We can all be messiah individually if we give up our self-preserving sense

Kelly Gillespie introduces Neo Muyanga

Johannesburg is a city that still produces messiahs at high frequency. Preachers of gospels both spiritual and secular saturate the air with their messages, promising salvation and liberation from all possible imaginable oppressions. Money, power, sex, love, life, death – the holy people of Jozi can tell you all about it. Academic travellers most likely meet those belonging to the genres of cab drivers and drunkards in bars on 7th Street in Melville. Stories shared during coffee breaks revealed that JWTC participants were no strangers to these phenomena. But this blog does not dawdle with peripheral prophets. Hadn’t we members of academia come to Johannesburg secretly expecting to meet a real contemporary messiah, if not a club of messiahs? Was the purpose of our congregation not sharing bits and pieces of the messianic curricula that guide our own professional practices? After all, we had gathered in Johannesburg to raise the question of the futures of nature. The devils of oil capitalism, climate change politics and racist nature conservation discourses hunt us day and night.

After a week of pondering the futures of nature, the 2012 JWTC was ready for a serious messiah. The messiah we encountered on the evening of the seventh workshop day was Addis Shembe. We met her at the Dance Factory in Newtown. Addis is the main figure in Neo Muyanga’s brilliant operetta “The Flower of Shembe” (http://neomuyanga.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/the-flower-of-shembe-run-in-joburg/). The play narrates the story of a girl born as “a new-messiah-in-the-making”, the trials and tribulations she encounters and how she comes to terms with her own destiny. After having resolved seven trials and returned home to participate as a war general in the liberation of her people from the rule of a cruel dictator, Addis speaks:

“contrary to popular belief

the problem is not

choice

but our immutable instinct

for self-preservation

the very fact, our glory,

makes it impossible for us to love”

(From the libretto of “The Flower of Shembe)

Neo Muyanga and members of his NeoSong Company had introduced “The Flower of Shembe” to us in a JWTC session moderated by Liz Gunner before we went to see the show. According to the composer, the operetta is a story about hope, joy and love. It is also a story that engages with spirituality, politics, youth and leadership. Asked by Liz Gunner whether there was a need for a new messiah today, Neo Muyanga answered that we live in cynical times and offered the following proposal: “we can all be messiah individually if we give up our self-preserving sense.”

Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks that “[a] man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language.” At the JWTC we discussed the epistemologies needed for practicing theory and criticism from the South. How does it come about that many academics these days take to writing about art? Are artists our new messiahs? Or is writing about art our way to be messiah individually? “The Flower of Shembe” is a story told in many languages that are brought together most eloquently. There are languages of the body, languages of movement, languages of music and languages of the visual. “The Flower of Shembe” is told in Sesotho, Maskanda, fashion design, Zulu, painting, English, dance, flowers, Opera, sculpture, animation short film (select listing with no particular order).

Being a historian of flowers and rather illiterate in matters of music and dance, I will end this blog with few sentences about the language of flowers used in the operetta and offer my own comment in the language of flowers. Flowers are present in the play in various forms. “Addis” means “flower” in Amharic. The stage setting contains beautiful huge metal flowers. The poster and libretto for “The Flower of Shembe” feature a painting of Addis with a protea on her forehead (http://neomuyanga.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/image.jpg). The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the protea after the Greek god Proteus, the sea-god who changes his appearance constantly as to remain unseen by those who would approach him to use his gift of future telling. Linnaeus chose the name due to the many different forms in which the flower appeared. The plant also symbolically lives up to its name, as numerous meanings were attached to it, shifting according to time and space. Dictionaries of the “Language of Flowers” that fascinated 19th century Europe associate the protea with the meaning “courage”. The protea was prominently adopted by white settlers as a symbol of their South Africa and in 1976 the Protea cynaroides was officially declared the national flower. The new democratic South Africa holds on to it as a truly protean symbol. Due to their longevity, proteas and other fynbos plants have for long been popular as grave decoration. But the protea also has a history that reaches back before the flower represented death or nationalism. As Frieda Shenton’s mother in Zoë Wicomb’s short story “A Trip to the Gifberge” says: “Only fools and cowards would hand them over to the Boers. Those who put their stamp on things may see in it their own histories and hopes. But a bush is a bush; it doesn’t become what people think they turn it into. We know who lived in these mountains when the Europeans were still shivering in their own country. What they think of the veld and its flowers is of no interest to me.” (Zoë Wicomb, You can’t get lost in Cape Town (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2008), 189)

