Insects and Incisions



Clapperton Mavhunga presents

 For me Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s talk, ‘How did African sciences and technologies shape colonial science and technology of nature?’ re-inserted critical considerations of the ‘past’, of the historical imagination and the power of historical specificity in our engagements with questions on the ‘Futures of Nature’ and nonhuman agencies. Way overdue in discussions about ‘nature’ within postcolonial settings is the need to move past uncomplicated and simple framings of epistemological differences along categories such as ‘the West’, ‘African’ or ‘Indigenous’ and to begin to theorize from a more situated epistemological position.  If one takes seriously the agency of nonhumans as co-constituents of the historicity and materiality of the everyday and thus as agents in how people come to know and be – what are the implications of this in thinking about the colonial encounter in terms of ontology?

Clapperton’s talk explored this to some extent by looking at the material and social realities in which so-called “Western” science and technology took form. In doing so, he brought our attention to those ‘entangled knowledges’ and the manner in which practices of knowledge production are always embodied, emplaced and situated within very specific ‘geometries of power’ and ‘cultural topographies’. To illustrate this Clapperton took a somewhat unconventional approach - reading the colonial encounter and archive in southern Africa through tracing the ways in which the ‘Tsetse Fly’ came to be constituted or known and the multiple techniques that emerged in response to its existence, forms of mobility and power. By focusing on the history of the Tsetse Fly, Clapperton’s talk subverted more dominant historical narratives that read colonialism as the brutal and subtle imposition of Western ways of knowing on indigenous ways of knowing and the subsequent creative appropriation of or resistances to those Western science and technology by Africans. Instead Clapperton showed that much of colonial science and technology in this territory emerged from and were produced by appropriating already existing African sciences and technologies and subsuming them into a ‘Western’ episteme.

Clapperton’s talk eloquently and somewhat ironically showed how a tiny insect – the Tsetse Fly - was deeply implicated in the co-production of the history of mobilities and thus colonialism,  and the patterns of migration and settlement in the then Rhodesia. By focusing on tracing the mobilities of this particular agent – the Tsetse Fly – within the context an imperial project of re-territorialization, Clapperton showed how certain ontological categories or framings of “nature” and the ‘Other’ came to be - ways of knowing that which is imposing, strange, threatening, or untameable. Within this historical moment an specific ‘ontology of pesthood’ emerged premised on a certain way of knowing, perceiving and representing and engaging ‘Others’ – both human and nonhuman –who exhibits certain characteristic mobilities or who come into or settle in a territory or space to which one has made a certain claim to.

There is much in stake in postcolonial Africa when one writes and performs history from a ‘register more accommodating of agency’ – as Clapperton phrased it – not just human but also nonhuman agency. In considering nonhuman agencies as key actants in the shaping and making of the colonial encounter and the frontier, a more heterogeneous narrative might emerge. In such narratives representations of colonial power can be subverted by or be intimately related to the agency of nonhumans – such as the Tsetse Fly. Thus, these narratives can begin to destabilize our imaginings of the distribution of power and agency in the making of material and social realities. Such narratives may also be able to resonate more with the kind of “popular epistemologies” Nyamnyoh (2001) or ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway) that inform everyday lives of people in different African contexts. Many African scholars such as Francis Nyamnyoh (writing on Cameroom) and Achille Mbembe (in his talk on equatorial Africa), as well as writers such as Ben Okri –have showed that the kind of epistemologies that inform the everyday of many people within different African ‘lifeworlds’ do not rely on a priori boundaries between the invisible and the visible, the animate and inanimate, between subject and object, and between so-called culture and nature. Rather there exists a “deep interconnection between different levels of the real” (Mbembe) – a real which is always emergent and populated by a multiplicity of beings – both human and nonhuman – whose agencies are situated within vernacular framings of power.

