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This book is published at a time when deep thinking about the social
world, even within the academy, is not encouraged. Instead, self-closed
and self-enclosing conversations celebrate a social world that is controlled
by technology, management and, until their recent collapse, markets.
Working together, these have drawn public and academic discourses away
from critical ideas and imagination towards horizons that promise – often
in the name of freedom – the very control of the planet itself. The high
point of this has been the ‘unidirectional narrative’ – to use Premesh
Lalu’s term from Chapter 10 – called globalisation. Until recently, this
was celebrated as a near-universal even though, in its earliest form, the
idea appeared almost exclusively in the financial sections of the media
(Connell: 51). These early observations may seem decidedly untoward in
the introductory chapter of a collection on knowledge in post-apartheid
South Africa. So, why is there a need for this book?
It is probably true to say that anyone who sat through the fecund
discussions on South African historiography generated in resistance to
apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s might have thought that critical social
thinking was in the country’s very DNA. But when apartheid ended, critical
thinking ended – and abruptly too. Why? In Chapter 5 Michael
Neocosmos offers this answer: ‘Different kinds of politics are distinguished
by their historicity, in other words they have a history, they arise and then
they pass on.’ Certainly this has happened in South Africa and, as we will
see, the chapters that follow are interested in explaining why and how
Framing and Revisiting 3
critique in the service of social justice has been hollowed out of post-
apartheid politics.
It might help us, then, to locate the importance – indeed, the necessity
– for this collection within the following chain of questions. As apartheid
ended, why too did the country’s season of questions end? Why did South
Africa’s academy shift from critique to subservience? Why did critical
thinking become an indecent activity? In one way or another, these
questions are answered by Max Weber’s notion that political change
invariably favours the status quo ante. Or, indeed, by Hannah Arendt’s
more blunt formulation of the same idea, namely that the most radical
individuals invariably turn conservative the day after the revolution.
Whatever the preferred take on the issue, the outcome has complicated
South Africa’s ugly present and hobbled prospects for another future, as
eight of these nine chapters record.
This narrowing has marginalised both the humanities and the social
sciences, as Higgins suggests. Their value has been questioned because
these disciplines are perceived not to be making a direct contribution to
employment or to the production and distribution of commodities. Their
defenders are left in disarray and some are drawn into arguing for their
retention on the very instrumental grounds offered by their detractors
(Phamotse and Kissack 2008). More subtly, humanities faculties are being
reshaped to align with perceptions of market opportunities. For example,
in a recent South African university humanities faculty debate, it was
argued that there is no longer any real demand for German (as reflected
in student enrolments) and that there might be benefit in downsizing this
offering while at the same time assessing the market value of Spanish (for
translators) or Mandarin.
This reorientation of purposes has been accompanied, as Rowe’s
chapter suggests, by the ‘individualistic materialism’ that seems to drive
many of the leaders in higher education. The income gap between leaders
and led in higher education appears to be in inverse proportion to the
narrowing of the space for critical thought.
In this environment, the critical project of the humanities and the
social sciences has faded. As Neocosmos claims, these disciplines appear
‘to exist in the absence of any emancipatory project’ and offer instead the
‘intellectual praise-singing of state power through a continuous celebration
of our peaceful transition and our supposedly wonderful democracy and
constitution’. It is interesting, but of no real comfort, to learn that this
has happened elsewhere too. For example, after the triumph of the
Chicago School in Chile, ‘critical thought came to a standstill as neo-
liberalism introduced new problems and discussed them in a new language,
and the connection between critical thought and social movements was
lost’ (Connell 2007: 153).
This outcome is a far cry from the promises made during the revolt
against apartheid. As Pithouse recalls: ‘the prospect of humanistic studies
critically engaged with the unfolding and multiple living realities of our
time and place was an exciting prospect suggesting innovation and
unmediated relevance via the replacement of the crippling distance from
meaning that came with positing Europe as the locus of authentic meaning
8 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin
scattered in every conceivable corner of the earth, even – some might say,
especially – in places like the Middle East where religion has played –
and continues to play – a central role in social relationships. At a prosaic
level, then, ongoing social dissent and a ruinous legacy of early forms of
theorising reinforce the idea that history has no end – despite Fukuyama’s
confident 1992 claims to the contrary. More profoundly, the daily grind
of the poor, the homeless, women and children – the list is endless –
suggests the importance of imagining life beyond both inherited and
everyday framings, as these chapters forcefully suggest.
theory to describe its themes, its varieties and its methods. We can find
no previous example in the South African literature of a piece that has
carried this burden. The importance of the chapter, beyond framing the
discussions of South Africa that follow, lies in its invitation to those
interested in social theory to explore the various domains that Schatzki
presents. This invitation is gilded by his invocation in Chapter 2 of Max
Horkheimer’s observation that ‘evolving societal constellations . . . [like
South Africa] . . . demand evolving social theories’.
