The Politics of Homecoming Contending Fictions O F Identity in Contemporary South Africa Aletta J

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The Politics of Homecoming Contending Fictions O F Identity in Contemporary South Africa Aletta J The Politics of Homecoming Contending Fictions o f Identity in Contemporary South Africa Aletta J. Norval Introduction home\ n.,a., & adv. OED l.n. Dwelling-place; fixed residence of family or household ... 2. Native land of oneself or one's ancestors, esp. Britain (sic). 3. Place where thing is native or most common ... come ~ to, become fully realised by... n April 1994, with the singular, unrepeatable event of the election, South I Africa once again has come to occupy a space in the imaginary of the West which is both unique and exemplary.1 In a world torn apart by ethno-national- ist struggles, in the absence of the stabilising influence of the Cold War, South Africa almost effortlessly moved from being a pariah state, to becoming a symbol of hope and unity, of what can be achieved in the name of democracy. However, reading this event from the standpoint of the spectator alone, will not do. For the election not only reaffirmed that which the West desired but also, and perhaps more importantly, it instituted a new imaginary, a horizon within which for the first time, a fluid, open South African identity became a possibility for all those denied it before. Institution The election acted as the moment of institution of a new social imaginary, signifying a beginning, an origin, as well as a completion. That is to say, the delineation of the horizon within which a newly articulated South African identity orginated, also prefigures the space of its own fulfilment. What is instituted as radically new, serves as an always already given origin, marking out the space of the possible. Such is the paradox of all beginnings. However, this is not to say, in Hegelian fashion, that such beginnings are determined by developments to follow. To the contrary, the element of paradox on which I 1 This argument is elaborated in Norval (1994b). Fil. vest. /Acta Phil., XV (2/1994), 27-43. 28 Aletta J. Norval want to focus here emphasises the contingency and impurity of all beginnings which, while far from determining its forms of identification, cuts out a space open to contestation and subversion, at the same time as it sets limits to that identification. In South Africa, the radical institution of a new imaginary happened before our very eyes: The abiding image o f the day that South Africa began to become one nation, all together, was in the orange, autumn sun rising over a new country teeming with extraordinary, renewed people. It rose over a country with a new flag, a new anthem, a new map, and a profound new human mood. When the people began to form those lines they became a new people, spontaneously and unintentionally. The tiny seed first glimpsed on the national peace day last year, giving life to the otherwise lifeless political slogan »non-racial«, burst into resplendent flower. Black South Africans learnt what whites already knew: how to vote. White South Africans learnt what blacks knew: how to wait. They did it together, in marvelous straggly multi-coloured queues... (Johnson, 1994, emphasis added). The question remaining to be addressed in this respect is the following: how do we think this moment of institution? The most obvious candidate for this in the tradition of political theory is, of course, the social contract tradition which attempts to theorise the moment of inauguration and establishment of society. The paradox we encounter here is well known: in order to institute society, we already need to have in place that which can only be brought about as a result of the very act of institution. As Connolly ( 1991:465) argues with reference to Rousseau, »(f)or a general will to be brought into being, effect (social spirit) would have to become cause and cause (good laws) would have become effect«. As we know, Rousseau resolved this problem in an interesting fash­ ion. He argued that the legislator being unable to employ either force or argument, »must have recourse to an authority of another order«, must claim his own contingent wisdom to be that of the Gods (Rousseau, 1968: 87). In order to establish the purity of the law, the lawgiver in fact has to resort to the impure mechanism of deception. In this sense, Rousseau not only »solves« his own problem, but sets into place a radical argument for the »ignobility of all origins«, even that of the Law, so introducing an ineliminable element of arbitrariness into political life. This act of institution is always retroactively realised, constituted after the fact. Analogously, it could be argued that the real constitution of the South African nation took place not so much in the actual act of queueing, as in the retrospective viewing of that act, emphasising the moment it entered the gaze, making the actor simultaneously spectator of her own acts. And in this