Torn_halves_of_an_integral_decolonial_ac.pdf

Torn Halves of an Integral Decolonial Activism RhodesMustFall and Sethembile Msezane’s Chapangu Matthias Pauwels

South African artist Sethembile Msezane performing during the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the main campus of the University of Cape Town on the 9th of April 2015 after a month of student protests. The performance is entitled ‘Chapangu - The Day Rhodes Fell’ (Photograph http://www.sethembile-msezane.com).

Torn Halves of an Integral Decolonial Activism. RhodesMustFall and Sethembile Msezane’s Chapangu.

Dr. Matthias Pauwels ‣ Presentation at the two-day symposium of the South African Society of Critical Theory (SASCT), University of the Free State. Anta Boga Hotel, Bloemfontein. Friday 17 September 2017. Session 3: ‘Critical Conversations on Progress and Protests in SA’. ‣ Short version of a longer essay currently in the publication process.

I. RhodesMustFall Between ‘Poo Activism’ and Performance Extravaganza

This paper reflects on a seeming oddity during the inaugurating moment of the on-going student protests at South Africa’s universities. I refer here to the ninth of April 2015, the day on which the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the main campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT) after a month of contestations by students regarding its central position at the institution. Protests were ignited by the pouring of faeces on the statue by Chumani Maxwele a month earlier and reached their climax with ecstatic students posing triumphantly on and around the statue on the day of its removal, clenching fists and singing revolutionary songs. Somewhat removed from the heat of the action, something else drew the attention of many participants and onlookers: a somewhat enigmatic, carnivalesque performance by artist Sethembile Msezane, then a student at UCT’s Michaelis school of art. For hours on end during the removal of the statue, Msezane stood steadfastly on a white pedestal with fancy stilettos, dressed in a black lace maillot, her face covered with a traditional Zulu beaded mask and two ornamental canes with swathes of hair hanging from it attached to her arms. In this performance, Msezane creates a clever play of allusions to the history of colonialism and contemporary attempts toward decolonization. The main reference is indicated by the work’s title: Chapangu - The Day Rhodes Fell. Chapangu is the Shona word for the Bateleur Eagle, which served as model for the so-called Zimbabwe Birds, a series of soapstone sculptures that formed part of the historical city of Great Zimbabwe.

The fate of these sculptures are typical of many cultural treasures of Africa. In 1889, hunter/looter Willi Posselt took the most intact specimen of the sculptures by holding indignant locals at gunpoint and ‘compensating’ them with a few insignificant household goods. Posselt went on to sell the sculpture to Rhodes, who put it up in his Groote Schuur estate in Cape Town, where it is still kept today. In light of this troubled history, one can understand the primary set of meanings of Msezane’s poetic rendering of the Zimbabwe bird at the removal of Rhodes’ statue. Together with this statue and the colonialist legacy of plunder and cultural misrecognition that it exemplifies, Rhodes’ Zimbabwe Bird is imagined to be decolonized as well, free to fly off and return to its native land and people. If not the statue itself, then its spirit at least, was symbolically liberated when Msezane, at the exact moment when Rhodes’ statue was lifted by the crane and became airborne, proudly lifted her arms kitted out as the bateleur eagle’s wings. This gesture was completed when Msezane staged the homecoming of the Zimbabwe Bird in a later, companion performance, appropriately titled Chapangu - The Return to Great Zimbabwe. Contrasting Styles of Decolonial Cultural Activism

In this paper, I address the remarkable contrast between Msezane’s performance and the dominant cultural politics of the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement, as epitomized by its activism against Rhodes’ statue. It here concerns two very different, opposite even, practices of cultural contestation that, although both subscribe to the project of decolonization, are difficult to reconcile and made to cohere as part of one movement. In what follows I want to explore the field of tensions opened up by and between them and contemplate on some of the aporia provoked by ongoing decolonial cultural contestations in South Africa. Let me start by making a first inventory of some of the most important contrasts. (a) Between an activism driven by a ‘passion for the real’, by unmediated confrontations with the ugly reality and an urge toward action and change in the here and now on the one hand, and the fictionalization and poeticization of the real, the evocation of an imaginary universe in which pressing issues are broadened and given depth by linking them to past events, on the other. p. 2

