At the Origins of The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism - Personal Recollections (2)

We decided to set up The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) during the Fall of 2008, in the aftermath of the July Workshop on “Future Tense”.

The Working Group out of which the JWTC sprung having operated under the auspices of WISER, some of us had thought that the new initiative would also operate under the auspices of the same institution, but in an extended inter- or across-Faculty collaborative framework.

This scenario did not materialize. We then examined (and rejected) the possibility of creating an entirely independent entity associated with the University, but with its own legal identity. At the end, after securing the support of the Dean of the Humanities and the VC’s Office, we opted for an interdisciplinary, collaborative Platform within the Faculty of the Humanities.

We wanted the JWTC to be an “intervention”, a mobilizing network rather than a conventional “institution” in the manner of a “Center” or an “Institute”.

We saw the JWTC as a loosely structured “Platform” where thematically-oriented collaborative work would bring together, beyond any particular discipline, a group of young and established scholars to initiate Southern-based, international projects greater in form, scope, depth, or complexity than any individual could undertake himself or herself.

A lot of thinking and consultations with international colleagues had gone into crafting the “intervention”. We set the JWTC up in response to a set of local and global trends and challenges we thought were emerging in the field of the humanities in general, and in terms of the relationship between “critique” and “institutions” in particular.

The global intellectual map was being redrawn. Besides traditional Northern Atlantic institutions, new centers of learning were being established in places such as the Persian Gulf, China, India or Latin America. Symposia, independent media, art shows, book fairs, film festivals and other hallmarks of intellectual life were gradually transforming entire regions of the planet.

The scholarly community was becoming more internationalized. Western-born academics were moving to other parts of the world in growing numbers while Southern born ones were filling many faculties and departments in Northern universities. In the social sciences and the humanities, the worldwide dissemination of thought had been buttressed by a worldwide circulation and translation of texts, a highly productive invention and re-appropriation of concepts and the de-nationalization of the great academic debates.

Yet, a fragmented and uneven distribution of the resources for learning, teaching and cultural criticism persisted. Huge disparities in research and funding capacities and in institutional and pedagogical innovations still pervaded North-South relations, derailing in the process the project of genuine “global humanities”. Marginal regions of the world were still producers of data and test sites for the theory mills of the North. Although it had been for the most part de-territorialized and many of its key concepts had been de-nationalized, displaced and reconstructed sometimes with surprising effects, theory itself was still seen as naturally metropolitan and Western.

In South Africa, the end of Apartheid had seen major shifts in the demand, production, supply and dissemination of knowledge. We had witnessed a surge in problem-oriented, context-specific research that relied on a thin notion of relevance”. Among donor agencies, there was a strong drive to shift funds away from scholarly endeavour towards organizations oriented to direct, practical action. Yet, the popularization of problem-oriented research had not resulted in as big an improvement of knowledge as might have been expected. Because of a profound disregard for theory and conceptualization, this kind of research was leading to the generation and repetition of ill-formed ideas, very poorly theorized and often with substantial negative implications for policy and practice. This translated into an implicit view of our region as a residual entity, the study of which did not contribute anything to the knowledge of the world or of the human condition in general.

It appeared to us that these challenges could no longer be confronted from within the traditional paradigms that relied on a strict North-South dichotomy. More often than not, the effect of such dichotomy had been to police thought by rendering it subservient to identity politics rather than to create the conditions for actually thinking.

Instead of endlessly re-enacting the ideological battles of the past, what was needed was to take full advantage of the new age of academic mobility and the renewed convergence of theory and civic activism worldwide to give expression to the variety of human forms in which argumentation occurs, contributing therefore to the global movement towards genuine global intellectual citizenship. The fractures within the world of global scholarship could not be vainquished through the re-enactment of old ghettos. We needed to create new nodes, facilitate the emergence of new connections and linkages, exercise our own intellectual power confidently, bring scholars together around intellectual propositions we would define in full autonomy.

