Remains of the Social

Desiring The Post-Apartheid

Maurits Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Premesh Premesh Lalu, Gary Minkley, Derek Hook, Mari Ruti, Jaco Barnard-Naude, Annemarie Lawless, Aidan Erasmus, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Maurits Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Premesh Lalu, Gary Minkley, Maurits Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Premesh Premesh Lalu, Gary Minkley, Maurits Bever Donker

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781776140329
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Remains of the Social is an interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what 'the social' might mean after apartheid; a condition referred to as 'the post-apartheid social'. The volume grapples with apartheid as a global phenomenon that extends beyond the borders of South Africa between 1948 and 1994 and foregrounds the tension between the weight of lived experience that was and is apartheid, the structures that condition that experience and a desire for a 'post-apartheid social' (think unity through difference). Collectively, the contributors argue for a recognition of the 'the post-apartheid' as a condition that names the labour of coming to terms with the ordering principles that apartheid both set in place and foreclosed. The volume seeks to provide a sense of the terrain on which 'the post-apartheid' – as a desire for a difference that is not apartheid's difference – unfolds, falters and is worked through.

CHAPTER 1

TRAVERSING THE SOCIAL

Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley and Premesh Lalu

What is South Africa? We have perhaps isolated whatever it is that has been concentrated in that enigma, but the outline of such analyses has neither dissolved nor dissipated it in the least. Precisely because of this concentration of world history, what resists analysis also calls for another mode of thinking. If we could forget about the suffering, the humiliation, the torture and the deaths, we might be tempted to look at this region of the world as a giant tableau or painting, the screen for some geopolitical computer. Europe, in the enigmatic process of its globalization and of its paradoxical disappearance, seems to project onto this screen, point by point, the silhouette of its internal war, the bottom line of its profits and losses, the double-bind logic of its national and multi-national interests (Derrida, ‘Racism’s Last Word’ 297–298).

The blackmail of whiteness

As Jacques Derrida reminds us, it is not possible to ‘forget about the suffering, the humiliation, the torture and the deaths’, in short, the weight of lived experience that was and is apartheid. At the same time, particularly when we consider apartheid as a question that extends beyond its own borders, it remains both necessary and urgent to distil the question of what he calls ‘South Africa’, to shape it and focus it as a problem for thought, so as to enable the possibilities of thinking what we in this volume call, without hyphenation, the postapartheid, neither a point in time nor a political dispensation, but rather a condition that names the labour of coming to terms with and working through the desires, principles, critiques and modes of ordering that apartheid both enabled and foreclosed. One of the tasks that we set for ourselves in this introduction is to provide a sense of this terrain on which the postapartheid unfolds.

Let us begin, then, by turning to a recent intervention into the social. Introducing their edited volume, Re-Imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-Apartheid Society, Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin argue that ‘when apartheid ended, critical thinking ended’ (1). The conditions of this ‘shift from critique to subservience’ (2) are to be found, they argue, in ‘post-apartheid South Africa’s incorporation into the logic and exigencies of global neo-liberal capitalism’ (7). With this ‘incorporation’, the value of humanities scholarship was reduced to its capacity to contribute to economic growth, always subject to tests – often in terms of ‘impact’, ‘efficacy’ and ‘efficiency’ – against the imperatives of the market. It is a counterintuitive claim – South Africa’s freedom has coincided with a constraint of thought – by the editors of Re-Imagining the Social, with which we are, to an extent, in agreement.

However, there is a jarring line in Vale and Jacklin’s introduction that makes this volume necessary. They write: ‘Even the most casual reading of these chapters will confirm that this collection, like most writing in critical social theory, is an exercise interested in promoting Enlightenment values’ (11). Precisely what values might this mean? As if to respond to the question, they refer, further on, to the ‘counter-Enlightenment authoritarian tendencies’ (17) which the state assumed in South Africa during apartheid. So, in their construction of it, ‘promoting Enlightenment values’ is an antidote to apartheid as an ‘authoritarian’ impediment to the ‘Enlightenment’, leaving the postapartheid to come as the Enlightenment’s fulfilment. To point out the Eurocentrism of this view is hardly necessary.

As for the question of which Enlightenment they are ‘promoting’, we are left guessing, for the Enlightenment was not a unified project. Given their subtitle, and their leanings, it is likely a call for those forms of critique that take their point of departure from Immanuel Kant.¹ If we take Michel Foucault’s reading of Kant’s elaboration of the concept of the Enlightenment as a touchstone, the itinerary to which Vale and Jacklin commit the postapartheid must be read as a ‘way out’ of the ‘immaturity’ of humanity with respect to the proper use of reason, that is, reason’s autonomous use as ‘humanity’s passage to its adult status’ (‘What is Enlightenment?’ 308–309). This presents what Foucault famously called ‘the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment’ (312), for the only way to counter the Enlightenment is on the very terrain of reason. That the game is rigged presents, in Foucault’s words, a ‘philosophical question that remains for us to consider’ (312–313, emphasis added). Rather than being for or against ‘Enlightenment values’, it is perhaps more apt to say that we are both constrained and enabled – conditioned – by this double bind, this false choice.

