Belonging in the neoliberal age: Following Peter Geschiere’s lecture at the JWTC

Geschiere on THE question

In times when I have the privilege of listening to scholars sharing their thoughts and ideas on the world we live in today, I cannot help but wonder about THE question that lies beneath their reflections, analysis, conclusions, interpretations. That question that drives them to think hours into the night and keep digging for answers in the places that they have chosen – or should I say, chose them – to spend most of their intellectual life. How does one end up working on prisons, born-again Christians, the law or the WTO? Where do notions like “ethics of mutuality” come from as analytical tools to counter necropolitics? And as I listened to Peter Geschiere speak eloquently about issues of belonging in a neoliberal age that has produced as much globalization as it has produced heterogeneous practices of locality, I could not help but wonder about the question that drives him to warn us of the terrible repercussions the politics of belonging have had and continue to have in Cameroon and the Netherlands.

He presents quite an alarming portrait of the spread of an extremely reductionist and naturalized form of identity politics, one that brings forth a new form of extreme territoriality, where one’s identity is re-inscribed literally in the soil that gave birth to him/her. Geschiere draws on compelling examples of kin being suddenly turned into strangers, political parties exploiting ethnic tensions and identity politics in order to gain votes in rural villages, relatives who have become urbanized being accused of witchcraft as a form of leveling by their kin and other residents of their villages of origin, and of conflicts erupting over where those who are accused of being allogènes, and not autochtones should or should not be buried.

His arguments relate to a body of literature in the human and social sciences that has been increasingly gaining ground, one that is focused on deconstructing and implicitly delegitimizing notions such as community, and collective manifestations of identity. The philosopher Kwame Appiah comes to mind, so does anthropologist Nigel Rapport. Both authors call for a form of individuality that can skate through the artificial boundaries of national, religious and communitarian identities. The violence human beings’ attachments to certain myths of origin and imagined sites of identity politics are cited as clear examples of the perils of belonging and community as analytical tools to interpret and understand human relations.

That is not the individualist project that Geschiere, I think, seems to defend although overtones might be detected. These notions are too self-evident, too imprecise, and too politicized to be used uncritically by anthropologists Gaschiere argues. Furthermore, they are symptoms of the neoliberization of politics. All of these are strong and convincing arguments. The devastation that fights over who belongs and who doesn’t have left in different societies is unquestionable. Yet, deconstructing belonging as a by-product of neoliberalism and highlighting its perils leaves unanswered an even more fundamental question: Constructed or not, artificial or not, these notions are invested in meaning, they are used and referred to in everyday life, so unless anthropologists are willing to go back to their old habits of telling people who they are and how they should think, we have an obligation to take seriously the meaning and value that groups and individuals invest in belonging.

As Geschiere would undoubtedly agree, autochtony is but one form among many that belonging can take. Its potency lies less, in my view, in its invocation of an organic identity derived from the soil (a specific place) than in the context and cosmology that has made that soil (or place) so central as a primary reference to identity. I am not convinced that the reference to the soil is more prone to the naturalization of identity than is religion or class or political affiliations for that matter … Whenever a criteria for inclusion or exclusion is established, it becomes potent and naturalized in order to impose its hegemony. So in the context of Cameroon, I would be very interested in understanding how “returning to the soil” (the village) has developed into a condition for belonging.

Geschiere argues that neoliberalization has very much to do with that. That is where he leaves me unconvinced. The passion that identity politics invokes can be explained only partially by an order like neoliberalism. Autochtony relates to an extremely powerful mythology of origin and the particular role that the stranger plays in those myths, legends, stories through which societies constitute themselves locally and globally, in the past, through the present and into the future. The causal relationship that Geschiere establishes between autochtony and neoliberalization fails, in my view, to capture the immensely powerful desire to belong as well as the myths of origin that produce autochtony. One eloquent example of this is the myth around which the state of Israel as a land without people for a people without land was created and through which its atrocities continue to be justified. Neoliberalism in this particular case serves only as an instrument among many to keep reproducing this myth. Neoliberlaism without this myth of origin would not have, in my view, made it possible for Zionist notions of autochtony to continue to be legitimized generation after generation regardless of history.

