub-species quite some time ago. Photography is still a complex form that needs little explanation. Like 19th Century painting, it includes everything from family snap shots, to news and magazine pictures, to tough formal and subjective ideas. Serious writers on many topics like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have turned their attention to photography, as good writers tend to turn their attention to difficult and lifelike things. Contemporary Art attracts trade writers stirring the same pot of words.

At the Havana Biennale in 2003 Paris-based curator, Nicolas Bourriaud, declared that documentary photography – from the “other world” of course – was the “new modernism”. He seemed to be saying that the primacy of the Contemporary Art curator was so firmly established that he could redeploy African photography much as Picasso had appropriated African masks, as raw elements in a Casablanca-like arrangement in which the curator did the thinking for artists too dumbstruck or grateful to do their own.

It’s foolish to believe that because of Contemporary Art, art could transcend the expectation of resemblances, objectifications, imaginations and ideas that lay at the very core of its being, skill and history, no matter what theorists, curators or funding agencies say. Photography has continued to engage these expectations - as a more convincing lie - so a lot of contemporary artists with something to say have taken to photography to contribute to the field of its vision, just as good performance artists like Laurie Anderson eventually became rock stars.

If photography now engenders the expectation of resemblances and implied or explicit visual narratives in art, then, in the last 20 or more years, architecture has continued the material, spatial and conceptual experiment that was the leitmotiv of Modern Art. Paradoxically, in museums for Contemporary Art, architecture found a project for its own astonishing and visible development – not as the presence of absence, but more like the presence making up for absence.

By Rodney Place

From revolution to rights in South Africa?

Public Debate at JWTC

Azapo's Mosibudi Mangena has recently questioned whether the current service delivery protests are a sign of political consciousness or depoliticisation (Cape Times, 27th July, 2009). For Mangena, post-apartheid state promises of free water, electricity and housing can only lead to citizens becoming passive and dependent clients of a paternalistic state. Mangena argues that this is not a sign of freedom but rather 'a prison called delivery.' So has the heroic anti-apartheid struggle for freedom morphed into this poverty of politics?

The post-Cold War era that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union also led to profound skepticism about all grand narratives of politics, progress and development. Without these meta-narratives to believe in, many progressive scholars and activists despaired about the direction that politics was taking. For some it seemed as if the triumphalism of neoliberal capitalism had ushered in conspicuous consumerism and the downsizing of the welfare state alongside deeply entrenched forms of structural unemployment, inequality and poverty. Many critical commentators in the West also claimed that 'we' were now doomed to live in a post-political world characterized by the demise of the collective, class-based politics of trade unions and revolutionary movements.

These critics were also deeply suspicious of what they regarded as the meaningless electoral rituals of liberal democracies. Citizens, they argued, had, not surprisingly, become apathetic and cynical about politics and politicians. At the same time, scholars such as Wendy Brown (1995) argued that recourse to the courts was becoming the only remedy in situations of social injury. For Brown and others, the problem with litigation was that it contributed towards individualizing, depoliticizing and fragmenting social and economic issues. Or, as some have put it, class action had replaced class struggle.

But is it such a zero-sum game between litigation and collection action? Are citizens the passive victims of these depoliticising processes, or is there something potentially progressive and empowering about 'rights talk' and 'the Law'?

South Africa's Constitution has been widely praised for being one of the most progressive on the planet. Its promotion of sexual and gender equality, as well as its recognition of cultural, linguistic and socio-economic rights has been lauded inside as well as outside the country. Many South Africans take enormous pride in the Constitution and zealously protect it from perceived threats. Nonetheless it has become increasingly clear that Constitutionally- enshrined rights can be very hard to realise. This is especially the case for poor people, for whom “rights'' and 'the Law' seem to be particularly remote and elusive.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lively debate over the merits and disadvantages of communities and social movements resorting to litigation in their struggles over access to basic services. Mike Muller, the former Director General of Water Affairs and Forestry, recently argued that the resort to water rights litigation by NGOs and communities opposing prepaid water meters and automatic disconnections undermined possibilities for effective political action. This view was challenged by Jackie Dugard, the Wits University researcher and member of the legal team representing the Mazibuko community in their water rights case against the City of Johannesburg. Dugard argued that, contrary to Muller's dismissal of rights-based approaches, in contexts of unaccountable and inefficient local government structures litigation can be effective in compelling the government to provide adequate services to the poor. Litigation, in other words, may be necessary where other forms of political engagement are less likely to succeed. However, she acknowledged that recourse to the courts requires resources and institutional support. Dugard's analysis implies that under certain conditions 'lawfare' may be more strategic than popular protest and public violence, which she refers to as political 'warfare.'
During the past decade, South Africa has witnessed a proliferation of “service delivery” protests in poor communities. During this period, there has also been the emergence of new social movements that use both mass mobilisation and litigation to address problems of access to basic services. For example, civic organisations such as the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), the Anti-Evictions Campaign (AEC), AbahlalibaseMjondolo, and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) have taken to the courts and the streets to challenge water and electricity disconnections and evictions. During the same period, the Treatment Action Campaign's (TAC) has fought struggles for AIDS treatment in the Constitutional Court as well as in the townships, universities, workplaces, and the media.

