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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it. In Undoing Apartheid, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company - Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission - which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth - if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Apartheid’s Double-binds
Tragedy Strikes
Beginnings
Unlearning Apartheid’s Sophistry
Wounded Education
Theory and Theatre
Setting to Work
Thinking Ahead
Notes
2 Apartheid’s Mythic Precursors
The Limits of Reason
Science Meets its Match
The Eclipse of Reason
Communication and Satire
Star-eyed Despair
Cybernetic Loops and Circular Causalities
Notes
3 The Return of Faust: Rats, Hyenas and other Miscreants
Faustus on Safari
Back to the Future
Doubling the Wager
Enter the Devil
A Rat in the Kitchen
Uncanny Returns
The Wound
Notes
4 Woyzeck and the Secret Life of Apartheid’s Things
Apartheid’s Subjects
Theatres of Subjection
Büchner’s Woyzeck
Displacements of Animate Objects
Neither Saint nor Sinner
Woyzeck in South Africa
Notes
5 Post-Apartheid Slapstick
Absurdism
Slapstick in Critical Theory
Violent Humour
Recoil
Spiralling Forward
Notes
6 The Double Futures of Post-Apartheid Freedom
Exit Apartheid
Cinematographic Memory
Partitioning Sense and Perception
Returning to Athlone
Stumbling in Athlone
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Plates
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Malcom Ferdinand,
Decolonial Ecology
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Dénètem Touam Bona,
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
Undoing Apartheid
Premesh Lalu
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Premesh Lalu 2023
The right of Premesh Lalu to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5282-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5283-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937711
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For
John Mowitt
Qadri Ismail
Rashieda Nkunkumana
Lolo Mkhonto
Saliem Patel
Acknowledgements
This book is the product of conversations with colleagues, graduate fellows, visiting scholars and researchers at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) of the University of the Western Cape over more than ten years. I hope that traces of our discussions will be found in the pages of Undoing Apartheid, and that this work serves as an acknowledgement of the generosity and collegiality for which the Centre at UWC is known. I thank my colleagues at the CHR for their patience in the making of this long-overdue work. The book responds to the CHR’s inaugural question of the meaning of post-apartheid freedom, especially through sustained projects on aesthetic education, the becoming technical of the human, and communicating the humanities.
I am especially grateful to those who read and commented on earlier drafts. They include Jesse Bucher, Jacob Cloete, Seelan Naidoo, Debjani Ganguly, Adam Sitze, Monika Mehta, Ian Baucom, James Chandler, Jane Ohlmeyer, Michael Neocosmos, John Noyes, Christoph Marx, Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Heidi Grunebaum, Aidan Erasmus, Valmont Layne, Lauren van der Rede, Fernanda Pinto de Almeida, Emma Minkley, Gary Minkley, Thozama April, Crain Soudien, Pumla Gobodo Madikizela, Daryl Hendley, Pamela Scully, Tim Campbell, Sipho Dlamini, Ben Nolan, Anaïs Nony, Ali Ridha Khan, Reza Khota, Qadri Ismail, John Mowitt, Shamil Jeppie, Marissa Moorman, Jon Soske, Jean Allman, Dan Magaziner, Warren Crichlow, Kass Banning, Carina Ray, Tejumola Olaniyan, Gary Candasamy, Nicky Rousseau, Riedwaan Moosage, Bianca van Laun, Binyam Sisay Mendisu, Surafel Wondimu, Timothy Murray, Ranjana Khanna and Srinivas Aravamudan. Basil Jones, Adrian Kholer, Jane Taylor, Siphokazi Mpofu, Luyanda Nogodlwana, Sipho Ngxola, Janni Younge and Aja Marneweck provided me with a much-needed education in puppetry arts. Helen Moffett’s careful reading of the entire manuscript deserves special mention, as do Chumisa Fihla and Retha Ferguson for the making of the cover artwork. Iona Gilburt believed in this book in ways that made its completion possible and Julie van der Vlugt offered invaluable editorial support in the final stages. Patricia Hayes, the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory in the CHR, has been an invaluable interlocutor over many years. I wish to especially thank my research assistant, Kiasha Naidoo, for her insights, thoughtfulness, and philosophical commitments.
A three-month writing fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College, Dublin provided much-needed respite from the demands of directing a humanities centre and access to the necessary library resources to think about race and apartheid in a global frame. An early attempt to provide a synthesis of the present book at the invitation of Dianna Shandy at the Macalester College Kofi Annan Centre inspired me to refine the argument, so too colleagues at the Dahlem Centre for the Humanities at Freie Universität Berlin, ICGC at the University of Minnesota and the Africa Institute in Sharjah. I also wish to thank members of the Advisory Board of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes for giving me an opportunity to learn from a truly trans-hemispheric humanities exchange.
This book benefited enormously from the guidance of Leticia Sabsay, Natalia Brizuela and Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, editors of the Critical South Series, and Judith Butler and Penelope Deutscher, convenors of the Andrew W. Mellon-funded International Consortium of Critical Theory Programmes, for unwavering support for my work. John Thompson and Julia Davies at Polity Press offered much-needed guidance and facilitated the publication process.
