African Futures

Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

Brian Goldstone, Juan Obarrio, Brian Goldstone, Juan Obarrio

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226402383, 9780226402246
• eBook ISBN: 9780226402413
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed?
           
The experts in this book address Africa's future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.  
 

Part One

Rethinking Crisis

Two

Africa Otherwise

Janet Roitman

Cameroon, 1993. Two Decades Past. Crisis. J’ai la crise.

When I traveled through Cameroon in the early 1990s, people everywhere lamented, “J’ai la crise.” Literally translated as “I have the crisis,” this beleaguered statement was intoned in the same way that someone would say, “I have a cold” or “I have the flu.” At the time, it seemed clear that one could only conclude that Cameroonians were living in times of crisis (Mbembe and Roitman 1995). That is to say that crisis, for those living in Cameroon some two decades ago, was more than a set of statistics. La crise was a condition and, as lived experience, had become an imperative, or a figure, of rationality.

Doubtless, the lived experience of what is deemed “crisis” cannot be reduced to a statistical event or an ensemble of socioeconomic indicators. Such representations disregard the ways in which crisis becomes a device for understanding how to act effectively in situations that belie, for the actors, a sense of possibility. But still we must ask, if crisis designates something more than a socioeconomic indicator or a historical conjuncture, what is the status of that term? How did crisis, habitually a signifier for a critical, decisive moment, come to be construed as an experiential or historical condition?1

The mere idea of crisis as a condition—j’ai la crise—suggests an ongoing state of affairs. Although crisis typically refers to a historical conjuncture (e.g., war, economic recession, famine)—or to a moment in history, a turning point—it has been taken to be the defining characteristic of the African continent for some twenty years now. Can one speak of a state of enduring crisis? Is this not an oxymoron? In effect, how can one think about Africa—or think “Africa” as an object of knowledge—otherwise than under the sign of crisis? This is a crucial question.

Needless to say, this is not a particularly African question. The geography of crisis has come to be world geography, CNN-style: crisis in Afghanistan, crisis in Darfur, crisis in Iraq, crisis in Mumbai, crisis on Main Street. The singularity of political events is abstracted by a generic logic, making “crisis” a term that seems self-explanatory.2 In a reversal of this typical manner of starting with a case (“Africa”) and then proceeding on to generalizations (colonialism, postcolonialism, neoliberalism), I begin with a general problem in order to take us to Africa. The problem is not Africa per se but rather the concept of crisis.

Crisis is an omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today; it is mobilized as the defining category of our contemporary situation. The recent “crisis bibliography” in the social sciences and popular press is vast.3 As I argue elsewhere (Roitman 2014), crisis serves as the noun formation of contemporary historical narrative; it is the place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history. In considering the status of crisis in such narrative forms, my aim is not to theorize the term “crisis” or to come up with a working definition of it. Rather than essentialize it so as to make better use of it, the point is to understand the kinds of work the term “crisis” is or is not doing in the construction of narrative forms. Likewise, the point is not to demonstrate that crisis signifies something new in contemporary narrative accounts, nor is it to demonstrate how contemporary usages of the term “crisis” are wrong and hence argue for a true or more correct meaning.4

When one speaks of “the crisis in Africa” or when Cameroonians say, “J’ai la crise,” one can only ask, “But what exactly is in crisis?” And that question leads us to consider how crisis is constituted as an object of knowledge. Crisis serves particular narrative constructions and particular truth claims. Most typically in social science writing today, crisis is mobilized to mark out a “moment of truth.” Such moments of truth are sometimes defined as turning points in history, when decisions are made or events are decided, thus establishing a particular teleology. They also are sometimes defined as instances when “the real” is made bare, such as when a so-called financial bubble is seemingly burst, thus divulging alleged “false value” based on speculation and revealing “true value,” or the so-called fundamentals of the economy. As a category denoting a moment of truth in these ways, and despite presumptions that crisis does not imply, in itself, a definite direction of change, the term “crisis” signifies a diagnostic of the present; it implies a certain telos—that is, it is inevitably, though most often implicitly, directed toward a norm. Evoking crisis entails reference to a norm because it requires a comparative state for judgment: crisis compared to what? That question evokes the significance of crisis as an axiological problem, or the questioning of the epistemological or ethical grounds of certain domains of life and thought.

Judging Time?

When we take crisis to signify a generalized condition—as opposed to a critical, decisive moment—we assume that a meaningful world is in crisis. But what does it take to posit the very idea that meaning can be in a state of crisis? Moreover, what does it take to envisage a society as breaking down? Such visions can only arise in counterdistinction to imagined alternative societies. Without them, we could not make such a judgment: the affirmation “this society is breaking down” requires a comparison, a comparative state of affairs.

As is well known, the etymology of the term “crisis” speaks to that requirement of judgment. The complex details of its semantic history can be found in many places and go beyond the scope of this text. Briefly, it is worth noting that its etymology originates with the ancient Greek term krinô (to cut, to select, to decide, to judge), which suggested a definitive decision. With significance in the domains of law, medicine, and theology, by the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the medical signification prevailed. Associated with the Hippocratic school (Corpus Hippocratum) as part of a medical grammar, “crisis” denoted the turning point of a disease or a critical phase in which life or death was at stake and called for an irrevocable decision. Significantly, crisis was not the disease or illness per se; it was the condition that called for decisive judgment between alternatives.