In the Language of flowers my blog about “The Flower of Shembe” looks like this:

(Concept: Melanie Boehi, Flower arrangement: Karin Bachmann, Photographer: Jayne Batzofin)

Translation drawn together from numerous Language of flowers’ dictionaries:

arum lilies   magnificence

blue iris       faith, hope, wisdom, eloquence

protea         courage, diversity

red rose      love

strelitzia      faithfulness, joyfulness, paradise


Melanie Boehi
University of Basel

On the Politics of Latour - Reflections on the Things of Nature, Nature of Things

As Sarah Nuttall noted, panelists Annie Leatt, Daniel Roux, Meg Samuelson, Mandla Langa and Hylton White addressed the “nature of things” in many different registers: the sociological, the autobiographical, the literary and the (explicitly) theoretical. I focus here on some of the issues that two of these speakers raised, that returned me, in different ways, to theorizing from the South, conflicts in reading Latour, and the ambiguities in the “objects” and “natures” that concern non-subject-centered thinkers.

In the closing lecture of the panel, Hylton White expressed his dissatisfaction with Bruno Latour’s analytic effects in the humanities. Latour’s mistake, for White, lay in the idea that in “fetishism”, the subject is casting her representation onto things. As White argued, fetishism for Marx (and for critical theory) is a fetishism of commodities: it is not a general fetishism of “objects”, but a specific form of fetishism, in a specific –capitalist –context.

Quite unexpectedly, White’s critique of Latour took me back to a conversation with a friend in my hometown in India last summer. This friend and I had both recently proceeded from the Sociology department at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) to Euro-American universities; she joined the PhD program at the University of Heidelberg and I joined the New School. Our interactions with graduate students had led both of us to conclude that Latour was read in the Northern university context in a very different way than he was read in our university context in India. In the Northern academy, we thought, Latour was too often depoliticized, with Latourian approaches conceiving of the ‘agency of materials’ as if in a political vacuum, “distributing” agency between subjects and objects at the cost of attending to the power relations between subjects.[1]

In reflecting on this, what interested me was that White’s critique of Latour –his suggestion that when it comes to theorizing objects, it is necessary to pay attention to specificity, to the specific political and cultural contexts in which humans have specific relations with specific objects –bore a resemblance to many an Indian graduate student’s critique of Northern Latourians. At the same time, I was also struck by the divergence in the two contexts in how Latour’s work itself was read. Was there something, apart from the historical particularities of different academic cultures, that allowed for this quite stark difference in the reading of this particular author? 

To read Latour as if he himself pays no attention to broader political context is, I personally think, to misread him: The Latour of We Have Never Been Modern does call for an attention to networks of subjects and objects keeping in mind their political environment. Suggestions of this can be found in his discussion of the possibility of the creation of dangerous hybrids with consequences that the ‘moderns’ refuse to account for in the process of their innovation (exhibit: perhaps the hole in the ozone-layer itself) (see Latour 1993, 41), the modernist conceptualization of the ‘premoderns’ (part 4 of the text), and the endeavour to establish a ‘nonmodern constitution’ (138), that challenges “the great narrative of the West” (112) and guarantees that “the production of hybrids, by becoming explicit and collective, becomes the object of an enlarged democracy that regulates or slows down its cadence” (141, my emphasis).

