At stake in the South

Isabel Hofmeyr

During their studio session, “Cultures of the Political”, Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr offered us two modes for understanding cultural forms of the political in the Southern Hemisphere. Nuttall’s could be identified as ‘the national contemporary’ and Hofmeyer’s ‘the historical international’. Nuttall concerns herself with contemporary, urban South African youth culture and the possibilities it offers for yielding a viable cross-racial South African city, namely Johannesburg. “How are young Africans shaping the [South] African modern?” and can we “deprovincialize Africa and African self-stylization” toward “developing new theories of modernity?” she asks. While Hofmeyer’s project is more historical—the Indian Ocean as a political, economic and cultural construct that fostered and continues to foster a set of relations among the countries and people that reside along it—similarly it challenges us to rethink ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ that have rendered South Africa. Both ask us to take into account alternative imaginings of South Africa that consider the South African nation and the Southern Hemisphere as sites of universalisms.

Interestingly these positings of Southern universalisms, particularly Hofmeyr’s, produced heated debate amongst the workshop about the real possibilities of these kinds of projects. What is the “Global South” exactly?, one participant asked. Another highlighted the romantic nature of the Indian/African solidarity that Hofmeyr’s project supposedly requires. While still another wondered at the correlation between the recent prevalence of this kind of work on India and Africa and the emergence of India and China as semi-imperial powers. Hofmeyr herself acknowledged the difficulty of this kind of excavation during her introduction to her work and throughout the session. Yet, it seems to me that Hofmeyr’s project provided the idiom through which our collective could begin an earnest exchange on what exactly it means to theorize the “South”, as a cultural, political, economic and social construct, from the “South”. The notion of the South as culturally particular and different from the Northern Hemisphere seemed to come most into question during this session. As a feeble gesture toward a conclusion (at least of this year’s workshop) I would like to use a considerable portion of my blog to consider why the South is so contested as I understand the South to be of the utmost importance to our gathering.

Hofmeyr’s Indian Ocean operates as a “Common”, to borrow from Michael Hardt, that need not be inherently Eurocentric. (All oceans, seas, bodies of water can represent the Common as international law dictates that they cannot be owned by individuals but I want to think about the exchange of ideas and commodities, and the movements of people specific to Indian Ocean as a loosely bounded entity as a singular political and cultural Common.) It is/was a space wherein people moved, were displaced, resettled, goods, plants, and animals were traded, sometimes de-nativized from one space and made native to elsewhere. If we put Hofmeyr’s Indian Ocean alongside Gilroy’s Black Atlantic in some ways (Southern) Africa becomes The Common betwixt these two Commons, connecting them. In fact, we begin to have an interlinked set of cultural entities that perhaps can be understood as the South. I use cultural here in lieu of political or economic as provocation because it occurs to me that it is thinking of the South as cultural phenomenon that is most problematic for us. The histories of the parts of the Globe understood to comprise the South share similar trajectories of conquest, colonization, expropriation and finally political independence from colonial empires in the form of the nation-state. Often this shared grammar of political ‘modernity’ is countered by fiercely local assertions of cultural difference.

Articulating a methodology for comparing the function of power and ‘the political’, either colonial or national, through the paradigm of the Global South (or the Southern Hemisphere) seems far less problematic than doing so for exploring the cultural “entanglement”[1], which transgresses boundaries of the local (I think, we could easily substitute ‘authentic’ here for local). For example, the much cited instance of the Xhosa woman who wins the Eastern Cape pageant for Miss India South Africa because, according to the judges, she offers the best performance of “Indianness” and the riot that ensues.[2] Clearly, for the majority of the judges the contestants were to be judged based upon the authenticity of their representations of Indian culture, while for the audience it was also, perhaps more so, about the cultural (or racial) authenticity of the woman presenting that cultural representation. Is there something more than coincidental here regarding the gendered stakes of this kind of representation of the local? Partha Chatterjee’s suggestion in The Nation and Its Fragments that the site of the home, domesticity—the sphere of the woman—become the embodiment of the (Indian) nation during anti-colonial struggle may shed some light here on the crisis that thinking about the Southern Hemisphere as a cultural space engenders. While not wanting to essentialize Chatterjee’s argument to include all nations that comprise the South, I would like to suggest that perhaps the resistance to the South as a construct when taken on by cultural theorists, presumably to think about culture, is due to our acceptance of the notion of cultures as local, embodiments of particular domesticities somewhat sealed off from the ‘corrupting’ machinery of colonial states and deregulated global markets. The problem that Hofmeyr’s work necessarily introduces is “what comprises the local if not culture”?