Ajay Lalu, Jaymathie Lalu and Hansa Lalloo, and my daughter, Kiera Lalu, have been unflinching in their support of my meandering scholarly pursuits. For Kiera, my most incisive interlocutor, I hope this serves as a gesture of friendship across the generations. Finally, this book is an effort to make sense of Jayantilal Lalu’s many cautions about what he called apartheid’s acts of daylight robbery.
I dedicate this book to two exceptional educators, John Mowitt and Qadri Ismail, as well as three formidable critics of apartheid, Rashieda Nkunkumana, Lolo Mkhonto and Saliem Patel, from whom I have had the good fortune to learn in the heady days of the student struggles of 1985.
1IntroductionApartheid’s Double-binds
Come with me; for my painful wound
Requires thy friendly hand to help me onward.
Sophocles, Philoctetes
Tragedy Strikes
This book tracks the sporadic two-centuries-long emergence of a sentient subject of modernity, in the hope that it might render an image of the perceptual habits formed by apartheid’s mythic core, particularly that mythos expressed as an extreme tautology of race lodged in the banality of the everyday. This mostly neglected feature of a system of racial oppression now foreshadows a reckoning with apartheid’s aftermaths, imbricated as they are with a techno-modernity of our contemporary world. It certainly weighs on the need to unlearn habits and attitudes formed under apartheid, and the necessity to re-enchant the desire for post-apartheid freedom. But more is needed. The terrain of sense-perception served as a specific site of apartheid’s attention, a site where we discover its double-binds. These, as it turns out, were experienced as a condition of race, not once, but twice – as grand apartheid and as petty apartheid. While grand apartheid is plotted in a familiar architectonics that combines metaphors of architecture and social engineering, the seemingly intractable and elusive character of petty apartheid, which mostly goes unnoticed, may yet teach us something about an enduring and persistent problem of race and modernity. Unless rethought and extended beyond, this deceptively benign strand of petty apartheid is likely to bring a long-brewed idea of race full circle.
The blockage was revealed at the very point where attempts were made to undo apartheid’s oppressive grip on everyday life. Apartheid, as a project that tilted sentience towards ever-more mechanical forms of life, appeared to have wedged itself in the circuits of sense and perception, leaving little room for manoeuvre or escape, and even less for desire.
This difficulty dawns for the reader who takes to the streets of the pages of Richard Rive’s novel, Emergency Continued.1 Here the gathering storm of protest fuels an urgent debate about the competing exigencies of liberation and education during the dying days of apartheid. As Andrew Dreyer, a college lecturer and lead protagonist, puts pen to paper in a bid to describe a political impasse, he is confronted by a feeling of sheer exhaustion at his own futile efforts to overcome apartheid. The year is 1985 and the setting the edges of Cape Town, in a racially separated zone cursed with the name of the last British governor in South Africa, Athlone, in the aftermath of large-scale forced relocations under the dreaded resettlements of the Group Areas Act of 1950. Fearful of becoming cogs in the apartheid machine, students on the Cape Flats join a country-wide boycott of formal schooling in light of the draconian emergency regulations imposed on everyday life.2 Like Dreyer, they brush up against a barrier of indecision, weighing the tactical implications of the difference between the entrenched structures of apartheid and its everyday constraints in delaying the onset of freedom. Despite his weariness about the effectiveness of a schools boycott, Dreyer the teacher asks whether there may be more at stake in the debate about liberation and education as a means of achieving the desire for post-apartheid freedom than the students imagine.
Rive brings us face-to-face with the threat of the eternal returns of race that plague the students in his novel. Beyond the standpoints that education avails, the reader is compelled to reflect on what has become of the promise of education against the backdrop of a revolting city – both a city in revolt and one that produces sensations of nausea. Contrasted with Rive’s much earlier novel, Emergency,3 about the experience of the generation of nationalist opposition in 1960, Emergency Continued takes us to the heart of the street fighting in 1985 in order to ask what has remained unresolved in critiques of apartheid. The limitations of the schools boycott are placed alongside an earlier struggle, of the generation of the Mandelas and the Sobukwes, which culminated in a state of emergency being declared in 1960. In contrast to the struggles that tested the limits of apartheid’s legality in Emergency, in Emergency Continued a generation of students stumbles on a more discreet form of violence enacted in everyday life, and which places under threat all desire for the future.
In the much later sequel, the reader is presented with a raging disagreement about liberation and education when competing claims made on the image of freedom are cut short by a surreal act of state violence that rapidly gained notoriety as the Trojan Horse massacre. Images of a trap set for protesting students soon found expression in a popular ancient myth. As the language of the streets seeps into the classroom of the teachers’ training college in Athlone, the beleaguered Dreyer, who is presented as both a failed writer and a disillusioned former anti-apartheid activist, is forced to come to terms with the fact that education is not immune from the mythic incursions that apartheid enacts upon psychic life. His waning belief in the efficacy of politics to offer a solution for life under an oppressive system leads him to ponder whether education might offer the only hope for overcoming apartheid. As the anxieties produced by that which returns through mythic infiltrations of the everyday intensify, he realizes that the students are trapped in a zone of indecision, albeit not of their own making.