Identifying a notion as having a certain power and cosmology built around it inevitably invites a deconstructivist approach. Anthropologists having always had a problematic relationship with culture, and having always thought about the human from marginality’s perspective are naturally more inclined to be skeptical and react negatively to any normative notion. So the reflex is to deconstruct. The deconstructivist position is one that generally starts with a negative. The notion being deconstructed is more often than not approached from the point of view of marginality, its hegemonic character is taken for granted and thus the orientation of the analysis can only go in the direction of picking through its elements and tearing them apart. This method has been quite useful and fruitful in denaturalizing and exposing implicit discourses of power but it has been quite unsatisfying in understanding why people are attached to such notions beyond treating them as being manipulated and helpless.

So the question is, how to resolve this dilemma of trying to deconstruct a notion without destroying in the same exercise the meaning that it has or has always had for people in one form or another. One might ask, justifiably, why not destroy “autochtony” since in Israel’s case, it has lead to so much suffering and injustice? Quite simply, the answer is because notions of autochtony may also be a site of liberation. Palestinians in diaspora have survived and continue to survive because they can still imagine being part of a shared homeland. Artificial or not, idealized or not, the imagined homeland has served as a catalyst of resistance and getting out of the refugee camps.

I think one of the ways of getting around this obstacle of deconstruction is by changing the root question that drives most deconstructivist interpretations of notions related to identity and belonging. Instead of starting from the premise that autochtony is constructed and thus inevitably artificial, I would actually build on the premise that human beings are quintessentially social and can only enact their humanity by relating to others, and in that sense, the longing to be part of something, to be attached is a condition of being (be-longing to cite David Goldberg). The question then is not how artificial or hegemonic one form of being is or not, but how individuals and groups strive to find belonging in a contemporary world that is constantly calling into question canonized myths of origin.

In a sense, this is what Geschiere does, and his analysis of the repercussions of neoliberalism is part of this quest to understand how different societies define and search for belonging. But neoliberalism is only one intermediary in a series of discourses and phenomena that shape notions of autochtony. I am quite skeptical of the way it has become the be all end all of everything happening in the world today locally and globally. In a way, it’s too easy. I am not sure that neoliberalism is more inclined to bring about the autochtony-related form of belonging. It might be simply the current category that we use to speak about powerful discourses that have always existed. Social scientists tend to invent new terms to think with or against that often refer to recurrent phenomenon. The danger in that is that it gives the impression that we are facing a unique or especially perilous situation when we aren’t.

So what I am proposing is, in effect, to decentralize neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse by going back and asking the question: how does belonging gain meaning in different contexts and among different societies. Instead of deconstructing what we perceive as artificial categories, I think we should build on localized and historicized understandings of belonging and go from there.

Yara El-Ghadban

The Common in Communism

JWTC on the commons

Michael Hardt’s The Common in Communism

Caveat: what follows is an attempted synopsis of what were very complex ideas. Apologies to their author!

Addressing what he described as the ‘sea change’ in the political landscape of the current fiscal crisis, Professor Hardt sought to work through a reconfiguration of communism drawing on Marx’s early economic and political manuscripts. In his reading of Marx, Hardt identified two concepts which he mapped onto a proposal of how to think beyond the fixities of capital and the social. In so doing, he advocated a ‘third way’ of conceiving the political anchored in a recuperation of the ‘common’ in communism.