This leads me to leave off with two central questions. First, though many scholars of literary and cultural studies seemed to ask this in varying ways over the course of the workshop, what is the role of literary and cultural studies in understanding the South and theorizing from it? Secondly, but related, what are the limits of the South as a theoretical paradigm by which we can understand and make possible an ethics of mutuality?

Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi

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[1] Sarah Nuttall develops and explores her theory of entanglement in Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid. Entanglement, Nuttall writes, “is a term which may gesture toward a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldness”, in contraindication to the human apartness that was/is apartheid (1). Thus, it may entail similar processes of inter-cultural and interracial mixing as creolization and mestissaje but accounts for these in contexts (such as the South African toward which Nuttall develops this concept almost exclusively in her book) in which they are more opaque and resisted or denied by hegemonic narratives of belonging to such contexts.

[2] Both Eric Worby and Sarah Nuttall made reference to this incident during their respective sessions.

Affective Geographies: a conversation on thinking and feeling (from) the south

Liz Gunner introducing Sarah Nuttall

In an essay in the recent collection Load Shedding, Sarah Nutall writes: “The days and nights of mid-August slid slowly by. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were living out the long end of something, or the end of a long something. Was it just me?”. In the essay, Nutall’s concern with feeling out the contemporary political moment, with mapping the affective landscape of a particular historical, and geographical, political and relational moment is addressed through the texts, conversations, strolls, fears, car rides both fast and meandering, public and private anxieties, imaginaries, and aesthetics that make up a late winter month in Johannesburg.

This concern with understanding what (contemporary, historical) political moments feel like infused and oriented Nutall’s studio session conversation with historian Isabel Hofmeyr, where it was explored through a set of personal-political questions. Introducing the studio session on “Cultures of the Political,” Nutall proposed a conversation around a series of related questions: how to read South Africa (in the world)? How to (read a) shift from concerns with difference to ‘new questions’ in and on ‘the new South Africa’? How to read the political in the present? Rather than offering discrete answers or diagnostic statements, the session took shape as an exploration of intellectual auto-geographies, a consideration of the effects of place and the place of affect in thinking from the South.

Both Nutall and co-conversationist Isabel Hofmeyr described their theoretical and topical trajectories as journeys that posed questions and concerns regarding intellectual place, political location, and relations within and across historically constituted spaces. In orienting the discussion around these questions, Nutall suggested an exploration of South Africa’s ‘after Apartheid’ moment as a space marked neither by a post-Apartheid concern with trauma and hope nor by the normative concerns of a post-colonial studies produced in (and for) New York and London. Nutall’s entry-point into this moment hinged on her own movement through the idea of Johannesburg – a city of surface and depth, as she described it – and through the city as concrete entity; the city that slides past the car window, in Nutall’s account, is positioned beyond the radical limits of a politics of difference. Her concern with the entanglements, contradictions, aspirations and imaginations that constitute Johannesburg, and which the city in turn makes possible, focused especially on rethinking the politics of difference, depth and hope in favor of thinking horizontally about the affective landscape and modes of self-fashioning made possible across the contemporary city of Johannesburg.

