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Framing and Revisiting 1

2 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin

Framing and Revisiting


Debates Old and New

PETER VALE and HEATHER JACKLIN

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.

The end of public debate


When political change came to South Africa, an agreed constitution
promised to dissolve the issue of race and draw all the country’s citizens
towards a life within the ambit of the law. Constitutionalism, it was argued,
could tame political passion and this would douse the flames that many
had predicted would engulf South Africa. But, and this cardinal issue
engages all the authors of these chapters, constitutionalism within a ‘parlia-
mentary mode of politics’ – to use an opening suggested by Neocosmos –
is not intended to encourage people to think. In essence, then, as Suren
Pillay suggests in Chapter 9, while the South African state was deracialised
in 1994, the search for democracy continued.
As a narrow interpretation of constitutionalism took hold, the thorny
issue of wealth and its distribution was set aside by recourse to the
dominant mode of economic thought, neo-liberalism. Instead of a
redistribution of resources, the increasingly powerful trope, ‘the market’
– with its averred neutrality, its promise of redistribution through the
trickle-down effect – was used to draw thinking away from radical
alternatives. These choices were to have profound effects on the country’s
hopes for a different future. As Richard Pithouse points out in Chapter
6, South Africa’s politics is characterised by ‘a broadly liberal democratic
4 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin

mode in the bourgeois world . . . [which] . . . actively depends on and


encourages despotic modes of governance within poor communities’. This
outcome, Neocosmos again notes, was based on thinking ‘. . . along one
line . . . [namely that] . . . capitalism and democracy signalled the end of
history’. This was the conventional wisdom that had emerged at the end
of the Cold War and was best expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s neo-
Hegelian notion that history itself had ended (Fukuyama 1992). With
time, the same set of ideas had morphed into George Herbert Walker
Bush’s notion of a ‘New World Order’ which, in Chapter 4, is described
by Bert Olivier as ‘a pact between neo-liberal economics and so-called
liberal democracy . . . [and which] . . . is not tolerant of revolt’.
If this was one set of factors that sought to discipline the social world,
and thinking about it, in the new South Africa, another was provided by
the fact that continuities invariably trump change: much of the old South
Africa remained within the new. This was not unique to South Africa. As
Ivor Chipkin points out in Chapter 3, the ‘contemporary African state
may come after the colonial state but it has not transcended its logic or its
mode of governance’.
The chapters that follow discuss a number of institutional and social
developments that have closed off critical thinking in South Africa. The
rise of think tanks provides an additional example of this. A momentary
digression will focus on the manner in which the acceptability of market-
based social outcomes was smoothed by the establishment of a think tank.
From the mid-1970s visit to the country of Milton Friedman, the Free
Market Foundation was to play an influential role in stabilising the idea
of free-market economics as a means to both dampen social discord and
speed the ending of apartheid (Feldberg, Jowell and Mulholland 1976).
But absent from its Friedmanite approach was any effort to embed human
relations in the country within wider social understandings – let alone
provide these with critical social reflection. Like free-market ideologues
elsewhere, South African protagonists of the idea avoided any discussion
of what J.K. Galbraith once called ‘history, power, and normative choice’
(Parker 2007).
The disappearance of these considerations from policy discourse
marked the most decisive policy switch of the immediate post-apartheid
Framing and Revisiting 5

