so i finally set up a new blog. I’m still cleaning up the place and moving shit in (I don’t even have a proper domain yet), but its looking okay…so steek out

I can’t think of any reason to keep blogging on amagama… so I’m out (finally). I’ll probably start another blog soon, but i’ll post a link here. Till then, thanks for reading.

I haven’t bought Naomi Klein’s Shock doctrine yet, but I suspect, as with most of her stuff, it’s entertaining and informative even if it tends to be more emotive than theoretically exciting. I heard her present the book’s central thesis – simplistically, that neoliberal measures are often pushed through during moments of crises, after some sort of national trauma that has left the population in a state of shock– at a lecture organised by UKZN’s Centre for Civil Society some time back. Klein was in Durban tying up her research on the South African transition for one of the book’s chapters, and I was really taken in by her talk. Admittedly, she is a good speaker and I am easily charmed. Anyway, the book has a site, and on it I found a short film by Alfanso Cuaron, based on the books central thesis. Just over five minutes, but well worth the bandwidth

It’s been almost two weeks since my last ‘navel gazing’ post. Suffice to say, I haven’t stopped feeling sorry myself or, for that matter, gotten back to work. But I’m done with resolutions, especially the public sort. Failure, even when it concerns something so mundane as “going outside everyday”, is a bitter reminder of the folly of being stoned all day. Better not to court it.

So, avoiding anything Real…

Watching Jacob Zuma and Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile belt out Umshiniwami at the close of the Polokwane congress, neausea seems to have made way for a strange, perhaps even perverse, excitement. Of course not much good will come from a Zuma presidency (whether it be of party or nation). Best-case scenario…under Zuma the ANC moves away from the idea of running a budget surplus and maybe even takes a serious look at a basic income grant. Lets see. But all this is of course speculation - the only thing that seems to have suggested Zuma as the preferred candidate of the (alliance) left is his credentials as “the guy you can talk to”.

Worst case? Eish! Folk like Achille Mbembe have held up the image of the post-colonial nightmare in our present (ironically more common amongst theorists of the right) to warn of the coming national suicide in the wake of the populist fervour surrounding Zuma :

As the former national-liberation movement the African National Congress (ANC) implodes, the stakes are getting higher. The Nongqawuse syndrome – the name for the kind of political disorder and cultural dislocation South Africa seems to be experiencing – is once again engulfing the country. This is a syndrome South Africa has always suffered in times of demoralisation and acute social and mental insecurity. The Nongqawuse syndrome is a populist rhetoric and a millenarian form of politics which advocates, uses and legitimises self-destruction, or national suicide, as a means of salvation. It is a syndrome many other post-colonial African countries (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan) have experienced with tragic effects over the last fifty years.

Personally, i don’t see it happening. I have however heard many (mostly middle class) people articulate a similar fear, although with a lot less theoretical dressing. But, if the populist frame of support for Zuma can be read as an attempt at reconstituting the political in the shadow of the very real failures of (neo)liberal democracy, there are very real dangers wrapped up in the Zuma’s inability (or unwillingness) to address the multitude of demands staked on his presidency, especially since all this will unfold within the same (neo)liberal democratic framework.

So why then am I excited? The thing is, for all its limits and dangers, or the producer’s amateurish stage management and the cast’s disingenuous performance, Zuma’s coup has reinserted an element of unpredictability into the national narrative…it has made politics entertaining. And who knows? Perhaps crisis also carries possibility

(and the guy can sing)

[this was culled from something i am working on. If we do end up talking about the succession race, it might be turn out to be useful]

Each week, the African National Congress publishes a letter from the president on its website. Although seemingly addressed to the ‘the people’ in their abstract unity, the accent of these public statements is often that of the party . And while the themes of the letters are varied - spanning a field running from simple accounts of the mundane rhythms of government, to remembrances of the fallen martyrs of the ‘national democratic revolution’ – they are also often marked by open polemic against foes of the nation and party, usually inferred, but occasionally named . Not surprisingly then, on the eve of one the most fractious leadership battles of the party’s long history, and amid increasingly hostile attacks on the president himself and the legacy of his term in office, Mbeki would explicitly confront the long standing accusation that government’s macro-economic policy, GEAR, “represents a neo-liberal assault on the standard of living of the working people, for the benefit of capital”. This was of course not the first time that the president had felt inclined to defend the state’s macro economic strategy, nor too was the spirited antagonism with which Mbeki addressed his accusers particularly unusual in his online letter. Beyond its explicit confrontation of the notion of neoliberalism however, what set this ‘intervention’ apart was perhaps its urgency:

The entirely false argument that sought to portray GEAR as an ANC betrayal of the working people has resurfaced in the recent past under the label of a so-called “1996 class project”. The shameless fabrications advanced under this label have sought to discredit our movement in the eyes of the masses of our people, to prepare for its political defeat.