Figuring out the difference between two states of emergency, the text turns its attention to the contradictory impulses expressed through competing political slogans – ‘liberation before education’ and ‘education before liberation’ – that surfaced, exposing the unanticipated generational tension brought about by apartheid’s conflicting orchestrations. When his activist son, Bradley, rejects the façade of normalcy surrounding education in an unmistakably abnormal society of permanent emergency, Dreyer has little option but to reckon with the disavowed political views he once embraced in his youth. References to Dreyer’s failure as a writer explain blockages of desire that multiply with successive states of emergency. He nevertheless commits himself to preserving something from the vestiges of an education system on the brink of collapse rather than risk a decision that might exacerbate an already debilitating intergenerational conflict.
The uncertainty of what was to come, in contrast to what was to be overcome, is the generative spirit behind Emergency Continued, a title that expresses immediate trepidation about a future beyond apartheid constituted by endless collisions. Rive’s novel confronts the unceasing threat of the return of myth in the streets in which the story unfolds. This premonition relayed fears of the abrupt foreclosures of mythic violence before a resolution to the disagreement about liberation and education could be reached. Dreyer searches for ways to nurture the educational sentiment in the itinerant worldliness of students that precedes the onset of such violence, but with little success. Although the students’ movement is premised on the demand for an education unencumbered by the designs of state power, state power ultimately distracts from the pursuits of education.
Sooner or later, the embattled educator must reckon with the drift towards permanent emergency. While crediting the students with this discovery, he also cautions that the hitherto discrete script of race, which they have resolutely identified as the target of their militancy, has also been constituted as a source of superstition and paranoia that threatens the partitioned city from within, and which must be confronted through conscientious study. Emergency Continued extends a hand of friendship across the generational divide in the hope of tempering perpetual internal strife among those most harmed by the banality of apartheid. The promissory statement of the text lies in a mostly untapped resource for relinking education to politics and life, albeit from the shards of memory lodged in the crevices of the divided city. Amidst the ruins of apartheid’s permanent emergency, Rive is concerned with generational feuds over fragments of memories.
If the generation of 1985 identified a psychopathology shaped by apartheid’s rationality that had been overlooked by Mandela and Sobukwe’s generation in the 1960s, Rive would have his readers believe that the former risked something far greater than their predecessors did. If they insisted on revolt at the expense of study, they risked squandering their accidental discovery of a symptom otherwise overlooked in the critique of the meaning of race under apartheid. The concern about an intergenerational conflict that would outlive apartheid reflected an anxiety about the intensification of oppression in which the expansion of technological resources in everyday life produced a masochism of speed and a claustrophobic constriction of space.
The novel does not present a yearning for a return to normalized education, which under apartheid was anyway inconceivable, but a search for a form of education that points towards an exit from the constraints of apartheid that the students stumbled upon in the course of their struggles. It expresses resolute confidence in education as necessary for ensuring a redemptive end to apartheid. This is exemplified by the way in which the text works as a chronicle foretold, in which the search for an educational outlet was foreclosed by the Trojan Horse massacre. Refusing to pit education against the demands of liberation, Rive believes that a pursuit of knowledge that draws on the confrontation with mythic constellations in everyday life may be a critical resource for a future beyond apartheid. In places like Athlone, a dumping ground for apartheid’s racial policies of forced removals and Group Areas demarcation in which the novel is set, education required the additional resources of intuition to evade surrender to apartheid’s determinations of a fateful destiny.
The tenor of Rive’s novel emulates a life of anticipation on the outskirts of the city, where intuition had become a habituated form of surviving the drudgery of everyday life. The quality of anticipation was widespread. Exactly a year before the massacre of 1985, for example, students at a local school staged Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Trojan Women a mere stone’s throw from where Rive’s literary foray was set. Randi Hartzenberg, an art teacher at a local Athlone school, was inspired by Sartre’s 1965 adaptation of the Euripides play, upon which he happened in a local library while searching for traces of the struggle against apartheid in France’s colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Besides serving as a commentary on political anxiety about the threat of violence, the production of Sartre’s play in Athlone foretold an impending collision in which manifestations of the unconscious in everyday life brushed up against the edifice of a divided city. Yet an educational sensibility prevailed as dreams of a post-apartheid future were wrapped in the garb of an ancient myth, this time to decry the lingering effects of war on those who had fallen prey to acts of colonial and imperial deception; later, in Rive’s novel, the warning is of uncanny returns. As everyday life collided with an oppressive and suffocating racial formation, the myth of the Trojan Horse revealed something hitherto unanticipated and dangerously virulent in the content of apartheid’s violent rationality.