For Clapperton, more heterogeneous narratives can also enable a move away from over-determined stories of victimization, which erases the ingenuity and resistances of colonized peoples and enables an opening up of the multitude of ways in which the colonial encounter - as a dialectical process – led to different forms of entanglements and appropriation. And rather than feeding into imperial and colonial representations of Africans as being held ‘captive’ by and being bounded to ‘nature’; Clapperton rather facilitated a representation of pre-colonial Africa as a space of innovation and design and liberation struggles as sites that brought together different ways of knowing in creative, eclectic, unpredictable but also very violent ways.

By tracing the ways in which human and nonhuman mobilities and processes of re-territorialisation and settlement in the colonies gave rise to particular ways of being and knowing; Clapperton was able to show how so-called ‘Western’ epistemological practices have been shaped by multiple configurations of ‘natures/culture’ as they were continuously made and unmade within the context of southern Africa during the colonial regime. Thus, ‘Western’ science and technology, despite its own universalizing and neutral claims are just as contingent upon specific spatial-temporal relationalities as any other form of knowing. Such historical incisions into the powerful exterior of ‘Western’ knowledge are an unsure project, but one that will at least lead to some leakages and experimental flows and has implications for current theorizing about what it means to know within the postcolony.

Elsemi Olwage

A Tied Tide

I want to begin this contestation in a very para-tactical way, in a delirious way, using/abusing a surrealist method of writing, I’m going to make an automatic writing list inspired by the four presentations made under the heading of Platform – Oceans | seas | islands |littorals | beaches. The following list is clearly inspired by the outstanding David Goldberg’s call to sound (out) the sea. In the same sense, with my list, I’m going to sound out the sea of one (my) brain.

The sea, at this moment, recalls an octopus, a fish, Jesus Christ walking, multiplied food, Christopher Columbus, a ship, a shellfish, a swordfish, salt, waves, fishermen, net, rich people on yachts, pirates, buccaneers, islands, capes, lighthouse, confusion, cruise, water world, bob squarepants, Alvar Nuñez cabeza de vaca, el pagamento, coral, whales, free willy, low tide, medium tide, high tide, drowned, flooded, ocean, a message in a bottle, continent, incontinent, Gulliver, sharks, coast, beach, other, cannibal, Caribbean, The Tempest, Une Tempête, slave traffic, drug traffic, submarine, marine, mar, mere, deep, depth, profound, jellyfish, Sinbad, crocodile hunter, Popeye, work trade, sea worship, ship, shipwreck, crusade, Rousseau, Crusoe.

Let’s take for instance Crusoe’s experience; the white European who become a castaway after a shipwreck. The story of Crusoe is probably one of the most well known plots, one that plays on different preoccupations and articulates notions of civilization, race, slavery, mastery, animality, cannibalism, faith, hope, ownership of the other, conquest of the other, ocean madness, individualism, etcetera.

Therefore, the particular relationships between Robinson and one of the other characters he dealt with are of some interest. Robinson, the main character, the Englishman, operates as the representative of civilization and the one in charge of sustaining certain values. As a Christian, he symptomatically names the fugitive from the native tribe, Friday, the day on which God created the animals and the beasts. Friday in Crusoe’s mind is adept to be his servant, companion or assistant, in any case, to occupy a position in which Crusoe is able to command him. It does not matter if Friday becomes educated and converts to Christianity, he still will never be able to command any future enterprise, only to clean up the mess.

Here is a fragment of a 1997 movie version of Robinson Crusoe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJw_WOvPFZ4&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL79D12E5FEA5EC369

In the conditions of the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, I see very little hope for the civilizing enterprise and a true dialogue becomes supremely difficult or impossible. It doesn’t matter if one learns the language of the other, there is absolutely no possibility that Robinson Crusoe will teach Friday how to change his role in their relationship or to invert the hierarchy.