period. This switch was evident in the 1996 jettisoning of the


Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of the ruling African
National Congress (ANC) and the adoption of a macro-economic policy
known as GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution): the move
suggested how successfully the idea of the market had penetrated the
country’s body politic. The GEAR rested upon basic structural
recommendations, without the assistance of the mandatory loan, of both
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The abrupt
manner of the creation of the GEAR programme contrasted sharply with
the deliberative style in which, it was claimed, policy-making in the new
South Africa took place. This was evidence that new state functionaries
were prepared to engage the country’s people, not through the
emancipatory discourses of the struggle, but through a code of
administration and approach that was little different – Olivier notes in
Chapter 4 – from early attempts ‘to wield power over others by the
disingenuous pretence of communicating’.
What was clear was that the ‘imperative’ of the political compromise
had enabled instrumentalism to trump the imagination and inspiration
which the humanities and the social sciences invariably offer to knowledge
of the social world. Positioned in this new universe, the self-styled
advantages of the ‘knowledge economy’ – which was characterised by a
non-questioning form and an ease of conceptual travel – effectively drove
critical thinking to the corners. The new government ignored warnings
on the dangers of this closing down of the public sphere. John Higgins
reports in Chapter 7 that when the literary theorist and Palestinian activist,
the late Edward Said, visited South Africa in 2001 he spoke of the ‘real
danger . . . [of critique] . . . being pushed to the sidelines’. At a conference
on ‘Values, Education and Democracy’, Said was asked whether a higher
education system which closed down critical space – the example used
was the closing of the Department of Comparative Literature at the
University of the Witwatersrand – seemed to support the critical values
for which he had argued in his presentation. The country’s then Minister
of Education, Kader Asmal, rebuked the questioner as did others at the
gathering.1 From this moment on, figuratively speaking and borrowing
from Olivier, the humanities and social sciences in South Africa were
rendered ‘utterly powerless to change the status quo’.
6 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin

Chipkin argues in Chapter 3 that, following 1994, policy discourse


did not issue from public debate but was displaced to a ‘public sovereignty’
outside of the formal institutions and legal and political processes that
are defined and protected by the country’s constitution. This development
helped to further close off any possibility of an open public sphere at a
time when, as Higgins echoes Marx, government – both in South Africa
and elsewhere – ‘hears only its own voice’. And so the responsibility of a
democratic state to expand the narrow definition of what it is to be a
citizen by creating and defending a ‘social state apparatus to give them
effect’ was negated. From different perspectives, the authors in this volume
believe that the South African state has not kept available the space for
open debate. Both the political and policy implications that followed these
developments would determine, amongst other things, the material
conditions of intellectual life in post-apartheid South Africa. It is to this
issue that we will now turn our attention.

The complicity of the academy


Until the end of apartheid, the country’s universities had been largely
sheltered from the vagaries of the managerialism that had characterised,
from the mid-1970s onwards, neo-liberal efforts to reform higher education
elsewhere. As apartheid ended, however, this was rapidly to change under
the rubric of market-based ‘reform’ with its code of synthetically formed
benchmarking and generic policy prescriptions that were underwritten
by ideas such as ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ and ‘governance’. This
was a moment, Pithouse notes, when ‘the better funded logic of the profane
. . . [hunted] . . . down that of the sacred’. Advertised as the necessary
‘globalisation’ of South African higher education, this approach ensured
that the policy ideas that regulated the university sector were brought
into line with the instrumental routines of neo-liberal thinking. Nicholas
Rowe points out in Chapter 8 that ‘the state and the so-called “customers
in the education market” increasingly wanted a more “practical” outcome
to their investment’. Higher education was increasingly embedded in a
monetary exchange and subjected only to the dominant discourse of the
market.2 This desire, and the very language of its making, had narrowed
the purposes of education.
Framing and Revisiting 7

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

with a direct connection to an immediate locus of meaning’. In its place,


a cult of expertise has grown, premised on the idea that ‘scientific
knowledge is the . . . [only] . . . basis for policy’ (Colebatch 1998: 2).
Ensnared by rational-choice thinking, the public sphere in South Africa
seems preoccupied with ‘generating statistical support for public policy
analysis, predicting demographic trends, and assisting in social
engineering’ (Calhoun 1996: 429). As a result, the academy has been
enmeshed – and quickly too – in the technocratic world of policy and
the intricacies of its making, both of which were embedded in a
depoliticised and technical discourse. This tendency was strengthened as
schools dedicated to the teaching of government (or governance)
flourished. Their purpose was to modernise the discipline of Public
Administration, whose task is to order society by disciplining it (Vale
2005). In addition, postgraduate courses – most modelled on the MBA –
mushroomed across the university system. These were inspired by the
notion that the one feature of government that was most needed in the
new South Africa was efficiency.

