More on Charismatic Financialism

Image by Aude Dieude

In his opening remarks heralding the inception of the 2010 JWTC, Achille Mbembe, senior researcher at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), crisply laid out the key themes and critical endeavors that would provide signposts for participants in the ensuing week and a half of dialogue and reflection. Mbembe described these as:

o Conceptualizing and experimenting with heuristics for the conduct of global conversation based in the South

o Thinking critically about such a conversation’s relationship to very particular urban spaces, which in turn may provide the performative realm for the playing out of new cultural moves that offer the possibility for the production of new forms of life (i.e., self-ownership, self-creation, and freedom)

o Giving careful consideration to the unique contours of wealth and property in the South African context

o Relating this local/regional scene of capital production, mobilization, and accumulation to the global circulatory network of financial capital and its ever more technocratic and opaque techniques.

Taking direct aim at the meta-discursive theme of financial capitalism’s unique influence on the global structure of feeling, Arjun Appadurai’s paper “Charismatic Financialism” provided a pointed and powerful opening to the workshop and established an extremely productive platform upon which to begin pursuing a vision of how “theorizing from the south” may offer flashes of redemptive insight in the face of the obscene scene of contemporary capitalism’s glaring social inequities.

Appadurai began his critique by situating the audience at the moment in the early 1970s when the episodic evolution of “efficient market” theory crystallized into the hegemonic basis for a new kind of dominant capitalist business model, one based on the utilization of derivatives for the identification, calculation, packaging (i.e., securitization), marketing, and selling of risk. Bearing witness to the unexpected swing toward radical indeterminacy in financialization’s neoliberal modus operandi—an interregnum precipitated by the US-led global credit crisis of 2007-08—Appadurai’s paper advanced an implicit call for the repoliticization of high finance’s narcissistic and solipsistic conception of risk and risk-management.

In this respect, “Charismatic Financialism” represented another stage in Appadurai’s confident entry into the rich field of scholarship regarding what has been productively referred to as “cultures of finance,” a nomenclature that congeals a set of debates actively shaped by disciplines operating outside of the cloistered realm of neo-classical economics and the managerial orthodoxy of the traditional Anglo-American MBA program. With an eye toward the established literature, Appadurai positioned his account in the space between the two primary strands of non-doctrinaire capitalist hermeneutics; one exemplified by economic sociology and the social science of finance’s preoccupation with what Foucault would describe as financial capital’s “micro-techniques” of power; the other categorized by an anthropologically derived focus on contemporary capitalism’s penchant for the reanimation of enchantment, magic, and luck within the popular imagination.

Poised between these two approaches, the crux of Appadurai’s critical insurgency hinged upon what he called an “odd historical telescoping” of the economic and religious sociology of Max Weber, a rich body of scholarship which Appadurai employed as the roadmap for a sophisticated genealogy of capitalism’s ethical core. Through a close re-reading of Weber’s classic study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (viz., Die Protestantische Ethik Und Der Geist Des Kapitalismus), Appadurai traced the epistemological thread connecting Luther’s anti-capitalist Christianity to the “invisible hand” of providence in Calvin’s subsequent and decisive contribution to the Protestant Reformation. In Calvinism, the actions of human beings in the world have the ability to reflect and extend divine will, a dialectical reversal in the gift of salvation that paves the way for the market to function as a beautiful machine going about the business of what Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein infamously referred to as “God’s work.” The arc of this evolution is crucial for Appadurai for it reveals how the habitus that finance capital has fashioned in its own image emerged and ossified as common sense.

Given that Weber did not concern himself with the capitalist figure as a uniquely modern incarnation of risk and risk-taking, of what relevance, Appadurai asks, is he to the contemporary scene? On this matter, Appadurai is keen to suggest that a ghost lies embedded within financial capitalism’s quantitative risk-management devices, one that could make an uncanny and disruptive return via the eruption of model-defiant tropes of “uncertainty.” Interestingly enough, Appadurai locates this uncanny presence not within exogenous “Black Swan” events, but rather within what he calls “Device Skeptics” who operate deep within the circuitry of global capital’s circulatory motherboard. These Device Skeptics reawaken the spirit of uncertainty within modern capitalism through the dexterity with which they make daringly large bets against the herd-like behavior symptomatic of an asset price bubble. For Appadurai, the contrarian charisma put forward by “short-selling bears,” like the celebrated financier George Soros and the hedge fund apostle John Paulson, channels a kind of pre-modern ethos of uncertainty and excess reminiscent of the potlatch chiefs in traditional societies, thereby instantiating an “Uncertainty Imaginary” that lies outside of the otherwise prevailing system. Here, we can witness chance reasserting itself over “the Culture of Control.”[1]