The chapters that follow Schatzki’s are all positioned within ‘critical
social theory’ to fleetingly use the taxonomy that he presents. This is
because, as we have already seen, South Africa’s history of critical
conversations hangs over this book. As with an earlier generation of critical
thinkers, those who write these pages have no qualms about the fact that
their scholarly work is to ‘politicise’ (as Schatzki notes) or that it will,
perhaps, invite the ‘unwanted attention of politicians and other
authorities’. Schatzki is entirely comfortable with this approach. ‘My own
view,’ he writes, ‘is that social inquirers should be free to pursue whatever
ends interest them: the study of social life has no essence or telos that
dictates or excludes any subset of ends.’ So, the writing in these pages, as
Schatzki approvingly says, ‘is a resounding affirmation of the desirability
of normative investigation’.
This is where, incidentally, the writing between these covers departs
from the mainstream social sciences, and sociology more specifically. As
the American experience in particular suggests, sociology – even its theory
– is not always critical. And it is at its least critical when it imitates the
natural sciences, in spite of a persuasive view, reaching back to Dilthey
and traversing Weber, Wittgenstein and Winch, that human ‘being’ and
human matters cannot be adequately grasped by the methodologies of
the natural sciences. The stance adopted in these pages negates the idea
of an objective social science. Pithouse’s abstraction of the iconic
Martiniquan intellectual Frantz Fanon’s ideas on this issue succinctly
captures the mood of his co-authors. Fanon, he writes, ‘pays careful
attention to the fact that . . . [colonial modernity] . . . has its theorists who
work, in the name of reason and science, to objectify the people who
inhabit the underside of modernity by abstracting their suffering from
14 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin
For Higgins, moving between the political real, the facts of the social
sciences and the semiotic, the interpretive representations of the
humanities, specifically literature, supports this move between critique
and political action. He quotes Said on this issue: ‘What I’ve done
politically is entirely dependent on the ability to read critically, to be able
to understand the uses to which language is put, its vast range of
possibilities. I think the best place to get a sense of this is through the
study of literature.’ This suggests that critical social theorising profoundly
differs from other efforts to understand and explain the social world.
Critical social theorists believe that understanding and explaining social
issues without fostering the opportunities to improve the human condition
is futile, at best, and, at worst, indulgent. Karl Marx idiomatically set this
down in his famous 1845 The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change
it.’ But elsewhere, too, Marx reminds us of the intimate links between
philosophy and practical politics. Although, iconically, Marx anchored
this idea, it emerges many times in this book. So, for Bert Olivier, ‘to
know and not to do, is not to know’.
This is one of two intellectual puzzles that runs between theory and
practice. The other begins with this question: does practical engagement
affect the quality of scholarship? The answer is, no. As Schatzki points
out, there is no firm boundary between the theoretical and the empirical:
either may be foregrounded at any given point in social theorising. For
him, and for his colleagues in this book, the ‘pursuit of practical ends
needs not endanger good scholarship’. This understanding counters the
notion that the ivory tower is remote: removed from the messy business
of daily life; that it is abstract, austere and apart. In South Africa this was
endorsed in the 1980s by the American sociologist, Michael Burawoy,
who, when visiting the country shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release
from prison, approvingly wrote that ‘everywhere . . . there were sociologists
[and other academics] acting as organic intellectuals of the home-grown
liberation movements’ (2004: 11). And its value is remembered in the
exemplary examples of academic-activists, such as Rick Turner and David
Webster, who tragically lost their lives during the struggle to end apartheid.
16 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin
The single question that interests these authors is this: ‘What are the
conditions for thought to be critical today?’ This question cannot, however,
be disentangled from what went before, from the intellectual resources
bequeathed to us to with which to ignite new debates. So, this is the place
to say something about the history of South African social thinking –
critical and other. With this in mind, we will evaluate discursive resources,
both historical and contemporary, available to encourage a critique of
modernity and modernity’s impact on South Africa.
and ordering the social world of the Afrikaners, well into the twentieth
century. So it was that ‘segregation in South Africa was condemned not
primarily because things were different elsewhere but because it denied
black people rights common to all human beings’ (Callinicos 1999: 312).
As the twentieth century deepened, race as a means of social ordering
flew in the face of an intellectual life that was drawn to the goals of the
Enlightenment and away from social taxonomies. Imprisoned by cognitive
maps, Afrikaner leaders were unwilling – perhaps, unable – to appreciate
how fiercely a new generation of critical thinkers were questioning the
way social relations in South Africa had been described and known (Harries
2007: 6). Simply put, Afrikaners – and the nationalism they had used to
build a succession of states and their republic – were increasingly out of
touch with the social thinking of the times.