Myths, markets and the making of the modern


The technicist market discourses that pervade the public sphere and the
academy in South Africa express post-apartheid South Africa’s
incorporation into the logic and exigencies of global neo-liberal capitalism.
If we are to fully apprehend the project of recovering – or generating – a
critical vocabulary, undertaken in these chapters, we must read them
against the dominant discourses that they aim to uncover, subvert and
displace.
Triggered by reckless lending in the property market, the ‘new’ crisis
of capitalism that arose between the seminar at which these papers were
delivered in July 2007 and the publication of this book in late 2009
provides a good example of the holding power of canonical thinking.
Driven by the lineal arguments around rationality and efficiency, and
helped by dodgy accounting, governments were not able to counter the
speculative panic in both oil and food that broke out in early 2008.
Underlying their policy response was the assumption that the markets
would correct themselves because they were always ‘right’. So, instead of
Framing and Revisiting 9

introducing corrective measures – tighter regulation, for instance –


governments delayed cutting interest rates for fear of inflation. This belief
in the ‘conventional morality’ of the market (Olivier’s phrase), has proven
to be disastrous. But the crisis has also been assisted by a secondary factor
and to this we must briefly turn.
Underlying neo-liberal economics is the idea that markets are not
only rational and efficient but that they can resolve social conflict. The
latter idea is embedded in the notion that management – the market’s
alter ego – orders the social world by providing the authority and control
that it lacks. The everyday routines of management – ironically, sometimes
cast as a ‘revolution’ in human affairs – satisfy the need for order and
predictability that can only come through social control. As a result,
directed social behaviour in a world organised through the prism of
rationality and management provides intelligible horizons for both
communities and for individuals. This universe is thought to be the only
plausible approach to social relationships in the modern world because it
passes three tests: it purports to provide a view of what human beings are
like; it is said to offer a view of how society works; and it creates a vision
of an ideal world (Edwards 2002: 34). If modernity is aimed at control,
then the great strength of its peak, globalisation, is also certainty and
predictability. On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive because, as
Olivier suggests, globalisation is the ‘apparent imperative . . . to expand
trade and commerce limitlessly across the entire globe, extending the
market optimally, with the concomitant demand that no national barriers
stand in the way of expansion’. In this, the popular understanding,
globalisation seems to offer more, not less, human freedom. However, as
indicators show, pursuit of globalisation has compounded human misery
by widening income gaps between the rich and the poor. So, while the
rich may be free, the poor are certainly not free to carry out ‘what they
would freely choose to do, compatible with the freedom of others’ (Booth
2007: 112).
Notwithstanding the claim that the market (and globalisation) is a
benign force, the evidence of the discord it produces is everywhere to be
seen: within the family, on the street, at the city hall, between nations
and, as Olivier points out, ‘with the planet itself’. Instead of fostering
10 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin

harmony and encouraging community, the very opposite has occurred:


market-centred policy-making emphasises individuality. Drawing from the
writing of Robert Bellah, Rowe calls this an American-centred cultural
‘ontological individualism’. Margaret Thatcher, the great champion of
the market, pointed to the true purpose of this approach to public policy
in her claim that ‘there is no such thing as society: there are individual
men and women, and there are families’ (Keay 1987: 9). The Nobel
Laureate Amartya Sen pointedly uses the same image in drawing on John
Donne’s idea that ‘no man is an island entire of itself’. In his riveting
book on the dangers of identity-based politics, Identity and Violence: The
Illusion of Destiny, he writes, ‘The postulated human beings of pure
economic theory are often made to see themselves as pretty “entire” ’
(Sen 2006: 20).
But, as we have seen, instead of inviting public debate, market-driven
policy-making closes the door on it. Deliberation is shot through with
technically driven discourses whose purpose is to depoliticise social
interaction. This outcome profoundly touches the issues in which these
essays are interested. As Neocosmos suggests, ‘politics is absent from . . .
[everyday] . . . life’ because liberal democracy ‘statises and technicises
political agency with the sole exception of the casting of the vote every
quinquennium’. And as Pithouse points out, drawing from Rancière,
‘depoliticisation is the oldest task of politics’ and, as he goes on to argue,
depoliticisation is prone to the kind of autocractic rule that marked the
Mbeki years.
As worrying is the idea that the ideological hold of the ‘triumph of
the market’ – the market as an ideology – will be long-lasting. All
contemporary social life is confronted by the debris of past forms of social
ordering and these complicate the future. The institutions and practices
that earlier ideologies create and then sustain are everywhere to be seen.
Religion is an instructive example. Directed towards both the individual
and society, and known in virtually all communities, religion was (and
remains) a powerful social force. Combining myth and mystic, ritual and
routine, organised religion commands obedience and fealty always in the
name of order, past or future; it collects taxes and, even in this day,
commands armies. While its organisational form differs case by case, the
physical presence of religion is to be seen in the places of worship that are
Framing and Revisiting 11

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.

What is social theory?


At the seminar where the ideas in this collection were first presented,
there was much discussion of how critical thinking and its language had
been flattened by the combined effects of the marketisation of the academy,
on the one hand, and the greed and avarice of South Africa’s political
class who have benefited from the closing down of critical space, on the
other hand. One hope of the gathering was that a series of interventions
could help to bring critical thinking back into the centre of the country’s
intellectual life. These might promote a more deliberative democracy that
will encourage ‘a rather more heightened and mobilized sense of
citizenship and participation than currently exists’ – to use a phrase from
Edward Said (Higgins 2001b: 157). The chapters that follow demonstrate
how critical social theory can contribute to such deliberations and arrest
what Pithouse calls the country’s crisis of citizenship.
In Chapter 2, Ted Schatzki both asks and answers the question: what
is social theory? He defines social theory as ‘abstract, systematic thought
that, through rational argumentation, fashions general accounts of the
character, development, and organisation of social life . . . and of the
comprehension that can be had of these’. For Schatzki, social theory
contributes to social enquiry in a number of ways: it acts as a bridge
between individual disciplines and between the broader domains of the
humanities and the social sciences; it helps to abolish an unsustainable
distinction between the world of culture and world of the social; and it
combines the conceptual and methodological resources available to social
analysis by providing a more comprehensive account of the ‘complexly
12 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin

related human world’. These intersections explain why it is that theorists


in both the humanities and the social sciences have crossed disciplinary
divides, as Schatzki says, in order to encourage ‘the rise of a common
realm of theory – what we call social theory’.
Philosophy, history, the arts and languages – conventionally
comprising the humanities – have a lineage in western thought reaching
back to the Greeks. But the natural and social sciences were ushered into
the European academy much more recently by the scientific revolution
of the seventeenth century, with its secular inclination towards
understanding, controlling and transforming the natural and, by extension,
the social world (Heilbron 1995; Phamotse and Kissack 2008). This
revolution brought a proliferation of new forms of intellectual work outside
of the formal universities, leading to the development of new disciplines,
such as sociology, economics and politics, that were later introduced into
the academy, and prompting the reconfiguration of university faculties.
Although they came late to the academy, these disciplines-in-the-making
were intimately caught up with the ideas of the Enlightenment. As a result,
systematic thinking about the social world was (and remains) wedded to
progressive ideas. As Phamotse and Kissack argue, the humanities can be
considered to be ‘the central locus for Modernity’s reflection upon its
own nature and significance’ (2008: 51). Even the most casual reading of
these chapters will confirm that this collection, like much writing in critical
social theory, is an exercise interested in promoting Enlightenment values.
This particular calling was to draw social thought towards evolutionist
and positivist thinking. But it was two revolutions, the French and the
Industrial, that opened it up to dynamic social processes most, if not all,
of which were associated with the development of capitalism. And this
issue – capitalism as the relentless driving force of what is loosely called
modernity – has been at the centre of all serious efforts at social theorising.
This insight also frames the approach of this collection to the South African
experience. But before turning to this, we pause to locate the chapters
methodologically.
The point of entry exercised by all but one of the chapters in the
volume is ‘critical social theory’. The exception is Schatzki’s Chapter 2,
which casts a broad – and interesting – net over the wider area of social
Framing and Revisiting 13

