The Johannesburg Workshop on Theory & Criticism For Jean and John Comaroff, understanding these times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is the point, the provocation, the critical pulse that underlies both the poetics and the disciplinary practice toward which Theory From the South aspires. Whether it succeeds or fails, or does both in some proportion, the issues that it was written to address remain too important to ignore, too serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.
Authors' Note: We should like to thank our dear friends and comrades, Achille Mbembe, Juan Obarrio, and Charles Piot for having had the temerity to organize the "Authors Meet Critics" session at the 2011 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (Montreal, 2011) at which these papers, and our response to them, were first presented. It is to their great credit, and to our great benefit, that they were willing to grab a rather wild, willful text by its tail. We also owe a debt of gratitude to James Ferguson, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Ato Quayson for agreeing to engage seriously with Theory from the South and to do so with obvious critical acuity. It is with a deep sense of loss that we note that Fernando Coronil, our long-time friend, could not take part as planned. In our shared bereavement at the tragic loss of a person of uncommon humanity and grace, of singular imagination and scholarly flair, we dedicate this symposium to his life, his work, and his memory.
The
conversation among the participants here has already spanned several
years, continents, and contexts; indeed, many of their ideas have
contributed directly to the arguments made in the book. Our exchanges
have always been conducted in a spirit of empathetic critique, of
mutual respect, and of reciprocal, playful vexation - as, gratefully,
they were in Montreal. The point of Theory
from the South,
and its even more intemperate under-title is, as Ferguson and Mbembe
note, to provoke debate and to raise intractable questions about
matters that really count in the world today-at least, if it is to be
a world in which the very idea of social science and social theory
has any salience. Yes, Srinivas [Aravamudan], we plead guilty,
without the slightest trace of guilt, to being social scientists, not
philosophers. Ours is a time in which society truly does need to be
defended; this less in the sense intended by Foucault (2003), for
whom there was too much of it, than by our intellectual ancestors for
whom the sui generis nature of collective facts, of Hegel's social
ethic, had to be established against the reductionist excesses of
methodological individualism and economic reason. We agree with
Ferguson that, premature announcements of its death notwithstanding,
"the social" is actively being refigured in our times as
both theoretical and political object; also, that its refiguration is
often palpable in places where we have not classically thought to
look. But tracking transformations of the social requires that we
rethink received space-time configurations, theoretical trajectories,
and disciplinary practices, thus to move beyond now well-worn
colonial and postcolonial perspectives. The Courage to Do An
Anthropology At Large-whatever the risks of failure-is a sine
qua non of
participation in the world of contemporary critical theory. This, we
hasten to add, is not to forsake our longstanding commitment to the
ethnographic-to ethnography, through thick and thin-or to eschew our
perennial encounter with the parochial, the intimate, the
experience-near; to be sure each of the chapters of Theory
from the South is
an encounter with grounded human practices. It is, rather, to open up
an argument about our unique disciplinary sensibilities in the face
of the Biggest Question of All: how are we to grasp the unfolding
history of advanced capitalism-and the world being fashioned by its
pervasive, invasive designs-as it takes tangible shape in different
places, as it makes real its abstractions and extractions, as it runs
up against its own contradictions?
Theory
from the South has
already given rise to a range of comments, critiques, and conundrums,
not just those raised by the contributors to this symposium, but also
by others elsewhere. Of the most frequently asked questions posed of
the book, four stand out.
The first is
this:
What
is the status of "the South" in our argument? Given the
ways in which we qualify, critique, and deconstruct it, why retain it
as a term of use at all? What, indeed, do we actually mean by it?