The question of Enlightenment – of the autonomous use of reason – is inseparable from questions of race. Kant’s Anthropology was, as Foucault argues in Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, central to his critiques, the two projects traversing each other. Both the philosophical and the political project produced race as a necessary function rather than as a timely accident, as Gayatri Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and Tony Brown in The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage have argued. Apartheid here is not an impediment to but is, rather, coextensive with the Enlightenment, for apartheid is not purely an anomaly, a perversion of ‘Enlightenment values’, but their fulfilment.² This is not a small issue, for it informs how we might clear the ground for the arrival of a sense of difference that will not be apartheid’s difference.

It is, arguably, in response to a version of this ‘blackmail’ that Steve Biko in ‘Black Souls in White Skins?’ offers a diagnosis of the problematic named by apartheid. On the apartheid policy of separate development, Biko states: ‘Everyone is quite content to point out that these people – meaning the blacks – will be free when they are ready to run their own affairs, in their own areas’ (20). His specific concern, however, is not this indefinitely deferred autonomy, but the tutelage under which liberals place blacks, treating them as children, ‘claiming a “monopoly on intelligence and moral judgment”’ (22–23). As he continues: ‘There is nothing the matter with blacks. The problem is WHITE RACISM and it rests squarely on the laps of white society’ (25). Here, Biko takes a position ‘against integration’ if it means ‘an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms’ that will keep in place ‘the superior–inferior white–black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil’ (26). While explicitly dealing with the relations between liberals and the black consciousness movement in apartheid South Africa, what Biko is drawing attention to in this formulation is the very question of racial formations as these structure the present in South Africa, both his and ours. If we consider the invisibility of whiteness, apart from accusation, in the framing of the postapartheid, the course opened by Biko’s intervention acquires a fresh and purposive urgency. To state this intervention more pointedly, liberals, rather than concerning themselves with ‘helping Blacks’, must rather ‘fight for their own freedom’ (27) through confronting ‘the real evil in our society’ (25). To grasp the force of this injunction we need to briefly invoke, as Biko does, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon similarly argues that ‘there is no black [noir] problem’ (13). Rather, he suggests that the problematic that structures the social derives from a deeper terrain. That Fanon refuses the definition of the problem as ‘black’ does not mean that he defines it as ‘white’, nor does it mean that he is dismissive of, or ignores, what he calls the ‘lived experience of the black man’ (89–119) – this in fact orders his intervention. For Fanon, however, the problem has to do with the ‘metaphysics’ of blackness and whiteness as these come to structure society in relation to the concept of Man. As he argues, Man is the concept on which both blackness and whiteness are articulated, as well as the function that ‘brings society into being’ (xv). It would, however, be too quick to focus only on dismantling Man and producing a new terrain for humanity (the focus of most critiques of Eurocentrism); the question of blackness is not so easily dismissed. For Fanon, Man as a concept does not designate an entity in itself; rather, Man is a becoming that in modern society is produced through the operation, the differential function, of whiteness/blackness. As he phrases it: ‘The black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man’ (xiii). This relationship, where black and white are both ‘locked’ in place (xiv), where ‘whites consider themselves superior to blacks’ and ‘blacks want to prove’ their equality with whites (xv), and where blackness is relegated to a position of ‘non-being’ (xii), has produced a ‘massive psycho-existential complex’ (xvi) which Fanon’s intervention attempts to destroy. In short, it is the conceptual terrain produced through the mechanism of blackness/ whiteness that leads Fanon to declare that ‘an individual who loves Blacks is as “sick” as someone who abhors them’ and that, conversely, the black man who strives to whiten his race is ‘as wretched as the one who preaches hatred of the white man’ (xii).

It is because whiteness and blackness constitute a mechanism in the project of Man which produces blackness as non-being and whiteness as the potentiality of man that any relation to whiteness or blackness as such is a sickness. Biko directs our attention to this structural formation when he invokes the ‘real evil’ in our society. What he names with the signifier ‘evil’ is the mode by which the white man is produced as Man through the objectification of the black man. As an injunction that is laid in the laps of whites, this enables a reinscription of Biko’s formula that ‘the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’ (74). While clearly dealing with the question of a mental attitude, this statement also indicates the process of objectification outlined by Fanon in which whiteness becomes mind and blackness becomes body. Here it is both the mental condition of viewing the self as white or non-white that is a potent weapon, and the existence of those who claim to be white as such.