Friday is domesticated and educated by the European Castaway, which means that someone who is absolutely lost educates him. Who he becomes is someone who shares the general fate of the native who also becomes the immigrant, the servant, the object of domination, the freed one, the alien, the outer space inhabitant, the other culture, and the multicultural one. Nothing new, nothing outstanding but only a perpetual position in a never changing structure of power. Perhaps it would have been preferable for Friday to have been eaten by the Cannibals.

Crusoe’s logic of confusion, his will of the lost, is perpetrated by the supremacy of the hierarchical systems used to construct knowledge, history and images. The confusion of Christopher Columbus, his inability to recognize where he was, drove him to name the inhabitants of the islands Indians, and in that act, one can identify a similitude to the way Crusoe named the savage. We can view both Crusoe and Columbus’s voyages as delirious overlapping journeys in the case of Columbus, through an imagined Indian Ocean that wasn’t there.

The confusion caused by the oceanic drift is the aspect of both Crusoe and Columbus’s stories that I wish to point out here. It is this confusion, provoked by feelings of disorientation, of a lack of moorings that recalls the image of a continental shipwreck. This land is the land where we have been shipwrecked and the sea that surrounds us is only drift and confusion.

We learned how to survive the wreck of the Conquest, that big bang that overlapped theories and histories, but we are still being educated by the necessities of a few people. We are frightened, surrounded by the sea, by the ocean, by the land where we have been shipwrecked. Only those who master the ocean are able to manage it, to be in charge of the resources it gives us.

We are still being trapped by the ocean, not only by the oceaness of the ocean, but also by the Civilized European epistemology that can only understand it as the opposite of the land, a narrow perspective in which everything is seen as the opposite of something. In a very appropriate image of the apocalypse, we are acquiring old perspectives at the end of time. We are afraid of something; we need something to be afraid of. We create opposites in order to justify our fear and our will and means of domination of nature.

Addressing the image of the surfer showed by Goldberg, surfing can be seen as one of the ways to feel that humans domesticated the ocean, civilized it, but only in a superficial way, that means, only on its surface. We can proudly use a surf board as if it were a piece of land surfacing above the water, in order to re-enact the scene of Christ not walking but surfing the waves. Beneath the surface of the images of Christ walking on water or the surfer, lays a deeper meaning.

Ever since the shipwreck initiated by the conquest, we feel that every colonial episode has transformed our whole understanding of the relationship between the sea and the land, between the ocean and the earth, but on the other hand, we feel that nothing has changed. If we take for instance the fuller isoedric dyxomap projection, and we attempt to use it to replace the actual coordinates we use to understand the earth, we may drift into other allegorical problems, one can imagine the continent as the site of a shipwreck and our lives as those of castaways or marooned sailors.  We are faced then with the impossibility of accurately representing or charting our course into the depths of nowhere.

But the point I wish to make is that the type of subject derived from that enlightening narrative of Crusoe’s experience; the radical individualistic subject depicted by Crusoe’s character, is the perpetual lonely soldier in a frantic ride against nature. He represents the crusading human’s desire to travel far away, into the ocean of planets, asteroids and universes, not caring that the human is going to feel alone, in a world that doesn’t give him any stability or security.

This is a fragment of Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7BuN8eEYM0

Robinson is with his dog, but he’s alone, he’s with the cat or the parrot but he feels alone eternally lonely, he searches tirelessly in order to in the hope of not feeling abandoned or marooned in the universe. The Apocalypse seems to complete the image, and at least make the human feel that he’s not that lonely. Sometimes one can sense that the Apocalypse is the step humanity has to take to evolve, to transform nature and to become something other, at the same time, the apocalypse differentiates between the living dead and the spirits, the good and the bad, those admitted into the glorious kingdom of heaven and those that are to be excluded.

http://www.benitomovieposter.com/catalog/images/movieposter/robinson-crusoe-en-marte-img-5345.jpg

Maybe we should plan to face the apocalypse with a surfboard.