Hofmeyr’s comments also hinged on an active questioning of established theoretical geographies. Situating her responses in light of her own position as a Cold War intellectual trained to see the world through the puzzle-piece lens of area studies, Hofmeyr described her work as fundamentally concerned with the movement and travel of people, objects, ideas. Her study of Indian Ocean print culture in the 19^th and 20^th century, provides – among other things – a starting point for reconsidering the uneasy solidarities and cleavages between South (or southern) Africa and India in ways that build on, but are not reducible to, shared histories of non-alignment. In seeking to explore and understand long-standing political sympathies without erasing personal antipathies and preconceptions, she examined the ways in which changing geopolitical context effected but did not determine the kinds of partial, unsteady, but significant transnational relationships made possible by the particularities of the Indian Ocean over time.

For Nutall, Johannesburg – idea, object, experience, relationship, place – as a site in and through which the limits of postcolonial theory became visible, where understanding the present meant tuning one’s analytical ear not only to the deep historical chords through which the present emerged into being but to the slippery, abrasive, planar surfaces of life through which the present is lived. In a context where, Nutall argued, the privatization of many forms of publicity had been accompanied by a simultaneous rendering apersonal of public life, attention to the moods, emotions, affective currents, and stylistic significances of life in the city is a strategic political act. For Hofmeyr, ‘thinking South Africa’ in the context of the Indian Ocean circuits with their deep historical currents and unlikely contemporary bedfellows (from neo-imperial visions to shared practices of cultural resistance) likewise opened up the possibility of moving beyond ‘easy solidarities’, of recasting colonial and post-colonial relationships by decentering the ‘area studies’ of the past, even as she considered the ways in which these new circuits may be ‘emerging’ regions in new geopolitical configurations. The necessity of thinking through partial solidarities, ambivalent sympathies, and relations of hierarchy and domination within and across peripheries and boundaries emerged as central to both discussants’ remarks.

In placing the ‘cultures of the political’ within two distinctively different circuits, the conversationists highlighted questions of affective geography squarely at the center of their discussion. For both commentators, place, space and location emerged as key themes. In response, their comments opened up discussion not only of the relation between culture and politics, mediated through affect, aesthetics, and place, but also of the key aims or propositions of the workshop: the Global South. What – and where and who – counts as ‘the South’? What are the methods we use to think it? What sorts of relationships populate this theoretical and geopolitical space? How do we negotiate and understand the politics of our thinking and what kinds of topics, perspectives, and material do we draw on to do so?

Ramah McKay

Variations on Waste

Achille Mbembe and Eric Worby

Achille Mbembe has argued that there is a distinct social category of waste people. He cites successive social managements of supernumerary people to support his claim that this category is ubiquitous: the great confinement and siftings in the period of primitive accumulation, the Napoleonic conscription of the petite bourgeoisie to staff the state, the redefining of the lumpenproletariat in 1848 and later with fascism, the use of criminalization, immiseration and regal incentives to eject people into colonies and the exemplary modern waste populations of refugeeism and displacement in Palestine, Africa and eastern Europe serving as bartering chips of international policy and fund positioning.

In counterpoint to Mbembe’s category is the military logic of eliminating class enemies, construable at certain times as supernumerary populations - in the Terror, in 1917 and 1930, in the European and Japanese genocides after 1939 and the innumerable colonial exterminations. These are modalities of civil war in the sense of a state attacking those in its jurisdiction and are as transient, exceptional and cyclical as the violence that this requires.

Mbembe’s waste people are not the object of a direct or indirect genocide, are not peripatetic groups unanchored in a jurisdiction or entirely void of rights, they are not synonymous with the extremes of immiserisation nor with the famed reserve army of labour. They are not the leftovers of a social, economic and developmental recuperation of surplus populations - the residual hard core anomalies in a disciplinary society. What is sinister about Mbembe’s category is that it maps so inexactly onto the three great systems that create and recover surpluses - surplus value extraction, territorial expansion and social defense - are only the backdrops to the tragedies and farces around superfluous people.

Mbembe himself registers this difficult mapping in his searches, his erudite variations -his frottage - across the places where he thinks new waste populations are. It is in homage to his search , that so captured his audience and vanished in their questions, that a minor variation on the theme of Mbembian surplus is offered here.

