Post
previously published in the Cape Times, 5 June 2012
Brett
Murray’s The Spear has generated an
extraordinary amount of media and political commentary, social media
twittering, marches and protests, including the defacing of the painting
itself. The rage expressed by many in response to the depiction of the private
parts of the President seemed to far exceed other media controversies of recent
years. One thinks here of a number of Zapiro’s rather unflattering cartoons of
the President as well as his depiction of the Prophet Mohammed. All of these controversies have drawn
attention to the tensions between freedom of expression and religiously and
culturally inflected conceptions of propriety, respect and dignity. But there
is another angle on the latest controversy that still needs to be addressed,
namely the question of how leaders and political parties ought to act when, for
various reasons, the “raw emotions” of citizens become available for populist mobilisation?
Was President Zuma neglecting his responsibilities by remaining silent about
the verbal attacks on Brett Murray, the Goodman Gallery and Ferial Haffajee,
the editor of City Press? Was the ANC leadership complicit in encouraging
dangerous simplications and demagoguery that contributed towards portraying
Murray as a diehard white racist, ignoring the inconvenient truth that he had
also been an anti-apartheid cultural activist? Finally, what are the longer-term
costs and dangers for our democratic political culture of the kind of emotionally
charged politics witnessed over the past few weeks?
The
politics of emotions and affect is starting to get some serious attention in
scholarly literature. For example, a recent book by Deborah Gould entitled Moving Politics has shown how, during
the early stages of the AIDS pandemic in the US, gay men initially experienced
feelings of shame, guilt and grief in relation to the social stigma, politics
of blame, and physical devastation unleashed by the disease. By the late 1980s,
activist organisations such as ACT-UP were channelling these feelings into publicly
expressed anger and styles of militant protest directed an initially
indifferent and unresponsive Reagan Administration. In the case of South
Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign also proved itself to be extremely adept
at transforming feelings of stigma and shame into collective anger against the
Mbeki Administration’s initial refusal to provide adequate HIV treatment. Both
these cases illustrate how activists were able to forge an “emotional habitus”
or affective disposition through organisational practices such as street
protests and demonstrations. In other words, these cases show how emotions are
often given shape and direction by activists through processes involving
“emotional labour.” Similarly, the anti-apartheid struggle created its own
affectively charged expressions of resistance, a political culture that still
finds expression in the barricades, service delivery protests, COSATU demonstrations
and ANC rallies. The events leading up to the march on the Goodman Gallery revealed
how the ANC is still able to channel “raw emotions” for party political
purposes.
The
examples above suggest that the political mobilisation of emotion can be put to
many purposes and, in the case of AIDS activism, these political strategies can
lead to constructive democratic outcomes. However, what happens when
politicians and leaders deploy and channel affect for narrow party political or
undemocratic purposes? What happens when the drumming up of emotions by
activists and politicians serves to distract citizens, cloud judgment, facilitate
authoritarian populism and undermine democratic rights?
A
problem with emotive politics of the sort generated by The Spear controversy is that it takes on a spectacular form that
both simplifies issues and limits the horizons of the political imagination,
leaving very little room for nuance, contradiction, ambiguity and creativity. It
would seem that the ANC mobilization against The Spear framed the art work in terms of a simplistic binary logic
of cultural warfare which pitted a disrespectful and racist artist against the
President, the ANC and “the people”. Thereby, parody, irony and satire became stripped
of any political legitimacy, and the art work was magically transformed by the ANC’s
Big Men – Mantashe, Nzimande and Mtembu – into a cultural weapon in a racist war
against “the people.”
The ANC
leadership was very successful in transforming genuine grievances about The Spear into a populist politics of
outrage. This mobilisation conflated The
Spear with histories of racism, and linked both of these to the perceived persecution
of the President at the hands of the media. Once again, the predicament of “Zuma
the Everyman” elicited widespread popular sympathy and support.
Depicting
the penis of a powerful black man in a painting as he did, Murray unwittingly
tapped into both a historically produced taboo, and a vast colonial and
apartheid archive of racist iconography. The deep histories of racist
representations of black bodies and African sexualities provided an entry point
for the ANC leadership to mobilise public anger.
But
there was also another less obvious source for the channelling of popular anger
towards The Spear. The obsession of
Christian missionaries involved in the European “civilising mission” in Africa
was to cover the naked bodies of “heathens”. Nakedness was seen by Europeans as
signs of “primitive “backwardness.” As Jean and John Comaroff note in their seminal
account of 19th century missionaries who worked amongst the Tswana,
“colonial Europeans in South Africa had insisted, from first contact, that
Africans with whom they associated should adopt minimal standards of ‘decency’;
that they should, at the very least, cover their ‘private parts’” (1997: 249).
As a result, Tswana women who worked in white households had to hide their
breasts and replace their skin aprons with skirts, while men working in similar
occupations abandoned their loincloths for trousers. Alongside this Christian “civilising
mission,” were the scientists who measured and objectified black bodies. The
most notorious of these scientific projects were the anthropometric studies of naked
Khoi and San bodies, including of course the figure of Saartje Baartman. These
histories of Christianity and scientific racism, and the sense of shame
produced by these histories, provided the raw material for collective
mobilisation against The Spear. Given
these deep histories of race, and the ANC’s effective mobilisation strategies,
it is not surprising that thousands marched on the Goodman Gallery.
From
the perspective of the largely middle class and cosmopolitan cultural elite
that frequent art galleries and exhibitions, The Spear, and the other critical art works in the Murray
exhibition, was probably not considered to be all that shocking or offensive.
After all, many of the members of this elite have at their disposal forms of
cultural capital gleaned from exposure to iconoclastic and irreverent artistic
traditions such as Dada, punk, and other counter-cultural movements. However,
once The Spear went ‘viral’ through
its dissemination in the media, it came into contact with other publics that were
not at all comfortable with Murray’s edgy and “no holds barred” style of parody
and political critique. It would seem that the artist and the gallery owner did
not anticipate how great the distance was between the cosmopolitan art world of
the cultural elite and the wider South African society.
The Spear entered a
bourgeois public sphere in which it was expected that black South Africans could
detach and disassociate themselves from long histories of racism and engage
with playful political satire that mercilessly lampooned a heroic black icon of
the liberation struggle. This was clearly a big ask for many South Africans. It
was of course also a “gift from the gods” for an ANC Leadership seeking to
animate a flagging Zuma campaign in the run-up to Mangaung. The Spear controversy quickly became all
about the ANC’s attempts to mobilise “raw anger” in order to defend the
reputation and dignity of a besieged President, all in the name of “the nation.”
The genius of the ANC was its capacity to transform and channel a widespread, but
largely inchoate, sense of shame and grievance into carefully orchestrated and
contained expressions of collective anger. In this respect, the ANC leadership perhaps
deserves some credit for bringing the country back from the brink it helped
create, by channelling and containing popular anger and calling for a national
debate on these matters. It is, however, still too early to gauge the
longer-term consequences and casualties of the strong arm tactics deployed by
the ANC against the artist, the gallery, and the editor.
Steven
Robbins
University
of Stellenbosch