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

historical processes and projecting it into the essence of racialising


identities that hold those who suffer to be responsible for their suffering
due to their own biological or cultural failings’. At the heart of these
chapters is the desire to ‘bring all the resources of critical thinking’ to a
‘ruthless criticism of the existing order’, as Higgins writes, quoting Marx:
ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from
conflict with the powers that be. A careful reading of these pages shows
that each of these authors is keen to explore something beyond the messy
present. This is an important methodological moment, both in the book
and in this chapter, and we must pause to build on it.
Critical theory is premised on the search for an alternative that
generates its conceptual terms. These critical and conceptual dimensions
are augmented by a third dimension which we will call ‘methodological’.
Here social theory is concerned with reflexive thought upon the very
process of thinking itself. These three dimensions – the critical, conceptual
and methodological – suggest the sheer complexity of the intellectual
terrain within which social theory is located. In considering how any
social entity engages the activities of agents, structural arrangements and
meanings, social theorists are drawn to cross-disciplinary approaches that
bring within its ambit questions such as the nature of the political, cultural
and economic processes associated with globalisation, the constitution of
public life and civil society, the relation of technology to social relations
and the nature of social practice. A cursory glance at the biographical
notes of each of our contributors shows that they are drawn from a range
of disciplines: history, literature, sociology, education, philosophy, politics,
even engineering. But in their approach to the matter at hand, these
disciplinary origins play a distinctly minor key. Not only is this a function
of the critical project but it is also a recognition – as Higgins points out –
that conventional disciplinary divides prevent thinking across ‘the
representation of reality’ and ‘the reality of representation’.
The three lives of social theor y – critical, conceptual and
methodological – make it possible to look beyond received understandings.
But they do more than this: they present an optic to analyse the world
and a means to engage its mundane and commonsensical prescriptions.
So, both understanding and action become possible.
Framing and Revisiting 15

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 necessity to draw on social theory to imagine and enact an


alternative future explains why it is that the chapters in this volume take
issue with an academy whose horizons are hobbled by orthodoxy. These
authors confront and critique a received vocabulary that seems to have
entirely lost its emancipatory hold (Neocosmos and Pithouse), which is
trapped in disciplinary logics that regulate critical thought and is
constrained by ‘legacies of authoritarianism’ (Lalu). They are preoccupied
– to varying degrees of explicitness – with examining the relationship
between the forms of knowledge in the academy and the operation of
power within the country’s past and present historical contexts. Three
chapters focus these questions on particular programmes or academic
disciplines: Pillay takes the discipline of history within the South African
academy as a case study to ask first, ‘. . . how history produces History’
and, second, what would be entailed in not only deracialising the personnel
of the academe but also decolonising knowledge production within it.
Lalu asks how a new programme on the study of the humanities in Africa,
which is located within the Subaltern Studies tradition, could work its
way out of the authoritarian legacy. And Rowe asks how a Catholic college
can sustain a value position and an intellectual tradition within its
humanities programme that asserts the common good against the
individualistic norms and pragmatist logic of the dominant ideology.
Moving away from particular disciplines and programmes but pursuing
the same critical goal, the chapters in this volume also question whether
the more general structure and discursive orientation of the academy
equip us to imagine change: Higgins focuses on the organisation of
enquiry, testing the epistemic separation between, and hierarchical
ordering of, the academic domains concerned with the semiotic cultural
and the political real. The philosopher, Olivier, asks how a received
political vocabulary can envisage a different humanity when it is grounded
in a ‘conventional morality’ that issues from (and affirms) hegemonic
social, political and economic discourses. And Chipkin asks whether the
quasi-government sponsored Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC),
an organisation equipped to respond ‘flexibly and comprehensively to
national requirements’, can produce critical work.
Framing and Revisiting 17

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.