Unlike the 'Big Politics' of revolutionary socialism and labour movements, new social movements such as the TAC aspire to smaller political acts and less monumental victories. In many cases these movements simultaneously use the courts and the streets to shame, lobby, and pressure the state to respond more effectively towards improving the lives of the poor. This pragmatic rights-based politics blurs and implodes the conventional political binaries of Left and Right, socialism and neoliberalism, revolution and rights. But does it offer possibilities for progressive politics?

The extraordinary achievements of the TAC in recent years illustrate how litigation and rights-based approaches can, under certain conditions, contribute towards addressing broader questions of social justice. One has only to reflect on the successes of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) during the anti-apartheid struggle to recognize that rights-based approaches can, along with mass mobilisation, contribute to progressive political outcomes. Yet, it also cannot be denied that the groundbreaking Grootboom Constitutional Court ruling that recognized socio-economic rights to housing, ended up being a pyrrhic victory for the primary litigant, Irene Grootboom, who died last year while still living in a shack in Wallacedene, Cape Town. In other words, socio-economic rights and litigation can mean very little without a responsive and capacitated state and mobilized citizens.

Legal solutions can also have unintended consequences. For instance, in a 1995 study of the impact of agricultural labour courts that were introduced in terms of the Extension of Security of Tenure Act , Andries du Toit and I found that this progressive labour law initiative resulted in the eviction of large numbers of Western Cape farm workers. As soon as farm workers laid a complaint against a particular farmer they were summarily evicted and blacklisted by local white farmers in the area, making it extremely difficult to find work. Clearly, rights and litigation do not always produce the anticipated progressive outcomes.

Activists are often quick to learn when legal strategies work and when other methods are required. For instance, the young Nelson Mandela's training as a lawyer, and his respect for the rule of law, did not prevent him from resorting to militant trade unionism and armed struggle. He was able to combine rights based politics with philosophical and political influences ranging from Gandhi, to Nehru, to Fanon. This eclecticism has in fact been part of the ANC political culture for many decades, notwithstanding the predominance of Africanist and socialist ideological orientations within the organisation.

TAC has successfully used the courts, the media, global support networks, and grassroots mobilisation in the townships to lobby and pressure global pharmaceutical giants and the South African government to put measures in place for the provision of AIDS treatment in the public health system. In these David and Goliath battles, TAC operated simultaneously on local, national and global scales. Its tactical use of both litigation and mass mobilisation was also reminiscent of popular struggles against apartheid's influx control laws and forced removals. Whereas critics of rights-based social movements accuse these organisations of depoliticising and individualising social causes, TAC has been capable of deploying 'rights talk' and litigation alongside grassroots mobilisation with remarkable success. TAC's engagement with a devastating AIDS crisis in South Africa is very instructive. It reveals a highly contingent and improvisational politics that refuses to get bogged down in conventional oppositions and antagonisms between Left and Right, revolution and rights, state and civil society. For example, at one moment TAC partnered the South African government in a legal challenge to the global pharmaceutical industry over the question of ARV generics and intellectual property rights; the next moment TAC was in court challenging government for failing to implement ARV treatment within the public health sector. And now, TAC is back to working together with the Post-Polokwane ANC government in order to monitor and pressure the government to expand and improve ARV treatment and conditions in the broader public health system. The TAC's rights-based approach not only challenged the state and the global pharmaceutical industry in the quest for HIV treatment for poor and working class people, it also involved profound transformations of the identities of its members. In many cases TAC has managed to transform the potentially lethal stigma of AIDS into a badge of courage. Life after diagnosis with HIV seemed to have more meaning for many activists than it did before they tested. Rather than producing docile patients and biomedical subjects, the organisation created highly politicised activists who understood their role as the foot soldiers of a globally connected, working class health movement.

Ideas, practices and technologies - for instance, development, liberal democracy, rights and 'the Law' - can be put to many purposes, sometimes progressive and sometimes not. There is nothing inherent in these ideas and technologies that preordain particular outcomes. For TAC activists, this has meant that litigation in the highest courts has had to be accompanied by mass mobilisation in the streets. For housing activists, however, the Grootboom Constitutional Court victory was clearly insufficient and the Irene Grootbooms of the world continue to live and die in shacks without adequate basic services. Yet, it is equally unclear whether popular protests and public violence on their own will achieve better outcomes in terms of service delivery. Litigation and mass mobilization need to be analyzed in terms of their particular conditions of possibility; only this will reveal whether particular rights based approaches and modes of collective action lead to successful and progressive outcomes or not.