Hardt argued that the normative meanings attributed to communism have to be reconceived in light of shifts in the composition of labour and forms of production. He contended that Marx’s notion of property in his 1844 manuscript ‘The Relationship of Private Property’, demonstrates a division between moveable and immoveable property, represented by the extraction of value in profit and rent respectively. Hardt went on to contend that, given the transformation of production, Marx’s analysis of moveable and immoveable property retains its purchase when applied to the concepts of 21^st century material and immaterial production. The latter he defined as ideas, language, codes and social relationships in contradistinction to the more traditional forms of material property embodied by the former. The defining characteristic of the immaterial as something shared, leads Hardt to perceive it as the site of ‘the common’, and a locus from which the social power relations of capital can be contested. Whereas, for Hardt, Marx maintains the triumph of profit (the immoveable) over rent (moveable) in terms of the expropriation of value, the contemporary political-social has witnessed the triumph of the immaterial over the material, as its reproducible and shared form makes it more resistant to the kinds of policing and containment applied to the exclusive and non-reproducible qualities of the material.

Hardt qualified this assertion with the following observation: in order for the maximum productivity of the immaterial to be realised, ideas must be shared. The contradictory implications for capitalism thus reside in the paradoxical nature of immaterial production: the more the common is controlled and delimited, the more its productivity is reduced. Conversely, the sharing of the immaterial undermines the notions of private property so central to capitalism’s formation. Hardt supplemented his interpretation of Marx’s analysis of property with a focus on his exploration of communism in the essay, ‘Private Property and Communism’. This essay, Hardt submitted, provides evidence for a Marxian understanding of the ways in which capital appropriates not simply the object/commodity, but also subjectivity. That is, capital seeks to produce human subjects as commodities, as sources of production. This social relation of capital reveals both the increasingly bio-political nature of capitalist production and offers up a site for the interaction of singularities, the formation of multiplicities and mutualities, which resist its hegemonic impositions. The notion of the bio-political and/or immaterial as ‘the common’, and its increasing centrality to modes of capitalist production, allows us to think about the ways in which these concepts can be utilised against capital. When we recognise the ‘common’ in communism we recognise our shared potentiality to dismantle the oppressive apparatus of late capitalism.

Responses to Hardt’s argument are considered by Maki Motapanyane…read on!

Megan Jones

The politics of common belonging

Michael Hardt’s poetic vision for the future asks us to become conscientized to our intrinsic autonomy in the context of late capitalism. This autonomy, he argues, can serve as the basis of a shifting and radicalizing of social, economic and political relations beyond the domain of private property.

The ‘common’ that Hardt proposes brings human plurality and diversity into its fold through what he identifies as the intrinsically autonomous connection human beings have to the ecological (earth, nature) and artificial (creativity, affect, cognitive labour) common. Hardt imagines, from the present, the possibility of a common organized outside of private property relations yet still engaged in the market; a common that challenges the idea that something is only ‘ours’ when we possess it.

The argument that current modes of capitalist production reduce productivity by appropriating, controlling and constraining the common, is compelling. As is Hardt’s vision of rescuing immaterial products (ideas, images, affect) from private property relations so that these may be ‘freely’ shared.

What remains unclear is whether and how this vision of the common accounts for difference and inequality, for the material presence of history in day-to-day life. Radical speculation, in this case around the possibilities for organizing labour relations in a new way - in a manner that frees up human creativity for genuine mutuality, is important to the practice of effecting change. Nonetheless, part of the intellectual responsibility we carry in such endeavours involves grappling concretely with difference, racism, exclusion/inclusion, gender-based violence and vampirism in the name of the common, among other lived realities.

Maki Motapanyane

Belonging As An Episteme

Peter Geschiere

Peter Geschiere’s lecture “Neo-Liberalism and The Paradoxes of Community and Belonging” generates two accounts of belonging. The first account connects belonging to state power, the sharing of resources, recognition and rights within the nation state etc. At the heart of this reading of belonging is public recognition. And the key criterion for public recognition here is autochthony which is a claim to the state of being aboriginal or native to a particular state. This stands in contrast to the allochtons-the so-called strangers. The politics of estrangement and antinomy among the elements of this concept of belonging drove Geschiere’s lecture and partly animated audience’s response.