Achille Mbembe

At the Origins of The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism. Personal Recollections (1)

In the course of the academic year 2008, Kelly Gillespie (Anthropology), Julia Hornberger (then at WISER), Eric Worby (School of Social Sciences) and Achille Mbembe (WISER) convened a Working Group on the the theme: Future Tense: Rethinking Radical Politics in a Neo-Liberal Age.

An informal platform, the Working Group operated under the auspices of WISER. Its starting point was that theories of the future and models of radical political change that characterized modernity no longer seemed to provide sufficient understanding of current social upheavals and disruptions. The Working Group brought together about twenty interested scholars from various institutions in the Gauteng. Coming from various disciplinary backgrounds, they nevertheless shared a common interest in the question of radical hope in a world in fragments – a world that, according to the convenors, experienced uncertainty as to its ways of living and being, its politics and its values, its modes of distribution of social goods and of imagining law and the possibility of justice.

The Working Group met several times and its proceedings were concluded with an International Workshop which took place at The Cottages, Johannesburg, from July 2 to 4, 2008.

The call for the Workshop read as follows:

“Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, published in 1918 in Germany is a passionate account of the importance of the utopian impulse. Throughout the work, and in his subsequent trilogy The Principle of Hope, Bloch is at pains to discover the origins of longing for a better world – what he calls at times ‘imagination’, at times ‘the ethical self’ – and to validate this longing as one of the most profound and relevant forms of social life.

“No matter how the things that still exist respond: hope makes one partial to precisely the well-fabricated [erdichten] but otherwise unverifiable idea. For we are able to escape ourselves, and our quasi-phenomenal form of existence, insofar as we form intelligible characters. Here the world’s labyrinth and the heart’s paradise become visible discretely; the world in the focus imaginarius, in the more hidden, intelligible part of our subjectivity, begins to appear as hope for the future” (Bloch [1918] 2000, 176).

In reading Bloch’s provocative text today, two possible modes of thinking about ‘the future’ in our contemporary world seem to emerge. Firstly, in the spirit of political philosophy, in a world in which substantive claims to grand liberatory politics have been seriously curtailed, and utopias themselves rendered dangerous and passé, what becomes of critical and substantive political engagement when it is not driven by a clear projection of a desired future? If the content of the utopian is no longer fixable, what kinds of political | critical | theoretical projects are possible in the wake of clarifiable futures? Has the withering of the utopian produced, necessarily, the apathetic? Or does all political engagement not rely – explicitly or implicitly – upon some imagination about the future that is underwritten by an element of the utopian? Is there space to enact a utopian gesture without content, without program, perhaps in the name of the ‘emergent’, perhaps in the name of ‘critique’? By allowing for the unfinished character of the ‘not-yet’, as Bloch does, how do we trust that our thought and action does not assist in a state of repetition and conservation?

Secondly, in ethnographic terms, Bloch’s insistence that the utopian can be found in many social forms of everyday life continues to hold true. Indeed, to argue that utopianism has disappeared would simply be incorrect. As neo-liberalism has compromised the space for a utopian political imagination, it has simultaneously created conditions for the vivid expression of cultures of the future, many of which are clearly built upon utopias, or their dystopic inversion. The surge of pentecostalism, suicide bombing, environmental catastrophism, for example, have in many ways colonized the spirit of utopia, playing it out in eschatological fashion. Other social forms, almost in mockery of the utopian, have produced new constellations of time in which the limited uncertainty of the future becomes massively profitable. Market speculation, trend-spotting, casino capitalism put the future to work in service of a predatory present, disavowing the largesse of politically motivated futures in favor of profitable probability and the management of risk. Such eschatological and ‘occupied’ futures are quite different from the kinds of old futures proposed by modernism. Indeed, modernist futures imagined either in terms of welfarist generation and life cycle, or in terms of coherent utopian/dystopian projections – think Brave New World, Metropolis, Blade Runner – seem no longer to represent contemporary imaginations. Such shifts in the cultures of the future alert us to the contingencies in the making of time and possibility.

