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

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

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

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

The call for the Workshop read as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achille Mbembe

Suffering and Surplus people

Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale spends the night in Diepsloot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C.A.K. Uzondu

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

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

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

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

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

Herman Gray, UC Santa Cruz

Faking it: Design as Re-making

Ackbar Abbas (with Pamila Gupta)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nienke Boer

When is a shoe no longer a shoe?

Noam Yuran at JWTC

‘What is Money?’ This was the title of the one of the last seminar sessions of this year’s JWTC Workshop, presented by Noam Yuran. Ah, money: so immediately personal, so globally pertinent. Each of us was bound to be hooked by the topic. Yet what difference does it make who asks that question and where and when it is being asked? What does it mean, for example, to ask ‘what is money’ in a context of wealth and high-end consumption, or in truly precarious times and places – and what might be the relationship between these?

Ask an ordinary Zimbabwean in Zimbabwe this question these days (if indeed anyone who has survived the past decade there could be called ordinary) and she or he would probably laugh or grimace or both, but anyway have countless ways of talking about how one goes about finding it, keeping it, using it, losing it. Everyone would have a take on those who have it, don’t have it, hoard it, share it, convert it, divert it.

In the worst period of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, which reached its unimagineable, world-historical peak of trillions of percent in late 2008 – before the ‘Zimbabwe dollar’ was officially cancelled and replaced with the Real Dollar (USD and other exchangeable foreign currencies) – there would be endless tales, or advice, on how and where one might access cash itself (which was a near-impossible feat for many), or how one might carry or count it. People would literally queue outside banks for days waiting to cash their salary cheques or simply draw out enough to pay for food or school fees. And as they waited, either outside banks or in queues for just about anything, their money literally disappeared since the actual bank notes (not Zimbabwe dollars as such but what the Reserve Bank denoted as ‘bearer cheques’) lost value almost at the speed of light. In a recently published novel, The Hairdresser of Harare (Weaver Press, 2010), in the course of making a surreptitious payment for a few kilos of ‘illicitly’ bought sugar from behind the back of a supermarket, the narrator recounts: “[Lucy] took the brick-like bundle of cash I had and stuffed it into her own large handbag. She did not need to count it. We can tell the value of money by its weight. It wouldn’t even matter if it was a few hundred thousand short anyway, the way its value was falling by the hour.”

So when Noam was poised to address the question, ‘What is Money?’, this paradox of the weight and weightlessness of money in contemporary Zimbabwe was partly what I had at the back of my mind as context. At the same time, knowing that Noam came from a very different historical-spatial reality and disciplinary milieu, I was intrigued by what his thinking, and the collective engagement this would evoke in the seminar, would bring to my own struggles to understand the changing value, exchangeability, modes of exchange and multiple meanings of money in times of both dramatic and sustained crisis and displacement. That specific interest aside, here was something both at the very core of the notion of ‘capital’, and basic to most people’s everyday lives and futures. Noam’s aim was to somehow unsettle the assumed universality – and economism – of much thinking about money; to turn the familiar strange, or at least provoke us to ‘rethink money through desire’, as part of a broader project of exploring ‘the object as the medium of the history of the subject’.

In Noam’s broad framing, money is no longer a means to an end (as asserted in orthodox economics), but rather ‘has become the ultimate end’. Money, he argued, is no longer distinct from commodities but is itself a commodity, to be accumulated for its own sake: much like a brand, whose value-added extends beyond its mere utility value. In this lies a sense of money’s indefinite desire, which Noam linked partly to ‘the nature of money itself’. With regard to his definition of desire, he said he rejected a psychological reading of the notion of desire, allying himself with Zizek in proposing that part of our subjectivity is imbued with objects. He further suggested that ‘that money itself wants to grow’. This latter idea was challenged by a number of commentators in the seminar for its disconnect from the social. In response, Noam asserted that the impossibility of the fulfillment of desire is what made it social.