At the same, what I think does allow for a reading of Latour as if he were politically vacuous is a central ambiguity in his own text: his tendency, throughout We Have Never Been Modern, to conflate ‘nature’ with ‘objects’, and the ‘subject’ with ‘society’. It is this conflation that I think makes it possible for a certain strand of Latourians to speak of  nature/object and subject/society –terms that have been falsely rendered synonymous –in absolute abstraction, allowing for a vehement but extremely vague invocation of the ‘agency of things’. It seems that in post-Latour social science, even the staunchest critics of the nature-culture binary effect a different kind of categorical confusion in equating “nature” with “things”; so that even Achille Mbembe, in his incisive introductory lecture, critiqued in one sentence the “separation between us and nature, us and things”.

It is, finally, in this context that Annie Leatt’s talk, opening the panel, was particularly instructive. Through her interest in secularization and her ethnographic examples (deforestation and the ecology monks in Thailand; Jae Rhim Le, the Korean “scientist-artist” who thinks of the effect of the toxification of the human body on the environment)  Leatt makes a case for theorizing “nature” and “objects” together, instead of assuming a synonymity between them.  

Marx, one of the “moderns” that Latour critiqued and that Hylton White then used to critique Latour, was exceptionally careful in working out the relations between the subject, the object and nature. “Nature”, in Marx’s work, is both human nature and the external environment, and it is through his theory of labour and estrangement, particularly in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, that he shows us how (for him) they are connected.  If we are to think seriously about the “future of nature”- if we are to know the future of which “nature” we are talking about, rather than using the term to allude either to “objects” writ large or to an abstract, external environment –then it is to these kinds of connections, to the particular meaning of particular terms, in particular political situations, that we need to attend.  It is this that Leatt and White, in their otherwise very distinct discussions of their very distinct concerns, managed together to suggest.

Katyayani Dalmia

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[1] Take, for example, the very popular 2005 essay on the North American blackout by Jane Bennett, where Bennett attempts to “distribute” agentive capacity, including the capacity for political transformation, between subjects and objects {“…though human reflexivity is indispensable for transforming political life, on many occasions and in a variety of ways the efficacy of political change is not a function of humans alone…effective agency is always an assemblage (Bennett 2005, 454)} Bennett is sensitive to the question of power, and to the critique that allowing for the agency of objects may undermine the political responsibility of subjects. And, she does specifically observe that “power is not equally distributed across the assemblage” (ibid, 445). Nevertheless, there is nothing in her method that in fact, allows for an accounting of the effect of this differential distribution of power {What, for instance, would Latour-inspired approaches such as Bennett’s make of gender?}

Prospecting autonomy, extracting authenticity?

Carlos Crespo present

Phillip Rousseau comments on Carlos Crespo’s “Statalization and Commodification of Natural Resources and Social Resistances under the Morales Government”.

Carlos Crespo’s public lecture focused on the long history of destruction of the commons by the centripetal forces of the Bolivian State. From 19^th century laws of expropriation, to State led mining and oil extraction in indigenous territories in the 20^th century, the richly detailed presentation offered a clear view of the renewable waves of statalization and commodification of natural resources. The historical overview culminated in the presentation of contemporary processes of resource extraction in Bolivia and recent indigenous strategies of resistance to them.

Autonomy was a persistent theme in Carlos’ presentation. His explicit call for a politics of autonomy to counter Bolivian statism was especially eloquent in his presentation of the two main strategies of indigenous resistance to State and Capital expansion. The gist of Carlos’ argument was that, historically, indigenous struggles have been for autonomy and not just efforts to obtain rights of citizenship from the State (and therefore not just asking for more dependence/recognition). The two main strategies adopted by indigenous populations presented were the following:

1)          Reciprocity as contractual negotiations of rights and duties between State and indigenous communities;

2)          Refuge from territorial expansion of State and Capital, a strategy becoming more and more difficult in the face of the intense mapping out of the Bolivian territory.