Waste, what is or is laid fallow, is not an intuitively explicit concept or experience. Its nearest analogue in experience is pollution, which, as Mary Douglas showed, is intuited as contagion and only then against a set of relationships and categories harboring logical anomaly. It would be interesting to see the extent to which waste is an historicized version of pollution and contagion and carries over its sources of the sacred and the defiled and their bodily models. This might become clear from a comparison of the juridical and philosophic registers Agamben’s thought straddles with similar mixtures of precept and concept found in Douglas’ Purity and Danger.

But this is not the time to explore the anthropological provenance of Mbembian waste. A more immediate parallel exists in the history of science. In the era of Newtonian dynamics there was no conception of waste. Wind, animal and water power had all the renewability our contemporaries see in solar energy. All that was required was the machinery exactly elaborated by Galileo and Newton to harness - sails, levers, gears, wheels, weights .Eighteenth Century technologies seamlessly reflected the universe - as Leibniz’ monadic clocks testify - and if ever motion ran down, you could reverse it or couple it to wider vectors of cosmic movement in its neighborhood.

Carnot shattered this world with his reflections on the motive power of heat. Faced with the steam engine, it was not sufficient to explain motion by the extant motions it coupled to: it had to be derived from energy, as one particular – kinetic ─ phase of its conversions.

In a Newtonian system forces could all be harvested and accounted for, hence the drive to greater and greater precision in the levers and gears of clocks: in a steam engine the final reckoning of forces always shows a deficit, a nonrecuperable loss of energy each time it changes form. From the pressure of the boiler to the motion of the piston, energy leaked from the machine. This profligacy could not be offset by greater precision, by making the steam engine in the 18^th century image of the perpetuum mobile or the frictionless plane - waste was inherent as a principle despite all conscientiousness of design and execution - and waste always took the form of heat.

Heat is the first totally exact - because entirely deducible - model of waste. Once each energy conversion was known to create irrecoverable surplus energy it was a short step to generalizing the steam engine, through Carnot’s abstractions, to the universe and finding in its daily workings the symptoms of its eventual demise. The cost of the universe is changing energy and each transaction leaves a cosmic residue to lessen the difference between energy potentials until all work is choked and the cosmos dies in its own tepid waste.

This history of ]wasted heat and the natural or historical motors that make it thinkable has been traced for decades by Michel Serres and he finds its steam-engine reservoirs, heat sources, potential differences and lossy circulations in figures as seemingly remote as Marx, Freud, Bergson, Derrida, Turner Zola and Monod.

Its would be interesting to read in Serres perspective the great passages in The Order of Things on hominisation in the dissipative motors of life, labour and language, restoring the minor axis of ‘deductive demonstrative sciences’ in the famous trihedron of the human sciences.

Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests shows early capitalist thought from Mandeville to Smith fully awake to the drastic metamorphoses Carnot would trace in the fate of energy - which political economy expressed as transubstantiating social devices efficiently able to recuperate all warring interests to the greater good: the literal motors of history.

From the Invisible Hand to Hegel’s Aufhebung an automaton formalized by the steam engine framed capitalisms ability to harness the disparate and implement ways of overcoming its own limits.

This vision of pliant circulations and efficient transductions had its critics, preeminently Marx, who emphasized the residual human losses and civic waste caused while extracting surplus value from the reservoir of labor power .Das Kapital culminates in a Carnotian scene of overheated flows circulating in a single channel, causing it to lose potential difference and void future movement - the changing organic composition of capital is reinvestment’s version of a universe swamped by inutile energy - or a piston hotter than its steam.

Mbembe crosses this bizarre current of motors and social automata when he invokes Baitaille’s Veblenian fantasy in La Parte maudite of waste becoming the momentary objective of production. Bataille confronts Hegel, the model bourgeois recuperative thinker ,with his General Economy of heat and noise in place of value - celebrated as l’informe - irrecoverable to circulation, experience and thought.

