Re-imagining The Social In South Africa: Critique, Theory And Post-aparheid Society

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1 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

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critique in the service of social justice has been hollowed out of postapartheid 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 ‘parliamentary 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

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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 neoHegelian 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 marketbased 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

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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’.

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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.

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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 neoliberalism 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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 ‘WhiteMan’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 establishment 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.

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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 cooperation 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

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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 antiapartheid 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,

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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 communityin-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

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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 marketmediated social relations within a thin form of electoral democracy guaranteed by rights-based constitutionalism is a far cry from the peoplecentred 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 postcolonial 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.

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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

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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).

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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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