Despite the numerous interpretations of the Robinson Crusoe story, we still face the ghosts that inhabit the story as if they were brand new. The narratives of Nature found in Crusoe, which tend to come back again and again: the survivor, he who is skilled enough to confront inhospitable nature, has already been transformed. Our quest for survival has become a different narrative about the earth and its wealth; Happy Water, Green politics, natural reservations, conservationism, sustainability, everything is in our hands. Don’t use too much water, be natural, be wild, love the animals, and don’t eat meat. We survive as consumers and we have created a new subject of opposition, a new emerging class of green people, green politics who are at the front of the green apocalypse.

http://www2.swaylocks.com/files/jesus%20logo2.jpg

We see that there has been a transformation; now the consumer is compelled to clean up the mess, while the managers of the world keep on exploiting and educating in a very humanistic approach to preserve not only the world, but the actual relations of the world. Who is deciding how to master and mange the climate change policies?

Art also has to deal with those inner contradictions, with the representation of the human and the non-human as we saw in the exhibitions during the JWTC. It seems that one of the responsibilities of art is to construct different images and critique existing images of the possible. To be transgressive. We repeatedly have had to struggle with powerful narratives of corporative land owners, of religions, and with remixes of those same narratives, and we are still cleaning up the mess of the residual processes of history in whose construction we had no part.

Southern epistemologies appear to be a way of encouraging other dialogical forms. As Achille Mbembe pointed out about the singularity of human kind, human beings are part of the unique but they are not the unique. Instead, human life can be seen as an impure form of water. (Impure Ocean).

Southern epistemologies can be seen as epistemologies of the impure or composite epistemologies. We can decide not to be blinded by the promises of green consumerism, which mask the same old narratives of exploitation and occlusion, the same ideologies masked by the promise of the apocalypse and of redemption. We can prefer not to take our places in the glorious green heaven of the believers and instead stand with our feet firmly on the ground. From that perspective maybe we can sound (out) the polluted sea that we are.

Andrés Jurado

Why epistemologies of the south?

JWTC in conversation

“Why epistemologies of the south?” Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s challenging lecture was charged with greater provocation in the context of the JWTC conversation on nature and environment. It was even more provocative since his argument seemed to unsettle the emergent view in the workshop that knowledges alternative to hegemonic knowledge are romanticized reinventions whose time has passed since the world in which their interventions may have been productive has already been fundamentally transformed. The lecture foregrounded the epistemologies of the metaphorical global south in the context of what the speaker observed as seven threats to social justice in the forms taken by contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Some of these threats, like continued colonialismfor example, are not new or different, just paradoxical in the ways that they continues to perpetuate racism while superficially rejecting the nineteenth century science of race. Other threats to social justice identified represent a widening out of the exclusions of earlier forms of capitalism: For example, as technological advances have allowed work to be brought home and as the nature of the workplace has changed in various sectors, incursions into leisure time have been pushed further. These forms of unpaid labour have thus expanded the sphere of the most significantly unrecognized and unrecompensed labour of traditional women’s work. Most of the threats outlined identify attacks on social justice which allow the continued encroachment of a fluid and engulfing capitalism.

 One of the threats singled out by the speaker, however, namely, the destruction of nature, is a threat of a different magnitude and order since it threatens both the dominant and the dominated. This reinforces the view of Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, who suggests that the finitude of the world conceptualized as resource makes the present crisis of capitalism a crisis which capitalism’s legendary protean powers of transformation will not succeed in transcending. In fact, the environmental threat is a planetary catastrophe which could destroy not only actors in capitalist relations of power, but also animal and vegetable life. (This question addresses a different tension which seems to have arisen in the JWTC conversation. On the one hand, some points of view have taken for granted environmental finitude and potential catastrophe. On the other, the discourse of disaster has been presented as part of the problematic which needs to be challenged.)