These two modes of interpreting the logic of the future – the political philosophical and the ethnographic – are, of course, intertwined. One has only to look at protracted empirical social contradictions such as Israel-Palestine or the workings of late capitalism to realize that any philosophy of optimism is rendered precarious when read against the depressing repetition of such social relations. Yet these two modes seem to provide a way to engage some of the conceptual and material expressions and configurations of the contemporary utopian, or at least contemporary futures. The shifting relationships between past, present and future are critical in deciphering the times in which we live and negotiating the possibility of social transformation.

The Workshop took as its springboard Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia. We wished to read this text against contemporary social orders, either teasing out its meaning in light of current predicaments, or borrowing some of its key terms to reflect on our own critical dilemmas. By choosing a single text as collective starting point, we hoped to lend focus to our intellectual encounter, while leaving as much interpretive scope as possible to participants.

Achille Mbembe

Suffering and Surplus people

Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale spends the night in Diepsloot

Image and story: www.iol.co.za/news/politics/rich-tokyo-spends-night-among-poor-1.453846

The third session of the Sawyer Seminar on Property, Race and Poverty at Wits University began three weeks ago. Its second meeting focused on vulnerabilities and poverty. The 14 participants discussed readings concerning poverty in South Africa. This post is by C.A.K. Uzondu; Sawyer Seminar series postdoctoral fellow.

In his article, “The Third Force” S’bu Zikode reminds us that “poverty is not just suffering. It threatens us with death every day.” Zikode is explicit. Those violently constituted as “surplus peoples” are those whose death is rendered insignificant. Surplus people are allowed to die. Could it be that “surplus peoples,” those Fanon called the “wretched of the earth,” are those that are killed? This was the question troubling me.

First published in 1985, “The Surplus People Project” captured some of what it meant to be rendered “surplus people.” It reveals, as Mbembe would have it, the superfluous black bodies that were made vulnerable, debased, and wasted as a “necessary sacrifice.” This sacrifice may require either or both biological and social death. Still, on some level, The Surplus People Project also captured the way people resisted their subjection to, what Agamben terms, “bare life.”

And so, reading “The Surplus People Project” generated different emotions and questions for the participants. Some wondered why we were reading this material. After all there is often a lurking sense that we know what happened during apartheid. Others expressed angst over the information presented. The specificity provided, in some instances, made us acutely aware of how much we did not know, could not know. This in turn generated questions about the different power and restrictive possibilities of both statistics and narration. Another intervention relayed how The Surplus People Project problematized liberal and Marxist accounts of dispossession. The Surplus People Project also pointed our attention to the law and its relation to violence. One participant noted the way that the law, specifically the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill, categorically denied any and all legal recourse to Africans. This of course was part of the attempt to systematically deploy the law to deny African citizenship in South Africa through the creation of banstustans.

Dispossession of Africans, however, did not start during apartheid. Critically, one participant reminded us to be cognizant of the failure of The Surplus People Project to register apartheid as an aspect of a longer history of colonialism and imperialism to which Africans had been subjected. Sol T. Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, we were reminded, powerfully chronicled African dispossession in the early 1900s. This was an important intervention given the tendency to exceptionalize apartheid. Even with its limitations, I felt re-engaging with The Surplus People Project as important, as it is a history (necessarily partial) of the present. Obviously any engagement of vulnerability and poverty must necessarily be attentive to the historical specificity in which they were produced, as well as with the contemporary practices that reproduce and intensify them.

And so we turned to Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s largest shantytown movement, via S’Bu Zikode, and engagement with the same movement via articles by Anna Selmeczi and Xin Wei Ngiam.

“The Third Force” articulates the struggle for shackdwellers to be recognized as human being. If it is “all the pain and suffering that the poor are subjected to every second in our lives,” as Zikode puts it, that make them the Third Force, it is their maturation through the “thinking of the masses” and their political/moral action that constitutes the shackdwellers as political subjects, who are necessarily human beings. Collective thought and action are clearly constitutive of the political subjectification of shackdwellers. The echoes of Fanon are clear. In particular, I remember Fanon’s discussion in A Dying Colonization of the Algerian peoples’ embrace of the radio. Given the prominent place for direct action that S’Bu Zikode posits, do we need to probe more deeply the relationship between state violence and the constitution of shackdwellers as political subjects?