In the social sciences, despite widespread usage of the term “crisis” to denote a historical event, only Reinhart Koselleck has elaborated a conceptual history of the term (1988 [1959]; 2002; 2004 [1979]; 2006 [1972–97]).5 He describes a decisive shift in the semantics of crisis transpiring between Hippocratic medical grammar and Christian exegesis. Not surprisingly, one did not replace the other: in the elaboration of Christian theology, with reference to the New Testament and alongside Aristotelian legal language, krisis was paired with judicium and came to signify judgment before God, which Koselleck characterizes as possibly being the unsurpassable signification of crisis in the course of its conceptual history (2002: 237; 2006: 358–59). Throughout the history of its conceptual displacements—which involved the elaboration of semantic webs as opposed to a linear development of substitutions and which I have drastically abbreviated6—the term “crisis” entailed a prognosis, which increasingly came to imply a prognosis of time.

Koselleck’s conceptual history of crisis illustrates how, over the course of the eighteenth century, a spatial metaphor came to be a historical concept through the temporalization of history. What does he mean by this? By “the temporalization of history,” Koselleck refers to the process by which, since the late eighteenth century, time came to be no longer figured as a medium in which histories take place; rather time itself became conceived as having a historical quality. In other words, history no longer occurs in time; instead, time itself is now an active, transformative (historical) principle (2002: 165–67; 2004 [1979]: 236). Koselleck’s point, in a sentence, is that this temporalization of history transpired through the temporalization of the Last Judgment: prophecy was displaced by prognosis.7 While prophecy involves symbols of what is already known and entails expectation in constant similitude, prognosis, to the contrary, generates novel events.8 Crisis served this transposition from prophecy to prognosis, or the “channeling of millennial expectations,” because it became the basis for claims that one can interpret the entire course of history via a diagnosis of time.

Koselleck’s account of this semantic shift is part of his oeuvre on the emergence of the European concept of history and the ways in which its associated historico-political concepts (e.g., progress) thematize time.9 Prior to the achievement of this shift, crisis did not have a time; it was not historically dated, and it did not signify historical dates.10 By the eighteenth century, the term “crisis” attained the status of a historical concept, which means that it signified temporal spans. But it is now equally apprehended as a temporal category itself: it denotes time (war, revolution, a time of crisis), and it denotes history itself (World War II, the French Revolution, Rwandan Genocide). Through this process of temporalization, the term “crisis” comes to signify a historically unique transition phase, which would mark a fundamental transformation of social relations, as in the case of the French Revolution or Marxist capitalist crisis, both of which signify a fundamental break with the past. Yet it also comes to signify an epoch insofar as this alleged break with the past defines new time; hence we refer, post hoc, to “the medieval era,” “the Renaissance,” or “the Industrial Age.”

Through the invocation of the term “crisis” as a historically unique transition phase, which marks off an epoch, historical experience is likewise generalized as a logical recurrence. And we, as narrators of our own history, recognize moments of crisis in terms of epistemological rupture, or a problem of meaning or legitimacy. The role of the historian (as witness) is thus to judge events as both significant and logical. And yet, at the same time, history itself is posited as serving the ultimate form of judgment. This is exemplified, in a trivial manner, by the expression “time will tell” but is best understood in terms of an expectation for world-immanent justice, which many, from Schiller to Koselleck, have noted is the fundamental condition of modern reason (see Koselleck 2002: 241; 2006: 371).11 It is assumed—as is often the case—that history, as an acting subject, enforces justice. And this judgment is effected, retrospectively, through acts and errors. Judging time (sorting change from stasis, perceiving intervals) and judging history (diagnosing demise or improvement, defining winners and losers) is a matter of prognosis. What are the criteria by which we justify such markings as failure and error? The term “crisis” serves this manner of denoting “history.” It raises the issue of the burden of proof for meaning in history—that events have significance. And it raises the issue of the burden of proof for the meaning of history itself—that we can qualify history itself as an “epoch,” as a turning point, as entailing failure or justice. The idea that history is just or unjust for certain populations is underwritten by the assumption that there is a possibility for world-immanent justice (as opposed to transcendentally derived justice). If a transcendental, such as “God” or “the planets,” is not deemed responsible for the quality of our lives or for the nature of events, we nonetheless mobilize other referents that serve as a nonlocus from which to signify contingency or to qualify the nature of events. Crisis is just such a nonlocus, or an enabling blind spot, for the production of knowledge.12

Times of Crisis?

The very notion that one could judge historical time (that it presents itself to us as an entity to be judged and that it can be deemed good or bad, a failure or a success) and that history is defined by a teleology of justice (that there are winners and losers, errors and victories) conjures an extraordinarily self-conscious mode of being. This critical historical consciousness—or this specific way of knowing the world as “history” and this specific way of positing that there is a distinction to be made between historical events and knowledge of those events—is consumed with the puzzle of the inevitable inadequacy of such knowledge. We thus discern historical significance in terms of dissonance between politics and morality, between theory and practice, between knowledge and human interests, between technology and humanity—in brief, in terms of ethical failures.