The identity (or symbolic value) of an object, or brand, he continued, is linked to the way it is desired. The images or symbols of the brand are not mere symbols, but become part of the thing itself. At the same time, an object or brand’s worth is in its uniqueness, its UN-exchangeability. This is not an entirely new phenomenon Noam noted, giving the historical example of the leisured classes learning Latin at a time when it no longer had any utility value, but had social-symbolic value. In a more contemporary vein, he proposed that ‘when a kid asks for a Nike shoe, he [sic] wants the symbol itself’. In this scenario, ‘a shoe is no longer a shoe’.

This last phrase turned out to be particularly provocative. Of course a shoe IS still a shoe for those too poor to afford even a basic pair, several people noted. Yet it was among several points that generated animated responses (and even some degree of animosity) from seminar participants. My own unvoiced question at the time was, ‘where and when would such a phrase have purchase? (no pun intended). Others vocalized a range of challenging questions that took on different aspects of the broad arguments presented. These are not reported here comprehensively or verbatim (with some exceptions), but rather in loose translation through my own reading of what was at stake:

In what historical, spatial, social, economic, political and cultural context has this overall theoretical formulation emerged? What is its analytical reach and relevance? What does it take for granted, and what are its blind spots? What are its implications for whom? Where is ‘the social’ in this approach? Where and how do material and institutional realities fit in this perspective? How does it help us understand how politics and economics affect social relations of power? Where does money fit into a revolution? Can we talk about ‘Capitalism’ (or ‘late Capitalism’) as a universal phenomenon with overarching trends, even with so much spatial/social diversity in its global and local manifestations? What is the distinction (and/or relationship) between an economics of need and an economics of desire? Can one separate desire from need in such an abstracted way?

Many of the questions posed by participants reflected not only different disciplinary or theoretical perspectives from Noam’s explicitly philosophical (and Northern) one, but some also came from an overtly normative position linked to an impassioned politics around issues of poverty and exclusion. In this sense, the seminar provoked valuable reflections at the core of JWTC’s overarching project: namely, what does it mean to think and theorise ‘from the South’. It would be interesting to trace the diverse results that might emerge if each of us was to pursue (empirically and theoretically) this same question – what is money? – in a range of contexts. What would our own answers be?

On a more personal note, this seminar fuelled my curiosity and concern – as did so much of the workshop – about why and how we ask the questions we ask. How questions are conceptualised, where and when and by whom, has profound consequences for our ways of seeing, methods of investigation and modes of representation. It affects the visibility and legitimacy of certain experiences and the political space for particular struggles. It also implicates us, as knowledge producers, in the ways the world is constructed. This forces me to keep asking myself what kind of scholar I want to be.

Amanda Hammar
Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University

Reckoning (with) Wreckages

Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr

In the final studio session of the 2010 JWTC on Tuesday afternoon, “Wreckages of Utopia,” Isabel Hofmeyr, Louise Bethlehem, and Sarah Nuttall invited us to consider new ways of learning from, living in, and even laughing at the “wrecked” spaces of violent (colonial, imperial, and/or religio-nationalist) utopian projects. Each of the panelists reckoned with the past, present, and/or future of certain wreckages, and taken together their comments occasioned, for me, a reflection on the complex, contradictory, and contested temporalities involved in reading the spaces of what we have been referring to as the Global South, as well as on the nature of the intellectual’s relationship/response to these complex temporalities.