Baitaille’s economy of potlatch is a Smithian nightmare: inverting the poles of heat and work in the motor of political economy while leaving the rest of its apparatus intact. It is completely at home in the energetics matrix of the theory and shows that even for such an eclectic thinker, political economy remains the best means to develop his concepts of waste, superfluity and excess because it is the automaton least disguised by hominisation.

Foucault would famously use the Bataillian measure of absence of works in contrast to the recuperative frame of production to define madness in the modern era. Foucault wrote of madness becoming superfluous, stripped of its roles and imagery and sifted by confinement from the sick, the indigent, the criminal and the morally dissolute until it became a pure, mute surplus.

Yet from this vanishing point it was at once turned into a powerful support to elaborate a new kind of reason, to medicalise deviance and with Freud, to implant desire in people as a liability. Simulated by drugs it gave critical power to art and counterculture and replaced death as the touchstone of authenticity .When Deleuze and Guattari returned the mad stroller to the heart of capitalism they broke perhaps the most productive silence in history.

It is conceivable, thanks to Foucault, that waste populations and supernumerary individuals are maintained to make elbow room for new institutions and contracts, for social innovations possible only in reaction to breaks in sense and utility. The managed void replaces eternal vigilance as the price of liberty.

This vision of ingeniously applying waste and loss pervades Foucault and more so Deleuze and Guattari, who pry worlds apart into major and minor powers with their own tempos and spaces, intensive and extensive qualities in order to make work and waste, information and noise circulate more intimately.

Perhaps a showdown is looming over the Deleuzian machine - between de Landa- committed to its thermodynamic metaphysics and Negri and Hardt who draw on its credit of social vitalism. The continuum of schizophrenic noise and capitalist waste might split into a new automaton for mapping minor histories and a non- philosophy for those seeking the permanent informality of flight.

The difficult reduction of political categories to their implicit models and metaphysics accepted and ingenuously balanced by Deleuze is also the subtext for scientists when they write and make expositions for more than just one another.Vaulting out of culture by means of one of its products, their explications of evolution, machine cognition, neurobiology, cosmology and exotic physics update the atlas of common thermodynamic reason, lending their work its strange and unexpected political effect - neither natural nor social nor physical nor informational - making Dawkins, Dennett and Haraway the Hegels, Humes and Mary Shelleys of the present…

Mbembe uses the suspended social machines and the hiatus in their imagery to suggest a condition of social waste exceeding economic, educational and fiscal recuperation. Such waste is invisible to the eighteenth century model of the contract, to the institution of the market (this much Marx made clear) and is considered a mere performative error by the State in its role as administrator of utility and welfare. Waste people exist in an intimate beyond - outside recontractualisation and reinstitutionalisation to agents, citizens and populations and below resubjectivisation to pupils, workers, or offenders.

The split between the reach of capital and the nation state central to Negri and Hardt’s arguments has made many of the waste processes of capitalism into everybody and nobodies problem: displacing state and economy into units with discontinuous boundaries, different times and incommensurate worlds in between.

Perhaps the waste people are only the facts of power and exploitation no longer automatically overlaid by the inertia of the nation or the ameliorative services of education, training, credit and health so vital to capitalism? Waste is the point where capitalism can find no social organization commensurate with itself: for two hundred years thermodynamics has made this point both inevitable and unthinkable,

Achille Mbembe has leapt into the hiatus-society of waste which is a concept’s width away from us all. Like the priest in L ‘Age d’Or he has a vast social, epistemological and today metaphysical load harnessed to his back. His questions light the thin membrane separating capitalist rationality from itself - the blur it can somehow never focus: the dynamics of waste that unites its furthest reach with its imaginable core. There is every indication that this engaged, passionate, polymathic wanderer is leaping over capitalism’s shadow.

Jean Pierre La Porte

Africa Bauhaus Workshop

The political possibility of exceeding a politics of representation.