In ‘Study and Revolt’, Adam Sitze encourages us to follow Rive in asking what to do with the idea of ‘school’ – and scholē – that seems to have been a specific site of indecision and intensification under rule of the permanent emergency of apartheid.4 Perhaps the students’ movement evinced a desire for a mode of schooling that restored an interval which could avert the threat of being overwhelmed by the rapid expansion of technological resources against the backdrop of political constraint. Both study and revolt were appropriate methods of staving off such a fate, even if they offered different prospects for charting a destiny unmoored from apartheid’s stifling racial formations. Through nuances of competing temporalities, Emergency Continued permits the reader to explicate the dangers unforeseen by the students preoccupied with their indecision about education and liberation in the months leading up to the Trojan Horse massacre. That which is unforeseen, however, also proves to be a feature of apartheid that had not been grasped by the earlier generation of Mandela and Sobukwe. As successive generations emerged from prison, they ignored a caution that showed not only how myth had seeped into education, but that myth signalled a deeper crisis for the ideal of post-apartheid freedom. Rive’s Emergency Continued ends on a note of disenchantment as Dreyer and Bradley face a future of indeterminate intergenerational conflict. The disenchantment Rive seems to have intuited would be one result of the counterintuitive model of education bequeathed by apartheid, which would stultify any desire for post-apartheid freedom.
Beginnings
This work, Undoing Apartheid, is motivated by the need to escape Rive’s quandary by arguing that only an aesthetic education attuned to a desire for post-apartheid freedom can properly prepare for a future beyond apartheid, especially with regard to an apartheid of the everyday, known as petty apartheid. Understood as an operation of racial interpellation that traps certain life forms in a near-mechanical existence by blocking pathways to the enchantments of freedom, the aftershocks of petty apartheid would be felt long after apartheid had been laid to rest, thwarting desire and bedevilling creativity wherever it left a trace. The question then, as now, is how to re-enchant the desire for freedom against the backdrop of a racial modernity that took shape under the sign of petty apartheid.
A brief caveat followed by a proposal for how best to proceed is necessary at this point. Since petty apartheid has at best proven elusive to critical currents of theories of the state in South Africa, and while it is mostly unavailable as a trace in the archive, the work of unravelling its effects may be best apprehended in the patterns of everyday life formed in repertoires of object theatre. A key aspect of object theatre is its reliance on mnemotechnic objects – instrumentalities of communication used to record, recall and replay – that offer a rare glimpse of the psychic breach orchestrated in the guise of petty apartheid. But object theatre is not simply beholden to the scripts which it enacts. It is rather an exemplary model of aesthetic education, drawing us towards the realms of techne, or the work of crafting that is not reducible to a distinction between a world of contingencies and necessity, but a way of knowing in which things can be otherwise. Where a racial modernity is pressured by a yearning for a future beyond it, object theatre may very well marshal the resources of an aesthetic education towards outwitting the uncanny returns of race.
What is needed is a form of education capable of surpassing the circular causality of race that paradoxically destines modernity to return to a partitioned fate. A model of political education that seeks mastery over this wretched predicament, or one which proceeds via methods derived from anthropology and history to recollect that which has been forgotten, will no longer suffice for the task of undoing apartheid. The double-bind of apartheid’s discursivity solicits a twofold approach. While training the senses on the attractions of the object, where the consiliences of the arts and sciences that resulted in a modern concept of race are made available for scrutiny, it simultaneously calls attention to how the object might be put to work in the interests of a viable concept of reconciliation endowed with a truth content and capable of overturning apartheid’s sordid rationality. If race, as I argue, came to signify the drift towards mechanized life in modernity, apartheid’s end must necessarily be scripted in a manner that releases the energies appropriated to the technical circuits that sustained a facile and psychically debilitating orchestration of a racial modernity.
Fortuitously, on the cusp of a much-vaunted transition to democracy in South Africa, the quagmire of a racial modernity resurfaced in three theatrical works – two by William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company, and a third written by Jane Taylor – that thematized the human and technological entanglements of petty apartheid. Faust, Woyzeck and Ubu Roi were originally conceived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Büchner and Alfred Jarry respectively, at times when the human condition seemed imperilled by uncertainty regarding the rapid expansion of technological resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This European hermeneutics of theatrical suspicion, I argue, paralleled the proliferation of origin myths of race that ensued with the abolition of slavery. With, we should add, one significant difference that resurfaced on the eve of the demise of apartheid: as Europe turned its back on the figure of the slave in 1834, from the vantage of the Cape Colony, the slave bore witness to an afterlife inscribed in a signifier of race that disparagingly degraded life into elementary parts.
Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld and Ubu and the Truth Commission compositely brush up against the demand to de-constitute a modern configuration of race as it suffused an emerging field of experimental psychology, or psychotechnics, that presumed a disaggregation of the apparatus of sense-perception.5 The garnering of a theatrical response to this inheritance reclaims an element of surprise directed at the task of making history, rather than merely recording or recalling the past. Harnessing figurative and literal references to labour, discipline and power, in their South African incarnations Faustus, Woyzeck and Ubu disclose subjectivities embroiled in a turbulent struggle between human and machine that belies the otherwise calm appearance of the co-evolution of object life in modernity. Whether in fears of displacement of the human by technology (Faustus), the depletion of sensory resources (Woyzeck), or the collisions of unrequited love in ideals of truth and reconciliation (Ubu), each revolves around a contradiction of instrumental reason that came to pass as petty apartheid. Thematization of the human and machine thus refracted via the medium of a theatre of objects in a South African setting helps to craft an image of localized life in a struggle to stave off the overwhelming technological reorientations underway in the world.
To bring about a twist in the tale of fate, the works under discussion here exploit an indecision about apartheid’s place in the co-evolving story of the human and technology. They confront those anxieties regarding an enlightenment in which the slide into mechanized forms of life unfolded as a story of an incremental racialized modernity. The audience is encouraged to reconsider the problem not at the level of grand design of political programmes, but in intricate mechanisms and techniques that threaten to overwhelm life at its most individuated encounter in a changing world. This is achieved by deftly assembling elements of myth and machine that held sway in the shifting relation between subjects and objects – in a bid to flip object life into a renewed scene of freedom.
To the extent that this book conjures up an image of freedom to which the medium of theatricality aspires, it is similarly committed to asking whether the enigmatic charm of theatrical objects might help to re-enchant the desire for post-apartheid freedom. This is tantamount to asking whether the Trojan Horse offers to art, politics and writing what Monique Wittig, in a ground-breaking essay from 1984, saw as a necessary process of questioning with which to reimagine freedom. Wittig elucidates how event, metaphor and memory thrive in the shadows of the Trojan Horse, yet remain beholden to the seductions of instrumentalities of war upon which oppression ultimately pivots.
The horse built by the Greeks is doubtless also one for the Trojans, while they still consider it with uneasiness. It is barbaric for its size but also for its form, too raw for them, the effeminate ones, as Virgil calls them. But later on, they become fond of the apparent simplicity, within which they see sophistication. They see, by now, all the elaboration that was hidden at first under a brutal coarseness. They come to see as strong, powerful, the work they had considered formless. They want to make it theirs, to adopt it as a monument and shelter it in their walls, a gratuitous object whose only purpose is to be found in itself. But what if it were a war machine?6
What, indeed, if the arrival of the post-apartheid evokes memories of a Trojan Horse that turns out to be little more than a war machine with which we have come to make a premature peace? The motif of the Trojan Horse describes the seemingly inescapable arc of human attitudes to technological objects: from trepidation to gradual accommodation. To paraphrase Wittig, what if this war machine requires a detour where the shock of words produced by their association, disposition and arrangement now calls for a work of turning raw material into something else – perhaps another perspective of freedom? Wittig lays forth a plan for gathering the aesthetic resources of myth and tragedy – where myth harbours the conditions of violence, and tragedy serves as a pathway to self-definition in modernity. Her plan enlivens the possibilities of rereading figurations of race in Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld and Ubu and the Truth Commission from which aesthetic resources may be diverted towards the productive work of re-enchantment. If the aesthetic in aesthetic education leads to a piecing together, Wittig’s injunction to unlearn assumes an equally potent educational function that ought to be clarified. The pertinent question is whether it is possible to remake post-apartheid freedom from the shards of images remaining after the violence constellated by the Trojan Horse of petty apartheid.
Taking seriously the diminutive descriptor, a strand of racial thinking that surfaced as a trait of petty apartheid in South Africa emulated a dangerously simplistic response to a complex problem arising from the nineteenth-century Promethean shifts in distributions of energy between humans and machines that accompanied a revolution in thermodynamics. Briefly, the first law of thermodynamics laid the foundation for a principle of energy conservation to determine the place of the human in a nexus of nature and technology. In the 1860s, an attempt to violate a second law of thermodynamics by introducing an imaginary mediator, Maxwell’s demon, established a precedent to redistribute entropic energy towards an extreme ordered state. The violation of this second law, while failing to live up to the expectation of perpetual motion machines, nevertheless affected contentions about the distribution of energy across the spectrum of the human, nature, information and technology: as the source of a metabolic rift (Marx and Engels), as transforming labour into a perfect machine (Sergei Podolinsky), or as a sensory-energetic loop resulting in active sensing (Wilhelm Wundt).7 Petty apartheid seems to have reductively settled on the informational dynamic of sense-perception derived from Wundt, whose studies into nerve mechanics in the bonds of individual and group psychologies found expression in a working out of a twentieth-century category of race with which South Africa was to become synonymous.