Steven Robins
Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch.

“Teachable moments” - David Theo Goldberg on the Militarization of Society

David Theo Goldberg

Political figures in America, including President Barack Obama, lined up to call the fierce disputes of meaning and significance that surrounded the recent arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. a “teachable moment” for the nation. But quite what was to be taught—to whom and how; if anything—remains unclear. Most Americans, for example, did not need to be taught why ‘racial profiling’ was widely invoked as a frame to explain Gates’ arrest and anger: terms like ‘racial profiling’ are keywords in a national vocabulary on citizenship and the law; institutionalized racism permeates the American everyday. Likewise, the media’s ‘expert analysis’ on the conduct of the Cambridge police sounded an old conversation—looped sound-bites on the difficulty of naming what constitutes reasonable use of force by the state in a post-9/11 era. Gates’ story was not exactly one episode in a series—in fact, the media made it newsworthy by playing up the distracting, juicier specifics, all unusually well-documented—but it was rendered familiar with the effect that necessary and new questions went unasked. Indeed, the political furor that broke in July 2009 was rather largely to do with confirming that no man—tenured, Harvard professors in leafy, literate suburbs, no less—stands exempt from America’s logic of militarization par excellence. Examining the logic—looking to the nature of American fluency with the practices and consequences of racial policing; to national strategies of domestic governance by force and Americans’ long co-presence with it—may help us explain why, in the afterwards of Gates, hoped-for public teaching moments on violence, race, and the American state failed to materialize (national lessons in why the U.S. incarcerates the greatest percentage of its population, for example; why felony disenfranchisement and racial disparities in the criminal justice system leave almost a fifth of African American men unable to vote, etc.).

David Goldberg’s capstone seminar in Johannesburg, De-Militarizing Society, developed an elegant line of analysis on the nature of modern power and its work in institutionalizing confrontation in the co-making of society and the state—a helpful analytic in elucidating events as politically muddled as Gates’ arrest. Professor Goldberg called for a close reading of how modern societies are ordered by a logic of militarization and are constituted and reinforced by modes of governance akin to war—a vision of the life of power in which all basic relations of force in society might be examined more richly as relations of war. Goldberg took flight from Michel Foucault’s 1975-1976 Collège de France lectures, Il Faut Défendre La Société, to deliver ten claims on the relations of militarization, governmentality, and the modern subject. His premise: Modern states require a strong military, a ‘culture of militarization’, and militarized modes of governance that reach deep inside the social body to assert their sovereignty effectively. Extending and refining Foucault’s thesis, and weaving together strands of the workshop’s conversations, Goldberg set in motion an especially powerful series of tensions, paradoxes, and relations that proffer new kinds of questions on power and society, in which a logic of exclusion (from outside and from within) becomes the foundational practice for governance and social belonging. On militarization’s relation to political economy, for example, he traced the ways states find afterlives for technologies innovated in war in times of political peace and use war to forge ways out of depression and unemployment.

Professor Goldberg’s careful argument came alive as he outlaid examples of militarization, war of-and-in the everyday, and the governance of the social by violence: mandated military service; the privatization of state prisons; national anthems and civic parades; the implementation of a ‘working day’; CCTV; volunteerism. But, as likely Foucault would approve, Goldberg also actively encouraged analysis of the messy case-study and the unfitting, unfinished example: One recalls, for instance, New Orleans' residents begging for military assistance after Katrina in a bifurcated moment of state abandonment and spectacular state violence; or, as Julia Hornberger superbly describes, the uncanny turning of many African migrants and refugees in Johannesburg for protection from the South African police they fear in the wake of xenophobic cleansing. Avoiding a totalizing theoretical argument, Professor Goldberg invited participants to think through personal examples and experiences: these included the phenomena of ‘military police’ and the scandalous prisoner treatment at Abu Ghraib—two cases that show how militaries are both subject to and outside the law, but also how the logic of militarization relies on an elsewhere and outside; and the emotional, affective elements and tactics of war-making, such as ‘shock and awe’. Closing the Johannesburg workshop with unsurpassed energy, de-militarizing society—as much as subject for critical thinking as a call for political action—can only begin, Goldberg argued, after the meaty logics and paradoxes of power are teased apart.