Isabel Hofmeyr began the session by framing the spaces of the Global South as sites of “social experiment” (echoing, though with a slightly different emphasis, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s earlier articulation of colonies as sites of experimentation for global capital) that are left to deal with the permanent fallout of others’ utopian schemes once the experiments have failed/been defeated and their (colonial, imperial) agents have withdrawn. The spaces of the Global South, she suggested, are the spaces where the archives of these wrecked social experiments are most dense and painful. How, methodologically, Hofmeyr asked, do we deal with these archives? While the dominant response has been to focus on the axis of anti-colonial resistance, Hofmeyr underlined the potential of new or neglected cultural forms and registers: satire, parody, irony; bizarreness and juxtaposition; slapstick and crass comedy; attempts to “recycle the wreckage.” She concluded her comments, however, with a brief description of her own research into a very different genre, an example of what she labels “South-South Gothic”: the search for a cenotaph marking the resting place of Boer prisoners of war detained in the Punjab during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. This memorial, she suggests, is “haunted with contradictions that address multiple pasts and presents.”

For South Africans, Hofmeyr writes, “reading a roll of Afrikaans names (De Jager, Van der Merwe, Cronje, Fourie, Pienaar) in the Punjab (present day Haryana) is bizarre, estranging and nostalgic.” While in public discourse the Anglo-Boer War had been a “yawn-worthy staple in the school syllabus, part of the arsenal of Afrikaner nationalism,” it nevertheless “haunted private spaces,” and here Hofmeyr recalls the war stories told by her maternal grandmother, which “emerged at odd and unpredictable moments, bizarre and jagged shards whose repetition could never smooth their violent edges.” “To read the Boer names in Ambala Cantonment,” Hofmeyr suggests, was thus to “revisit these semi-forgotten private and public histories from a radically different angle.” Borrowing from Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, Hofmeyr reads the cenotaph as the “beginnings of an unintentional memorial,” unintentional memorials being about “uncertainty, the unpredictability of change, unexpected juxtapositions, and colliding time schemes.” Thus while in India the graves of Boer prisoners of war have become “ruins on the border of recorded time, passing into an archive of opaque ancientness severed from the present,” the visit by Hofmeyr and her fellow researchers “re-inaugurated them into the present, even if only briefly.” The histories opened up by research into such (“obscure, off-centre”) “lateral linkages” across the spaces of the Global South, Hofmeyr writes, are “discordant, unpredictable, quirky,” but they nevertheless offer a perspective from which to “configure the shards and wreckages of many pasts.” In the ruins of St. Paul’s Church in Ambala – ruins of “more recent provenance,” Hofmeyr notes, a casualty of the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 – British imperialism, anti-colonialism, Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid “become embedded in a landscape shaped by Partition, the Cold War and their consequences.” None of these histories, Hofmeyr insists, are over; instead, their “spectral after-effects continue to accumulate in different parts of the world.” In her comments on Tuesday, Hofmeyr described herself as “the fallout of aspirations for Afro-Asian solidarity,” and in this project she sets out to reckon (multiple senses: she is giving an account of, but also still counting, still calculating) the historical wreckages that continue to accumulate across the spaces of the Global South.

In her comments, Louise Bethlehem offered us two optics, two windows onto another wreckage. She began with a reflection on her own (potential, imagined) movement through the spaces of the “fortress of learning” that she inhabits, a “structure knowingly turned in upon itself”: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Turned in upon itself, that is, with one exception, an exceptional space that Bethlehem has never thought to enter (and would never, as a woman, be able to enter “simply at will”): the Hecht Synagogue, which opens out onto a panoramic view of the Temple Mount and, in the words of its architect, Ram Karmi, is “at the apex of the faculty’s internal movement and orientation.” Bethlehem asked us to use this window “as a way into the spatial and mnemonic regimes of Israel/Palestine,” a space in which the law of “spatial sovereignty” very forcefully manifests itself. Bethlehem, however, endeavored to “decipher the synagogue window against its own transparency and in favor of the detritus of memory that it occludes,” insisting on reading the material referent itself, the Temple Mount, as “reconstituted through the apparatus of ideological reinscription by the Zionist narrative as Har Habayit, in opposition to Haram-ash-Sharif: the site of al-Aqsa.” This reinscription, Bethlehem suggested, whether nostalgic or messianic/millennial, is the “aftereffect of both spatial and epistemological violence.” Thus while the eye “surveys an inhabited landscape, saturated with the evidence of rival cultural, religious and national claims,” the “visionary gaze of the ideologically interpellated worshipper in the present-day synagogue is uncannily close to the injunction of the founding Zionist forefathers,” who imagined the university as a “Third Temple” of science and a “necessary accessory” to the Jewish national revolution. The gaze, Bethlehem continued, is “momentarily split” between its “emplacement in space” and the “phantasmatic space of possession it extends across the valley, denuding the lived space of the Old City of its historicity, of its being-inhabited.”