If, for Carlos, both strategies enable some form or another of political autonomy, refuge seemed to win his favor for its less conciliatory perspective.[1] Although one can certainly understand the strategy of avoidance in this case, how to articulate these practices to anything resembling a “common” certainly becomes a highly critical issue. Political autonomy can certainly lead to forms of appropriation that might be quite challenging to communal efforts wishing to go beyond institutionalized political divisions.

The main thrust of what follows is that, contrary to Carlos’ appeal, the concept of autonomy, albeit necessary, seems more ambiguous to me then he suggested in his talk. This deserves scrutiny since efforts we’re made to contrast this concept from what he called “ideal concepts” like human rights, sustainable development, social participation, etc. These abstract concepts, Carlos suggested, contrary to immanent practices, lack the capacity to galvanize social cohesion and counter commodification.[2] They cannot do so, since they are based on a “rights” discourse that is mostly individualistic.

Autonomy has everything to do with a will to extract oneself from easy equivalences, abstractness, interchangeability, loss of specificity, etc. State, Capital and the social sciences are particularly well equipped for quick standardization and determinist accounts lacking historical agency. In the case of indigenous populations, and as the two strategies have shown, autonomy stands as an attempt to circumvent, partly at least, the standardizing processes that inevitably comes with State citizenship and ownership.  

Yet, autonomy can play itself out on many (political) scales: individual, local, regional, State or global level. The State, for many – whether they are right or wrong – is an apparatus that might give a certain political leveraging to those concerned (I come from a Canadian province that sometimes likes to think so). Others might prefer to find this autonomy at the local or even individual level against the State – again, for better or worst.

Let’s zoom in on the individual level for a second. We should not forget here that the rights discourse is precisely a philosophical offspring of modernist moral philosophy (amongst other things). In other words, self-law, self-government, self-rule we’re all concepts deriving from an attempt at designing responsible and autonomous individuals (or groups of) against fatalism and determinism. It was an attempt at giving autonomous “free will” a practical traction in daily lives. This, of course, has not necessary lead to autonomous forms-of-life, but abstract and standardized legal codification with which comes the good, the bad and the ugly (and certain forms of social cohesion). Yet, this example shows us that the politics of autonomy are not so easily distinguishable from rights as was suggested in the lecture. One could argue that autonomy is precisely at the heart of a rights based approach.

Let’s continue with my very crude analogy with the design of the modernist autonomous subject who is constantly asked to know thy self and act accordingly to her/his true conscience. In other words, autonomy can imply being true to oneself, the “authentic self,” its needs, desires and aspirations (constantly riveting us to us or me to me). This reeks of authenticity speak and I’m a bit worried that this underlying link between autonomy and authenticity might be replayed on other scales then the individual one (which has already shown the incredible levels of toxicity it can reach).

This becomes even more troublesome if autonomy is weaved together with ideals about social cohesion (as it seemed to be the case in Carlos’ presentation). What social cohesion are we talking about here exactly? Who is to determine and apply the necessary criteria? Is social cohesion to be linked with “authentic” ways of life?

I am not implying here that the indigenous strategies in Bolivia are for these reasons reprehensible, inefficient or morally skewed, my point is that the concept of autonomy used to qualify them tends to become an abstraction in itself if it does not take into account its own political and historical ambiguities. Exactly what Carlos rightly tried to demystify during his important contribution to the workshop.

One last comment regarding the lecture: Carlos’ strategy depended on historical continuity – the “long view” as he called it – to read through the Bolivian case. A necessary strategy, of course, that was executed with the hand of a maestro. The one issue I might have with this type of narrative is that you end with the impression that you simply have different historical reactions, by State or locals, to the same capitalism. It therefore tends to dehistoricize capitalism as an immutable outside by concentrating on localized practices. Supplementing the Bolivian case with the changing processes of Capital might offer interesting analytical and political possibilities.