The complexities around the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. present a loud case of the militarization of society that Goldberg’s project helps situate. Precisely because the long militarization of race, policing, and state violence in America is traceable and elusive, familiar yet unspoken, much did not need to be said about Gates in public. But people also watched the Gates arrest closely to see what kind of reaction Obama would make: it was Obama’s test, of sorts, in choosing to confront or acknowledge, or not, a national, public secret. And, for a brief moment, I think many felt a “teachable moment” had arrived, as Obama’s thoughts came out in off-the-cuff one-liners to journalists—describing the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, as “acting stupidly.” (We see here a defining element of the Obama Presidency: this is a President who does not mean what he says—a refreshing contrast from his predecessor who frightened the world by believing everything he said and needing no evidence for action). Obama's decision to hold beers of reconciliation between Gates and Crowley thus took many in America by surprise. A national “teachable moment” on the militarization of society may not have convened in July—after all, swarmed by reporters as they left the White House, Crowley and Gates returned to the language of war, of battle-lines redrawing and “agreeing to differ,” and of the episode as a 'truce' without apology. But by allowing two 'sides' to sit down and talk; for the citizen to speak up to the state; calling for dialogue over violence, and going against police tactics in America of using arrest as a method to qualm assembly—perhaps we can allow ourselves to read Obama's 'reconciliation' as a tentative act of de-militarizing society.

James Williams

At stake in the South

Isabel Hofmeyr

During their studio session, “Cultures of the Political”, Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr offered us two modes for understanding cultural forms of the political in the Southern Hemisphere. Nuttall’s could be identified as ‘the national contemporary’ and Hofmeyer’s ‘the historical international’. Nuttall concerns herself with contemporary, urban South African youth culture and the possibilities it offers for yielding a viable cross-racial South African city, namely Johannesburg. “How are young Africans shaping the [South] African modern?” and can we “deprovincialize Africa and African self-stylization” toward “developing new theories of modernity?” she asks. While Hofmeyer’s project is more historical—the Indian Ocean as a political, economic and cultural construct that fostered and continues to foster a set of relations among the countries and people that reside along it—similarly it challenges us to rethink ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ that have rendered South Africa. Both ask us to take into account alternative imaginings of South Africa that consider the South African nation and the Southern Hemisphere as sites of universalisms.

Interestingly these positings of Southern universalisms, particularly Hofmeyr’s, produced heated debate amongst the workshop about the real possibilities of these kinds of projects. What is the “Global South” exactly?, one participant asked. Another highlighted the romantic nature of the Indian/African solidarity that Hofmeyr’s project supposedly requires. While still another wondered at the correlation between the recent prevalence of this kind of work on India and Africa and the emergence of India and China as semi-imperial powers. Hofmeyr herself acknowledged the difficulty of this kind of excavation during her introduction to her work and throughout the session. Yet, it seems to me that Hofmeyr’s project provided the idiom through which our collective could begin an earnest exchange on what exactly it means to theorize the “South”, as a cultural, political, economic and social construct, from the “South”. The notion of the South as culturally particular and different from the Northern Hemisphere seemed to come most into question during this session. As a feeble gesture toward a conclusion (at least of this year’s workshop) I would like to use a considerable portion of my blog to consider why the South is so contested as I understand the South to be of the utmost importance to our gathering.

Hofmeyr’s Indian Ocean operates as a “Common”, to borrow from Michael Hardt, that need not be inherently Eurocentric. (All oceans, seas, bodies of water can represent the Common as international law dictates that they cannot be owned by individuals but I want to think about the exchange of ideas and commodities, and the movements of people specific to Indian Ocean as a loosely bounded entity as a singular political and cultural Common.) It is/was a space wherein people moved, were displaced, resettled, goods, plants, and animals were traded, sometimes de-nativized from one space and made native to elsewhere. If we put Hofmeyr’s Indian Ocean alongside Gilroy’s Black Atlantic in some ways (Southern) Africa becomes The Common betwixt these two Commons, connecting them. In fact, we begin to have an interlinked set of cultural entities that perhaps can be understood as the South. I use cultural here in lieu of political or economic as provocation because it occurs to me that it is thinking of the South as cultural phenomenon that is most problematic for us. The histories of the parts of the Globe understood to comprise the South share similar trajectories of conquest, colonization, expropriation and finally political independence from colonial empires in the form of the nation-state. Often this shared grammar of political ‘modernity’ is countered by fiercely local assertions of cultural difference.

Articulating a methodology for comparing the function of power and ‘the political’, either colonial or national, through the paradigm of the Global South (or the Southern Hemisphere) seems far less problematic than doing so for exploring the cultural “entanglement”[1], which transgresses boundaries of the local (I think, we could easily substitute ‘authentic’ here for local). For example, the much cited instance of the Xhosa woman who wins the Eastern Cape pageant for Miss India South Africa because, according to the judges, she offers the best performance of “Indianness” and the riot that ensues.[2] Clearly, for the majority of the judges the contestants were to be judged based upon the authenticity of their representations of Indian culture, while for the audience it was also, perhaps more so, about the cultural (or racial) authenticity of the woman presenting that cultural representation. Is there something more than coincidental here regarding the gendered stakes of this kind of representation of the local? Partha Chatterjee’s suggestion in The Nation and Its Fragments that the site of the home, domesticity—the sphere of the woman—become the embodiment of the (Indian) nation during anti-colonial struggle may shed some light here on the crisis that thinking about the Southern Hemisphere as a cultural space engenders. While not wanting to essentialize Chatterjee’s argument to include all nations that comprise the South, I would like to suggest that perhaps the resistance to the South as a construct when taken on by cultural theorists, presumably to think about culture, is due to our acceptance of the notion of cultures as local, embodiments of particular domesticities somewhat sealed off from the ‘corrupting’ machinery of colonial states and deregulated global markets. The problem that Hofmeyr’s work necessarily introduces is “what comprises the local if not culture”?