Ariella Azoulay

In the impossibility (or possibility) of this time I will not try to respond to the lecture “The Civil Contract of Photography” by Ariella Azoulay. Rather than present an argument, I prefer only to post some ideas to put into question the relationship between the politics of representation and the possibility of the political.

A distinction should be made between the political possibility of the image and the politics of representation in which images are inscribed. Photography is not (only) an action or an encounter but a production of images; images that are inscribed in a specific regime of knowledge that establishes some distributions on the sensible in which some things can be seen, heard and thought while others are just non-visible, non-hearable, non-thinkable even if there is an image that stands as the promise of “presentation”.

A photo is not the presentation of an event but the possibility of visibility. Visibility is not the grade of clarity in which we can see an object, but the logic that permit something to be open; visibility is not the act of the subject that sees, nor the empirical data of the visual sense, but the interaction between actions and reaction with the aesthetical (that we can understand as Rancière suggest, “as a system of a priori forms determining what present itself to sense experience.”[1]).

Photography might not be thought as a representation of anything as its own temporal and spatial structure is based in the spectrality of the dislocated manifestation of the un-present (thinking spectrality as the dialectical force, that resists the configuration of the image as a representation of something, that allows us to be related to an event not in the distance of its correspondence –symbol- with time and history but in the in the continuality of its manifestation) but we cannot deny that photography is inscribed in a system that creates and allows the production of meanings trough a given system of knowledge, a regimen that in modern western culture is based in the establishment of politics of representation as an epistemological device for the enforcement of the configuration of the sensible.

Images are part of the regime of knowledge and are one of the mechanisms of power (institutions, including the State) to create representations (as fixed meanings based in the structure of the symbol – as a correspondence between the object and the truth) in which to fix identities and meanings in order to legitimize some regimes of knowledge and orders of things.

In this scenario maybe what we have to think is how images can exceed this politics of representation, and how their emergence can be a political irruption that allows the possibility of new constellations of meanings to unsettle the dominant regime of knowledge.

How can an image create new knowledge if the image is inscribed in the same politics of representations, based on identities, based in the dominant system of power (state) based on the dichotomy of friend-enemy (in-law/out-law, citizen/non-citizen)?

In this sense what seems necessary is to suspend the functionality of the politics of representation and to search for a moment of manifestation in which the image can operate not as a correspondence with a fixed identity but as a moment of de-identification in which a new constellation of meanings can emerge.

Maybe we can think images not as symbols but as fragments; the image as an allegory that introduces the possibility of history, of the past not as gone but as a moment that keeps coming back, of time not as a fulfilled structure but a collapsed one in which modernity (as progress) can no longer operate.

Perhaps the poetical (as poiesis or moment of emergence and creation) potential of the image might allow us to search mechanisms, strategies and devices to re-read images, to unsettle the politics of representation and open up the possibility of the political. It is important to keep looking for ways to open the invisible, the hidden and the concealed by some given regime of visibility in order to create a fissure.

These are just some problems in which I am engaged, and knowing that there are no final solutions but only stutters, I want to share with you my own way to deal with the possibility of the political in some art practices, as I believe that arts works in between territories, what creates a space and time in which we can re elaborate the relationship between the aesthetical and the political.

Instead of the global south I will invoke the Red Specter as a possibility for what is to come, and I hope he bring us back together…

¡Nos vemos en el 2010!

Helena Châvez MacGregor

Click here for my article “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost: The Red Specter”

http://www.des-bordes.net/0.5/en/la%20barricada%20de%20los%20muertos/helena_chavez.html

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[1] Ibid., p. 13.