No doubt, the reference to the “1996 class project” characterisation, clarifies, at least in part, the target of the attack . The phrase, recently made popular within the SACP and sections of the COSATU, was described by the party’s general sectary, Blade Nzimande, as a “combination of certain objective processes of class formation in a democratic South Africa, and of deliberate policy choices followed by the government and capital, especially since the adoption of GEAR in 1996”. Emphasizing the “ideology” of the small layer of black capitalists and the professional and managerial class that surround them, for Nzimande, the “consolidation” of this “class project” has seen it become dominant within the state as well as the (congress) movement more generally, with its influence extending as far as sections of the media . At stake in this characterisation is an assessment of the broader post apartheid project, here geared towards ‘restoring the profitability of capitalism’ through the introduction of a set of neoliberal measures that have worked in the interest of sections of international and local capital, as well as a hedonistic emergent black bourgeoisie moulded in the image of fanon’s comprador class; and at the expense of the deepening immiseration of the country’s poor and working class black majority.

This criticism, beyond the idiosyncrasies of the SACPs political language, is not new and has, with vary degrees of intensity, nuance and rigor, been the staple of the broader South African left for the last decade. However, what is perhaps new is the ferocity of its deployment within the alliance and the mainstreams of nationalist discourse in contesting a vision of NDR. While criticism of government policy is certainly not unfamiliar to the politics of alliance, it could be said to be, in less capricious periods, tempered by a kind self-restraining commitment to a broader common vision (the NDR), or less generously, the expectation of ‘political discipline’ among loyal cadres of the ‘mass democratic movement’ whose form is not unlike the maxim, which in Kafka’s incomparable ‘The Great Wall of China’, insures the ‘decrees of the high command’:

Try with all your might to comprehend the decrees of the high command, but only up to certain a point; then avoid further meditation. A very wise maxim, which moreover was elaborated in a parable that was later often quoted: Avoid further meditation, but not because it might be harmful; it is not at all certain that it would be harmful. What is harmful or not harmful has nothing to do with the question. Consider rather the river is a spring. It rises until it grows mightier and nourishes more richly the soil on the long stretch of its banks, still maintaining its own course until it reaches the sea, where it is all the more welcome because it is a worthier ally. - Thus far may you urge our meditations of the decrees of the high command. – But after the river overflows its banks, loses outline and shape, slows down the speed of its current, tries to ignore its destiny by forming little seas in the interior of the land, damages the fields, and yet cannot maintain itself for long in its new expanse, but must run back between its banks again, must even dry up wretchedly in the hot season that presently follows. – Thus far may you not urge your meditations on the decress of the high command

If the parable strikes a familiar cord, it is because we recognise in its structure a generalised set of patriotic expectations that public discourse on government is increasingly warned off transgressing (is this not precisely the structure of people like Dali Mpofu or Christine Qunta complaint against the media’s criticisms of government, or the government’s own objections to the menace of distractions wrought by the TACs ‘incessant’ court action? ). But, leaving aside (for now) the deep irony of the SACP antagonistic posture, a party which in less ‘enlightened times’ disciplined cadres for hazarding far less severe characterisations of ANC policy , or its fortuitist timing, sprung in context of the stirrings of a leadership battle (in which the party’s preferred candidate, Jacob Zuma, has affirmed his broad acquiescence with the current trajectory of government’s economic policy ); the public animosity read off the statements of the embattled factions of the hegemonic currents of the broad nationalist movement gives off every bit the scent of a crises , which, although by no means insurmountable, strikes at the centre of the post apartheid nationalist imaginary.