This leads me to leave off with two central questions. First, though many scholars of literary and cultural studies seemed to ask this in varying ways over the course of the workshop, what is the role of literary and cultural studies in understanding the South and theorizing from it? Secondly, but related, what are the limits of the South as a theoretical paradigm by which we can understand and make possible an ethics of mutuality?

Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi

---

[1] Sarah Nuttall develops and explores her theory of entanglement in Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid. Entanglement, Nuttall writes, “is a term which may gesture toward a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldness”, in contraindication to the human apartness that was/is apartheid (1). Thus, it may entail similar processes of inter-cultural and interracial mixing as creolization and mestissaje but accounts for these in contexts (such as the South African toward which Nuttall develops this concept almost exclusively in her book) in which they are more opaque and resisted or denied by hegemonic narratives of belonging to such contexts.

[2] Both Eric Worby and Sarah Nuttall made reference to this incident during their respective sessions.

Affective Geographies: a conversation on thinking and feeling (from) the south

Liz Gunner introducing Sarah Nuttall

In an essay in the recent collection Load Shedding, Sarah Nutall writes: “The days and nights of mid-August slid slowly by. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were living out the long end of something, or the end of a long something. Was it just me?”. In the essay, Nutall’s concern with feeling out the contemporary political moment, with mapping the affective landscape of a particular historical, and geographical, political and relational moment is addressed through the texts, conversations, strolls, fears, car rides both fast and meandering, public and private anxieties, imaginaries, and aesthetics that make up a late winter month in Johannesburg.

This concern with understanding what (contemporary, historical) political moments feel like infused and oriented Nutall’s studio session conversation with historian Isabel Hofmeyr, where it was explored through a set of personal-political questions. Introducing the studio session on “Cultures of the Political,” Nutall proposed a conversation around a series of related questions: how to read South Africa (in the world)? How to (read a) shift from concerns with difference to ‘new questions’ in and on ‘the new South Africa’? How to read the political in the present? Rather than offering discrete answers or diagnostic statements, the session took shape as an exploration of intellectual auto-geographies, a consideration of the effects of place and the place of affect in thinking from the South.

Both Nutall and co-conversationist Isabel Hofmeyr described their theoretical and topical trajectories as journeys that posed questions and concerns regarding intellectual place, political location, and relations within and across historically constituted spaces. In orienting the discussion around these questions, Nutall suggested an exploration of South Africa’s ‘after Apartheid’ moment as a space marked neither by a post-Apartheid concern with trauma and hope nor by the normative concerns of a post-colonial studies produced in (and for) New York and London. Nutall’s entry-point into this moment hinged on her own movement through the idea of Johannesburg – a city of surface and depth, as she described it – and through the city as concrete entity; the city that slides past the car window, in Nutall’s account, is positioned beyond the radical limits of a politics of difference. Her concern with the entanglements, contradictions, aspirations and imaginations that constitute Johannesburg, and which the city in turn makes possible, focused especially on rethinking the politics of difference, depth and hope in favor of thinking horizontally about the affective landscape and modes of self-fashioning made possible across the contemporary city of Johannesburg.

Hofmeyr’s comments also hinged on an active questioning of established theoretical geographies. Situating her responses in light of her own position as a Cold War intellectual trained to see the world through the puzzle-piece lens of area studies, Hofmeyr described her work as fundamentally concerned with the movement and travel of people, objects, ideas. Her study of Indian Ocean print culture in the 19^th and 20^th century, provides – among other things – a starting point for reconsidering the uneasy solidarities and cleavages between South (or southern) Africa and India in ways that build on, but are not reducible to, shared histories of non-alignment. In seeking to explore and understand long-standing political sympathies without erasing personal antipathies and preconceptions, she examined the ways in which changing geopolitical context effected but did not determine the kinds of partial, unsteady, but significant transnational relationships made possible by the particularities of the Indian Ocean over time.