To counteract a gaze that registers only the “phantasmatic space of possession,” Bethlehem turned to a different optic, a unique window onto the destruction of Gaza. She discussed “Postcards for Gaza,” a 2009 exhibit curated by Norma Musih for the dissident organization Zochrot, in which Israeli artists responded to a series of photographs by the Palestinian artist Shareef Sarhan documenting the destruction of Gaza, producing a proliferation of postcards in the gallery space. “What repertoires of resistance, witness and dissent,” Bethlehem asked, “may be extrapolated from this relay?” She entertained two interpretive models for appraising the dissent offered: the first, a “referential politics of witness,” she argued, forecloses the “political desire” of the recirculation, restricting it to “reiteration.” The second model, however, moves from referentiality to affect, and allows for a reading of the recirculation of Sarhan’s images as “an attempt to extract the photograph from an adjudication of the political constrained by the fetishization of mimesis, so as to restore the photograph to its status as fetish – tout court.” Bethlehem elaborated, drawing on the work of William Pietz: “Although the fetish partakes of an irreducible materiality, a materiality as intractable as the wreckage Sarhan photographs, it does not merely resignify material components.” Rather, “it articulates relations between the material, on the one hand, and the structures of desire, belief, affect and narrative in which materiality is embedded, on the other.” Pietz enables Bethlehem to “draw on the notion of transvaluation between cultures” in order to read the transformations of Sarhan’s photographs as “more than simply derivative of a primary mimesis belonging to another,” more than “mere evidence of the colonizer’s narcissism.” Bethlehem then suggested that the “ambivalent production of aesthetic value and symbolic capital as lines inscribed between the lines of wreckage on the part of Israeli artists might profitably be considered as the symptom of a Nachträglichkeit (the Freudian ‘deferred effect’ of anterior trauma) that reinscribes the originary production of value by the Zionist state brought into being through the founding violence of dispossession that is the Palestinian nakba.” In other words, it is “dissidence wrecked in advance by the violence of a utopianism which predates it.” Wrecked in advance, but Bethlehem also emphasized that the project “translates the longue durée of the nakba into a vernacular idiom, a visual repertoire, that constructs fairly radical emplacements for Israeli Jews who consent to participate in Zochrot’s dissident project of counter-memory.”

Bethlehem concluded with a few brief comments on Zochrot itself: the organization (its name translates loosely as “remembering,” but is derived from the plural feminine form of the verb in order to contest the masculinist bias of conventional historical accounts) seeks to raise awareness of the nakba in defiance of the work of a “willed Zionist amnesia,” and attempts to “re-inscribe the memory of pre-1948 Palestinian life on the face of the Israeli landscape from which it has been erased.” Zochrot’s “mnemonic activism” also seeks to crack (לסדוק) “the fortress of that other bastion of Zionist utopianism: the Hebrew language itself.” Its journal is titled Sedek, or “fissure,” and the Zochrot website makes clear that its aim is to “speak the Nakba in Hebrew and in so doing to change the Hebrew language,” “to make it into a language that contains the Nakba (in Arabic), into a language that contains a fissure.” Bethlehem noted that sedek also “preserves echoes of a not-quite homophone: צדק [tzedek] – that is to say, justice,” an echo that she described as “linguistic subversion” present as “willed différance” in the journal’s title. In its “resolute production of discourse, in Hebrew, but also in Arabic and English,” Bethlehem concluded, “Zochrot stages an ongoing allegorical performance of a differently inflected Israeli identity.” We could also understand Bethlehem’s own presentation as such a speaking otherwise: not merely a report on a relay, more than simply descriptive or derivative of (reproductions of) a primary mimesis belonging to another, her comments can perhaps be read as dissidence wrecked in advance, yes, but also with the knowledge that, as in Bethlehem’s own words, the “mis-en-abîme of appropriation does not vitiate the gesture of solidarity” with a project committed to a politics of counter-memory. Each iteration does its own work of reckoning.