If the coiners of the “1996 class project” take as their ‘public object’ the reinstatement a reified notion of the “working class” to the position of leadership over the NDR (presumably in the person of Jacob Zuma), Mbeki, standing at the centre of a storm, would invoke “materialist philosophy” - and an objective account of “practice” as the only foundation of the ever-elusive “criterion of truth” - to prove that they never lost it. Pointing to expansionary posture of the state, its spending on the “social wage” and investments in infrastructure, Mbeki would dismiss any suggestion of the state’s capitulation to neoliberalism, or GEAR’s resemblance to IMF and WB imposed structural adjustment programs . No doubt, since RDP figured so prominently in complaint that GEAR marked a turn away foundational principles of ‘democratic revolution’ and the ANC’s 1994 mandate, the former would, for Mbeki, provide the key point of reference to be used in measuring the success of state policies. Thus, under the heading “what the people say”, mbeki, citing from the newly published stats SA report - undertaken to measure the effectiveness of government in meeting targets set by the RDP - would demonstrate a progressive, albeit modest, improvement in people’s access to basic services and housing since 1994, and thereby towards the RDP goal of “meeting basic needs” - which was after all, as the argument runs, government’s rationale for adopting GEAR . The claims of his accusers are thus said to be the wilful exploitation of the continued misery of “the poorest in our country” “which the democratic revolution inherited from the centuries of colonial and apartheid white minority domination, [in order] to persuade them that the ANC has betrayed them.”

If materialist philosophy appears as the hollowed out frame of the debate, a mark of each camp’s claim on the traditions of radical thought, nationalism remains its privileged referent. The inescapable object of the SACP’s position, the limits of its strategic gaze beyond the leadership tussles within the ANC, merely reinforce the narrow historical trajectories out of which the ‘NDR’ conception springs, and which, as Neville Alexander has pointed out, “simply abdicated any pretence to political leadership of the mass movement and permitted the political allies of the party, that is the aspiring black middle-class leadership of the ANC, to lead the mass struggle” (25). In Mbeki’s hands however, the NDR seems to become something else; the work of closure with the past, and an opening into the indifferent path of nation through what Benjamin called a “homogenous open time” (and which Anderson identified as the temporal structure of national imaginings (reference)). Thus, as if reciting a formula for the imagined march of ‘a people’ through a history, or the prototypical nationalist’s vision of progress, Mbeki’s letter begins and concludes with the possibly irrefutable, yet somewhat empty, truth; “today is better than yesterday”…with no other cause beyond the commitment to the work of making tomorrow is better than today. A practical vision for just another ordinary country .

It is precisely with an eye to the political significance of leadership race in the ANC that Gillian Hardt challenges us to grasp “more fully how meanings of the NDR have been redefined and articulated as part of the hegemonic project of the ruling bloc within the ANC, along with how and why these meanings have become an increasingly vociferous site of struggles and contestations within the ANC alliance and grassroots politics” (86). Following Wolpe, Hardt notes that, if what had been at stake in the RDP for the ANC and its allies was “the completion of the NDR”, the forms through which the RDP “eradicated sources of contradiction and conflict by asserting harmony and a consensual model of society” meant that the ‘crucial political issues’ submerged in its conception of a ‘fundamental transformation’ always threatened to become a source of contestation (93). From this perspective, the unilateral adoption of GEAR in 1996 was more than simply a shift away from the “benign Keyesianism” of the RDP towards “harsh neoliberalism”, as has often been argued by the left. GEAR was, for Hardt, neither simply the “roll-back of the state”, nor “just’ the final victory of class over race apartheid”, but instead, “a redefinition of the NDR in terms of a re-articulation of race, class and nationalism, along with the assertion of new technologies of rule” (93).

Of crucial importance, however, is the fact that (public) redeployments of the NDR by the ruling block within the ANC, have paralleled, and in part grew out of a “drive” to contain increasingly antagonistic challenges to what Hardt calls ‘the ANC’s hegemonic project’. Pointing to the fact that the “frequency and intensity” of public invocations of the NDR became “increasingly vociferous” after 2002 with the emergence of a new breed of opposional movements , Hardt insists on a conception of the NDR that is sensitive to ways in which the notion comes to operate within the broader discursive arsenal to discipline political challenges from the left (95). While Hardt is obviously correct, she tends to ignore the operation of a conception of NDR, pre 2002, in insuring state policy through the inscription of a set of limits on the content and forms of dissent within the alliance (whose structure, we have already had cause to note, bears an uncanny resemblance to Kafka’s parable on the decrees of the high command). In fact, many of the leading figures of the new breed of movements who marched the banner of the SMU at the WSSD, found themselves outside the fold of the broader alliance at precisely that moment at which they attempted to test those limits. While the heterogeneous set of antagonistic social movements that emerged with our new century resist any general theory of genesis, the political deployment of the NDR (within the alliance) in the name of an ostensibly neoliberal state strategy is threaded through the mesh of tensions out of which they sprung. What the post 2002 public deployments of the ever-mutating conception of the NDR highlight is thus the growing dysfunctionality of the alliance in containing popular forces, and a concomitant drive to generalise the discursive figures and disciplinary models of the ANC led nationalist movement across ‘civil society’. The latter ‘drive’ is in fact, in part, enabled by an aspect of the structure of many of the augments and criticism levelled by the oppositional movements allude to by Hardt. If these are read posing a challenge to the hegemony of the ruling block within the ANC, as hardt suggests, it is in part for the ways in which their narrative and critique of the present - often shot through by a notion of ‘betrayal’ - lays claim to ‘an image of the past’ and its ‘vision of the future’ in whose name the struggle was said to have been waged; thus calling into question not only the character of the ANCs leadership over the liberation movement and the broader NDR, but more importantly, it’s virtual monopoly over the symbolic economy of post apartheid nationalism. What we find in the bitter exchanges within the ANC led alliance is thus the return of the myriad set of tensions that, although repressed within the hegemonic exercise of nationalism’s narrative of the transition, have nevertheless continued reappear within it with ever more threatening force. If, however, the narratives and the critique of the transition that had begun to appear in the shadow of the new oppositional movements have increasingly sought a political horizon beyond of plane of nationalism, it’s redeployment by the SACP in the name of the NDR, and the context of the ANC presidential race, work to arrest this flight.