Heynes on Geschiere

Gamadoela's restaurant

Thursday morning the JWTC welcomed Peter Gescheire, whose earlier work on The Modernity of Witchcraft, is familiar to many of those gathered for the workshop. More recently, Gescheire has turned his attention to issues of migration and “belonging.” His presentation, which drew on his recent book, Perils of Belonging, which is focused on the ethnographic problems of community membership and autochthony. The neoliberal world, he argues, has seen an increased number of claims to cultural and ethnic membership, often cast in the language of autochthony. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s transnational ethnography of global “frictions,” Geschiere argued for an increased focus on localized experiences of globalization, rather than other analytic approaches that might take this phenomenon for granted. Globalization is not a uniform process, and therefore must be actively engaged at the various points in which it is experienced in order to understand it properly. Geschiere was particularly critical of what he sees as an overemphasis on introspection in much current ethnography due to the reflexive turn in Anthropology, which he linked to the influence of Cultural Studies on the discipline, especially in the United States. This, he said, negates the context in which ethnography is carried out and therefore turns the anthropological project from one of dialogue into one of ventriloquism.

While I very much appreciated Geschiere’s discussion of autochthony, and I found his criticisms engaging, I would like to qualify them a bit at one point. Specifically, with regard to the importance of particularly in the study of globalization, I heartily agree that anthropologists and other scholars cannot afford to treat globalization as a uniform process. James Ferguson, in his book, Global Shadows, has noted that one can hardly speak of transnational “flows” – whether of information, wealth, or culture. Rather, it is more accurate to describe the dissemination of such things as a series of “hops,” which systematically skip certain parts of the globe while simultaneously connecting others. However, while we will all certainly do well to avoid treating globalization as a monolithic process, it is equally important, at least as far as anthropology is concerned, to hold on to the idea of globalization as a framework for comparative study. Anthropology, while clearly concerned with the kinds of particular description and analysis to which ethnography is best suited, is also importantly a comparative discipline. Axes of commonality, whether human reproduction, economic exchange, or experiences of the supernatural, are the necessary flashpoints along with the study of human experience develops – hence the rich ethnographic literature on kinship, reciprocity, and religion. I would therefore temper Geschiere’s critique by sounding an equal and opposite warning: just as anthropologists gain nothing from treating things like globalization as uniform social phenomena, they will be equally hindered in their efforts by a retreat from comparative arguments in favor of the too-particular.

Rallying Cries and the (Mis)use of Terms

Shalini Randeria

Shalini Randeria, in her talk on “Juridification in the Shadow of the World Bank,” unsettles the boundaries between theory and practice, academia and activism. Often, as academics, we become—contrary to the best of our efforts—overly reliant on monolithic terms and concepts. Neoliberalism, for example, becomes in many academic circles, an unexamined entity synonymous with exploitation: a hegemonic “technology of governance” (to use Aihwa Ong’s words) that, by opening markets and instituting a drive for privatization, unevenly benefits the West in lieu of the rest. Similarly, the World Bank, often rightly indicted for using the language of human rights to push structural adjustment programs, emerges as a singular entity: an oppressive regime unquestionably rejected by anti-privatization academics and activists alike. Yet, as our academic training continually reminds us, nothing is this simple. John Comaroff, speaking on the “Politics of Law” this past Thursday, emphasized that neoliberalism as a noun differs greatly from that which is labeled with the adjective “neoliberal.” As both scholars and activists—and this is a statement that has become a bit of an academic cliché—we must be meticulous in how we use our terms. On many occasions I have been guilty of homogenizing complex concepts under the sign of a singularity. It is much easier to rely on rallying cries, yet we must seriously commit to rigor if social activism and academics are to work together.

This brings me back to Prof. Randeria’s presentation, as her multifaceted approach to discussing the World Bank highlights the importance of ethnographic and theoretical rigor. The World Bank, in her formulation, cannot simply be discounted as an apparatus for ensuring the hegemony of US free market policies. In many cases, the bank can be used against itself to put pressure on individual states. As Shalini emphasizes, globalization has brought about a sort of global government made up of four major entities: NGOs, states, international organizations, and transnational corporations. By playing these governing bodies against each other, activists and social movements can enact changes that accord with their own agendas. Through a productive friction (a term championed by Peter Geschiere in his talk on Friday), organizations such as the World Bank can be used as leverage against the state and vice versa; activists can use bank policies to name and shame their own governments, thereby forcing a change in the status quo. Instead of outright condemnation of the World Bank, we must identify the tools that the organization and other such political bodies provide for enacting a progressive social and economic agenda. Similarly, other entities—NGOs, governments, etc—can be used to destabilize certain hegemonic policies of the bank. Of course, this will not bring about any sort of balance; that would be utterly utopian and unproductive. Yet openings exist where progressive change can occur.