The antinomy and how it is to be resolved boils down to the ethics of public recognition-that is who is to be recognized as free, necessary, sovereign, autonomous and freely participating member of a polity, and those whose membership of that polity is contingent. Applied to the African continent Geschiere observes the inclusive ethics that defined African societies prior to colonialism and transatlantic slavery. Given this supposition, the issue is : to what extent are the issues of (i) autochthony/allochtony and (ii) ethics of public recognition based on the binary of autochthony/allochtony a problem of the unresolved question of the arbitrariness of the colonial nation state which was driven primarily by crude capital accumulation, cheap labor, colonial conquest and transatlantic slavery? That the politics of autochthony/allochtony cuts across all polities-South and North – with similar characteristics speak to the similarity of the historical project of the nation state both in the colonies and the metropolis.

The second reading of belonging which dominated the response from the audience is belonging as a form of resistance. Belonging as a form of resistance allows us to read historically and properly resistance against global sites of evil-colonialism, transatlantic slavery, racism, apartheid, the holocaust, the occupation of Palestine etc. I will like to round this off with how this plays itself out with respect to the idea of belonging in Global Africa’s (by this I mean the experiences of peoples of African descent in Africa, America , Caribbean, Europe, Asia etc) Diaspora experience. W.E.B. Du Bois’ thesis on Double Consciousness and its problematic appropriation by Paul Gilroy in his thesis on the Black Atlantic forms the basis of my argument.

During the transatlantic slave trade, the first point of attack was the spiritual state of peoples of African descent, their consciousness, their belonging. And the manner of attack is a mutilation of the black identity. The consequence is that peoples of African descent were compelled to look at the world and themselves through the consciousness of others, the “belonging” of others, that of the racist authority. This was a veil Du Bois called Double Consciousness of the Negro. Du Bois was critical of Double Consciousness for he argued that people of African descent were in possession of a true self consciousness, a cultural subjectivity, a belonging which racist authority attacked virulently and crudely.
In more recent period, Paul Gilroy appropriated Du Bois’ thesis and pressed it into a thesis of Black Atlantic in characterizing the experiences of the New African Diaspora .. In Gilroy’s words “… in opposition to nationalist and ethnically absolute approaches, I want to develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective…” That any space can be taken as a single unit of analysis is not the problem. The problem for African Diaspora is the sort of black Atlantic subject that emerges from this unit of analysis. Where a single unit of analysis is purged of its ontology, its transformative sense of belonging the product is nothing but a ghost in the machine of capital, pliable, usable and disposable by capital.

Gilroy cites the creative hybrid musical forms of black communities in England as examples of this hybrid black Atlantic cultural product. The crucial point is that Gilroy fails to see why and how his transatlantic product might have been driven by capital rather than the cultural agency of the African Diaspora. A good illustration is the complete purging of black music by capital of its transformative ethos in the name of creativity. Walking around black communities anywhere in the Diaspora and looking straight into the eyes of those little black kids who shake their heads and hips to those musical chloroforms and musical opium in the name of creativity and hybridity, my question all the time is that who benefits, who gains from this flight of belonging and ontology from formerly vibrant transformative and liberating black musical forms?

We do not need to go too far before we see the transformative nature of belonging as a form of resistance. The struggle of the Palestinian people is a true reminder of the unfinished business of culture, of true belonging as form of resistance which Amilcar Cabral talked about, and which Du Bois gestured towards and apprehend as true self consciousness. The global, the universal, the transatlantic are legitimate species in the peoples history only when they are transformative, otherwise they are opium, cracks and soulless ghosts in the machine of capital. Transformative belonging is the antidote against these cracks.

Adeolu Ademoyo

References.

1. Peter Geschiere (2009) Perils Of belonging Autochthony, Citizenship And Exclusion in Africa And Europe, Chicago University Press.
2. Echeruo, Michael, “An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project.” The AfricanDiaspora, ed. I. Okpewho, C.B. Davies, and, A.I. Mazrui Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
3. Gilroy, Paul The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
4. Cabral, Amilcar, Return To Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. NewYork:Monthly Review Press, 1973. Pp. 39-56
5. W.E.B. Du Bois The Soul of Black folks.
6. Adeolu Ademoyo “The Ontological Imperative For The New African Diaspora’ in Isidore okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu (eds) The New African Diaspora (2009) Indiana University Press.