This is a tough nut to crack for sure, but one that might enable autonomy to become a much more commonly shared practice working against some of its own ambiguous impulses.

Phillip Rousseau

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[1]       This links his efforts to the works of Pierre Clastres and James Scott. In his classic work, La Société contre l’État (1974), Clastres argued that where some tend to presuppose a lack of State formation in “primitive” societies, one instead could find strategies of avoidance to it. Carlos’ argument is based on a similar logic: indigenous populations do not necessarily aim at being recognized by the State, but are actively trying to dodge its expansive grip.

[2]         (making wonder if “commons” is also an ambiguous ideal concept)

Theory - north south and between

Kerry Chance, from Harvard University, attended the 2012 Session of the JWTC. She speaks to The Blog.
 

What in your view distinguishes ‘theory’ from Harvard and ‘theory’ from Johannesburg?

As I understand it, the proposition of the Johannesburg Workshop, among other things, is to read and produce contemporary theory from ‘the South,’ and thereby also to make visible the potential parochialisms of ‘the North.’ Having lived and worked in South Africa for over a decade, my approach to theory has been profoundly shaped by life and thought emanating from here. As anthropologists and scholars of Post-colonial and African Studies have argued for some time, our vantage in the world has a bearing on the kinds of questions we ask of theory, and how we think theory vis-à-vis the Western canon. So, while it is important not to lose sight of this proposition, the lines between ‘North’ and ‘South’ often are not so easily drawn. With regard to recent housing evictions in Johannesburg and Chicago, for instance, we might see more connections between Soweto and Chicago’s Cabrini Green than Sandton or Chicago’s Northside. In other words, we should not overlook emerging global relations and processes that suggest how ‘North’ and ‘South’ can be seen as multiple and beyond any simple dichotomy. In this vein, having spent the last year at Harvard, I can say that it is a place where African Studies is being taken seriously. There also are many academics, students, research projects, initiatives and student organizations that are ‘thinking from the South’ in important ways.

Why would a scholar from Harvard or Chicago want to join a theory event taking place in Johannesburg?

I would encourage scholars from Harvard or Chicago to take part in the Johannesburg Workshop. Aside from the reasons I just mentioned, the Workshop produces a space to think broadly and intensively about theory across disciplines and with scholars from across the globe. As corporate logics increasingly structure the aims of universities, such spaces are increasingly hard to find. In the American academy, amid ongoing financial crisis and a shrinking job market, so much of academic work, especially by young scholars, is oriented toward individual professional development, which limits the horizon of theory. Colleagues in the South African academy also note decreasing job security, and increasing managerialism. The Workshop, by contrast, is a space where the idea of ‘the university’ is alive and well, and being reclaimed under current conditions.

From your point of view, how do platforms such as The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism may contribute to a reformulation for what stands for international scholarship today?

Again, for all the reasons I just mentioned, it produces a space that challenges us to rethink what ‘the university’ might look like in the twenty-first century, both in theory and practice.

You presented a paper on the politics of fire in the Anthropology Department at Wits. In the communities you are studying, do you see any relationship between the politics of fire and the politics of nature?

My approach to studying the politics of fire, I hope, has broader methodological and theoretical applications to studying other aspects of the natural world. The paper examines the political meanings of fire amongst residents of townships and shack settlements in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that fire – inside the home as a hazardous source of light and heat, or on the streets to signal revolt – expresses a grammar of everyday practices and interactions between residents and state officials. Where residents posit the state’s failure to provide formal housing and services as the cause of routine slum conflagrations and street protests, officials posit a new criminal type amongst ‘the poor.’ These practices and interactions have given rise to disputes in South African public discourse over the legitimate demarcations between crime and politics under liberal democratic conditions. In contrast to Claude Levi-Strauss’ contention that fire signals man’s mastery over nature, I argue that fire signals the fragility of the “synthetic tether” that binds a territory, population and rule in modern states.