Apartheid, by this account, strategically combined technology (the architectonic implementation of scientific knowledge) with a machinery (stratagems, abilities, instruments of power, or tricks) to transfer indelibly the mythic precursors of race to a near-automated form of life.8 The many architectural and engineering metaphors used to describe its power somehow fail to account for this level of technical and mechanistic existence. Focus on the level of apartheid’s architectonics has meant that the process of corralling disorderly intensities of racial feeling and attitudes into a system of communication and control by the state project of apartheid has been overlooked. Much like the science of cybernetics established after World War II, which resulted in the invention of automated machines inspired by discoveries of machine control over the unpredictable qualities of human speech, an apartheid of the everyday ordered race, conscripting its signifier in the transmission of messages between human and machine, in an overarching technology of power.9
With all the trappings of a repressed mythic inheritance that bound human subjection to machines, petty apartheid was tantamount to a Trojan Horse dispatched to conjure a feeling of unceasing strife, requiring a tautological stoking of the flames of civil war by means of everyday provocations to justify the enforcement of stasis, a future collapsed into a recurring present. This prohibitive and constraining circular causality took on the characteristics of a self-perpetuating circuit in which race served as a standing reserve of energy that could be relied on to propel and modulate the exercise of power.10 The result was a convenient state fiction about sensory aphasia, a belief premised on a false problem of the assumed dissonance of images and words against which the orders of race were mapped and enforced. The ability to outwit the political sophistry of apartheid hinges on where precisely we apprehend the effects of race in this tautology. Rather than begin with the presumption of a master plan, I suggest that we begin elsewhere: at the point where a post-apartheid future encounters the remains of race in everyday life.
Unlearning Apartheid’s Sophistry
The lifting of the burden of apartheid in South Africa was tinged with irony as celebrations of the dawn of democracy unfolded a stone’s throw from an official archive of the unfulfilled promises made to emancipated slaves in the Cape Colony in 1834. Crowds gathered at the Grand Parade in Cape Town to welcome Mandela and his peers – once banished to an island prison – at the very site where slaves rejoiced upon hearing news about their pending freedom. Yet the gut-wrenching cries of racial torment (from which there had been little respite over the subsequent centuries) threatened to punctuate the euphoria surrounding the birth of democracy in South Africa at the closing of the Cold War. Fortunately, what might have passed as fear of history repeating itself – in which a desire to exit the rule of race amounts to naught – was momentarily suspended by the vista of a new horizon.11 Scenes of exuberance arising from an animated and vocal demos warded off the dark clouds of history and pointed towards a future beyond apartheid.12
Chris Ledochowski’s painterly portrait of Nelson Mandela on the balcony of the City Hall at the Grand Parade in Cape Town set the stage for aligning hope and history. Painting and photograph comingled through a shared idiom in a makeshift arena against the backdrop of Table Mountain, a garrison city beneath it, offset by the dwindling fortunes of Victorian architecture. It was a scene that evoked mixed feelings of déjà vu and future memories, in defiance of the strictures of time and space.
And so it came to be that by stepping out of the confines of prison and into a theatrical arena, Mandela’s arrival was met with the thunderous welcome of the postcolonial world that so eagerly awaited a renewed promise for the future. Amidst the jubilation of those gathered to celebrate the dawn of freedom, an unmistakably discordant note could be heard, as if to proclaim: Nomen est omen – your destiny is in your name. If there is a lesson that apartheid teaches, it is that its name, like those of slavery and colonialism, bears traces of the formation of race that would not simply disappear with a triumphalist reception of post-apartheid freedom.
Scars etched in the edifice of a divided city, formed over centuries of racial anguish, summoned long-repressed memories of offence from which the demos hoped to emerge as Mandela passed en route to his much-anticipated appearance at the Grand Parade. The burden of the past was laid bare before him: here, a reminder of the public rehanging of a deceased girl, Sara, following her suicide at the Dutch Slave Lodge in 1672;13 there, the home of the British colonial governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, where the plot to attack the Xhosa king, Hintsa, was hatched in 1834.14 And once, in that same place where a vast sea of people now gathered to welcome Mandela, an unidentified photographer captured an image of an inverted Jan van Riebeeck protesting the 1952 Tercentenary Celebrations of the fictional founding of the Cape of Good Hope.15 Mandela appeared to be stepping into a theatre of the world – one rich in irony and contradiction – rather than onto a stage of world history. While abjuring apartheid and contemplating the long walk to freedom (later the title of his famous autobiography), the demos awaited the first words of a returning hero, as if in a redemptive scene drawn from the ancient genre of tragedy.
Outrage over Mandela’s unjust imprisonment was projected onto a demos in fact and fiction. The long walk to freedom welcomed improvisation in making history. A refusal to allow his tormentors any role in preparing the journey to the centre of the city of Cape Town extended an already lengthy wait for the arrival of a long-lost hero. When he finally made an appearance, the longstanding ban placed on his image and voice, hiding him from public view for twenty-seven years, confounded anticipations and expectations. And in a moment of mild comic relief, a frantic search ensued for spectacles required to deliver a speech for which the world waited with bated breath. All was forgiven, especially since Mandela came bearing long-awaited news about racism’s last word – apartheid. Yet, in the shadow of the garrison city, questions abounded: among racism’s permutations, which script of race would be the last word signalled by apartheid? Would the wake of apartheid signal an end to the bifurcation of rural and urban labour along the lines of race and ethnicity? Or was apartheid’s eulogy performed over the psychic wreckage of everyday life unevenly borne by a racially designated population?