Seriously Playful

Seriously thoughtful

Citizenship of images

Ariella at opening

Opening experience

This is a multilayered experience, an encounter, as curator Ariella Azoulay called it. A series of affective moments crafted in the interaction of gazes looking at each other in multiple temporalities. In the exhibition Act of State, A Photographed History of the Occupation, different trajectories coalesce, with the intention of sparking if you wish, the numbing of the history of the Israeli occupation. This silence here takes a stance through color and in black in white, in strong faces and desolate spaces, in blood and tears, in flames and water spilled over pavement, under dust and rocks full of meaning—even if only for some. But it is this same multiplicity that sometimes makes this a difficult space to travel at once. There are many things going on here, in various levels and registers—even in the quantity of images themselves—that we are to deal with.

First of all there is the political implication of the photograph as a form of creating citizenship for those who are constantly denied of it. The visibility of the invisible subject is a stance that is taken directly and sets forth the possibilities of the image for the filling of voids. Voids that are, as Ariella reminded us of in her opening talk, the effects of state acts, that otherwise would be crimes. And still this filling of the voids of citizenship is an act that walks along the line of the victim as subject. However plausible this thin line is, I do want to take a step back from the critiques of visual representations of violence, and recall what Alan Klima has written about this critique of the visual. That despite the colonial and violent history of photography, we should also ask ourselves why, even if one can never do justice to the act of true witnessing through technologies of image reproduction, “if one was not there, then why are the flecks of the unaccountable political murders one has witnessed still ‘sticking to the heart?’ Just look” (The Funeral Casino; 2002: 226).

Other aspects of this multiplicity that spark reflection are those regarding the politics of photographing, presented not only in the image as image, but in the act of the photographer as part of the context as well. I am thinking of an image of a photographer being attacked and photographed, in an encounter with colonist-settlers, under the gaze of both the soldier and the Palestinian—while others snap the moment.

I am thinking as well of the politics of the image as seen in the series of Israeli soldier’s giving water and the captions that warn us of the invention of its humanitarianism through the crafting of the photographic moment itself.

There is also the moment of reflection of the public—public here as the visitor to the exhibition—which in this case is much more of a private moment that takes the viewer deep into her own personal memories. This moment can be a sensual form of memory in becoming, as a sensual form of memory making and experiencing the past in the present (see Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still, 1996). Undertaking the effects of the images and in this case of their location as they are merged in the exhibition implies a relationship as well with the space itself. Walking under the old prison’s barbwire to see images of more barbwired moments, or engaging the colors of decay on the walls where panels hang and of the images hanged above them, is part of a series of interactions that add layers to the experience of traversing silence and invisibility in multiple forms. These are moments that have the potential of generating sensual reactions through the images that surround us, and in some cases can then unsettle, delimit, excite, activate, and even, resuscitate.

This brings to the fore the role of the personal through the sensual and the aesthetic to the grounds of politics. I thus want to end this reflection by not letting go of the personal. A personal that, from what I have been hearing in recent discussions, is wanting to be disciplined—both in academic and in Foucauldian meanings of the term. Something that it was actually never intended to be. The personal whether through the medium of photography itself as form of writing, in the encounter, or in the represented being, comes to this stage of the political as a vehicle for the practice of poetics, imagination and the affective as politico-theoretical projects. Why should we limit its potential?

Juan Orrantia

Critique of the Law

Dale, Phumi and Kelly on the Law.