For Nutall, Johannesburg – idea, object, experience, relationship, place – as a site in and through which the limits of postcolonial theory became visible, where understanding the present meant tuning one’s analytical ear not only to the deep historical chords through which the present emerged into being but to the slippery, abrasive, planar surfaces of life through which the present is lived. In a context where, Nutall argued, the privatization of many forms of publicity had been accompanied by a simultaneous rendering apersonal of public life, attention to the moods, emotions, affective currents, and stylistic significances of life in the city is a strategic political act. For Hofmeyr, ‘thinking South Africa’ in the context of the Indian Ocean circuits with their deep historical currents and unlikely contemporary bedfellows (from neo-imperial visions to shared practices of cultural resistance) likewise opened up the possibility of moving beyond ‘easy solidarities’, of recasting colonial and post-colonial relationships by decentering the ‘area studies’ of the past, even as she considered the ways in which these new circuits may be ‘emerging’ regions in new geopolitical configurations. The necessity of thinking through partial solidarities, ambivalent sympathies, and relations of hierarchy and domination within and across peripheries and boundaries emerged as central to both discussants’ remarks.

In placing the ‘cultures of the political’ within two distinctively different circuits, the conversationists highlighted questions of affective geography squarely at the center of their discussion. For both commentators, place, space and location emerged as key themes. In response, their comments opened up discussion not only of the relation between culture and politics, mediated through affect, aesthetics, and place, but also of the key aims or propositions of the workshop: the Global South. What – and where and who – counts as ‘the South’? What are the methods we use to think it? What sorts of relationships populate this theoretical and geopolitical space? How do we negotiate and understand the politics of our thinking and what kinds of topics, perspectives, and material do we draw on to do so?

Ramah McKay

Variations on Waste

Achille Mbembe and Eric Worby

Achille Mbembe has argued that there is a distinct social category of waste people. He cites successive social managements of supernumerary people to support his claim that this category is ubiquitous: the great confinement and siftings in the period of primitive accumulation, the Napoleonic conscription of the petite bourgeoisie to staff the state, the redefining of the lumpenproletariat in 1848 and later with fascism, the use of criminalization, immiseration and regal incentives to eject people into colonies and the exemplary modern waste populations of refugeeism and displacement in Palestine, Africa and eastern Europe serving as bartering chips of international policy and fund positioning.

In counterpoint to Mbembe’s category is the military logic of eliminating class enemies, construable at certain times as supernumerary populations - in the Terror, in 1917 and 1930, in the European and Japanese genocides after 1939 and the innumerable colonial exterminations. These are modalities of civil war in the sense of a state attacking those in its jurisdiction and are as transient, exceptional and cyclical as the violence that this requires.

Mbembe’s waste people are not the object of a direct or indirect genocide, are not peripatetic groups unanchored in a jurisdiction or entirely void of rights, they are not synonymous with the extremes of immiserisation nor with the famed reserve army of labour. They are not the leftovers of a social, economic and developmental recuperation of surplus populations - the residual hard core anomalies in a disciplinary society. What is sinister about Mbembe’s category is that it maps so inexactly onto the three great systems that create and recover surpluses - surplus value extraction, territorial expansion and social defense - are only the backdrops to the tragedies and farces around superfluous people.

Mbembe himself registers this difficult mapping in his searches, his erudite variations -his frottage - across the places where he thinks new waste populations are. It is in homage to his search , that so captured his audience and vanished in their questions, that a minor variation on the theme of Mbembian surplus is offered here.

Waste, what is or is laid fallow, is not an intuitively explicit concept or experience. Its nearest analogue in experience is pollution, which, as Mary Douglas showed, is intuited as contagion and only then against a set of relationships and categories harboring logical anomaly. It would be interesting to see the extent to which waste is an historicized version of pollution and contagion and carries over its sources of the sacred and the defiled and their bodily models. This might become clear from a comparison of the juridical and philosophic registers Agamben’s thought straddles with similar mixtures of precept and concept found in Douglas’ Purity and Danger.

But this is not the time to explore the anthropological provenance of Mbembian waste. A more immediate parallel exists in the history of science. In the era of Newtonian dynamics there was no conception of waste. Wind, animal and water power had all the renewability our contemporaries see in solar energy. All that was required was the machinery exactly elaborated by Galileo and Newton to harness - sails, levers, gears, wheels, weights .Eighteenth Century technologies seamlessly reflected the universe - as Leibniz’ monadic clocks testify - and if ever motion ran down, you could reverse it or couple it to wider vectors of cosmic movement in its neighborhood.

Carnot shattered this world with his reflections on the motive power of heat. Faced with the steam engine, it was not sufficient to explain motion by the extant motions it coupled to: it had to be derived from energy, as one particular – kinetic ─ phase of its conversions.

In a Newtonian system forces could all be harvested and accounted for, hence the drive to greater and greater precision in the levers and gears of clocks: in a steam engine the final reckoning of forces always shows a deficit, a nonrecuperable loss of energy each time it changes form. From the pressure of the boiler to the motion of the piston, energy leaked from the machine. This profligacy could not be offset by greater precision, by making the steam engine in the 18^th century image of the perpetuum mobile or the frictionless plane - waste was inherent as a principle despite all conscientiousness of design and execution - and waste always took the form of heat.