But then what kind of political subjects are shackdwellers? Do they experience their political subjectification, as what Pretyna terms, “biological citizens”? And is their political subjectification ultimately indeterminate? If shackdwellers inhabit a particular biopolitical order can we consider their relegation to shacks in shantytowns as a type of moderated indefinite detention similar to what Judith Butler discusses in Precarious Life? It seems that placing particular populations indefinitely in states of precarious existence, where the nature of their citizenship, even the nature of their ontological status as human beings remain indeterminate, is essential to the constitution of governmentality.

Zikode wants to expose the leaders (the second force) to this biopolitical order. He wants them to experience suffering as the shackdwellers live it. Thus, Zikode appeals for “leaders who are concerned about peoples’ lives” to “come and stay at least one week in the jondolos. They must feel the mud. They must share 6 toilets with 6, 000 people.” I think him to kind. A confession is in order! I have long dreamt not of appealing to such leaders, but forcing all upper echelons elected officials to endure such conditions. And to do so with no predetermined end date in site. In other words, I have dreamt of making “my” political leaders “surplus people.” Like Zikode, I imagine that if leaders live and experience life as marginalized people do, it can be transformative for them and positively inform their political decisions.

Still, I am uneasy. I wonder if this “hopefulness” risks a kind of moralism. Does it necessarily provide an engagement with essential institutional transformations that must be required to confront governmentality? This concern was voiced by a number of participants. Is it enough to follow the lead of movements like Abahlali if what they offer does not explicitly engage the specificities of our biopolitical moment? One participant reminded us of the Arendtian critique of conflating social issues with political issues. Unfortunately, we did not pursue the potentialities and problematics of this latter line of argument/inquiry.

We returned to suffering. Does Zikode insistence on “speaking suffering” disable engaging the specificities of our biopolitical era, even if Selmeczi is correct when she asserts that this is constitutive of Abahlali’s political subjectification? That there was considerable angst for some participants regarding this speaking suffering as counter-conduct and “living politics as form of knowledge,” was readily apparent. For Selmezci, the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo serves to express the shackdwellers position of themselves as knowledge producers and their settlements as places of learning. This, Selmezci claims, lends shackdwellers authority for “altering the material patterns of urban politics.” For some of my colleagues looming questions remained, especially given the recent allegations regarding murder by key members of Abahlali. One question raised sought to know what then would be the possibility of participation by intellectual/activists in a movement like Abahlali? Another wondered if sentiments like Abahlali’s demand that “those who feel it, should lead it” were not intertwined with a bourgeoning anti-intellectualism? Still another wanted to know then the place of critique and the critic? Did Abahlali’s injunction automatically restrict non-shackdwellers from critical evaluation of movement practices? Indisputably these were important questions.

Still, I wondered if we were adequately listening. Were we listening to ourselves and, critically, were we listening to Abahlali. This is a significant point for Selmezci and Ngiam in their readings of Abahlali. Thus Ngiam listens to Abahlali and hears the “rich and eloquent personal theorizations of injustice, democratic betrayal, and political ethics.” This for me was the profundity of theorizing from suffering. (It resonates, I think, with Mbembe’s suggestions that theorists begin with the categories of life and death). Starting from suffering, the specific suffering of shackdwellers, vitalizes morals and ethics. The emphasis on betray is important because it aims to rupture the common place of the “politics” of governmentality. Perhaps, precisely at a moment when such sentiments seem anachronistic, Abahlali calls for a reawakening of a moral compass that could ground a practice of solidarity. Our first task, then, is to listen. Whether or not this reawakening of morality and ethics is sufficient to confront biopolitics is an open question. In fact, biopolitics may be inadequate a conceptualization. It may be more accurate to think of our contemporary as governed by a necro-political/necro-economic modality of governance? Our very way(s) of life may be conditioned by some, the “surplus peoples,” being killed. If so, then our anxiety with theorizing from suffering may have to do with our fear of facing our own complicity. Does proceeding from suffering implore us to face our complicity in the constitution of violence? Perhaps we do not really want to listen to shackdwellers because what they are telling us about poverty, and therefore wealth, is what we cannot afford to countenance. Do we secretly valorize (implicitly) white-supremacist capitalist-patriarchy and its benefits and are unwilling to confront what we find ourselves unable to address? Thus, perhaps we should side step the question “if we are concerned with poverty, what exactly is the object of study?” (We never truly engaged this question, in any case). Maybe we should not start with poverty, but with inequality.