If Hofmeyr asks us to think about the ever-accumulating “spectral after-effects” of historical wreckages, to think wreckages as archives, and if Bethlehem insists on the historicity (and inhabited-ness) of the Old City as (a gesture of solidarity with) a politics unfolding in the present, Sarah Nuttall’s comments shifted our attention to the future, and to the future of Johannesburg in particular. She provocatively declared herself to be “quite glad” that utopia has been wrecked, even as she remains interested in the “question of the future” (a provocation that I read as particularly striking given her own earlier acknowledgment, in the introduction to Entanglement, of “the need for a utopian horizon”). Nuttall spoke about “winning the right to address the future,” and about the possibility that “inventing the future” might itself come to be seen as a kind of “critical practice.” Picking up on themes that she has addressed in Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (2009), Nuttall pushed at the limits of a politics of difference – even proposing, again provocatively, to add postcolonial theory itself to the pile of wreckages – and shifted our attention to the idea of desegregation, as a way to think about living in Johannesburg, about making Johannesburg habitable, and, as she argues in Entanglement, as a counterpoint to “a long history, as well as contemporary formations, of suffering based on a distorted universalism and therefore an insulting invocation and enforcement of difference.” In fact, while I have emphasized Nuttall’s focus on the future, there is a more complex approach to temporality at play in her analysis: in the conclusion to Entanglement, she proposes that we leave behind the teleology of “post-apartheid” in favor of a “different theory of social time,” one that acknowledges the simultaneous existence of modes of “nostalgia and melancholy, of inertia and stasis”; modes of “presentism” (which lack a sense of the future); and modes of “invention.” Johannesburg, Nuttall argues, is a city “made up of simultaneity, speed, rapid alternations, and striking levels of mutability and change,” and it thus requires new conceptual categories that “embrace social velocity, the power of the unforeseen and unfolding, and a concept of the social as experiment and artifice versus order and contract.”

These thoughts lead me, finally, to some reflections on the nature of the intellectual’s response to these complex temporalities. In the final pages of Entanglement, Nuttall argues for a “politics of the emergent in South Africa” that “attempts to undercut a theoretical stance of resistance to the present at all costs.” Rejecting models of (Foucauldian) “renunciation” as well as (Adornian) “defamiliarisation,” she instead looks for the “potential, both latent and surfacing, for imminent change.” Where Foucault conceived of “imagining another system” as a “way of occupying the present,” Nuttall instead seeks to “[find] ways within the present system – a new democratic order – for dismantling the past and protecting the future.” I find Nuttall’s account to be both provocative and productive, but I also want to juxtapose it with another recent account of the intellectual’s relation to temporality, that developed by Mark Sanders in the epilogue to Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (2007). Sanders describes the “risk of interpreting what is happening in the light of what has come and gone” – the intellectual’s unavoidable “transaction with time” – but also emphasizes that he does so “with a view to a future.” Citing J.M. Coetzee’s essay “Critic and Citizen: A Response,” Sanders proposes that it is possible to “think responsibility in terms of the alterity of time,” the intellectual “introduc[ing] another temporality, counter to the time of an event, to the time appropriated by an event.” The intellectual, Sanders suggests, “strives to bring the current event before what has come and gone, and endeavors to find ways of opening it to futurity.” Sanders writes that he is instructed by Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and indeed both Hofmeyr’s (hauntings, spectral after-effects) and Bethlehem’s (aftereffect[s] of spatial and epistemological violence, phantasmatic spaces) comments invite us to think of the intellectual’s task as, in Derrida’s phrase, a “learn[ing] to live with ghosts.” “No being-with the other,” Derrida writes, “no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us” (and Nuttall, too, is particularly interested in the question of being-with, of a conviviality haunted by the specters of race and racism). “No justice,” Derrida continues, “seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.” Without this “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present,” Derrida asks, “what sense would there be to ask the question ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’” Part of being an intellectual, in other words, is reckoning with the fact that time is always out of joint (Hamlet’s phrase, to which Derrida points us); that is what, each in her own way, all three of the panelists were telling us as they reckoned (with) the wreckages of utopias.