 The speaker asserts that containing and reversing global disaster in the cause of social justice cannot emerge from the systems of knowledge which have produced transformations of the natural world on a scale hitherto unknown and unthinkable. In the context of global warming, there quite literally is no part of the planet which lies outside of human influence – there is no wilderness. The speaker maintains that since the sum of knowledges of the world exceeds a western understanding of the world, the epistemologies of the global south suggest a trajectory out of the impasse. Responses to environmental finitude for the most part engage only the knowledge of the global north whose epistemology exists on one side of an “abyssal divide”, producing a radically truncated horizon of possibility. In this way cognitive injustice reinforces social injustice.

Some questions, however, remain troubling in this approach which clearly is inspired both by a pragmatic realism and social concern. In terms of the argument presented, those on the other side of the “abyssal divide” must engage indigenous epistemologies. There is an interesting slippage in the terms used to describe the knowledge which must be gleaned. The argument shuttles between the terms “epistemological” and “cognitive” justice and also “indigenous understandings”. One gets the impression, one that possibly may be misconceived, that the framework and the terms of thinking of indigenous knowledges may, in fact, produce an instrumentalisation of epistemologies of the south, just as epistemologies of the north defined, delimited and  instrumentalised nature. If epistemology of the south refers only to indigenous “know-how”, then it may disembed knowledge from a much more profound understanding of the world which connects human, non-human, plant and cosmos. These spiritually and philosophically integrated worlds are also worlds enabled by a mythology which may not be shared by other indigenous groups. The question then arises of how different indigenous ethical understandings might encounter and engage one another.

Constituting the epistemology of the south as an epistemology of “those who have suffered injustices” as the speaker does, also tends to elide the enabling mythology of indigenous groups in favour of a mythology of a constitutive moment forged out of the engagement with capitalist modernity. In other words, this paradigm would continue to cast into abyssal darkness the epistemology which exists in excess of the epistemology of injustice constituted at the moment of capitalist encounter.

The broader framework of the argument also implies that somehow the radical left summons itself into being outside of an enabling mythology, in other words, universally, and so may be tasked with the role of managing indigenous epistemologies.

Indigenous cosmological or cosmogonic mythologies also simultaneously constitute a set of social and human – nonhuman relations conceived as obligation, the ways one ought to act and engage other people and the natural world. The epistemology of the south is always inherently an ethical understanding, not just a “know-how”. Ethics is also a term which has repeatedly been introduced in the JWTC conversation, but one which has not gone on to produce a dialogue.

Fiona Moola

English Department, University of the Western Cape

The Epistemologies of the Natures of Nature

Sabelo Mcinziba

I could not have imagined a better position for Achille Mbembe to begin his talk on Climate Change and the book of the Apocalypse than the position of epistemologies of nature. He claims that the conceptions of nature the world-over are not and have not been the same. This Western conception of nature can be characterised as instrumental, that is, in the European conception, nature is seen as “a giant complex of equipment” whose relationship is significant as it owes its usefulness to human beings, human beings themselves not nature but nature as an external relation that must be understood in order to be dominated.

In contrast or alongside to the European conception of nature is the African conception of nature – specifically West and Central Africa, with particular emphasis to the latter. This conception of nature is said to be located in the forest where nature is considered as a living organism which not only shapes the modes of thought in “life force” or vitalism but is also seen as a self-arising event and gift. Quite importantly was the argument made about the finitude of the physical environment as a Western conception and how the African idea is that of perpetual metamorphosis of life from one form to another, therefore rendering ideas such as ‘end of the world’ or ‘death’ of as a final stage mutually unintelligible. To this followed the conclusion that our understanding of nature as it stands today is a result of a certain epistemology of the world, to spell the obvious, the West’s.

Viewed from this perspective, there could be very little disagreement with this conclusion as it really tells the story of the world as the ‘battle of epistemologies’ between European gnosis and bodies of knowledge from other parts of the world. These battles have been ranging from economic and political governance and thought, spiritual rationalization, medicinal diagnosis and practice, forms of artistic expression, aesthetics of the physique, and so on.  As noted by Achille himself that this is a mere introduction to the characterizations of nature by Africa and Europe and in reality are not all that simplistic, they still leave us with a few potentially problematic understandings of both epistemologies.