This is implicit, I think, in the case study by Mark Hunter, “The Difference that Place Makes,” which we glossed over for a lack of time. I turn to it briefly as a way to tentatively conclude. Hunter’s conclusion is that the most defining feature of contemporary transit camps is that they make populations “more invisible” as they ascribe formality. Could this have been avoided, if shackdwellers had been listened to? Even more, does Hunter (inadvertently?) point us to something deeper? Do we refrain from accepting the significance of theorizing from suffering because it is not sufficiently “modern”? If so, maybe we ought to contemplate Lindquvist’s claim that modernity is built on a “progress that presupposes genocide.”

C.A.K. Uzondu

The possibility of critique: location, circulation, style and affect

As a first time participant in the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, I found the summer workshop on critique and critical theory extremely stimulating and gratifying, mostly because of the rare opportunity it afforded me to join in conversation with South African scholars and intellectuals. I found the sessions rewarding also owing to the process, collegiality, and a very real (affective and intellectual) sense of collective investment in a project of critical exploration. In the context of the constriction of certain sectors of the American university because of the financial crisis, the three days together provided a model of how one does the work of critique, especially how one forms and sustains a critical network (and conversation) about matters of concern. Since my return to the United States resonances of the exchanges, the sustained engagements, insights, and conviviality continue to animate and inform my conversations, teaching, and lectures.

One of the most pressing and enduing themes was our consistent concern with and attention to the conditions of possibility for critique--conditions of location, circulation, style, scenes, effect, and context. Indeed my sense is that we are facing a new set of conditions of possibility for critique and critical theory, one defined as much by the modes of its expression—the essay, the book, the blog, the manifesto and their specific futures as by the circuits of transmission including most especially the digital landscape and the organizing logics that define it.

This theme relates to the transformation, even hollowing out, of the everyday by the logics of branding, self-making, digitality, spectacular and spectacle, and the fake. This condition has put a kind of pressure on the critical, not just to recover the real or reveal hidden logics but to understand how it too, as an object of critique (its own?) has quickly become one more narrative, in a crowed field. Perhaps it is the imbrication of the everyday and the ordinary, the fake as the form in which the real, the critical, the participatory appear (as Ackbar reminds us) that is the ground on which critique can find new traction.

In the global north, (following Anna’s observation that where we speak from has implications), which is where I speak from, the everyday hollowing out of lives, labor, bodies, have themselves become ordinary. Yet, it is with the bodies cast out as disposable in spaces rendered illegible in the global movement of capital and information, that a different kind of critique and production of the marvelous is taking place. One that performs its critical project by using its individual and collective body to trace the contours of evacuation, automation, and displacement with the only tools available—bodies rendered menacing, dangerous, and productive mainly to set the normative boundaries. I returned to the global north convinced that this too is a form of critique, that critique might join in a collaborative conversation (rather than displace or instruct). Such collaboration is a form of the marvelous discovery and practice that might animate critique. For me one of the enduring large themes of the workshop is that critical theory and critique must begin to take account of the conditions, practices, and connection between the ordinary and the everyday, to make sense of the ways in which both are increasingly structured by media and affect. One implication of not grappling with this condition of the production of the critical perhaps is the obduracy of pessimism of critical theory, what a colleague of mine calls the paranoia of critical theory which also stems from a limited horizon of possibility but is also combined with the fundamental suspicion of the media and the conditions of possibility within which critique circulates. This disposition strikes me as in dire need of reconsideration if only to gain the attention of someone other than the choir to which we have become accustomed to preaching. The forms of discovery—the marvelous and the affective forms of critique and imaginations about the possible were also quite resonant for me in our time together and not so much as yet another mode of critique, but as a way of understanding just how much our critical dispositions are as Sara repeatedly insisted, forced into narrow and limited mode of expression. Attention to the importance of the register of the affective as a mode of critique in the moment of spectacular and digital seems like a point of important articulation on many fronts and in many modes of expression.