Joseph Napolitano

No Boer, No Future/ No Farmer/ No Future/ what loss?

Ben Cousins and Eric Worby

As Ben Cousins laid out for us in his presentation, land reform is at the nexus of a number of important concerns: apartheid redress, redistribution of wealth, the question of bounded territory, the understanding of our relation to time, and the need to create sustainable modes of food provision. In addressing land reform, we are dealing, then, with the complexities of multiple understandings of property rights, and, indeed, of property, of community and of history and the future in relation to power and to what we might refer to as everyday experience. However, the complexity notwithstanding, he reminds us that there is the need for urgent action, and with this a realization that we are, as he puts it, “grappling with the difficult present, rather than a simple version of the past or the future”.

“Sometimes,” he says, “brutal simplification is the only feasible response”. My response is one that pushes on the notion of simplicity, and perhaps this is its failure. However, since my work deals with notions of temporality and a sense of being a group among white Afrikaners, rather than with land reform in particular, the issues I am best placed to speak to are exactly the dreamworlds that land evokes, rather than the precise mode of reparation. However, since reparation – what is at the heart of land reform – is in itself, as Cousins states, a kind of dreamworld, I present this as an addendum to his discussion, rather than as a challenge or a series of questions. Cousins acknowledges the importance of the symbolic value of land in land reform, but emphasizes the economic materiality of land in most of his discussion. I cannot speak to the valency of land for those who are seeking to acquire land through the land reform process, or even to the valency of land for those who sell it in support of the land reform process. I will speak to narratives of material and symbolic value of land, in the broadest terms, in how Afrikaner volk is being constituted post-apartheid. The material value of land is located in the sensory experience of working the land, and the symbolic in the historic resonance of being a farmer. In this narrative, economic value is occluded. I will suggest briefly at the end that we can think about this using Noam Yuran’s analytic of a constitutive relation between material and symbol in money.

About two years ago I visited the museum at the Heritage Center at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The museum presents a history of Afrikaner presence in South Africa. In the museum visitor’s book one of the visitors had written: ‘It is places like these that stop me from leaving the country: No boer, no future’. This seems like such a simple statement: ‘No farmer, no future’. However, the word ‘boer’ can, of course, not be translated simply as ‘farmer’. It is a word that has come to be associated with rightwing racist politics – most notably in the way the repressive apartheid police were referred to as ‘boere’. So, read with this connotation, and in the context of the statement that it is places like the Heritage Museum that stop the writer ‘giving up’ on South Africa, ‘no boer, no future’ means that there is no future for the country without the boere? This sounds a bit threatening, but it is also more complicated. Specifically, we see here a particular set of temporalities invoked, in which the political significance shifts and in which the sacral is evoked.