Yet, for all of this, there remains something disturbingly unsatisfying about Appadurai’s account of these cryptic market pessimists. For, after all, we might ask, are they true charismatics, or merely synthetic facsimiles thereof? Appardauri himself confessed during the question and answer portion of the discussion that the “Charismatic Financialism” of the short-selling bears might ultimately boil down to merely just one more arbitrage opportunity among many—however colossal in scope and profitability.[2] In my own skepticism about the efficacy of regarding the proverbial “Master of the Universe” as a weirdly spectral force, I recall the scathing critique of Weber’s theory of charisma put forward recently by the late religious sociologist and cultural critic, Phillip Rieff. In his book, Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How it Has Been Taken From Us, Rieff argues that Weberian charismatic authority is merely the stuff of celebrity, a flimsy and dangerous imitation of the fire and brimstone-laced interdictions of the genuine article. So, rather than offering the “animus” of the Old Testament prophetic tradition, the Weberian charismatic merely gives a therapeutic masquerade of conflict resolution. As Rieff puts it, “our charismatics [today] are engaged in no wrestling with angels, but rather with the obeying of demons.”[3] Furthermore, he stresses, “there is no charisma without creed…there must be a conscious and intense established symbolic in the field before there can be a standard that can be used to break through that field. Doubt, skepticism, infidelity, are not charisma.” Of course, the stern ministrations of a theological scold like Rieff may in fact lead us directly to the kind of charismatic authority proffered by Osama Bin Laden, al-Shabab, and politico-evangelists like the Tea Party’s favorite son, Rand Paul.

So, ultimately, I come away from Appadurai’s brilliant exposition musing about whether “theorizing from the South” can achieve resonance by offering vigorous resistance to two diametrically opposed but tightly connected ideological systems: a) one whereby charismatic authority is wielded in the name of a market-led therapeutics where all that is solid melts into the air; and b) the other playing out as an adversarial—even violent—reinscription of a faith-based fundamentalism that Rieff describes as “holy terror.” It is from within this unlikely and harrowing aporia that the phoenix of redemption might yet arise.

Christopher Holmes Smith

University of Southern California – Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

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[1] Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (NY: Viking, 2003).

[2] Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (NY: W.W. Norton, 2010)

[3] Phillip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How it has Been Taken From Us (NY: Vintage, 2008).

Charismatic Financialism

In the opening session of this year’s JWTC, Arjun Appadurai presented a paper which theorizes a way in which we might be able to uncover the “ghost in the machine” that animates the ubiquitous presence of technical market devices (from credit scores to complex options-pricing algorithms) as well as to identify a particular “speculative ethic” which infuses the subjectivity of economic actors across different registers of social action.

As a gloss (and at the risk of reduction), I would contextualize Arjun’s paper as an initial response to the growing and developing body of scholarship that takes up the constitution and implications of financial markets as an object of inquiry. Loosely organized under the sign of the social studies of finance, this field of study is largely influenced by the important work of Michel Callon and his interlocutors^[1] and takes up, in a gesture to Weber, the relation between risk and uncertainty, choosing to focus on the ways in which technical devices and economic models mediate the relation. Crudely put, scholarship of this character situates technological devices as possessing “performative” power, in that the device or model “performs” the market. The issue for this work is not so much why or to what end the device responds or anticipates, but rather the ways in which the device is deployed in practice, and the peculiar socio-technical assemblages that cohere in the process. Importantly, this work has documented, often in granular detail, this performance, tracing the ways in which the model or device actually works in its situated practice, and producing consequences both intended and not.

While this gloss of a large body of work is indeed reductive, it does, I hope, signal the context in which I would place Arjun’s project. Both Arjun’s project and the extant scholarship on finance agree on financialization as a central diacritic of our times, which can be thought of as the ways in which finance pronounces itself in a more amplified manner and form to larger scales of social life relative to other historical formations (indeed, as Jean Comaroff noted in the second session on Tuesday, financialization itself is not new, just as globalization is not new). Simultaneously, Arjun’s project presumes an “age of risk”, gesturing to a Beckian concept of risk society, where risk is both immanent to and determinate of particular structures and institutions, and takes on a specific character in modernity. The technoscape of modernity, then, becomes a site where risk-objects and definitions are determined, often in highly normative terms (for example, interventions that occur in order to reduce harm to at-risk populations often produce violence in the name of harm-reduction). These technical devices in the financescape, then, can very well be (and often are described as) methodicalizing in their usage, producing routines and techniques of capital that seem to be external and commensurable. Yet, as Arjun is forcefully arguing, these devices might very well exist and circulate in such manners (in the Callonian sense), but say nothing about how the disposition of the financial actor might congeal into a socio-technical assemblage that is diametrically opposed to the spirit identified by Weber as necessary for capitalism. Said differently, the rationalizing and methodical devices make room for a type of actor that implodes the this-worldly asceticism of the Calvinist work-ethic.

The difference between the more “device oriented” accounts and the project articulated by Arjun can, and is, best expressed through Weberian frames. As Arjun points out, The Protestant Ethic reads like “a thriller” at times, as we follow Weber on the trail of the ethos which animates the dispositions and sensibilities of capital’s need for labor power and capital accumulation (Weber makes the strong point that markets and labor are not new in capitalism, but that the form of labor and logic of accumulation is what makes it different from earlier historical formations). I would even suggest that Arjun’s paper continues that spirit, as he takes us on a new thriller that seeks out the ethos, the spirit in the moment where finance is obscured, opaque, elided, and slippery as (again in a nod to the Comaroff’s presentation) culture is increasingly commodified, compounded by a dense technoscape of communicative and computational tools.