An
initial caveat here in response to a remark made by James Ferguson,
speaking of a colleague who dismissed Theory
from the South as
the work of "two white people from Chicago." Echoes, this,
some of the sillier sorts of self-reflexivity that afflicted the
discipline in the 1980s, and of the identitarianism that mistook
itself for serious epistemic critique at the time. We are writing
neither "for" the south-heaven forfend-nor, simply, "from"
the south; in this respect, too, Aravamudan, who accuses us at once
of Western epistemological imperialism and a quest for authenticity,
appears to misunderstand our position, perhaps derived from his
particular grasp of the word "from." Writing from the
south, in that sense, is a species of intervention that Raewyn
Connell (2007) has captured under a different label, "Southern
Theory." As Ferguson points out, most of us bear scholarly
signatures that are simultaneously north and south. Our critical
edges are honed not from single placements but from multiple
displacements, multiple focal lengths, multiple interpellations,
multiple movements both away and towards. But that is a side
bar. Theory
from the South is
NOT about the theories of people who may be wholly or partially of
the south, least of all ourselves. Nor is it, as Aravamudan would
have us confess, simply theory "about" the south. It is, as
Mbembe has stressed, about the effect of the south itself on
theory, the effects of its ex-centricity, to invoke Homi Bhabha's
(1994:6) term, of its structural and tropic situation in the history
of the ongoing global present. Of course, we have long had a species
of "theory from the south." Its other name is anthropology:
anthropology, that is, of a certain critical sort. Or, at least, it
was-until much of the discipline, seduced by the neoliberal flight
from history, society, structure, system, determination, and
explanation retreated from theory sui
generis in
favor of contingency and the documentation of difference. But that is
another story.
Back
to the core of the question: What
is the status of "the South" in our argument? What,
finally, do we intend by the term?
Despite
the fact that it has replaced "the third world" as a
more-or-less popular usage, the label itself is inherently slippery,
inchoate, unfixed. It describes less a geographical place than a
polythetic category, its members sharing one or more-but not all, or
even most-of a diverse set of features. The closest thing to a common
denominator among them is that many once were colonies, though not
all in the same epochs. "Postcolonial," therefore, is
something of a synonym, but only an inexact one. What is more, like
all indexical categories, "the Global
South" assumes meaning by virtue not of its content, but of its
context, of the way in which it points to something else in a field
of signs - in this instance, to its antinomy to "the Global
North," an opposition that carries a great deal of imaginative
baggage congealed around the contrast between centrality and
marginality, kleptocracy and free-market democracy, modernity and its
absence. Patently, this opposition takes on a hard-edged political
and economic reality in some institutional contexts, like the G-8 and
world bond and credit markets-a reality that makes it appear as
though it has a "hard" geo-cartography. That process of
reification is precisely why we cannot simply do away with the term
by fiat: it has a life in the world. Analytically, then, the problem
for a critical anthropology is to account for when, why, and how it
takes on that reality and with what implications. In other words,
"the South" is not an analytic construct. It is an
analytic object.
Its very facticity-like its labile relationality and its capacity to
signify-is something for which we have to give account. This, to
answer Aravamudan, is why it has multiple connotations in our
narrative: they refer to different levels of abstraction, different
levels of theory-work.
In the complex hyphenation that links economy to governance and both to the enterprises of everyday life, then, the contemporary global order rests on a highly flexible, inordinately intricate web of synapses, a web that both reinforces and eradicates, both sharpens and ambiguates, the lines between hemispheres.
But
let us reiterate, lest we be misunderstood. Empirically speaking,
however it may be imagined, the line between north and south is
endemically unstable, porous, broken, often illegible. It is not
difficult to show that there is much south in the North, much north
in the South, and more of both to come in the future. All of which is
underscored by the deep structural articulation-indeed, by the mutual
entailment-of hemispheric economies, not to mention by the
labyrinthine capillaries of the world of finance, which defy any
attempt to unravel them along geopolitical axes. In the complex
hyphenation that links economy to governance and both to the
enterprises of everyday life, then, the contemporary global order
rests on a highly flexible, inordinately intricate web of synapses, a
web that both reinforces and eradicates,
both sharpens and ambiguates,
the lines between hemispheres. As a result, what precisely is north,
and what south, becomes ever harder to pin down. Which is precisely
why, as we argue in the book, "the Global South" cannot be
defined, a
priori,
in substantive terms, why it bespeaks a relation, not a thing in or
for itself-even though it can, and has, taken on material substance
along certain spatiotemporal axes for certain purposes. Analytically,
however, whatever it may connote at any given moment, it always
points to an "ex-centric" location, an elsewhere to
mainstream Euro-America, an outside to its hegemonic centers, real or
imagined. For our purposes here, then, its importance lies in that
ex-centricity: in the angle of vision it provides us from which to
estrange our world in
its totality in
order better to make sense of its present and future.