Herman Gray, UC Santa Cruz

Faking it: Design as Re-making

Ackbar Abbas (with Pamila Gupta)

Ackbar Abbas started out his lecture on “History in the Faking” by acknowledging his debt to a borrowed pair of scissors “without which this talk would not have been possible.” Indeed, a closer look at his notes revealed a Frankensteinian mishmash of segments from typed notes interweaved with handwritten interjections. The next day at breakfast I came across a folder containing the rejected remnants of earlier notes, holes marking the passages Abbas found particularly relevant to our workshop. I wished I could look at the remainders more closely, perhaps try to figure out why they were rejected, but I already felt like I was snooping.

Maybe Abbas would have been sympathetic to my snooping – after all, in a masterful closing argument delivered during the workshop’s concluding he returned to the title of the lecture on the previous day, Wreckages of Utopia, urging us to reexamine the ruins, claiming that one can only see Utopia in the wreckages. Using Walter Benjamin’s conception of the ruin, he suggested that one can ‘pick up and pick out fragments of a Messianic time, embedded like broken glass in the ruins’ (my approximate paraphrase) – the key is not to turn to the ruins either in a spirit of traumatic repetition or nostalgic return.

The question of how one should view these wreckages returns us to the key word in Abbas’s earlier lecture – design. Critique, he argues, has lost its efficacy – when critique is everywhere, it is also nowhere. Instead of critique or theory, he urges one to design. Design, in this argument (which I do not purport to follow perfectly), is to make something from conditions buried underground – returning us to the wreckages or ruins. The starting point of design is thus not having an idea of what a good design would look like (in fact, Abbas is invested in ‘poor’ design, which he stresses is not the same as bad design), but rather, addressing that which is confusing or unanswerable. ‘The South,’ as we have been thinking about it, provides a rich ground for design because it is the space where the anomalies of contemporary society (call it global capitalism or late capitalism or the information age, whichever you choose) become most clearly visible in the juxtapositions between the most advanced and most basic forms which coexist there. As Abbas reminds us, the marginal can no longer safely be dismissed to the margins.

For example: fakes. Abbas uses the proliferation of fakes (handbags, watches, etc.), particularly as made in China, as the focal point of his lecture. Fakes are, he says, a ‘hysterical symptom’ of capital – I believe one can also see them as the pieces of broken glass in the ruins, bearing a disconnected resemblance (like allegory in Benjamin) to that which they purport to reflect. Illustrating his argument with a reference to Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, he says that, just as in this work there are two perspectives at work, the conventional and the anamorphic (the painting contains a stretched-out skull which only becomes decipherable if one views the painting from the side, at which point the rest of the painting becomes blurred), fakes illustrate that the space of the market economy also contains multiple incompatible frameworks which are not visible from the same perspective, even though they are ‘right in front of you.’ The purpose of design, then, would be to make these frameworks visible.

Design, thus, is a remaking. Abbas references J.L. Borges’s Pierre Menard as the model. In this short story, Menard painstakingly ‘recreates’ or ‘remakes’ “the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two” (Borges, Labyrinths, p. 39. Translated by James E. Irwin). This is not a fake: “Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (ibid.). Menard has not copied the Quixote, but remade it. In Abbas’s formulation, the faker copies, but the artist falsifies. It is in this spirit that one can approach the wreckages or ruins: a spirit which is creative, not imitative.

I realize I have probably not done a very good job of relaying Abbas’s argument, nor was that really the point of this blog post. What I was trying to do was anchor his talk in our shared concern of how to think from the South. The fear Abbas addresses, I would say, is that the South is doomed to repetition, to belatedness, to imitation, while innovation happens elsewhere. He makes it clear that this is not the case – that it is from the South, and perhaps only from the South, that we can start thinking the present. Belatedness, being in the wrong time or the wrong place, becomes the basis for a liberatory politics.

Nienke Boer