As Mandela looked towards the future with borrowed lenses, a gift of theatre from a distant land, written to mark the occasion of his release, plotted possible pitfalls that lay in wait along the walk to freedom, returning us to a theatrical engagement with the seepage of myth into reason. Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy restages a Sophoclean tragedy from ancient Greece to lay bare the trials and tribulations facing Mandela’s pursuit of a rhyme of hope and history.16 Hints of optimism notwithstanding, the longing for a promised tidal wave of justice was interwoven with a cautionary tale about the dangers ahead if the wound of partitioned states was left to fester. Doubling as a celebration and a plea, Heaney’s adaptation of a play from the fourth century bc begs forbearance in the face of the turbulence accompanying transitions in two such states of partition – Ireland and South Africa – at the end of the twentieth century.
The verses of The Cure at Troy express a commitment to re-enchant freedom, not by proclamation, but by encouraging and nurturing educated choices. We gather this much from how an eviscerated Philoctetes – the wounded hero of Sophocles’ original play – is summoned to temper expectations of freedom for the purposes of the equally important task of remaking the self and the demos. This considerably delicate undertaking is performed against a sparse backdrop. A minimalist setting allows for a meditation on the conflicting demands for a cure for a wound, and the desire for a release from the solitude of suffering. Why a gift in the form of a play about a wounded wretch to inspire confidence in the tasks of re-enchanting freedom?
As the story goes, during a lull in the siege of Troy, we meet a Greek archer, Philoctetes, on the island of Lemnos, where he had been abandoned by his fellow warriors after developing a reeking and festering wound from a snakebite. Although overcome by self-doubt, Philoctetes nevertheless possesses the weapon necessary for victory in the war against Troy. This leads a calculating Odysseus and a younger warrior, Neoptolemus, himself willing to forego an abiding commitment to truth in the interests of loyalty to the Greeks, to trick the wounded outcast into surrendering the divine bow needed for victory over the Trojans. Philoctetes’ expectation of being freed once he surrenders his bow leads to puzzlement about the true meaning of the archer’s desire for freedom.
Taking a leaf from The Cure at Troy, meaningful resolution to conflict can only be reached by attending to a festering wound. After all, when partition is stealthily rationalized as a basis for peaceful coexistence as in apartheid’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine or its fanciful justification as a project of ‘good neighbourliness’, it often masks a deeper wound. Strangely enough, while the world wished to be rid of the stain of past conflict with the onset of an era of globalization, and as proclamations about the end of apartheid proliferated, the scars of petty apartheid on the memory of those who lived with its worst excesses remained or continued to be inscribed. This is not to suggest that petty apartheid could or can ever be entirely detached from grand apartheid. The instabilities of race specific to the former were corralled by the sophistry of a master narrative that claimed to have established political peace – stasis – through partition. With growing weariness surrounding the political sophistry that advocated partition as a strategy to guard against civil war, a peace brokered to thwart civil war among the subjects of partition was ironic at best.
Beneath the veneer of peace, qualities of race drawn from the past appeared to be converging with expansions in technological resources that promised a new world order in the present.17 Fresh contradictions arose in the place of older unresolved ones, placing even greater constraints on transcendent political claims. Ultimately, the residual effects of myths that co-evolve with machines cannot be simply transcended – only unlearned in the process of forging newer prognoses for subjectivity. Unlearning is called for because disenchantment inevitably builds when the myth on which partition rests is folded into technology, prohibiting easy exit from its hold over a repertoire of communication and control in which modern subjectivity is ensnared. This is particularly the case when we heed the subjective constraints that accrue in the cobbling together of petty apartheid.
Petty apartheid, as suggested earlier, will only ever be undone through a process of unlearning and a simultaneous process of learning to learn. It is perhaps in the gift of a story about a wounded Philoctetes that we discover a key to unlock the promise and potential of education specific to the aesthetics necessary for simultaneously unlearning and learning to learn. In Sophocles’ play about an outcast hero, a language about education necessary for avoiding the pitfalls of a deceptive stasis makes available points of departure that extend the search for resolution to conflict while guarding against political sophistry. In short, Heaney lays out the terms for negotiating the deceptive plots of partition, garnering the mythic precursors of race and harnessing the method of education necessary for averting a slide towards recurring conflict and war.