Some short time after the Dutch East India Company set up a refueling station at the southern tip of the African continent in the 17^th century some of the company employees formally left the employ of the company to farm and sell their produce to the Company: they were called vrijburgers or free citizens. Bibow, one of this group, we are told, is the first person to have coined the term ‘Afrikaner’, when he shouted ‘Ik bin ein Afrikander’ in rebellion against Company rule. What he shouts is, in one sense, ‘I am an Afrikaner’ – and this is how the story is usually told – but in another sense what he shouts is ‘I am an African’. Here we have the first complication in understanding how ‘no boer, no future’ makes sense: although its reference now is primarily to a rightwing politics of land as well as of race, it is a referent that resonates with a notion of being African. The resonance of particular concepts is important for my reasoning here because this is an important mode of meaning-making in Afrikaans volk history and in Afrikaans political positioning in the present. This sense of being a farmer, is opposed, then, to being a company employee and opposed to being a European, and contains a sense of being a stateless citizen. The next resonance is of ‘boer’ as citizen of the Boer republics.

In the mid-19^th century, groups of Afrikaners and their slaves and servants travel North of what becomes the British Cape Colony, to establish what are referred to as the ‘Boer’ republics (the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and the Oranje Vrijstaat). This time when Boer means citizen is shortlived – the republics never quite function as states in the way we understand states to function now, were never entirely autonomous in the way we expect states to be now, and, further, faced constant challenge from citizens we might now describe as ‘libertarian’. The states were attacked by the British Empire at the turn of the 19^th century, and the Boers or the Afrikaners came under British rule by 1905. Kitchener’s scorched earth strategy, in which farms and lands were burnt in order to flush out guerilla soldiers and leave them no support network, are remembered with as much horror as the concentration camps in which farm women and children and farm labourers were held under brutal conditions.

So, when we read ‘no boer’, it is a statement about a certain politics, the claim to a certain history, to a certain sense of persecution, and, of course, identity that is complicated to place politically, in the way we generally define politics now. This is especially true since the early Boer republics were motivated, as the story is told, in part by a sense of religious volk destiny – a point I will not go into here. So, we see ‘boer’ as resonating with this particular historical sense of oppositional identity-formation, shifting as it signifies a certain kind of belonging in Southern Africa that is similar but not quite a notion of citizenship. The word also resonates, historically, with seeking to occupy a particular economic place. But it is also about the experience of farming.

The museum I mentioned earlier features a display of a pair of ‘farmer’s’ hands filled with earth, with some lines of a poem superimposed on the hands. The hands are male and white, and while the skin has a rougher texture than perhaps we might expect of an intellectual, they still seem somewhat refined – nails neatly cut and no obvious callouses. Notwithstanding these signals of a kind of gentility, and the ability to employ labourers, the image emphasizes a certain embodied experience, that is hands-on, as it were, and which recalls the feeling of soil in the hands. It is an image that suggests sowing, and is not unlike images of Christ’s hands that are common in more old-fashioned Afrikaans homes: briefly, I would read the image as evoking fertility, the sacred nature of farming, presenting this a kind of depoliticized sensuality, in a nostalgic mode. It should be pointed out that farming is in the distant past for most Afrikaners, although most families know the name of what used to be their family farm and it is a site of nostalgic recollection that belies what they also know: that farming is arduous and difficult to make a financial success of. Knowing this, the claim laid on farming, and on being a boer, is a claim to a certain mythos of volk as well as, and sometimes instead of, a claim to actual land.

It is on these grounds, the grounds of experience, history and the sensual, that the political nature of being a landed farmer are evoked in popular narrations of these experiences. Speaking against a kind of commonsense notion of being ‘one’ with the land, and with identity being caught up in this sacral process, are accounts like Antjie Krog’s, in A Change of Tongue, and in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat. These accounts depict farms and farming as fraught with sometimes quite brutal racial and gender politics. In this additional resonance, the nostalgic temporality of farming is one that is fraught with taints of brutality, recalled with difficulty in the public sphere but not absent. Indeed, if only in reference to a history of settler struggle, the possibility of violence is one that is an uneasy presence in the phrase ‘no boer, no future’. As Cousins points out, the specter of violent land reclamations in Zimbabwe haunt visions of the future of South African land reform: this is a future to be avoided.