Imagining the state and its subjects


There is no way of understanding the blend of critique and prescription
that runs through these pages without dealing with the ‘state-fetishism’
which, in Neocosmos’s view ‘has been the dominant way of conceiving
the political capacity to transform reality’. This is not, of course, a trivial
question because – to complete Neocosmos’s poser – ‘if the problem in
Africa has been the state, then a new way of conceiving politics must be
developed’. Some necessary disciplinary and political history explains
why this is so.
Early forms of social theorising fed into the development of the first
states. The two treaties, Osnabrück and Münster, which together
constituted the Peace of Westphalia, gave birth to these new social
formations in Europe in 1648. The state, as the dominant form of social
organisation, is sometimes regarded as one of the great achievements of
modernisation. But it was born of a moment of epistemic violence – to
use Gayatri Spivak’s term – because it legitimised state sovereignty as a
means to discipline the social world, setting in train a process by which
the state (and its institutions) would be the marker of – and would mark
– the future.
Four short years later the first colonial settlement of the Cape took
place.3 The Cape of Good Hope – geographic place, discursive idea and
set of institutions – was rooted within the dominant discourse of the time.
The fact that this ‘new’ place should increasingly take the form of a political
community – a state – was commonsensical to those who were involved
in the exercise. Like other far-flung places, the Cape of Good Hope –
and later South Africa – represented modernity’s unfolding promise. One
18 Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin

of the consequences of Westphalia was the development and export of an


idea and theory of the state. This was taken up by the utilitarian thinker,
Jeremy Bentham, who first used the word ‘international’ in 1789. One
hundred and thirty years later the practice of statehood, and its myriad of
discursive forms, prompted Weber to observe that the state’s distinguishing
feature is that it enjoys a monopoly of the means of violence. Chipkin
calls Weber’s insight the ‘ “empirical” measure of stateness’. The limits of
the state as a social institution, especially its counter-Enlightenment
authoritarian tendencies, would generate fierce contestations over social
relations in the – to use Benedict Anderson’s iconic phrase – imagined
community called South Africa (Anderson 1983). These would run for
three-and-a-half centuries, as the genealogy which follows will suggest.
The intrusion of this modern European form of the state into southern
Africa disrupted traditional patterns of life and, in time, brought into
play the three great categories of social thought that have dominated the
story of South Africa: colonialism, race and class. The presence of these
three issues has often positioned South Africa as a veritable case study in
social theorising. Hannah Arendt (1951), for example, drew on South
African history to illustrate the tangled roots of both imperialism and
totalitarianism. But the telling of this history, and the complicity of the
discipline of history in its telling, which is the subject of Lalu’s chapter,
suggests that the Enlightenment bequeathed South African history a
contradictory legacy.
South Africa’s Afrikaners were caught in these contradictions as they
searched for knowledge, identity and, finally, statehood. A distaste for
empire and a fierce republicanism drew them towards interpretations of
race that were readily acceptable in early forms of social theorising. Raewyn
Connell notes that ‘ethnography’ – upon which apartheid was built – was
also known, in the nineteenth century, as the ‘science of racial difference’
and points out that a book called Sociology based upon Ethnography, published
in 1881, set out to build a sociological account of racial distinctions
(Connell 2007: 11). The cumulative legacy of this discourse would
eventually draw South Africa towards the abyss in the late 1980s.
Mythology, religion and the power of language as a force for mobilisation
fostered narrow, exclusive and increasingly racist ways of both explaining
Framing and Revisiting 19