(b)Between an urge toward desublimation, the reduction of cultural phenomena and political processes to their base impulses and interests on the one hand, and an attempt at resublimation understood as the transformation of basic affects into more elevated, cultural endeavours on the other. (c) Between a blunt display and uninhibited expression of raw emotion (anger, disgust, euphoria) on the one hand, and the evocation of less obvious, fragile and precarious emotions such as curiosity and beauty on the other. (d)Between a mode of activism that is confrontational, aims to shock and forces everyone to take sides on the one hand, and one that seduces and solicits wonder, stirs the imagination and invites the co-creation of meaning on the other. (e) Between a cultural politics of iconoclasm on the one hand, and an attempt at creating new icons or counterimages, on the other. (f) Between a cultural politics of vandalism, violence and destruction on the one hand, and one of “remembrance”, repositioning and re-imagining on the other. (g) Between a straightforward, single issue and goal-directed type of activism - of the basic form ‘X must fall’ - on the one hand, and one that takes time and effort to fully comprehend, has multiple, intersecting meanings and isn’t geared toward achieving something concretely identifiable, on the other. (h)Between spontaneous, gut-driven action and a very restrained, carefully crafted, staged and executed action. (i) Between a populist form of activism on the one hand, and a somewhat distanced, elevated, autonomous act - think of the white pedestal used by Msezane - on the other. Underlying these blatant contrasts between Msezane’s Chapangu and RMF, I take there to be an opposition between two more fundamental paradigms of aesthetic politics. In what follows, I shall make these paradigms more explicit, as well as present possible legitimations of each and implicit critiques toward the other, starting with RMF.

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II. RhodesMustFall, Or, The Cultural Politics of Strategic Philistinism

I propose to characterize the underlying model of RMF’s crass mode of cultural activism in terms of a philistine critique of art and culture. This not only relates to acts of vandalism toward colonialist monuments - the treatment of UCT’s Rhodes statue being a case in point - but also the infamous burning of paintings by student protesters at UCT on February 16, 2016. Instead of momentary lapses of reason, I take such blunt displays of indifference and outright aggression toward art to express the philistine attitudes and strategies at the heart of RMF activism in extreme and dramatic form. Fredric Jameson and the Redemption of the Philistine Hatred of Art

In order to articulate the latter, I turn to Marxian cultural philosopher Fredric Jameson’s (theorization of the relation between art and philistinism in Theodor Adorno’s work. Key here is Adorno’s notion of the “guilt” or “blackness” of art as a social activity. This concerns the claim that art as a specialized form of practice is inextricably entangled in more general processes of social division, classification and hierarchization. Jameson’s key reference here is a passage in The Dialectic of Enlightenment on the episode in Homer’s The Odyssey where Odysseus devises a clever plan to navigate his ship past the sirens. Adorno and Horkheimer interpret this scene as an allegory of how a stratified order with clearly defined “social roles” is established through the divorcing of “the enjoyment of art and manual work”. In Homer’s epic tale, “feudal baron” Odysseus claims the exclusive right and ability to listen to the Sirens’ songs while, inversely, preventing the oarsmen from doing the same, their ears having been filled with wax, thus incapacitating their ability for auditory enjoyment. The rationale behind the latter is to prevent the oarsmen - as “workers” - from being distracted by the aesthetic pleasure afforded by the Sirens’ songs, so as to channel all their physical and mental energy into the sole task of propelling the ship. Crucial here is the way in which regulation of access to aesthetic enjoyment - or, again, the granting of the license, ability, time and energy to contemplate and be distracted by art - plays a key role in the founding of a social hierarchy and division of labour. Exclusion from the sphere of art and culture is legitimated in terms of the rationalization, specialization and maximization of the labour process. In this regard, we can understand Jameson’s concise determination of the guilt of art in a class society in terms of its status as “luxury and class privilege”. p. 4

A similar process of aesthetic division can be seen to lie at the heart of the (neo) colonialist order. Here also, art functions as an exclusionary device, a site of division, privilege and distinction, but now predominantly between colonizer and colonized. The colonized were thought to be inherently incapable of ‘advanced’, ‘disinterested’ art appreciation, whether on biological or cultural racist grounds. Insofar as aesthetic capabilities were granted to them, these were considered to be of no practical use to them in view of their exclusively menial employment in the colonialist economy. Inversely, art appreciation became a mark of distinction of the colonizer, even if this was all but obvious in the actual, ‘philistine’ behaviour and pastimes of the colonizers. This troubled historical status of art as colonialist or race privilege should be taken into account in theorizing and assessing the deep suspicion, disregard and aggression toward art displayed by the formerly colonized. Another crucial aspect of art’s guilt distinguished by Jameson is also extrapolated from Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens. While the oarsmen/workers are deprived of the ability of aesthetic enjoyment and hence “come to incarnate the practical realm”, the aristocrat/Odysseus’s enjoyment of beauty is divorced, inversely, from “praxis”, becomes without “consequences”, is “neutralized”, with art turned into “a mere object of contemplation” . This refers to the fact that Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast so as not to be able to act upon the seductive songs of the Sirens and their “allurement” of happiness. This has grave implications for art’s ability to realize the happiness contained in its beauty. Being excluded from the practical sphere, this happiness must of necessity remain “powerless”. This is then said to create a sense of being “cheated” among the masses, who understand that art’s promise of happiness thus necessarily “remains a lie as long as classes exist”. That is to say, as long as art serves as object of mere contemplation for the privileged classes, with the majority of society excluded and deprived from aesthetic enjoyment. This is identified as one of the key sources of philistine attitudes. What is found to be “unbearable” is “the thought of happiness without power [...], because only then [i.e. with power] would it be true happiness”.