Crudely put, I take Arjun’s project as an inquiry that helps us to understand and explain the current ‘spirit’ of financialism and its speculative character, asking the question as to what are the cultural and social sensibilities, formations, beliefs, and imaginaries that enable finance to emerge as a central diacritic that is emblematic of our times? For Arjun, Weber’s deliberations on the relationship between risk and uncertainty is of crucial importance. Simply put, risk is the outcome of making uncertainty probable. In practice, that which is uncertain can be subjected to set of mediating rationalities, producing a set of possible outcomes which are calculable possibilities for agentive action. Largely expressed as a means and end relation in Weber (salvation is uncertain, therefore a commitment to a this-world asceticism of work makes probable one’s salvation), Arjun recapitulates the relation as a decisive and necessary element of financialization, where the means and ends are not couched in religious salvation, but in the accumulation of capital, or simply put, profit.^[2] Arjun recapitulates the relation as a decisive and necessary element of finance, where, crucially, the processes by which uncertainty is turned into risk is the moment of intervention. In the financescape, these uncertainties are subjected to specific economic rationalities, mediated by technological devices, producing a set of possibilities that are projected onto screens. The distribution of possibilities is further mediated by concentrations of capital, as traders commit capital to certain possibilities that are assumed to maximize gain and accumulate profit. Clearly, this process opens up questions of structural power and the circulation of surplus capital, while also reminding us that the screen displaying the set of possibilities also screens out other possibilities for action, foreclosing and effacing the non-economic forms of possibilities.

Here, Arjun’s theorizations take us into the spaces of financial action, locating the tension between cultures in finance and cultures of finance. For Arjun, the “short selling bear” articulates a contrarian position where the relation between risk and uncertainty is pronounced in a strong fashion. That is to say, the “short sellers” (i.e., the financial actor who identifies and bets against the ‘efficiency’ of the market to distribute value) are “device skeptics” who are those “players who are not only contrarians but are actors who are willing to infuse their reading of uncertainties...into their reading of the timing of the downturn as measured on the screens that reflect risk.” The contrarian has identified in the most clear fashion a methodicality and disposition which is able to exploit uncertainty, narrowing the outcomes of action according to distributions as predicted by the models and computational devices of the technoscape.

To my thinking, the issue here seems to be just this tension between this culture in finance and to a larger culture of finance (if we agree that cultural forms are increasingly marked by finance in a more amplified manner). That is to say, the ways in which these dispositions, actions, methods and routines become more generalizable, mapping onto larger patterns of social action and decision-making processes. The short-seller possesses a particular charisma, articulating properties of an ideal type (in the Weberian sense) which percolate out into larger scales of social action.

I am inclined to include another ideal type of financial actor possessing a similar charismatic position in a culture in finance -- the proprietary trader. A proprietary trader is one who trades with the financial institution’s own money, and for the institution’s own account; in other words, the prop trader is not burdened with the social ties that ‘regular’ traders, whose primary purpose is to arrange buyers and sellers in space and time. To my thinking, the prop trader comes the closest to embodying homo economicus, the subject of neoliberal (or, in the Comaroff’s conceptualization, post-liberal) governmentality. The prop trader is the exceptional self, self-regulating and self-disciplining (proven by being ‘trusted’ with the firm’s own capital), deploying a technologically mediated market logic rationalized by an efficient market, making an endless series of choices under the sign of risk, where each choice can be self-actualizing, or, conversely, self-annihilating. The premise here is that the prop trader, in the early historical moment of formation, becomes the ideal model for a range of financial actors, and whose tactics become an ideal strategy for managers as it is deployed in wider and wider scales. Hedge funds and their managers come to mind, as do the now everyday practices of most risk-taking traders whose job is no longer defined through customer-oriented actions, but by an ability to manage risk profitably. The question that remains open for investigation, and to which Arjun’s theorizations prove invaluable, is whether or not this type of knowledge, in its ‘spirit’ form, circulates outward from a culture in finance, structuring, to a greater or lesser degree, larger social registers in the constitution of a culture of finance.

Jean Comaroff responded to Arjun’s paper, rightly pointing out that any account of finance must include some form of political economy, and I would agree strongly. One point of inflection, for example, might include a robust account of surplus capital, tracing its insertions and extractions, its formations and obstacles, as a way to express a larger structural logic that patterns some of the enablements. Such an account would also add further political dimensions, as one would be forced to interrogate what it means to live in a world where surplus capital is distributed in particular ways, rather than the obstacles and failures of the smooth flow of capital which dominate the current accounts of the current historical formation of the global economy (for example, the economic reorganizations occurring today -- I hesitate to call this a crisis, as it has a more permanent character -- are often mediated by accounts of excess and greed, or failure and incompetence, which tell us nothing about the way in which capital is structurally organized).