Heat is the first totally exact - because entirely deducible - model of waste. Once each energy conversion was known to create irrecoverable surplus energy it was a short step to generalizing the steam engine, through Carnot’s abstractions, to the universe and finding in its daily workings the symptoms of its eventual demise. The cost of the universe is changing energy and each transaction leaves a cosmic residue to lessen the difference between energy potentials until all work is choked and the cosmos dies in its own tepid waste.

This history of ]wasted heat and the natural or historical motors that make it thinkable has been traced for decades by Michel Serres and he finds its steam-engine reservoirs, heat sources, potential differences and lossy circulations in figures as seemingly remote as Marx, Freud, Bergson, Derrida, Turner Zola and Monod.

Its would be interesting to read in Serres perspective the great passages in The Order of Things on hominisation in the dissipative motors of life, labour and language, restoring the minor axis of ‘deductive demonstrative sciences’ in the famous trihedron of the human sciences.

Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests shows early capitalist thought from Mandeville to Smith fully awake to the drastic metamorphoses Carnot would trace in the fate of energy - which political economy expressed as transubstantiating social devices efficiently able to recuperate all warring interests to the greater good: the literal motors of history.

From the Invisible Hand to Hegel’s Aufhebung an automaton formalized by the steam engine framed capitalisms ability to harness the disparate and implement ways of overcoming its own limits.

This vision of pliant circulations and efficient transductions had its critics, preeminently Marx, who emphasized the residual human losses and civic waste caused while extracting surplus value from the reservoir of labor power .Das Kapital culminates in a Carnotian scene of overheated flows circulating in a single channel, causing it to lose potential difference and void future movement - the changing organic composition of capital is reinvestment’s version of a universe swamped by inutile energy - or a piston hotter than its steam.

Mbembe crosses this bizarre current of motors and social automata when he invokes Baitaille’s Veblenian fantasy in La Parte maudite of waste becoming the momentary objective of production. Bataille confronts Hegel, the model bourgeois recuperative thinker ,with his General Economy of heat and noise in place of value - celebrated as l’informe - irrecoverable to circulation, experience and thought.

Baitaille’s economy of potlatch is a Smithian nightmare: inverting the poles of heat and work in the motor of political economy while leaving the rest of its apparatus intact. It is completely at home in the energetics matrix of the theory and shows that even for such an eclectic thinker, political economy remains the best means to develop his concepts of waste, superfluity and excess because it is the automaton least disguised by hominisation.

Foucault would famously use the Bataillian measure of absence of works in contrast to the recuperative frame of production to define madness in the modern era. Foucault wrote of madness becoming superfluous, stripped of its roles and imagery and sifted by confinement from the sick, the indigent, the criminal and the morally dissolute until it became a pure, mute surplus.

Yet from this vanishing point it was at once turned into a powerful support to elaborate a new kind of reason, to medicalise deviance and with Freud, to implant desire in people as a liability. Simulated by drugs it gave critical power to art and counterculture and replaced death as the touchstone of authenticity .When Deleuze and Guattari returned the mad stroller to the heart of capitalism they broke perhaps the most productive silence in history.

It is conceivable, thanks to Foucault, that waste populations and supernumerary individuals are maintained to make elbow room for new institutions and contracts, for social innovations possible only in reaction to breaks in sense and utility. The managed void replaces eternal vigilance as the price of liberty.

This vision of ingeniously applying waste and loss pervades Foucault and more so Deleuze and Guattari, who pry worlds apart into major and minor powers with their own tempos and spaces, intensive and extensive qualities in order to make work and waste, information and noise circulate more intimately.

Perhaps a showdown is looming over the Deleuzian machine - between de Landa- committed to its thermodynamic metaphysics and Negri and Hardt who draw on its credit of social vitalism. The continuum of schizophrenic noise and capitalist waste might split into a new automaton for mapping minor histories and a non- philosophy for those seeking the permanent informality of flight.

The difficult reduction of political categories to their implicit models and metaphysics accepted and ingenuously balanced by Deleuze is also the subtext for scientists when they write and make expositions for more than just one another.Vaulting out of culture by means of one of its products, their explications of evolution, machine cognition, neurobiology, cosmology and exotic physics update the atlas of common thermodynamic reason, lending their work its strange and unexpected political effect - neither natural nor social nor physical nor informational - making Dawkins, Dennett and Haraway the Hegels, Humes and Mary Shelleys of the present…

Mbembe uses the suspended social machines and the hiatus in their imagery to suggest a condition of social waste exceeding economic, educational and fiscal recuperation. Such waste is invisible to the eighteenth century model of the contract, to the institution of the market (this much Marx made clear) and is considered a mere performative error by the State in its role as administrator of utility and welfare. Waste people exist in an intimate beyond - outside recontractualisation and reinstitutionalisation to agents, citizens and populations and below resubjectivisation to pupils, workers, or offenders.