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RhodesMustFall, Or, The Cultural Politics of Strategic Philistinism

Based on Jameson’s redemptive reading of philistinism, I argue that acts of violence against art by student protesters cannot be dismissed outright. They can be seen to be driven by a sobering insight into the structural complicity and historical guilt of art and culture in the constitution and perpetuation of social, cultural, and - specifically in South Africa - racial division. It concerns a guilt that is not so much attributable to individual artists, art works or practices. Rather, on a supra-individual level, art, as a specialized and distinguished social activity, is structurally implicated in processes of class and race division. By the mere fact of producing or consuming art, one is complicit to a system of which one knows that it is a predominantly elitist affair that provides the markers of cultural distinction to the privileged, while the majority of the population is unable de facto to participate in it. This is not to say that this guilt cannot be moderated and alleviated in significant ways by artists in individual works. Msezane’s Chapangu, for instance, clearly attempts to breach the distance between art and life, performance and activism, aesthetics and politics, art and the masses, imagined and real change. I attempts to give art ‘consequence’ and ‘power’ by aligning the fictive take-off of Rhodes’ Zimbabwe bird with the actual removal of Rhodes’ statue. The latter are certainly redeeming features, yet might not be sufficient to absolve it completely from the general guilt of art. This?? became apparent in the art burnings at UCT, when students destroyed several paintings by black artist Keresemose Richard Baholo indiscriminately with institutional portraits of university dignitaries. This happened despite the clear anti-apartheid theme of Baholo’s work, protests in the early 1990s at UCT against interference by the apartheid state in the university’s affairs. Rather than a tragic mishap on the part of student activists, such indiscriminate acts of destruction of art demonstrate that no matter how solidarious with decolonial struggles or socially engaged, art cannot undo its status of relative exclusivity and luxury in the context of such struggles. Art’s promise of human liberation will always remain inconsequential relative to radical social activism. Artistic acts will never be able to force the kind of radical, momentous changes which activism can enforce (such as the removal of Rhodes’ statue) or, at least, not in a straightforward, calculable way.

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From a philistine perspective, art can thus be experienced as grossly inadequate and even unbearable in conditions of heightened revolutionary struggle. It can quickly become the object of the philistine’s intolerant, envious, and destructive attitude toward projected illusions of the possible realization of happiness in societal conditions in which it is perceived to be structurally impossible.

III. Chapangu as an ‘Aesthetic Cut’ in RMF’s Activist Routines

Having offered an activist, philistine?? critique of engaged?? art, I shall now change sides and look at RMF from the perspective of Chapangu and formulate an aesthetic critique of philistine forms of cultural activism. This involves uncovering a political register of Msezane’s performance that is less obvious than its critique of colonialist plunder. It here does not so much concern Chapangu’s intervention on the level of the politics of representation or its activist component. It is an aspect that lies at the heart of many of the previously listed characterizations of Msezane’s performance activism in opposition to the mainstream forms of RMF’s activism. I am referring to a politicity immanent to art and aesthetic experience as such. For this, I turn to recent work by contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière on the relation between aesthetics and politics. Jacques Rancière and the Immanent Politicity of Aesthetic Experience

One of Rancière’s key moves is to identify an emancipatory power inherent to art and aesthetics in idealist and romanticist conceptions, mainly those of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. He mainly focuses on what Kant took to be a crucial component of aesthetic experience, namely, the harmonious, horizontal free and lively play between the human faculties of the imagination, reason and sense-perception. In aesthetic experience, the imagination is said to operate in a state of productivity and self-activity, as opposed to being merely reproductive and subservient, as in the case of scientific and moral reasoning and sensual experience. For Rancière there is something liberating about this aesthetic mode in which the divisions, hierarchies and relations of domination between the faculties that usually rule human existence are suspended. One can think here of the domination of mind over matter, ideas over sensations, truth over sensibility, morality over the body, but also more general oppositions or hierarchies such as those of ends and means, reality and appearance, facts and fiction. The latter p. 7