On the first, one could ask whether the ‘instrumentalization’ of nature has not been useful to better the life of humans world-over if not the only constant practice that has allowed humans to move from the different Ages of our history. Europe, in this minimal regard, is no different from the rest of humans in all other parts of the world, perhaps the sharp distinction that even allows us to pointedly differentiate between the epistemologies of the nature of nature among humans is the development of capitalism in Europe. As capitalism developed, so did ideas to rationalise this environment and something akin to a body of thought developed, highlighted by the so-called Enlightenment. In Africa, before Europe developed Capitalism and as it was developing capitalism, the environment of social organisation was vastly different. Generally, being a place of historical abundance, Africa will have had as it did a different rationalization of its environment and how its humans think of themselves in relation to the environment vis-a-vis their European counterparts. Indeed, many Africans will confirm what Achille was asserting as the rationale of perpetual metaphormosis and that nature is a gift tied with the spiritual and cultural ways of existence. As delivered by Achille, and given that it was an introductory feature of his talk, it risks leaving itself open to criticism that Africans have never used nature instrumentally – and of course we know this not to be the case as Africans were the first humans and consequently the first manipulators of rock/stone into then complex tools and technologies that were useful to people at the time. The visit to the Origins Centre at Wits further crystallized this.

I think what ought to be taken strongly from Achille’s characterization of nature from the perspective of Africa and Europe is the cautionary tone against this radical instrumentalization of nature by humans under the shadow of capitalism brought to African life by colonization and colonialism. As a philosophy (capitalism) operating from a rationale of scarcity of resources and the finitude of the physical world, and through its global reach as a result of colonialism and universalization of its local realities, it makes (contextual) sense for Europe to build its epistemology of the nature of nature based on this ontology (“dark age/s” in Europe). As indicated, this epistemology of the nature of nature could not have emerged in Africa because the ontology of Africans was quite different and in fact its fertility and abundance (as opposed to scarcity) was the very drive for its colonization and appropriation for European needs and purposes. With much emphasis again, this is not to impress that the African epistemology would not allow for the usage of nature for the ends of humans (whilst it remains a gift), but the sharp distinction being that of orientation between Europe and Africa. Achille’s criticism takes place from the viewpoint of the South, particularly Africa, and it is situated in a world where one body of knowledge has had almost vanquishing power over another.

Africa itself being the victim of the most vicious form of capitalist labour exploitation, land and resources, human displacement and so forth, the epistemologies dominant in Africa have been those of a Eurocentric interpretation, including in the climate change debate, and the systematic organization of knowledge/s in Africa today through the university.

The university in Africa today struggles to theorise from the position of the South, as the framework of learning and thinking in Africa today is only such by geographical demarcations. This was clearest when Achille discussed the issue of the apocalypse, particularly as a Western concept, specifically a monotheistic one, perhaps more accurately to locate that monotheistic rationale squarely in Judeo-Christian thought. While it is true that there is no understanding of an apocalyptic event (Judgment Day/Hell) in the African epistemological framework but a perpetual metamorphosis of living organisms, it must also be recognised that that made more sense when Africans controlled what happened in their natural as well as social environment. In the age of Euro-American hegemony, where the ‘battle of epistemologies’ has been to the defeat of Africa, the university in Africa today cannot even thoroughly critique the West outside of Western thought and mannerism. The reality that Africa is experiencing now, is an experience forced onto Africa by Euro-American hegemonic forces and the real challenge for Africa today and the rest of the colonized world is build epistemology from ontology and more importantly that that ontology must emerge out of Africa’s own determination. Until the epistemologies from the formerly oppressed peoples of the world: racially, gender-based, queer, working class, etc. have power to their knowledge and an articulation of difference without the temptation to interpret difference hierarchically therefore justifying domination can we move towards a more humane existence.

Sabelo Mcinziba