Importantly, an invocation of a Weberian frame strongly signals a turn to culture and resituates the terms in a different register to the economic. The economic grammar used to describe and orient finance remains opaque and external to cultural forms and sensibilities, and a gesture to develop a new grammar of the economy seems an important political move. As long as economics and finance continues to describe and define itself on its own terms, the fewer openings for intervention become possible. The distinction is in keeping with the spirit of Weber’s work, in that it is an attempt to locate and describe the rise of ‘financialization’, but beyond its economistic, technological, or functionalist accounts. In trying to uncover this ‘spirit’ which enables the logic of finance to smoothly circulate, it is very much a cultural conversation, as it realizes that change will not emerge within the concentrated sites of power, where uncertainty is pathologically transformed to risk, but rather in those spaces where finance plays, perhaps, a reduced role, and where uncertainty is filled not with risk, but the possibility for something different.

Robert Wosnitzer

New York University

Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

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^[1] For a full set of all the referenced work in Arjun’s paper, as well as this work mentioned, email me directly here.

^[2] Frank Knight, an early translator of Weber, wrote the seminal economic text on risk, titled “Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit” (1929).

Afropolis Metabolis

Sharad Chari at JWTC

After Arjun Appadurai's reflections on the Geists and ghosts driving big finance, this afternoon's session revolved around the assets of the urban poor. Sharad Chari argues that subalternity can itself be an asset: when people "refuse to be ruined, while surrounded by processes of ruination," for example residents in Durban's South acting up against the toxic industries that pollute their livelihoods. Biopolitics are here turned into techniques of struggle and protest. But, one might ask through John and Jean Comaroff's discussion on the contemporary self, what if making an asset of ones own wastedness is not (only) a progressive tool as Chari suggests, but describes a dramatic new relationship in which people literally mine their own bodies as assets, or else brand themselves as waste or as waste worker and their space as waste land, as the Comaroffs described for the post-industrial American town of Youngstown? And how can we interrogate space itself as an asset - succinctly articulated by Ricardo Cardoso: "Can the subaltern produce space?"

Edgar Pieterse turned the question of assets of the urban poor into one of politics: sustainable city- making for the future. Crucial to this project, Pieterse argues, is a better understanding of everyday cityness in the global South, including the variegated sets of knowledge, experience, and capability of the urban poor. Pieterse suggests imagining cities in their metabolic flows. This means thinking the sociality of a city through both its human and non-human relations (i.e. understanding the life cycle of a bridge as part of social relations). It also entails stretching the understanding of urban infrastructures towards the various social, communicative, often provisional infrastructures that the urban poor build in the absence of functioning material infrastructures (de Boeck 2002, Simone 2004). In such visions of the city, rationalities of urban survival and urban politics extend beyond the cognitive to include the diversity of affective rationalities of everyday life.

Surprisingly under-discussed remained the question of uncertainty and risk. What assets do the urban poor create, use, or strive for in conditions where uncertainty is a permanent feature of urban life? And how can uncertainty become a resource itself to make things happen (Simone 2010)? This brings the assets of the urban poor close to the taste for uncertainty and speculation at Wall Street. We would then have to look at the assets of the speculators on Wall Street and the urban entrepreneurs who struggle for everyday survival in downtown Dakar or Luanda in one and the same laboratory of self creation in precarious times.

Christine Hentschel

Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin

Identity and Property in Precarious Times

John and Jean Comaroff with Eric Worby, JWTC

Jean and John Comaroff’s session on ‘Identity and Property in Precarious Times’ took a different look at themes that had also preoccupied the first day of the workshop. How do we study the forms of subjectivity associated with economic action at the present time, and what does doing so teach us about the larger trends that are shaping the future? Arjun Appadurai came at these issues on Monday through a return to Weber in light of Callon, leading to a call for work on the kinds of ethos inspiring how various actors (traders, for instance) animate the instruments or devices of contemporary markets. The Comaroffs’ intervention was to lay out the terms for an immanent critique of what they called the emerging identity economy. How are we to understand a world where (some) people make a living by owning and selling their culture? What configurations of justice and recognition emerge around this activity? What kinds of social entities congeal through it? How does the commodification of culture relate to other historical iterations of self-possession?

The Comaroffs’ approach to these questions started from a (Foucault-inspired) sketch of continuities and disjunctures between the logic of classical liberalism and a present moment they variously termed post- and neo-liberal. According to this narrative, the world at present is witnessing the involution of categories, distinctions and relationships that once marked the constitution of civil society through acts of exchange among self-possessed individuals: free subjects who exteriorized their selves in forms of property produced by work, protected by law, and circulated in markets. Most importantly for their argument, neo-liberalism sees the narrowing--to the point of collapse--of any residual gap between the self and the forms of property on which self-realization in the liberal world depends. With this comes the collapse of the idea of a social world mediated by acts of labour, and into the resulting space step subjects like the South Africans and others whom the Comaroffs cite as (self-consciously) possessing and selling not labour, but identity itself.

This is the basis for what they call Ethnicity Inc., the object of their recent book by that title. Increasingly naturalized modes of belonging (genetic ones, particularly) become the means of membership in legal corporations that control the rights to exploit and profit from heritage, indigenous knowledge, ancestral land, and other such ethnic properties. (Things that in more modernist times were seen as the very antitheses of the logic of the commodity form.) The result is a new configuration of self, culture, and social being--including new forms of harm and exclusion the Comaroffs identified particularly with life in the waste ecologies of the formerly industrial zones of the world (both North and South).