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

By the end of the nineteenth century, racialised interpellations of the


subjects of the state was a project shared by the Cape colonial government
and their Afrikaner republican neighbours. Following a shift in the
political balance of power from an alliance between the colonial
government and an agricultural peasantry to one between the colonial
government, mining industry and large commercial agriculture in the
1880s, the Cape colonial government differentiated between its ‘European’
citizens and the native, who were not entitled to the protection and services
of colonial government. From this point on race, rather than class, became
the primary organising principle for social differentiation in the Cape
(Bickford-Smith 1995).
Notwithstanding this common tendency towards racial differentiation,
early contestations over unfolding social and political relations in South
Africa were cast along the axis of difference between two representations
of minorities, colloquially called Boer and Brit. Their conflict and co-
operation came to fashion the early form that was taken by the state called
South Africa both before and after its emergence as a state a full century
ago.
Although its state form expressed European thinking, South Africa
was not entirely foreign made. The growth of a local academy did bring
South African issues closer to home, as it were. In these developments,
the social sciences played a role. So it was that the idea of apartheid was
crucially shaped by three social scientists: the sociologist, Geoffrey Cronje;
the anthropologist, W.M. Eiselen; and Hendrik Verwoerd, who was trained
in psychology. Each was drawn to the instrumental logic of the ‘science of
ethnography’ and positioned this in the emerging republican discourse
that underpinned Afrikaner nationalism. For all its contradictions, this
discourse suggested that it was possible to perfect a European state in
Africa. In this tragic unfolding, institutions – societies, churches and
eventually nationalist-centred universities – authorised particular forms
of knowledge with codes of practice that were not friendly to the idea of
free speech.
As elsewhere, the great rupture to this was not drawn from local
knowledge. In the 1960s and 1970s, thinking about social relations in
South Africa was torn asunder by the overwhelming force of class analysis
Framing and Revisiting 21

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

and it is as well to remember that much South African Marxism – both


within and outside the academy – was closely tied to ‘political thuggery,
dogmatism, slander’ (Nash 1999: 78).
But the deep epistemic break – as Foucault called the moment when
the unthinkable becomes thinkable – lay in the much-researched, but
poorly understood, issue of race that was drawn to the fore in the early
1970s. The question, put in crude terms, was this: who were South
Africans? Were they, as the country’s English-speakers claimed, bearers
of the benign tendencies of imperial power? Were they, as Afrikaners
hoped, an anointed European tribe in Africa? Or were they, as more
crude Marxists often declared, an exploited proletariat on the periphery
of a capitalist world? Of course, South Africans were all of these, and
none of them. As is the case for all states, the country was a community-
in-the-making – Anderson’s constantly ‘imagined community’ – and its
making was contingent on the assumptions upon which social thinking
was based. But accepting this instability was not possible within
formulations that promised permanence and predictability. Drawing upon
the writing of Fanon, a young South African medical student, Steven
Bantu Biko, broke the impasse by famously declaring: ‘Black man, you’re
on your own’ (1978: 97). This black consciousness was a fresh framing of
South Africa’s deepest social issue, race, and, as importantly, it’s framing
was not anchored in metropolitan ideas. The body of this approach to
social relations was forcefully drawn into an analysis of racism by Chabani
Manganyi’s 1973 book, Being Black-in-the-World.
The social theorising that would drive towards apartheid’s end was a
melange of old and new understandings of the social world: race, class,
nationalism, black consciousness and, of course, the market. This was
also a time of critical thought, a time when it was hoped that ‘society – its
politics, its ways of functioning, and its institutions – should work in the
service of the people that comprise it, not the other way round’, as Rowe
argues in Chapter 8. Pithouse is at pains to point out in Chapter 6 that
these new understandings challenged the logic of the country’s universities
(and, indeed, disciplinary canons), leading to the expectation that they
would be redefined to serve more emancipatory purposes. As we have
seen, however, this did not happen. Instead of commencing the long
Framing and Revisiting 23