The Studio Session, Critique of the Law, was triple framed: first by John Comaroff’s morning talk (see below), then by Achille’s recalling the four doors of intellectual encounter through the JWTC, focusing on the studio sessions as more informal conversational times, and finally by our two co-chairs Julia Hornberger and Kelly Gillespie. Kelly and Julia posed questions along the lines of (1) What does it mean to carry on struggle in post-apartheid SA when political space has been saturated by the law; how do we engage the law critically and strategically? How do we not be abject before the law? And (2) for proper critique, we need to be first recognizing the enchanting and conjuring power of law in SA. In particular, the powerful negative apartheid past in SA animates the role of the Constitution; because of the undisputed injustice of the regime, the image of the Constitution is as a means to a radical political project. (In a legal jurisprudential key, see for instance the past and current South African Journal on Human Rights work of Dennis Davis and Karl Klare on this theme of transformation).

The morning had indeed been John Comaroff’s two hour talk, focusing largely but not entirely on constitutionalism and the judicialization of politics. That’s not the subject of this post but did provide the background to the afternoon session on the Critique of the Law. Supported by scholars such as Charles Taylor and South Africa’s own Martin Chanock, John seemed sympathetic to the view that legality was increasingly significant as a form of neo-liberal governance. Noting David Schniederman and South Africa’s own Heinz Klug analysis of a movement from a classic to a neo-liberal frame of constitutional design, John noted how the judicial has taken power by contrast to the bureaucratic and the parliamentary and how group rights have been constitutionalized only as aggregates of individuals.

The contrast to this studio session was real and intended: three inputs by self-professed activists – indeed of three different varieties: an academic/activist, a guerilla academic, and an organizational strategist for gay and lesbian rights. Jackie Dugard told us that law is a backup where politics has failed. While she was unrelentingly self-critical and institutionally modest, her water rights litigation nonetheless looks set to change some important policy at its Constitutional Court hearing in September. Hers was the perspective of the self-described human rights lawyer, but one who seeks to and does work with social movements. Dale McKinley, expelled from the Communist party for trying to be a communist, was explicitly utilitarian in his view of the law. It’s there; don’t debate, use it. Indeed, if those damn civil rights lawyers (not you Jackie) would just be willing to help me and my APF colleagues out on our criminal transgressions (see John for the dynamic of pushing the political into the criminal space) we would be happy to use them more. Phumi Mthetwa also was self-critical – recognizing that the gains on gay and lesbian rights were won by a small group of activists and not a social movement, and certainly not, as would be currently desired, with appropriate class analysis and alliances.

One similarity (but yet different) with John’s morning talk was around access to justice. For John, this was the issue of standing – how groups become aggregates of individuals or otherwise have their identities transformed through and in the legal/juridical encounter (broadly understood). For these three activists, access to justice was not enough money, lawyers, time, court attention, and other organizational resources. I’ve heard Jackie speak elsewhere on the dilemmas of litigating for those who are precisely not the poorest of the poor but that angle did not come out here. (See J Dugard in Part 3 of the South African Journal on Human Rights for her story of the Phiri water rights campaign thus far.)

One difference (but yet similar) was the local versus global framing. While he is not that beast, John could almost not help but at times sound like a comparative constitutional lawyer – the sheer volume of doctrinal holdings dispensed was enormous. On the other hand, apart from some backgrounding by Jackie, the afternoon sessions had little doctrine and moreover became explicitly anti-comparative constitutionalist. In response to a question about Kenya looking South for guidance, Jackie and Dale both advised against borrowing from South African legal models, at least with respect to the TRC. (Indeed, the Kenyan version will be the TRJ(for Justice)C). Phumi was silent on that one, perhaps implicitly approving some borrowing.

I came away wondering whether rights campaigning (think CALS, think TAC, think Khulamani) in the courts (think SA, think NYC) was indeed becoming or has already become the base narrative of legitimacy for transformation in our current juridified global politics. It is much easier to imagine a win in a New York City court for a Nigerian case than it is to imagine an election linking those two locations. In order to pursue emancipatory politics, it is important to have a good story to tell and a successful rights case is a good story.

Jonathan Klaaren