It remains to discuss the significance of ‘no future’. As Ben Cousins pointed out, the stakes in land reform are exactly of different kinds of futures – he points out that this is what drives the process but that this is also what makes it problematic. Given the urgency of the need for reform, he says, we cannot pause too long to consider all the best possible futures, disregarding the need to take action, albeit imperfect.

The word ‘future’ in Afrikaans is ‘toekoms,’ which can be transliterated as ‘then-arrival’. It resonates with the words ‘herkoms’, which can be transliterated as ‘arriving-again’ and means origin, and ‘heenkoms,’ which can be transliterated as ‘where-arriving’ and also means origin. ‘Origin’, here, is both literal and metaphysical, and points us to the ways in which ‘future’, here, is both a literal and a metaphysical place, a metaphysical destination that connotes material space. The future is, then, in some senses a land, a landedness, a promised land. Indeed, this is how we often understand it. We should note though that this way of thinking suggests that there is a predetermined place to arrive at: this means that the loss of land creates a crisis of temporality, in the sense that there is no clear place to arrive at. For a volk whose mythos refers to a series of exoduses, this is not a new state of affairs, indeed, it engenders a sense of volk even as it seems to disallow it. However, in a mythos in which the future is a kind of predetermined place, the loss of that place also calls the past, and the nature of history itself, into question (drawing here on Rachel Fulton’s discussion of medieval apocalyptic thinking).

What I have sketched above is a problematic of materiality and symbolism that leaves out the economic. Representations of Afrikaner history, reiterated in service of a reformulation of nationhood, suggest that the material is at the service of the symbolic, even as the material is emphasized: so a narrative might go as follows ‘we are losing our land which is symbolic of our identity and our future, but the symbol we lose is also material in that we lose our literal connection with the land and physical spaces that are important to us as a family and as a people’. This is not an uncommon way for people to describe the process of losing land (and I draw here on the stories related in Cherryl Walker’s Landmarked), but the problem of how to account for the economic materiality of land remains. In the nostalgic regard for the past, and even in the regard for the sensual experience of farming, and in a vision of the future, we seem very far from the rands and cents that we know are part of the picture. We might ask, cynically, ‘yes, but what about the ways in which land is a commodity now? What about the financial gain that land might represent? Or the financial loss that land means?’ or, even more simply, ‘where is class in this?’ I see this problematic as emblematic of much local discussion about apartheid reparation: it is rare in public discourse to see a reconciliation of the spheres of affective, spiritual or historical loss and gain and the spheres of gain and loss in terms of hard cash, assets or investment futures and the shifts in class that such changes might represent. (So, for instance, Deborah Posel tries to make sense of Smuts Nkonyama’s statement ‘I did not fight in the struggle to be poor’ in terms of a racial economy that was always about consumption, rather than more ‘purely’ about ideals of metaphysical emancipation.)

In an effort to suggest some resolution to the problematic I have sketched out here, I will attempt a short-cut to a theoretical possibility, via Noam Yuran’s discussion of money as symbolic matter or material symbol: we could consider land as material symbol, in which, according to Noam’s analytic, land’s materiality is concealed in its symbolic value. In the politics of reconstituting Afrikaner volk, concealing land’s materiality in its symbolic value (or certain aspects of its materiality) obscures financial gain and loss in land reform in favor of regarding its symbolic value as part of a mythos of volk. However, this tendency can, again using Noam’s analytic, be considered as a definitive aspect of neoliberal economy, and not specific to a racist politics. Indeed, presenting land as primarily symbolic (even in its sensual aspect) lends itself equally well to a narrative in which selling land in support of land reform is a sacrificial act, beyond the mere rands and cents of the transaction. The occlusion, specifically, of monetary value in narratives of political persecution or redemption, I would venture, speaks to the separation of what we consider to be matters of finance from what we consider to be matters of politics: a dangerous occlusion if we consider the challenges that neoliberal economy poses to nation-state governance (exactly the kind of governance that makes land reform possible).

Kathleen McDougall