South Africa’s English-speakers, on the other hand, were folded into
the great social tent called the British Empire. From this perspective, the
world view was cast by the right of birth: to be born into the English
language, it was thought, was to be part of the greatest modernist project
of the age. The self-styled civilising mission of Empire – intimately bound
with Christianity – drew from the deepening hold of Darwin’s theory of
evolution. To speak English in Africa (or anywhere else in the ‘new world’)
was to bear the cross of what Rudyard Kipling famously called the ‘White-
Man’s Burden’. Here, as South Africa’s history would starkly illustrate,
an assertive strain of empire-building would position South Africa – its
material wealth – in the service of the British Crown. This direction was
much-celebrated in the life of Cecil John Rhodes with its famous dictum
of ‘painting red the map of Africa from Cape to Cairo’. Here the estab-
lishment of universities was to play a crucial role. English-speaking
universities, as Lawrence Wright has suggested, were aimed at ‘transmitting
metropolitical knowledge and excitement in a colonial situation’ (2006:
73). A more benign strain of this liberalism drew on the natural law writing
of the Enlightenment figure, John Locke, with his emphasis on life, liberty
and the right to property. In this interpretation, the purpose of the state
was to guarantee these rights and, if it failed, it should be overthrown. It
is, of course, the right to property – the land – that has been at the heart
of so much of South Africa’s tangled story.
20 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin
derived from the thoughts laboriously set down by Karl Marx in the British
Museum a century earlier. This approach to understanding the country,
especially its historiography, was officially received with great hostility
and was immediately and deliberately portrayed as ‘ideological’. This was
ironic, of course, given that the dominant ideas about the nature of the
world – South African included – were locked in an ideological iron cage
called the Cold War. Whatever its flaws, class analysis offered an antidote
to a frozen analysis, which, until the 1970s, was largely blind to Lalu’s
‘competing claims of domination and resistance’.
By countering accepted understandings of the idea of South Africa
and its social pathologies, Marxist explanations enabled scholars to
appreciate that the country’s fundamental challenge was not one of
language or race, or of white wealth and black poverty, but rather (as Lalu
notes) of class, expressed as ‘rural marginality and urban violence’. The
intensity of the resulting debates certainly made them impervious to the
untrained but, with time, Marxist analyses permeated almost every
discipline in the humanities and reached deep into the social sciences,
inspiring a generation of social thinkers. Entire disciplines were renewed
by the force of this analysis. As Pillay points out (adopting an inclusive
definition of the humanities that is emerging in South Africa), ‘sociology,
political studies, anthropology, and other humanities disciplines were
intensely ideologically inflected by these emancipatory implications’.
However, other disciplines such as international relations, encrusted in
Cold War thinking, were impervious to its creative energy.
This was to be a time when theorising in South Africa, at least in anti-
apartheid circles, was a veritable social phenomenon with ‘its own cultural,
disciplinary, political and economic contexts of production and
propagation’ as Ted Schatzki puts it. It was, the acclaimed South African
historian Charles van Onselen noted, ‘the most exciting two decades in
the social sciences . . . [and the humanities] . . . in this country’ (2004).
Deepening reflexivity, however, enabled recognition of the limits of the
strain of Marxism on offer. As Belinda Bozzoli once put it, ‘[w]hat South
African reality could demonstrate to the intellectual world has increasingly
been pushed aside in favour of what that world can tell us about South
African reality’ (1981: 54). It is certainly easy to romanticise this period,
22 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin
Beginning anew
The account of social thinking about South Africa recorded in these
paragraphs is less than complete – it is a pencil sketch, a caricature,
perhaps, of a research topic whose time has come. There is some hope
that a more complete account of the development of social theorising in
South Africa will follow. Historians of social science and the humanities
have recently offered new insights into how knowledge and knowing has
shaped South Africa and how it has fed – and continues to feed – the
country’s understandings of worlds, both social and other (Dubow 2006;
Harries 2007; Jubber 2007; Vale 2008; Carruthers 2008; Van Ommen
and Painter 2008).
The authors in this collection suggest ways in which this can be done.
Lalu offers a compelling approach to the discipline of history in a time of
constant change by locating the thread of the post-colonial within debates
on South African historiography. In his provocative chapter on the
complicated links between the issue of race and the issue of class in South
African historiography, Pillay lays out a series of markers that have troubled
– and will continue to trouble – South African social theorists as they
search for both identity and transformation. These and other approaches
in these pages set down two challenges for theoretical understandings of
the social world: Are there alternatives to the existing paradigm? And
where is the voice of Africa, and the global South? In addition to these, a
suite of social issues crowd the agenda, as we have seen: these include the
threat of ecological devastation, the de-politicisation of society, the closing
of the public sphere. Each of these has added to the urgency of exploring
new and critical ways of viewing the social world. South Africa will not be
exempt from engaging, as Schatzki suggests, ‘with a great diversity of
incompatible ideas about nature, development, and organisation of human
coexistence’.
Drawn together, the chapters in this collection are rich and diverse in
their analyses, providing what Rowe calls a robust platform for critique
and for imagining alternatives. For these authors this will involve recoveries:
for Neocosmos, the recovery of historically present modes of politics; for
Pithouse, the recovery of the agency and centrality of the subaltern; for
Lalu, the recovery of the post-colonial, ‘an episteme in the making’; for
Framing and Revisiting 25
Notes
1. E-mail from John Higgins to Peter Vale, 23 March 2009. For a general account
of the conference and a subsequent interview with Edward Said, see Higgins
(2001a, 2001b).
2. This idea is drawn from Clive Dilnot’s ‘Why economics can no longer be left to
economists’ in Cruddas and Rutherford (2009).
26 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin
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