The early round of responses focused mostly on the way the Comaroffs traced the genealogy of Ethnicity Inc. Several participants asked how the emergence of the identity economy would look if narrated specifically from the South. How would the story of ethnic tourism look if one saw precedents in Fanon’s account of the black subject rendered dependent on white recognition, for instance? Would the communitarian dimensions of cultural property look different if one started, not with the logic of Lockean liberalism, but the history of the constitution of property in the colonial world? From a different angle, what is occluded by moving from classical liberalism to its neoliberal involution without thinking through the impact of the first ‘post-liberal’ era: that of 20th century state capitalism?

In answering these challenges, as well as subsequent questions on the status of high theory in the contemporary moment, the Comaroffs insisted that their project is to understand a world that more and more understands itself in terms of the intertwining of property and identity. Thinking through the logic of the subject-as-commodity is motivated not by traditional theory, then, but rather as a way of engaging the terms of thought in the neoliberal age.

Myself I find that a deeply compelling argument on the interplay of method, theory and history. But it seems to me that hard work still lies ahead to discern, in a rigorous way, exactly where developments cross the line from continuity to epochal difference. One participant pointed out the affinities between Ethnicity Inc. and the central tenet of post-workerism: the idea that we have shifted from a condition where the isolable and measurable industry of factory workers manufactured valuable things, to one where value stems from our ineffably subjective contributions to an economy of images, attachments and desires. Without a doubt this illuminates some aspects of an ongoing shift, but it also draws its force from a strangely artisanal account of what industrial labour was even at its height in the Fordist economy. What if one sustains instead the idea that even classically proletarian subjects never survived by commodifying their labour or its products (both of which belonged instead to the capital employing them) but instead by selling the time in which they exercised their own subjective capacities for action? If subjectivity is time, and time is the most important form of property that industrial labour constituted and alienated, then the lines between industrial and identity economies begin to seem less radically distinct than implied by a contrast between the selling of labour and culture.

Hylton White

Wits University

Of cities of cash and gold

Arjun Appadurai presenting at JWTC

In the first public lecture of the 2010 edition of the JWTC, entitled “Slum Cosmopolitanism: The Cultural Tactics of Mumbai’s Urban Poor,” Arjun Appadurai gave us a taste of how one can fly from elevated discussions on Weberian thought, down to the vernacular; a move without which any enterprise aimed at theorising can prove not only vain but also irrelevant. And this is a point worth underlying since this capacity is not that frequent among thinkers. What Appadurai precisely presented to us by putting forth the background, components and experience of “slum cosmopolitanism,” is a critique of the most frequently elitist definitions of cosmopolitanism.

One first comment that comes to my mind relates to the very attempt of the JWTC to “theorize from the South.” Because the workshop is meant to be an experiment, this endeavour will be further discussed in the coming days. The South is here thought mainly in opposition to the North as the still dominant provider of theory. It is also approached, to follow Jean and John Comaroff’s remark, from a “technical” point of view, as a place where experiments are conducted before being (re)exported to the North. Last but not least, the South, which is sometimes labelled “global,” remains an unstable notion, a multifarious space and time with many connections to its Northern counterpart. One way to further nuance this opposition is therefore to wonder if we are not actually trying to theorize from the Northern part of the South, and to stress that one would probably struggle to do so from the Southern part of the North. By this I suggest that Wits may not be representative of Southern based institutions of higher education and that it is probably a more privileged place to think from than many universities in Europe could be. One can also wonder whether institutions such as let’s say the American universities of Beirut and Cairo are better described as Northern or as Southern institutions. Yet what Arjun Appadurai showed us tonight is that it is crucial to think one south from another south.

Slums, most commonly called townships in South Africa, remain here a still too familiar life experience. They are defining spaces that challenge politically asserted certainties such as democracy by showing that if “one man, one vote” can constitute a beginning it is far from being a finite achievement. They are places that politicians are now fearful to visit since the reassertion of their commitment to change does no longer guarantee them a quiet visit. But they are also places where leaders as much as shack dwellers counterparts are drawn, just like in Mumbai, into the microcosmopolitanism that encompasses the hopes, strategies and needs of the urban poor.

Arjun Appadurai led us to a visit in the streets of Mumbai’s Nagpada slum, in a city he once described as the “city of cash.” He did so speaking with his guts just like an Edward Said would leave literature for a moment to speak against the occupation of Palestine, before eventually turning back to theorisation on the basis of his sympathy in the literal meaning of the term. Mumbai and Nagpada are the setting for the mobilisation of the Alliance, a federation that gathers three movements, namely SPARC (Society for the Protection of Area Resource Centres), Mahila Milan (Union of Women), and the NSDF (National Slum Dwellers Federation). According to Appadurai, they can be characterised as groupings of the “progressively organised urban poor” that developed a capacity to debate and negotiate in a cosmopolitan space, hence participating in the deepening of democracy.