In the social sciences generally, crisis is posited so as to establish the grounds for questioning the terms of normativity.13 In doing so, one assumes that if the grounds for truth are necessarily contingent and partial, truth is nonetheless performed in moments of crisis because these are instances when the contingency of these truth claims are made bare and the limits of intelligibility are potentially transgressed. Examples can be given from the ranks of critical theory,14 the sociology of critique,15 or poststructuralism. To take a contemporary example of the latter genre, epistemological crisis is defined by Judith Butler as a “crisis over what constitutes the limits of intelligibility” (1993: 138).

Many scholars, including myself (Roitman 2005), have taken crisis to be the starting point for narration. Following the work of Michel Foucault, we assume that if we start with the disciplinary concepts or techniques that allow us to think of ourselves as subjects—that enable us to tell the truth about ourselves—then limits to ways of knowing necessarily entail epistemological crises. For Butler, then, subject formation transpires through crisis—that is, crisis, or the disclosure of epistemological limits, occasions critique and potentially gives rise to counternormativities that speak the unspeakable (1999; 2004: 307–8; see Boland 2007; Lyotard 1988). For Foucault, crisis signifies a discursive impasse and the potential for a new form of historical subject. For both, crisis is productive; it is the means to transgress and is necessary for change or transformation.16

This way of taking crisis as fundamental to epistemological and historical change is endemic to thinking about Africa—to thinking “Africa.” To take a recent intervention, the contributors to a special issue of Ethnos, devoted to “Crisis and Chronicity” (Vigh 2008), posit crisis as the point from which ethnography begins: crisis is the means to access both “the social” and “experience.” In his provocative introductory essay, Henrik Vigh proposes a move from “placing a given instance of crisis in context” to “seeing crisis as a context,” by which he means “a terrain of action and meaning rather than an aberration” (8). Vigh and his coauthors take crisis to be an “ongoing experience,” a state of affairs or an enduring condition (see also Greenhouse 2002). This notion of crisis as an ongoing or permanent state of affairs—what is denoted as “times of crisis”—is conceptually fraught. As Vigh notes, the very notion of constant crisis implodes the concept of crisis, since one ends with an oxymoronic “ordered disorder.” He welcomes this implosion of the concept (while nevertheless retaining the term) as a means of “freeing the concept from its temporal confines” (2008: 9). To unleash the concept of crisis from time would clearly be an unprecedented form of freedom (see Roitman 2014), but the claim seems to entirely disregard the conceptual history of the term and Koselleck’s point that crisis is necessarily a temporal concept.

The programmatic statements set forth in several edited volumes (Greenhouse, Mertz, and Warren 2002; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002; Vigh 2008) take crisis as a point of departure for ethnographic insights produced by social scientists as well as a point of departure for the “production of social rules, norms and meaning” (Vigh 2008: 12) generated by local people. This approach is in keeping with a long-standing tradition of social science theory for which crisis serves as a mediation between theory and practice (cf. Benhabib 1986; Habermas 1975; 1984–87; 1987).17 Leaving that point aside, for ethnographers today, and especially for those doing research in Africa, crisis is a means to account for the emergent. As I argued above, crisis is the place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history. And because crisis is taken to be an instance when the contingency of truth claims are made bare, it presumably grants access to a social world: “When crisis becomes context the order of our social world becomes in other words questioned and substituted by multiple contestations and interpretations leading to the recognition that our world is in fact plural rather than singular: social rather than natural” (Vigh 2008: 16). This claim reiterates the approach to critique associated with the pragmatic sociology practiced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991), which takes reflexivity as crucial to practices of justification and the formation of critique. But social reflexivity is inherent to praxis; it is not necessarily or inevitably contingent on crisis.18

Carol Greenhouse states, “Crises, by definition, involve conditions in which people (including the state’s agents) must improvise with the elements of their social and political technologies and cope with a variety of unexpected disruptions and opportunities” (2002: 9). Following Habermas, she takes crisis to refer to “conditions that make outcomes unpredictable.”19 In this sense, crisis seems to allow for interpretations of historical situations that do not partake of linear causality or an ideology of progress. As Pedersen and Hojer (2008) and Vigh (2008) maintain, crisis situations abolish a coherent progression of time: a chaotic succession of changes disrupts linearity. We thus supposedly have “‘progressless’ motion” (Vigh 2002: 17), which nonetheless can be narrated. While that feat of narration deserves more thought, suffice it here to note that the term “crisis” suits contemporary dispositions, which, while committed to narrativity, renounce linearity and causality.

A Politics of Crisis?

Africanist anthropologists have much to learn from critiques of historiography (cf. White 1973; 1978). Of course, most scholars now reject any form of historicism (or the validity of claims to knowledge of the facts about the pas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ONE  /  Introduction: Untimely Africa?
• PART I: rethinking crisis
• PART II: emergent economies
• PART III: urban spaces and local futures
• PART IV: possibilities
• Acknowledgments
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Footnotes