Itinerary

In this volume we seek to address the problem of the social as it is diagnosed by Fanon and reoriented by Biko. In what follows, and as a way of anticipating the chapters in this volume, we turn to two interventions into the postapartheid social which we have found productive to think with and against, one by Mark Sanders, the other by Achille Mbembe. We select these two texts for the way their juxtaposition brings into view the shifts in the social that are under way and the conceptual turns we seek to make. Despite our clear equivocation over their recourse to psychoanalysis, our initial invitation to contributors to write on the remains of the social was framed largely in psychoanalytic terms, and several of the contributions stage their chapters, at least in part, in or against psychoanalytic language. Thus, critically assessing these two texts is useful in underlining the wager of the volume itself.

We take the work of Sanders and Mbembe as an invitation to begin to elaborate what we call the remains of the social. Rather than advancing Kantian critique – and we cannot be sure that this is what was called for in Re-Imagining the Social – we turn, in framing this volume and as a point of departure, to an heir to the Kantian problematic: Sigmund Freud, to whom Fanon also turned.³ We do so not as a means of imposing a different Enlightenment figure – the best word to describe Freud’s relation to the Enlightenment is, perhaps, troublesome – on the social after apartheid, but as a means of making adequate what is immanent in the discourse on the social in South Africa; that is, there is already a form of austere psychoanalysis in the air, a weak psychoanalytic sensibility lodged in, and ordering, the social, largely as an effect of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the 1990s and, it has been argued, its most immediate precursor, the colonial Commission of Inquiry, which the TRC inherited and had to make function in a new way.⁴ Within this frame, we aim to traverse the social in the wake of apartheid.

Traversal, in the psychoanalytic sense, is an act of passing through repetition after repetition – acting out – until the signature of the unconscious has been written in the rhythm of a transferential relation, the production of a repetition without which no new configuration of desire would be possible.⁵ To traverse the social in the wake of apartheid, in this sense, is to attend to the repetitions that impede but also make possible another social beyond the horizon of apartheid, beyond apartheid’s ordering of extrinsic difference. And if traversal is a means of grasping the social as a series of repetitious acts, it is also an act through which the social is constituted.⁶ We are not ‘promoting’ psychoanalytic ‘values’, then, nor do we wish to close off the potential of the psychoanalytic as a discourse adequate to the question of the postapartheid social. We take a position neither pro nor contra psychoanalysis, but versus it, which suggests, for us, not only to turn against, but also to face, to turn towards, to return to, even (simply) to turn, to turn the soil of and, thus, to till, to renew, and – in its etymological link to the German werden – to turn it into what it might become, turning it away from its therapeutic, institutionalised uses so as to activate its critical potential. We abide by psychoanalysis, then, reading it for its productivity despite what we see as its several false turns.

If a crude form of psychoanalysis was set to work in and around the TRC, producing a form of mournful sociality that marked the end of apartheid, we want to turn the conception of mourning towards a wakefulness, not that of reason, but rather as a question of our present, a visceral articulation of a lived experience ordered by the undercurrents of apartheid. These undercurrents – and we discuss some of their symptoms below – persist in this time named by the adjective ‘postapartheid’ as a form of remainder: as the remains of apartheid, as those remains that apartheid produced and, indeed, continues to produce, as the very conditions through which the social coheres in this time and, as such, as that which produces this social as (perhaps) already out of time, even before it has properly begun. All of this, the contributions to this volume suggest, shape what is grasped as life, shaping life to such an extent that, now as a noun rather than only an adjective, the postapartheid operates as a signifier for a condition. The postapartheid, a condition of life, not only an adjectival signifier: this is one of the moves that this volume makes, a move that asks that we grasp difference as a marker of life that is, precisely – and, to repeat ourselves – not apartheid’s difference.

Following the next section, ‘The wake of apartheid’, we dwell on the concept of ‘global apartheid’, particularly as it is figured in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire and Multitude), as a means through which to rethink the category of difference as this operates in the social. The concept of global apartheid, we argue, asks that we rethink the social lived in the wake of apartheid, that we rethink apartheid itself and thus rethink what a postapartheid social will be.

The wake of apartheid

The work of Sanders on the TRC serves as a useful starting point in conceptualising social acts and the remains of the social. In ‘Remembering Apartheid’, Sanders argues that apartheid was and continues to be an ‘interdict against the development of a social formation’ (61), the essence of apartheid being the ‘foreclosure of the other, and thus of any historical possibility of another social formation’ (61). The question of a social to come is at the forefront of his concerns. Though the parameters of such a foreclosed social formation against which Sanders writes were never clearly stated by the theoreticians of apartheid, at the heart of apartheid’s discourse – Sanders argues – there is ‘a proscription on mourning, specifically of the other’ (60). For Sanders, ‘mourning, as the giving up of a loved object, presupposes desire for that object’ (65), an...