In South Africa, such mobilisations, which are connected to India’s through the Slum/ Shack Dwellers International (SDI), are visible in groups such as, for instance, the South African Shackdwellers’ Movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign, or the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, some of which are also part of the umbrella organisation known as the Anti-Privatisation Forum. They’ve been engaging government and the ANC over the years by demanding the provision of basic rights and services such as housing, electricity and water. To extend Appadurai’s argument to South Africa and though it also differs from the Indian context, one can question the meaning of “cosmopolitanism from below” in relation to recent waves of xenophobic violence that have been targeting mainly non South African residents of the townships.

They are one challenge among others to South Africa’s unique project of establishing a non racial society. But they also express the will of some actors, led by political or economic agendas, to play against slum cosmopolitanism rather than to resort to it in order to achieve their goals. Such enterprises are not without recalling the 1990s ethnically based violence between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party and they are not disconnected either, to echo Jean and John Comaroff, from ethno capital or business. By this I mean that gangs and criminal organisations are involved in xenophobia but also that political actors who are supposed to be rooted in the principles of the Freedom Charter are failing to take responsibility. In this last regard, the recent call by the South African Communist Party to consider xenophobia as nothing less than crime, hence calling for police and legal repression on xenophobic criminals, is interesting but does not constitute a comprehensive solution.

To such an extent and because the roots of racism and xenophobia (the two being interestingly distinguished by many in the South African case) are social, economic and political rather than otherwise, they are also a call to take seriously the “injunction” to local cosmopolitanism, which has too often been attacked or unprotected by the state, rather than that to comply with monolithic definitions of the self. This need for township resident organisations to be considered as full fledged interlocutors by state institutions, as well as by the ANC or the trade unions -many of whom still tend to view them as competitors rather than as partners- finally means that former leaders of the struggle are also entitled to renew their “capacity to aspire” if they want to succeed.

Raphaël Botiveau
University Paris 1 & French Institute of South Africa

Open letter to the London Review of Books

Posted by Professor Achille Mbembe
19th July 2010

To the Editor,
With its stress on its own 'depth and scholarship and good writing' and its 'unmatched international reputation', the LRB has a responsibility to maintain high standards if it is to retain its enviable position of having the 'largest circulation of any literary magazine in Europe'.

We find it baffling therefore that you continue to publish work by RW Johnson that, in our opinion, is often stacked with the superficial and the racist. In a particularly egregious recent post on the LRB blog, 'After the World Cup', 6 July 2010, Johnson, astonishingly, makes a comparison between African migrants and invading baboons. He follows this with another between 'local black shopkeepers' and rottweilers. He concludes with what he presumably thinks is a joke about throwing bananas to the baboons.

Whilst it might be unfair to pick on a man for his inability to be funny, we believe that it would be wholly wrong to stay silent when he resorts to peddling highly offensive, age-old racist stereotypes that the LRB editorial team deems fit to publish. (Indeed, we note from the comments that at some point the post was edited – and yet, in our opinion, it still remains an appalling and racist piece of writing.)

In the particular arena of football, some fans do not need to be encouraged to produce racist abuse. Across Europe for many years, black players have been spat at, subjected to racist chants often including references to monkeys or apes, and have been the focus of monkey chanting noises during matches. Neo-Nazi groups have also been known to use football matches as target areas for recruiting new members and promoting their racist practice. (How ironic that when Johnson does decide to write about ‘Football and Fascism’, 11 July 2010, he produces a piece about Italy that reveals the dearth of his knowledge.)

While South Africa has made great strides, overturning the racist politics of the National Party, it still has a long way to go in combating the racism that thrives among certain communities and individuals. Elsewhere, in the UK for example, this is no time for complacency about attitudes to race. Although British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, may have been humiliated at the recent General Elections, his party now has two MEPs. Let’s not forget that young black men in this country are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than young white men, and they comprise a disproportionate number of the prison population.

We are deeply concerned that the LRB could be so impressed by RW Johnson that his racist and reactionary opinion continues to be published in the magazine and now, in the blog too. And there we all were thinking the LRB was progressive.