The Cure at Troy belongs to the theatre of expectation, or what Samuel Weber calls the rise of theatrocracy in ancient Greece, disparagingly referred to as a ‘government’ of spectators. A theatrocracy eludes the grids of intelligibility of both history and anthropology in its anticipation of the subjectivity that freedom names. Consider, for example, Weber’s crisp definition of this much-maligned political offshoot of ancient theatre:
Theatrocracy, which replaces aristocracy and is not even democratic, is associated with the dissolution of universally valid laws and consequently with the destabilisation of the social space that those laws both presuppose and help maintain. The rise of theatrocracy subverts and perverts the unity of the theatron as a social and political site by introducing an irreducible and unpredictable heterogeneity, a multiplicity of perspectives and a cacophony of voices. The disruption of the theatron goes together, it seems, with a concomitant disruption of theory, which is to say, of the ability of knowledge and competence to localise things, keep them in their proper place and thus contribute to social stability.18
We should be careful not to reduce this formulation to mean mere freedom. Rather, the novelty of freedom lies in the conviction to think ahead, to think the absurd, when passions and politics are misaligned. Effectively, theatrocracy makes available a model of education for uncertain times, akin to the decision by Heaney to deliver a lesson about a future unencumbered by sectarian violence in the form of The Cure at Troy. Instead of storming the citadel, Weber notes that theatrocracy enables itinerant choruses that sidle up to the altar, issuing seductive, contagious and hypnotic strains that disrupt the injunction to know one’s place.19 By extension, Heaney’s gift to Mandela evokes a similar sentiment. Bearing the burden of history both as tragedy and farce, it is difficult to ascertain whether behind the voice that cut into the late afternoon sun in Cape Town, inviting the demos to join in the long walk to freedom, we would hear echoes of a wounded Philoctetes, a guilt-ridden Neoptolemus or a plotting Odysseus. Amidst the euphoria, a chorus similar to that encountered in Greek tragedy could be heard – welcoming Mandela with jubilant cheers in lieu of an end to threats of war. Returning home, it would appear, proved to offer welcome, if momentary, relief from the experience of exile or banishment. In verse inspired by Mandela’s release, strains of hope of a world beyond the violence of partition are conveyed by a chorus of three women reflecting on the blindness of three men:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here
Believe in miracle
And cure and healing wells.20
Nothing stirs postcolonial passions quite like the rituals surrounding the theatrical repertory of overcoming oppression, especially when the stage is set for an angst-ridden tale about an abandoned wretch with a festering wound.21 Eclipsing the hero’s welcome, the curious theatrical tale of a wounded archer with a divine bow and poisoned arrows delivers a gift that doubles as an act of generosity and trickery. Heaney finds in the occasion an opportunity to distinguish sophistry from cure, beyond the genuine expressions of joy to welcome the return of an outcast hero. Philoctetes’ mistrust of the promise of freedom that doubles as a cure for his wound is placed alongside the trickery of Odysseus, who is determined to ensure victory at any cost. Could it be that by invoking the figure of Philoctetes amidst promises of peace in a partitioned world at the end of the Cold War, Heaney looks askance at the prospect of success, pondering whether the conceit of freedom reveals that the half-true rhyme of hope and history is inevitably deceit?
Notwithstanding Heaney’s view that ‘poetry tends to evolve a little ahead of what is actually happening’, or Eugene O’Brien’s qualification that his work be read as ‘a poeticized thinking that opens up hitherto unseen and unexpected aspects of philosophy and history’,22The Cure at Troy curiously delimits the possibility of righting a past wrong through poetry, play and song.23 Rather, the medium of theatricality works niftily to craft pathways out of the impasse of the threats of recurring violence. Theatre is where a message of ‘hope’ is prepared in the wake of history’s sea-change, when the pain and stench of a festering wound thwarts the desire for a future ‘on this side of the grave’. The Cure at Troy thus makes available the memory of theatre to negotiate a passage through deception and pathos out of which a different future will have to be crafted. Heaney offers Mandela a gift about the interplay of myth and tragedy in everyday life in order to prepare for the arrival of a future that ought not to be mistaken for a ‘chronicle foretold’.
What precisely to hold onto in The Cure at Troy in order to make a hopeful future? Perhaps we are to discover in it the inspiration for a discourse on education adequate to the task of re-enchanting freedom. Or, as it pertains to the demands to quell the thirst for civil war, Heaney may be cautioning Mandela about the dangers lurking in political rationalizations obscured by characters such as Odysseus. After all, the latter acts as a master journeyman whose capacity for intentional deception, more than lying or falsehood, knows no bounds. In The Cure at Troy, the force and consequence of deception reflect the mercenary relationship that Odysseus forges with those under his tutelage, foreclosing possibilities of an education allied to the desire for freedom. The dramatic purpose served by inserting a youthful Neoptolemus between the deceptive oratory of Odysseus and the battered sensibility of Philoctetes leads to the affixing double-bind that overwhelms plans to exit a cycle of violence and recurrent generational conflict. An education oriented towards the everyday that strives to remake a concept of freedom beyond the bounds of tradition and national resonance may be the only hope of reaching Heaney’s proverbial other shore. As we learn from experiences of apartheid, such an endeavour soon brushes up against the limits of deception and sophistry. Tucked away in the gift of a Sophoclean meditation on freedom and education, Philoctetes is left uncertain about whether a humanistic or technically expedient education might potentially re-enchant his search for freedom.
Wounded Education
In The Cure at Troy