haul towards building universities and disciplines oriented towards


developing a deliberative democracy, universities fell under the thrall of
technocratic management, corporatisation and pragmatism, couched in
the slippery talk of ‘world class’, ‘internationally competitive’ and ‘global
standards’. As Rowe recalls: ‘As time went on . . . the discussions start to
shift from what we should have and how to work toward it, to simply
“what will work” and what we will settle for . . . the disturbing thing was
that “what will work” worked for fewer and fewer people.’
The narrower question of why it was that apartheid ended remains
unresolved. Beyond the conventional wisdom around the rise (and
undoubted reordering) of Margaret Thatcher’s economics, Ronald
Reagan’s build-up of weapons and the raw courage of Mikhail Gorbachev,
lie a complex series of wider geo-political ruptures that closed the Cold
War era. Apartheid, this chain of reasoning runs, ended because the Cold
War did. But claiming one of these interpretations – or even a chain of
them – as the true explanation for apartheid’s ending, may be premature.
The salutary lesson in understanding change is not that history can end;
it is Chou En-Lai’s lesson. Asked in the 1950s about the consequences of
the 1789 French Revolution, he famously replied, ‘It’s still too early to
say’.
The dominant utilitarian theory that promotes the idea of market-
mediated social relations within a thin form of electoral democracy
guaranteed by rights-based constitutionalism is a far cry from the people-
centred hopes that inhabited social discourse in the late 1980s, to borrow
an idea from Pillay. But this may last only a fleeting moment. Chipkin
recognises that the South African state has not only found itself in the
neo-capitalist global arena, but has also found itself positioned as a post-
colonial African country within that arena. This produces a tension
between a neo-liberal discourse in which the ‘the very idea of “social
citizenship” has been called into question’ and a nationalist post-colonial
discourse in which ‘the unity of the nation is instantiated by that of the
black subject’, argues Chipkin, citing Kymlicka and Norman (1994). The
resulting tensions are at the heart of almost every conversation on the
country and its future.
24 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

Rowe, the recovery of a Catholic intellectual tradition; for Higgins, the


recovery of depleted and misconstrued conceptual resources. But it will
also involve the rupture of received representations for Lalu, and received
conceptualisations and morality, for both Olivier and Pillay. Mostly,
however, it will involve transcendence of the grim modernity of the present
and its transformation to achieve Olivier’s ‘continued relevance, and
indeed, the indispensable role of the humanities concerning the existence
of a world that is recognisably human’. All of these involve reviving critical
thought to enable thinking new possibilities into being.
The fecund ideas in these pages aim to renew critical social theorising
in South Africa and to position it at the centre of social enquiry. The
purpose is to restore education – especially higher education – as the
custodian of the democratic public sphere. This book comes at a time
when the limits of what the late Tony Holiday once called ‘constricting
locution’ are plain (2005). Many who celebrated the triumph of neo-liberal
globalisation now fear the ringing of the stock exchange bell. And at the
periphery – as the generation of thinkers inspired by the once maligned
and now greatly missed Andre Gunder Frank called it – fresh new ideas
about ways to organise the social world are emerging. As the contributors
to this collection believe, reviving South Africa’s once obsessive interest
in social theory has much to offer these debates and, perhaps, more to
offer the country’s people.
Thinking critically is not untoward, as suggested in the opening
paragraph; rather, it is imperative. As Schatzki puts it, ‘. . . South Africa
is well positioned to contribute strongly in the future to the elaboration
of social theories adequate to changing global constellations of power,
finance, culture, production and governance.’

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

3. This date, 1652, is included here as a marker only. Although it is difficult,


based on current understandings, to believe that the formation of the state we
call South Africa could be at any other time.

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