Yours sincerely,
Diran Adebayo, writer & academic, Lancaster University
Patience Agbabi, poet
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist & writer
Candace Allen, writer, journalist & broadcaster
Cristel Amiss, coordinator, Black Women’s Rape Action Project
Baffour Ankomah, editor, New African
Nana Ayebia Clarke, publisher, Ayebia
Pete Ayrton, publisher, Serpent’s Tail
Sharmilla Beezmohun, deputy editor, Wasafiri
Benedict Birnberg
Professor Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford
Professor Patrick Bond, University of Kwazulu-Natal
Victoria Brittain, writer & journalist
Dr Margaret Busby OBE, publisher & writer
Teju Cole, writer
Eleanor Crook, sculptor & academic, University of the Arts
Fred D’Aguiar, writer
Dr David Dibosa, academic
Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Group
Gareth Evans, writer, editor, curator
Katy Evans-Bush, poet
Bernardine Evaristo MBE, writer
Nuruddin Farah, writer
Professor Maureen Freely, writer & academic, University of Warwick
Kadija George, publisher, Sable LitMag
Professor Paul Gilroy, London School of Economics
Professor Peter Hallward, Kingston University London
M John Harrison, writer
Stewart Home, writer
Michael Horovitz, poet
Professor Aamer Hussein, writer & academic, University of Southampton
Professor John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths
Dr Sean Jacobs, The New School
Selma James, coordinator, Global Women’s Strike
Gus John, associate professor, Institute of Education, University of London
Anthony Joseph, poet & novelist
Kwame Kwei-Armah, playwright & broadcaster
Candida Lacey, publisher, Myriad Editions
Alexis Lykiard, writer
Firoze Manji, editor in chief, Pambazuka News
Shula Marks, emeritus professor, School of Oriental & African Studies
Professor Achille Mbembe, University of the Witwatersrand & Duke University
Dr China Miéville, writer & academic,
Professor David Morley, University of Warwick
Professor Susheila Nasta, editor, Wasafiri
Courttia Newland, writer
Dr Alastair Niven OBE, principal, Cumberland Lodge
Dr Zoe Norridge, University of Oxford
Dr Deirdre Osborne, Goldsmiths
Lara Pawson, journalist & writer
Pascale Petit, poet
Caryl Phillips, writer
Dr Nina Power, Roehampton University
Jeremy Poynting, managing editor, Peepal Tree Press
Gary Pulsifer, publisher, Arcadia Books
Michael Rosen, poet
Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group
Richard Seymour, writer & activist
Dr George Shire, reviews editor, Soundings
Professor David Simon, Royal Holloway
Keith Somerville, Brunel University
Colin Stoneman, editorial coordinator, Journal of Southern African Studies
George Szirtes, poet & translator
Dr Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths
Professor Megan Vaughan, University of Cambridge
Patrick Vernon, chief executive, The Afiya Trust
Professor Dennis Walder, Open University
Verna Wilkins, writer & publisher, Tamarind Books
Dr Patrick Wilmot, writer & journalist
Adele Winston
Professor Brian Winston, University of Lincoln
Dr Leo Zeilig, University of the Witwatersrand
PLEASE NOTE: Institutions are named for identification purposes only

Nationalism, a Janus-faced animal: the potential for xenophobia

These have been heady times as millions of South Africans celebrate the successful hosting of the World Cup. Being the first African country to host this global event does indeed seem worthy of celebrating. This extremely costly event has produced an extraordinary sense of global citizenship and national pride and belonging. Yet, not all observers are optimistic and euphoric. Dale McKinley (Cape Times 14th June 2010) and Patrick Bond are amongst some of the many critics who have questioned FIFA's claims about the economic and developmental benefits of hosting the event. In fact, Bond claims that FIFA has taken out of South Africa an estimated R25 billion in tax-free profits without leaving nearly as much in terms of financial benefits for the host nation (Cape Times 5th July, 2010).

Detractors, who bemoan the massive costs of hosting this event, claim that these resources could have been put to far better use by building houses and establishing other more appropriate development projects. Yet millions of South African patriots passionately wish for the feel-good fraternity and festivity of the soccer carnival to continue. They do not wish to be burdened by mundane realities of crime, corruption, violence, xenophobia and labour strikes that have periodically penetrated FIFA's well fortified football bubble. Even Left critics such as Richard Pithouse acknowledge the extraordinary social levelling power and utopian effects this global sporting event has generated. As he puts it, 'in a world where inequality is so profound and so effectively policed, administered and legitimated there is something utopian in the moments of transcendence that football can create' (Cape Times, 5th July, 2010).

Events such as the FIFA World Cup can indeed be seen as ritualised utopian spaces in which spectacle is cordoned off from the mundane realities of everyday life. Like the temporary suspension of everyday conventions and social practices during carnivals and rites, the month long World Cup in South Africa has resulted in the suspension of business as usual.

I too experienced this carnival-like atmosphere and camaraderie at the World Cup matches I attended in Cape Town. Although I encountered passionate competition between supporters of different nations at World Cup games, this rivalry was generally accompanied by the recognition of common humanity and mutual respect.

For me this 'feel good' bubble was punctured when I was recently asked to give a talk on the photographs and poems by David Lurie and Patricia Schonstein on display at the Right to Refuge exhibition at Cape Town Holocaust Centre. The photographs and poems focus on victims of the xenophobic violence that erupted in South African cities in May 2008. This exceptionally powerful collection of images and poetry hints at something quite unsettling about unrestrained outbursts of nationalist fervour of the sort that we witnessed in soccer stadiums throughout South Africa. This sense of foreboding was heightened by having the Holocaust Centre as the exhibition venue.

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the shadow side of nationalism and the nation state. They draw explicit attention to the political violence associated with the foundation of nation-states. For instance, Ranjana Khanna has drawn attention to the mass expulsions of an estimated 16 million people that occurred following the 1947 Partition when India was split into India and west and east Pakistan. These historical events demonstrate that the creation and celebration of nationalism and the formation of the nation-state are often accompanied by processes of xenophobic violence that result in displaced refugees becoming stateless and vulnerable.

