Remains of the Social

REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL DESIRING THE POSTAPARTHEID Edited by Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley & Premesh Lalu Published in South Africa by: Wits University Press 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg, 2001 www.witspress.co.za Compilation © Editors 2017 Chapters © Individual contributors 2017 Published edition © Wits University Press 2017 Artworks and Photographs © Copyright holders. See image captions. Music lyrics © Copyright holders. First published 2017 978-1-77614-030-5 (print) 978-1-77614-031-2 (PDF) 978-1-77614-032-9 (EPUB North & South America, China) 978-1-77614-033-6 (EPUB Rest of World) This book is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-1-77614-038-1. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978. All images and music lyrics remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals for the use of images and music lyrics. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images and music lyrics reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors. Cover artwork: ‘Life and Death’ by Dathini Mzayiya, artist in residence in the Centre for Humanities Research, Factory of the Arts Editor: Russell Martin Proofreader: Alison Lockhart Indexer: Marlene Burger Typesetting: Integra Print and bound by: Pinetown Printers, South Africa CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Preface Gary Minkley ix Chapter 1 Traversing the Social Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley and Premesh Lalu 1 Chapter 2 The Mandela Imaginary: Reflections on Post-Reconciliation Libidinal Economy Derek Hook 40 Chapter 3 The Return of Empathy: Postapartheid Fellow Feeling Ross Truscott 65 Chapter 4 The Ethics of Precarity: Judith Butler’s Reluctant Universalism Mari Ruti 92 Chapter 5 Hannah Arendt’s Work of Mourning: The Politics of Loss, ‘the Rise of the Social’ and the Ends of Apartheid Jaco Barnard-Naudé 117 REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL Chapter 6 Souvenir Annemarie Lawless 146 Chapter 7 Re-Cover: Afrikaans Rock, Apartheid’s Children and the Work of the Cover Aidan Erasmus 172 Chapter 8 The Graves of Dimbaza: Temporal Remains Gary Minkley and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick 195 Chapter 9 The Principle of Insufficiency: Ethics and Community at the Edge of the Social Maurits van Bever Donker 225 Chapter 10 The Trojan Horse and the ‘Becoming Technical of the Human’ Premesh Lalu 249 About the Contributors 275 List of Figures 279 Index 281 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In early 2011, the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare and the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, now the home of the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation (DST-NRF) Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities, began a long-term collaboration, a research and pedagogical experiment that took the form of a Winter School for doctoral and master’s students. The chapters collected here have emerged largely out of this collaboration. Together, they constitute an intervention into the concept of the social as such. There is much more to be said of this collaboration between two universities that were produced by apartheid thought and legislation as precisely not capable of such an intervention. We would, however, simply like to acknowledge these two projects – and there have been other important partners, most notably the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota – for providing the space in which this intervention was able to take shape. This volume would, of course, not have been possible without the investment and collaboration of all our contributors. Each one of the contributors has been, at some point in the past few years, a participant in the projects convened by the CHR and the SARChI Chair, whether as students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting faculty or participants in the various seminars and colloquiums that have taken place over the years. The contributors to the volume have been patient over a very long process, always responsive and positive, and have produced what are quite clearly in their own right outstanding interventions into the social. vii REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL The project has benefited from the intellectual friendship and direction offered by many who are associated with the CHR and SARChI Chair. For the care with which this volume has been read, critiqued and encouraged, we would like to thank John Mowitt, Brian Raftopoulus, Adam Sitze, Qadri Ismail, Cesare Casarino, Jane Taylor, Sanil V, Arunima G, Patricia Hayes, as well as our reviewers from the Press. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to Wits University Press for the care and patience with which they have handled the publication of this book. We thank the Estate of Stephen Spender for kind permission to reprint his 1964 poem titled ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’ from New Collected Poems by Stephen Spender © 2004. Ross Truscott’s chapter is derived in part from an article published in Safundi on 5 May 2016. Thanks are due to Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint it here. The original article is available online: www.tandfonline. com/ dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2016.1172825. He would also like to thank the Stevenson Gallery and Nandipha Mntambo for permission to reproduce images from The Encounter. The editors thank the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for research grants that supported this project and for intellectual input along the way. viii PREFACE Gary Minkley Remains of the Social is, as we note in our acknowledgements, a product of a critical engagement between the SARChI Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare, the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and their respective research partners. As such, this volume, read as a coherent project in itself, might also be read alongside wider collaborations and developments, and in anticipation of subsequent volumes that broaden, deepen and extend the discussions around the social into areas that might seem absent from this volume. Most studies on the social as it comes to bear on the postapartheid – and studies of social cohesion could be included here – take the social as an ideal that must either be vigorously defended or triumphantly declared. Remains of the Social offers another perspective. Pressuring assumptions of rational progress for society and the subject, we begin by putting the social into question, asking after the ways in which, and the ends to which, it is invoked and given its itineraries, attending to the epistemological grounds of the social. In doing so, the volume inquires into that which is remaindered in the production of the social. In other words, Remains treats the social as a problematic, one from which it is difficult to emerge unscarred. The interventions collected here ask after what is rendered unliveable as a condition of possibility of the social. This unliveability most readily recalls Judith Butler’s concept of precarity – the ungrievability of certain lives that engenders their unliveablility, a theme taken up by several contributors here – but it recalls, also, and importantly, the rupture that, for Walter Benjamin, clears the ground for his critique of time and ix REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL progress in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Indeed, what is explored here, in various ways, is the notion that the very question of loss, as Zita Nunes has argued, might be read not only as constitutive of, or constituted by, the social – the social produced through loss, the grave as its first commemorative sign, or the social apportioning life and death and designating its grievability – but rather as a masking of that which enables the constitution of the social: the remainder, which we propose against conceptions of mourning and its failures, melancholia and nostalgia, which one finds more frequently in studies on the social. There is an echo here, as we discuss in the introductory chapter, of Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks of the social as it is constituted through the concept of Man, an echo that brings with it not only the urgent task of posing questions of racial formations, but also a need to turn attentively to modes of narration that enable an encounter with these remainders as resistant: to read this resistance back into the social as a demand that orders a future which is, as Fanon puts it in his opening lines, always too soon and too late, out of time. Such a demand is what threads the ethical weight that the chapters in this volume bring to the question of the social. REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, edited and translated by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 253–264. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008 [1952].

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