As the bitter conflicts between competing visions for a post apartheid society begin to re-emerge from within the shallow histories of triumphant nationalism, we find ourselves again blown into that zone of occult temporalities that Benjamin called ‘a moment of danger’.

Last week Friday I made up my mind that I would allow myself another week of self-pity, and then no more. I needed to get back into things, regardless of how I felt. Trying to keep it simple I promised (myself) three things. Firstly I would start working on the thesis again and tie up the remaining loose ends for my ‘paid-work-projects’. Secondly, I would start going outside everyday, even if just for a walk (the propensity towards reclusive behaviour needs to be resisted! :). And finally, I will try to blog more consistently, and of course, more meaningfully. The latter resolution - regardless of the pathetic tint it gives to an impression of my life - speaks to a newfound appreciation of my deep desire to write, whose expression I had perhaps suppressed for fear of failure (because its only failure if the desire was registered within the symbolic order). But maybe the threat of failure is also the condition of an attempt. Still, blogging, as a form of writing, buckles under the weight of aspiration running through this articulation of a “deep desire to write”. See, it’s not just that I want to write (I’m doing that now after all), it’s that I want to be able to write beautifully, like the masters who have inspired my jealously for their words. Not just to write, but to write like a master…or better, a marder. This desire, it would seem then, runs against the grain of something else I have said on this blog about blogging. However, if we resist the straitjacket of a dialectic resolution of the problem of the one and the many, ‘here’ becomes not only the site for the unfolding of the common, but also, the giving over of a space to the practicing (with an eye to mastering) a singular craft. Convenient? For sure…but still… The idea is that my writing needs work, and ‘here’, for all its limitations (and possibilities), is a space to do some of that work.

Thinking about what to start with, I was tempted by “d’s” (who I’m really curious about) suggestion that I throw a (b)log into a discussion coming out of some of Negri’s work (I wonder…is that’s ‘d’s’ blog?). The discussion is an interesting one, but in spite of being accused (on several occasions) of being a Negri-head, I don’t have much of an appetite for it. Less of an intellectual, and more of a klipgooier, I guess its in part because I don’t know how much I really have to say. In fact, halfway through the thread I realized that I wasn’t reading anymore, but merely registering the presence of each word as my eyes passed over them…a sure sign that this wasn’t the place to start.

But if I can’t muster up something to say about negri, then what? Actually one of the few worldly issues that I am thinking about at the moment is the succession race in the ANC. However, in this respect, the overwhelming effect of thought is nausea. But who knows, maybe writing about it will help with that also.

Blindly swept with the irrepressible current of the ‘now’, we are (more often than not) scarcely aware of the forces unleashed within those events that signpost the paths our lives end up following. It is, perhaps, only on the other side (of ‘those events’), when our bodies have passed into the calm of the shallows, that we are able to comprehend the route torn by the rapids out of which we have just emerged. I therefore make no pretense to understanding any of it; I am far from the other side, and my head aspires to nothing more than the most modest of causes - keeping above water. But ‘those events’ (and this one in particular), no matter how tightly locked into a context they might appear, can’t help but inspire regret. And wherever we end up, writing… my writing, will no doubt be bound up with the inescapable work of redemption.