Perhaps as one without knowledge of the interstices of the World Bank, I am contradicting my own call for rigor in this post. Yet, despite my inability to follow my own ideals at this point in time, I can still attest to their importance. This draws me back to the bridge (or gulf) between academics and activism. Through a commitment to careful ethnography and research, an endeavour championed by Prof. Randeria, academics can assist in developing a new pragmatic politics that can be mobilized by activists and academics alike.

Nicholas Matlin

The Temporality of the Political

Adi Ophir

Perhaps the task of defining something like "the political" is complicated by the fact that such an effort is itself entirely political. In today's seminar at the JWTC, Tel Aviv University-based philosopher Adi Ophir led us into a conversation which attempted just this. While various ontological and philosophical debates emerged in the discussion, I would like to draw out the theme of temporality, something which I think is central to understanding the political as Ophir suggests we define the concept.

Ophir proposes "the political" as a predicate, and thus a declaration. The political comes into being as humans gather publicly to articulate their dissatisfaction with the powers-that-be. The work of the political is the problematization of power, and here Ophir follows Foucault's historico-philosophical understanding of power. For Ophir, power is a structure of repetition which is imagined as external - and thus naturalized - and experienced as asymmetrical and hierarchical - and thus not equally accessible or transparent. The political, then, emerges in the moment in which power is recognized, confronted, and denaturalized. Importantly, political acts require an audience. The public as witness and participant in the political is a direct challenge to the hegemonic understanding of electoral and legislative politics as the singular site of the political.

An event, as Foucault defines it, is a reversal of power-relations, a particular shift in temporality in which the regularity of structures and systems is actively contested. The political is a moment of sovereignty which thrives in what Ophir refers to as the "excess" of power, that which power does not subsume in its repetitive technologies. As this excess is necessary to power's formation, so the political too exists in a complementary relationship to power, engaging the space outside it while remaining within it.

What, then, is the temporality of the political? As Ophir says, the political is an "always-already there"; in other words, the political lies in waiting, and it is called into being through words and actions. This always-alreadyness, however, is in tension with a not-yetness that restricts and suppresses the political from within its own imagination.

Perhaps it helps to think of the political as the production of alterity – that which is unrecognizably Other, yet demands to be recognized in its being-ness – through a temporality of untimeliness. This is to say that the relationship between the political and power is also a particular conception of the subject with respect to time and history, and thus truth. Untimeliness is characterized by Nietzsche as the rejection of the separation of the modern subject into “inner truths” and “outer truths,” which correlates here to Ophir’s notion of the problematization of power. As much of our debates during this session of the JWTC have revolved around Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ’s notion of the common, it fits to inquire, what is the temporality of the common? We talk about an imaginary of the future, in which post-apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine can drop the adjectives preceding their proper names, but what are the structural regularities of power that place such an imaginary in the future – as opposed to the day-to-day, the here-and-now? In other words, the relationship between untimeliness and the political is one which ties discourse to actions, which calls upon those who problematize power to “[act] counter to our time and thereby [act] on our time.”

It might be one of the tasks of the political, then, to problematize time itself by bringing the future into the present, that is, by acting in an untimely manner, without deference to history and its narratives, and instead grasping onto the emergent, that which is, perhaps, unrecognizable as the political. I would like to raise the question, then, of how the political, through temporal prolongation, can become a mechanism of power. For example, resistance movements themselves can become de-politicized as they are made regular, as they repress alterity from within. Temporality, as untimeliness, is therefore imminent to the political.

Rachel Signer in conversation with Bernard Dubbeld

For Rachel Signer on Michael Hardt click here:
http://jhbwtc.blogspot.com/2009/07/common-cause.html