are all said to be invalidated in aesthetic experience, combined in non-hierarchical fashion. Because of this, Rancière considers aesthetic experience to establish a “cut”, “break”, “gap” or, again, a “surplus in the order of things”. Importantly, this aesthetic mode of experience is regarded as confined to the sphere of art, but as constituting a “specific mode of living in the world”. Although exemplarily manifested in relation to art, the liberating mode of aesthetic experience suggests a broader rethinking and restructuring of life and society, creating the "hope of ‘changing life’”. In this sense, we can understand Rancière’s contention that the suspension of “the ordinary hierarchies incorporated in everyday sensory experience” in aesthetic production and reception is closely linked to the “social experience of emancipation”. The freedom afforded by aesthetic experience is held to be key to emancipatory politics because it provides “an opportunity for bodies to have different capabilities than those attributed to them by society, possibilities for aspects of life to have different meanings and be awarded more importance in society”. Even if art is not able to realize such liberating effects in an instrumentalist way, it is credited for being able to create a sense or experience of their possibility. Because of this, Rancière considers aesthetic experience to be able to “open[...] up new passages for political subjectification”, to stimulate playfulness with political subjects and subjectivities or invent new ones. For Rancière this also crucially involves an act of dis-identification by individuals or groups, a distancing and suspension of the places, roles and capacities imposed on them by the existing order. Chapangu as an ‘Aesthetic Cut’ in RMF’s Activist Routines

In case of RMF - and decolonial student protests in general - one could take the aesthetic mode of being to be hemmed in from two sides. On the one hand, by an absolute sense of decolonial justice in reaction to what is held to be an equally absolute, radical evil (apartheid, white supremacy, etc.). On the other hand, by an almost physically felt, visceral feeling of repulsion toward everything associated, directly or indirectly, with neo/colonialism. Whether from above or below, whether based on an unconditional sense of right or ‘immediate’ sensations of disgust, the danger is that creative activity is subordinated and made subservient to the higher moral cause or one’s immediate feelings of anger. What threatens to be put on the back burner, if it is not eliminated entirely, is the freedom, the licence, the ability even, to p. 8

play and to imagine. This might result in forms of repression driven by indisputable claims of justice or by ‘authentic’ feelings of hurt and rage, or by both, causing a ‘coincidence of opposites’ in which moral and political injustice is physically felt as, and inflamed by, feelings of rage and vice versa. In contrast, and in line with Rancière’s conceptualization of the emancipatory dimension of art, Msezane’s Chapangu can be seen to achieve a more balanced and playful integration of the sensory, affective, cognitive and moral dimensions of the ongoing struggle against the contemporary legacy of colonialism. Here we can offer another interpretation of the title of Msezane’s UCT performance. While Chapangu is the Shona term for the Bateleur Eagle, the French term bateleur means ‘street performer’ and also refers to acrobats and tight rope walkers. In Msezane’s performance, this play of meanings can be seen to refer not only to Msezane balancing herself by stretching her winged arms on the pedestal amidst the frenzied crowd of students and activists. It might also be indicative of the way in which Chapangu achieves a fragile balance between the said, multiple dimensions of the struggle for decolonization, between art and activism, aesthetics and politics, fiction and reality, imagination and action. Finally, one could also see in Msezane’s performance a liberation from, and disidentification with regard to dominant black, radical political subjectivities, as instantiated by RMF. It concerns the routine mode of decolonial activists as enraged, frenzied, ecstatic and impassioned subjects, as entirely consumed by, and self-identical with their pain, anger and moral and political righteousness, allowing little room for critical distance and alternative self-determinations. In contrast, Msezane’s performance qua aesthetic performance - i.e. still apart from its representational content or pedagogic aim - enacts the ability to play with alternative, fictive identities, freeing itself from stereotypical, hackneyed modes of activist subjectivity through role-playing, in this instance by ‘becoming-bird’ - as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might have phrased it - thus becoming something other or more than her pain, oppression, demands or abstract, principled positions.

Conclusion: ‘Torn Halves’ of an Integral Decolonial Activism?

To be sure, from the philistine perspective set out by Jameson, the immanently emancipatory nature of aesthetic experience as theorized by Rancière can be p. 9

interpreted and downplayed as a variant of the ‘powerless happiness’ that provokes the ire of philistines. The connection between art and the ‘hope’ of ‘changing life’ or, again, art’s capacity to offer a sense of the possibility of liberation, might confirm the philistine’s suspicion regarding the ultimate powerlessness of art’s promises of happiness and a different, better life. Rancière, for his part, might consider art nonetheless as empowering in itself, even if not in the strong, decisive sense activists long for. There are thus sound arguments to be made for the liberatory force of both RMF’s crass mode of cultural contestation and Msezane’s artistic performance interventions. When considered together, however, their modalities of aesthetic politics appear irreconcilable and engender critical tensions back and forth. One appropriate way in which the uneasy, tensional, antinomous relation of these two logics of aesthetic politics might be conceived is in terms of Adorno’s famous characterization of the antinomous relation between modernist art and popular modes of culture, namely that “Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up”.

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