Jewish scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler have written critically about how the formation of the State of Israel was one such moment, and the continuing suffering of Palestianian refugees is a tragic consequence and continuing legacy of this founding moment. Arendt noted that the 'solution to the Jewish question' in the aftermath of the Shoah 'merely reproduced a new category of refugees, the [Palestinians], thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people'. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) also draws attention to the massive violent displacement of indigenous Palestinians during the 'War of Independence' or 'Nakba.' While Jewish supporters of the State of Israel continue to struggle to acknowledge this grim reality, Palestinians have indeed become stateless refugees and what the late Edward Said referred to as 'the victims of the victims.'

The founding of the State of Israel is by no means the only example of such violent processes of expulsion. Moreover, even when nation-states are well established, the nationalist desires and ambitions of leaders and citizens, especially those citizens experiencing chronic poverty and marginalization, can be expressed through the expulsion of internal 'enemy populations' that are transformed into non-nationals and stateless peoples. Idi Amin's expulsion of the Asian population in Uganda is but one of numerous such examples on the African continent and beyond. The genocidal violence against Jews in Nazi Germany is certainly a limit case when it comes to these nation-state processes.

In her 1951 study of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt referred to the ways in which xenophobic nationalist responses to those displaced and stateless in the period between the two world wars contributed towards the pathologising and criminalising of refugees and non-nationals. Reflecting on the devastating consequences of statelessness for Jews and other displaced peoples, Arendt concluded that human rights depended on national rights, that is, rights that constitute and protect one as a citizen of a nation-state. Without national rights, she argued, talk about human rights was simply 'hopeless idealism'.

At first glance this dire warning from Arendt seems wholly inappropriate for the South African context. After all, South Africa has a democratic constitution and a responsible state that is certainly not bent on the violent expulsion of foreigners. Yet, Arendt's observations do seem to have resonance for us today. Could it be that the ways in which refugees and non-nationals are treated in their daily interactions with police and other state functionaries share some resemblances with the processes described by Arendt? Let me illustrate this by means of anecdotal evidence.

Over the past few years I have come to know a group of over a dozen young Zimbabwean men who sell crafts, and more recently national flags, close to where I reside in Newlands, Cape Town. These young men seek to make a living to support themselves and their families in Zimbabwe. When the xenophobic violence erupted in May 2008, fearing violence from neighbours, these men fled the communities in which they lived in Cape Town's poorer working class suburbs. Most of them lost their possessions, including the tools and materials that they needed to make 'tourist paintings' of the townships and Table Mountain which they sold to make a living.

Forced to seek refuge from the violence by sleeping in Newlands Forest completely exposed to the bitterly cold Cape winter, they managed to find temporary shelter in churches and community centres. Notwithstanding these setbacks, in a remarkably short period they had managed to get their arts and crafts enterprise up and running. Since they continued to be harassed by Metro Police and SAPS, I attempted to intervene on their behalf by writing letters and speaking to the local Counsellor and the Station Commander at the Claremont Police Station. I explained that these young men were responsible breadwinners who, under extremely harsh and precarious conditions, sought to support their families back in Zimbabwe. Although it seemed police harassment had significantly subsided, a few weeks ago I received a call from the brother of one of the men who had been arrested by the police. After having the spent the night in jail, the young man was released, having paid a R50 admission of guilt fine for 'disturbing the peace'.

It turned out that a Newlands resident regularly calls the police complaining about the noise from the dozen vendors selling fruit, flowers, newspapers, the Big Issue, and crafts next to his house. Yet it is the Zimbabweans who are routinely arrested. How is it possible that the resident and the police know exactly who amongst these vendors is responsible for 'disturbing the peace'. Clearly, the South African sellers have employers who will complain loudly if their employees are fined, arrested or have their goods confiscated. The Zimbabweans, by contrast, are soft targets for police who feel obliged to make an arrest to mollify irate Newlands residents who complain about noise.

This brief anecdote draws attention to the complicity of ordinary citizens and state functionaries in rendering non-nationals vulnerable to criminalisation and discrimination. Once criminalised, these non-nationals are rendered increasingly susceptible to violence from South African men who are unemployed and who may resent what they perceive to be 'illegal' economic competition from foreigners. So, while Zimbabweans sell South African flags to patriotic football fans, they are acutely aware that the benign nationalistic spirit of the soccer festivities could quite easily morph into resentment and violence against foreigners once the FIFA carnival closes shop.

Nationalism is indeed a Janus-faced animal: during the struggle for national liberation it helped forge solidarity in the fight against a repressive apartheid state; yet, after apartheid it has demonstrated its potential to become a far more menacing and ambiguous beast. Unless citizens, civil society and the state begin to respond constructively to the rumours, threats and everyday violence directed against non-nationals, the benign rainbow nationalism and expressions of global citizenship of the World Cup celebrations could tragically morph into the kind of lethal violence that has been historically associated by Hannah Arendt with conditions of statelessness. The photographs and poems at the Right to Refuge exhibition at the Holocaust Centre provide a poignant reminder of how exclusivist versions of national belonging can so easily end up dehumanising and discriminating against others.

By Steven Robbins.

Robins is professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch

This article was first published in the Cape Times, Monday 12 July, 2010.