Remains of the Social

313 Pages·2017·7.57 MB·English

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)
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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
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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.
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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