Difference and Repetition -- Achille Mbembe, WiSER March 14 2013

Difference and Repetition

March 14 2013

Tonight at WiSER Achille Mbembe, in a moving public address, lamented the fragile and failing power of imagination in South Africa, 20 years after the end of Apartheid. Concomitant with our inability to think with hope and clarity about a future from our own experience, is our stuckness, our stasis.

These arguments were unrolled with language stitched by references to dreams, secret vibrations, parched self visions, as well as concrete reference points about shifting class formations, the reverberating masks of power, the liquidation of mass production and the relationship of forms of work ending and the simultaneous sharp ascent of a society wedded to consumption.

Discussing the shifting place of South Africa's plummeting self trajectories and water-treading Achille addressed a room of people drawn together in sober reflection. The cool autumn night followed a South African day dominated by news of the ongoing Marikana Hearings, fresh evidence of police violence, worker eruptions inside and against trade unions at a major South African mining development site, and continuing opposition attacks on the costs and implications of the Nkandla estate of the republic's president.

Drawing people from PARI (the public affairs institute), and from art and culture institutes, from media houses and from a wide array of city's writers and thinkers at Wits, UJ and the University of Pretoria across many departments, an atmosphere of sober urgency permeated the room.

Achille argued we live in a time where people are constituted as mobs, as private militia, as consumers of certain things. These identities and political persona were parsed around a reading of Deleuze's analysis of repetition, of disguise. Achille asked: What kind of order, society, or even figure of world or human, is being constituted here, post the struggle against Apartheid; how, and what, is being constituted and being disguised in this process?

Invoking Fanon's assessment, (The Wretched of the Earth) that the worst consequence of those afflicted by racial rule was their inability to project themselves and imagine their future, Achille reminded the audience that racial injury leaves an injury to the imagination, and that temporality is eaten away, a dis-ease. We live the wake of nervous injuries. Here Achille cited Bloke Modisane's Blame me on History to paint a society with shaken personhood,  a vulnerability to  dawns and hosting desires without hope.
 

South Africa's people are stymied and cannot create work of symbols and imagination.

This new era is given name of democracy – but it has been less of a shift to a free order than the conflation an idea of this with, really, an order of consumption. It is creating havoc, free floating and insecure entitlement, suspicion, confusion...

Achille ended by painting a door to open,  insisting we draw on powers of imagination and future thinking, if we are to work ahead from this airless room.

The audience questions that followed the address were wide ranging -- from debates about the place of agency; the origins of affect and solidarity; ways of conjuring a space of empathy; to the spectre of "champagne and cake" in front of cadres at rallies and the trivialisation of democracy. The cufflinks of 'ownership' and 'entitlement' provided a powerful audience probe. Questions about whether "control" and "consumption" unfold together were debated. The audience asked "how do we place value on life"?

Achille responded with an argument against dependency and a call for a longer genealogy of these problems of violence and life destruction.

One of the powerful closing comments was Achille describing Jacob Zuma giving a recent televised prepared speech very badly, then putting it aside, and then regaling and stirring his audience with a song. Here Zuma's sonorous singing, the somatic beauty of the performance, was linked by Achille to control by accumulation. The people are sensorarily-captured, in the service of the new elite.

Most of the audience stayed for long talks and debates over drinks in the foyer. I for one left pondering the injunction: "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.