The split between the reach of capital and the nation state central to Negri and Hardt’s arguments has made many of the waste processes of capitalism into everybody and nobodies problem: displacing state and economy into units with discontinuous boundaries, different times and incommensurate worlds in between.

Perhaps the waste people are only the facts of power and exploitation no longer automatically overlaid by the inertia of the nation or the ameliorative services of education, training, credit and health so vital to capitalism? Waste is the point where capitalism can find no social organization commensurate with itself: for two hundred years thermodynamics has made this point both inevitable and unthinkable,

Achille Mbembe has leapt into the hiatus-society of waste which is a concept’s width away from us all. Like the priest in L ‘Age d’Or he has a vast social, epistemological and today metaphysical load harnessed to his back. His questions light the thin membrane separating capitalist rationality from itself - the blur it can somehow never focus: the dynamics of waste that unites its furthest reach with its imaginable core. There is every indication that this engaged, passionate, polymathic wanderer is leaping over capitalism’s shadow.

Jean Pierre La Porte

Africa Bauhaus Workshop

The political possibility of exceeding a politics of representation.

Ariella Azoulay

In the impossibility (or possibility) of this time I will not try to respond to the lecture “The Civil Contract of Photography” by Ariella Azoulay. Rather than present an argument, I prefer only to post some ideas to put into question the relationship between the politics of representation and the possibility of the political.

A distinction should be made between the political possibility of the image and the politics of representation in which images are inscribed. Photography is not (only) an action or an encounter but a production of images; images that are inscribed in a specific regime of knowledge that establishes some distributions on the sensible in which some things can be seen, heard and thought while others are just non-visible, non-hearable, non-thinkable even if there is an image that stands as the promise of “presentation”.

A photo is not the presentation of an event but the possibility of visibility. Visibility is not the grade of clarity in which we can see an object, but the logic that permit something to be open; visibility is not the act of the subject that sees, nor the empirical data of the visual sense, but the interaction between actions and reaction with the aesthetical (that we can understand as Rancière suggest, “as a system of a priori forms determining what present itself to sense experience.”[1]).

Photography might not be thought as a representation of anything as its own temporal and spatial structure is based in the spectrality of the dislocated manifestation of the un-present (thinking spectrality as the dialectical force, that resists the configuration of the image as a representation of something, that allows us to be related to an event not in the distance of its correspondence –symbol- with time and history but in the in the continuality of its manifestation) but we cannot deny that photography is inscribed in a system that creates and allows the production of meanings trough a given system of knowledge, a regimen that in modern western culture is based in the establishment of politics of representation as an epistemological device for the enforcement of the configuration of the sensible.

Images are part of the regime of knowledge and are one of the mechanisms of power (institutions, including the State) to create representations (as fixed meanings based in the structure of the symbol – as a correspondence between the object and the truth) in which to fix identities and meanings in order to legitimize some regimes of knowledge and orders of things.

In this scenario maybe what we have to think is how images can exceed this politics of representation, and how their emergence can be a political irruption that allows the possibility of new constellations of meanings to unsettle the dominant regime of knowledge.

How can an image create new knowledge if the image is inscribed in the same politics of representations, based on identities, based in the dominant system of power (state) based on the dichotomy of friend-enemy (in-law/out-law, citizen/non-citizen)?

In this sense what seems necessary is to suspend the functionality of the politics of representation and to search for a moment of manifestation in which the image can operate not as a correspondence with a fixed identity but as a moment of de-identification in which a new constellation of meanings can emerge.

Maybe we can think images not as symbols but as fragments; the image as an allegory that introduces the possibility of history, of the past not as gone but as a moment that keeps coming back, of time not as a fulfilled structure but a collapsed one in which modernity (as progress) can no longer operate.

Perhaps the poetical (as poiesis or moment of emergence and creation) potential of the image might allow us to search mechanisms, strategies and devices to re-read images, to unsettle the politics of representation and open up the possibility of the political. It is important to keep looking for ways to open the invisible, the hidden and the concealed by some given regime of visibility in order to create a fissure.

These are just some problems in which I am engaged, and knowing that there are no final solutions but only stutters, I want to share with you my own way to deal with the possibility of the political in some art practices, as I believe that arts works in between territories, what creates a space and time in which we can re elaborate the relationship between the aesthetical and the political.

Instead of the global south I will invoke the Red Specter as a possibility for what is to come, and I hope he bring us back together…

¡Nos vemos en el 2010!

Helena Châvez MacGregor

Click here for my article “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost: The Red Specter”

http://www.des-bordes.net/0.5/en/la%20barricada%20de%20los%20muertos/helena_chavez.html

---

[1] Ibid., p. 13.