very The Politics o f Homecoming 29 moment of elation, of birth, was enacted the contractual paradox: it foreshad­ owed the very thing which would make the nation possible. It established a South African identité à venir. It provided a vision of tolerance, of fusion, and one might say, of precarious unity, which everyone full well knows is patently absent in the present.2 To put it differently, the very conditions of possibility for democracy was instituted in a context scarred by their very absence. Empty spaces, barred subjects While the act of institution always contains a paradox, this does not mean that the paradox is eradicated with the full institution of a democratic social order. As I have pointed out earlier, there is an ineliminable element of in the ignoble, arbitrary moment of institution which continues to mark the political space. In order to understand why this is the case, we need to look more closely at two further dimensions of this institution: that of the space itself, and of the subject of democracy. Let us start with the former. »Democratic society could be determined as a society whose institutional structures includes, as part o f its »normal«, »regulär« production, the moment o f dissolution o f the symbolic bond, the movement o f the irruption o f the Real: elections«. (Žižek, 1989:147) In his seminal work on the democratic imaginary, Lefort argues that in a democratic society the place of power is an empty one (1988:17). That is, democracy involves the institutionalisation of the markers of uncertainty. What is sacrificed here is precisely the possibility of a given and certain content filling, without question, the place of power. But with this sacrifice, as with all sacrifices, something crucial is gained. The empty space of power, in fact, secures in its very nature, the space of contestability. Far from being a safe and merely bourgeois phenomenon, democracy shows the radical incompletion of all forms of identification. The third dimension of the paradox of this institution concerns the nature of 2 The extent of the intolerance characterising the South African political landscape, most recently, has been visible in the extreme violence in the PWV-region as well as kwaZulu-Natal. Other indicators can be used here as well. For example, a survey of the Western Cape region showed that 61% of Africans and 45% of Coloureds would not allow a political party they oppose to make political speeches on their home turf (Collins, 1994). Shortly before the elections, voter education programmes were reportedly being thwarted in kwaZulu-Natal by both the Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress. Several incidents in the rest of the country was reported where speakers were violently prohibited from addressing political meetings. These more recent indicators should, of course, not overshadow the fact that the political history of South Africa as a whole can be described as a severely intolerant one. 30 Aletta J. Norval the subject to complement this empty space. We can ask with Žižek, »who is the subject of democracy?« The anwer? The subject of abstraction, »the empty punctuality we reach after subtracting all the fullness of particular contents« (Žižek 1991:190) As both Laclau and Žižek, following Lacan, have argued, the important point here is not simply the empty point of reference, the »all people without regard to...« which forms the preamble to every democratic credo (Žižek 1991:190). Rather, what is crucial is the fact that the non­ substantiality of subjectivity, or to put it in Lacanian terms, the subject of a constitutive lack, the barred subject, inauguarates the need for identification. However, here the further paradox, or perhaps the paradox of democracy emerges. For democracy, in order to be democracy at all, has to be anti- humanistic in that it has to abstract from specificity. Yet, it also has to engender acts of identification which will always threaten the very moment of abstraction itself, which will »smear« democracy with particularity (Žižek, 1991:192). This is the very space in which the recent debate between liberals and communitarians is constituted, with liberals focussing exclusively on the abstraction of the subject from all context - exemplified in the Rawlsian »veil of ignorace« - while communitarians, in what had to amount to anti-demo­ cratic gestures, tended to solidify the subject, cementing it for ever in the bonds of community. Neither of these options will do, and while it is not possible here to discuss the matter in detail, it is necessary to signal oür disquiet with these »either-or« options, both of which misrecognises the complexity as well as the essential finitude, not only of the subject, but of the very space of democracy itself. Minimal remainders Instead of seeing this »smearing« of democracy with singularity as a disaster, it is necessary to recognise that democracy arises in the very tension of this empty space.
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