…and thus, we try again to do something useful with this space.

[the ‘thing’ below is a satirical response to and excellent post on KUK that deals with that old chestnut, Masculinity. But it works as a flippant review so I’m posting it here and at the other place]

This is not to say much, or nothing of any real importance. In fact, I wouldn’t have thought to say anything at all…except, this is a really good piece and I figured I’d mar it with a thought or two of my own…if only for the pleasure of spite.

Of course you right, and between “elusive “honour’ and lurking shame” is the mark of a fragile, tortured masculinity – forever surrounded by power without ever being able to ‘recognise’ himself in it…what those ever-allegorical pomo folk might characterise as the traumatic gap that separates the penis and the phallus.

But, on the other hand, William Munny was a ‘marder’!

It would have been sufficient to leave it there had the movie ‘Unforgiven’ been given the attention it deserved. But alas, nobody looks to westerns for the answers to riddles of masculinity, let alone for the tactical positions of an antagonistic politics. William Munny was a bad man, for sure…and he’d sooner kill you than piss on a hot rock. ‘Pure meaness’. But he wasn’t ‘like that no more’.

Redemption however only carries the bitter taste of the symbolic order… the ever-present threat of ‘lurking shame’. And more so for Willaim Munny, who had killed ‘women and children’ and ‘just about everything that walks or crawled’…William Munny who never had a problem ‘when it came to killing’, and who wielded the sovereign decision with all the confidence of someone standing outside the law…shame proportionate to the distance of the fall.

Isn’t this precisely the ambiguity of his declaration of ‘having changed’ in one of the opening sequences of the film:

Ned Logan: You were crazy, Will.
Will Munny: Yeah, no one liked me. Mountain boys all thought I was gonna shoot ‘em out of pure meanness.
Ned Logan: Well, like I said, you ain’t like that no more.
Will Munny: That’s right. I’m just a fella now. I ain’t no different than anyone else no more.

(my emphasis)

This ‘lurking shame’, so beautifully arrested in Munny’s addition of ‘no more’ in his assertion of being ‘no different than anyone else’, follows him throughout the movie; from the opening scene of him chasing the pig, to the beating he receives at the hands of the sheriff and his men. But after they kill Ned, Munny shifts beyond “elusive honour and lurking shame’ to become a ‘pure force of antagonism’. Not the shadowy double of (sovereign) public power that had been his former (bad) self (as most people who watch the movie assume), but the expression of a destructive violence whose only purpose for being is the annihilation of power (embodied in the sheriff, Little Bill Daggett). This is why, when Bill Daggett, presents Munny with the name, with all its weight within the symbolic order, Munny can remain indifferent and no longer needs to make reference to his redemption. His is now just the simple assertion of purpose:

Little Bill Daggett: You’d be William Munny out of Missouri. Killer of women and children.
Will Munny: That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned

But to get back to the point…and there was a point…one of the most memorable bits of the movie is the scene where Munny walks into the bar, passes Ned’s body set on display, and confronts the man gathered round Bill Daggett. As if enveloped in ‘marderdom’ and the quintessence of cool, Munny poses a question:

Will Munny: Who’s the fellow owns this shithole?
[pause]
Will Munny: You, fat man. Speak up.
Skinny Dubois: Uh, I… I own this establishment. I bought the place from Greeley for a thousand dollars.
[Will levels the shotgun, and speaks to someone standing behind Skinny]
Will Munny: You better clear outta there.
Man: Yes, sir.
[scampers out of the way]
Little Bill Daggett: Just hold it right there. Hold it…!
[Will shoots Skinny. Screaming, the women scatter upstairs]
Little Bill Daggett: Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a bitch! You just shot an unarmed man!
Will Munny: Well, he should have armed himself if he’s going to decorate his saloon with my friend.

So here’s the thing, being an denialist (of denialism) is not some same as killing your best friend, and decorating a bar with symbols of a defeated supremacist project is not the same as decorating it with your best friends body. On the other hand, the guy is Ronald Suresh and symbol is the South African flag…so, I’m not white, but I am probably a middle class lefty…still I’m with Munny on this one…you had better arm yourself. The point, I think, is that sometimes you got to be the phallus even at the risk of being a dick. So the next time I’m in Cape Town, if you buy the whiskey - in spite of my pretenses to being a reclusive-kipgooier-intellectual - we can go find some fascists and denailists (of all breeds) to get into it with.

turns out i am not up to writing the story and discourse of neoliberalism. If you checked in to read, i’ll make it up to you with something next week