The second
question, which is closely related, is this:
In
speaking, however provocatively, of a "counter-evolutionary"
moment in the global geo-history of capital, are we not, by a
somewhat disingenuous subterfuge, sustaining the telos of modernist
narratives, except in reverse? More generally, are we suggesting an
historical overdetermination, a directionality, to the history of the
present, to the history of capital in the 21st century?
As Quayson
and Mbembe both make plain, the quick answer is an unambiguous no on
both counts. But, given Ferguson's suggestion that we may confuse our
readers on this account and may indeed be reversing the telos of
modernity, given also that Aravamudan has it that we are unwilling to
decide whether Africa is either the end point of contemporary
capitalism in its utopic, most advanced form or an augury of its most
dystopian, degenerate future, let us address the issue head on.
... our central thesis does not hinge, as Aravamudan appears to think, on deciding whether Africa is either one or other of these things.
Note here
that our central thesis does not hinge, as Aravamudan appears to
think, on deciding whether Africa is either one or other of these
things. The problem, and our argument, is rather more complex. It is
that, while Euro-America and its antipodes are caught up in the same
world-historical processes, the Global South has tended to feel their
effects before the global north. There are good reasons for this,
reasons both historical and geopolitical, reasons that we spell out
in considerable detail in the book. Old margins are becoming new
frontiers, places where mobile, globally-competitive capital finds
minimally regulated zones in which to vest its operations; where, as
Mbembe also reminds us, capitalism flourishes as democracy is
displaced by autocracy or technocracy; where industrial manufacture
opens up ever more cost-efficient sites for itself; where highly
flexible, extraordinarily inventive informal economies-of the kind
now expanding everywhere-have long thrived; and where those
performing outsourced services for the north develop cutting edge
enterprises of their own, both legitimate and illicit; where new
idioms of work, time, and governance take root, thus to alter
planetary practices.
In
the upshot, the "advanced" edges of contemporary
capital-its experiments, among other things, in re-engineering legal
and regulatory instruments; in the appropriation of productive land,
intellectual property, and other resources; and in the development of
new modes of extraction and enclaved sovereignty-root themselves
there; vide the fact that, early in 2010, Newsweek, not known for its
post-racist take on the global economy, declared that Africa is "at
the very forefront of emerging markets...Like China and India, [it
is] perhaps more than any other region...illustrative of [the] new
world order" (Guo 2010:44), a multi-focal order, we argue,
whose axis
mundi is
no longer self-evidently in the north. At the same time, and for the
same reasons, the dystopian sides of that order have also been most
readily evident in the Global South. Material inequality, human
disposability, epidemic illness, social exclusion remain endemic
there-which, in turn, have produced more than just "glimmers...of
endurance, survivability, and even futurity," to recall
Aravamudan's phrase. As we take pains to demonstrate, they have also
yielded their own forms of politics, their own forms of
post-proletarian labor, their own kinds of sociality, their own modes
of income accumulation, investment, and distribution, some of them,
as Ferguson notes, authored in intricate north-south collaborations.
But these collaborations are motivated by conditions in southern
contexts, recast in them, and, increasingly, exported northward. In
short, as a frontier of contemporary capital, the south has spanned
everything from corporate giants like Mittal Steel, Cosan Biofuels,
and the Royal Bafokeng platinum empire through experimental
enterprises of various scales and reaches, to lumpen life-worlds
notorious for their desperate immiseration, their unruliness, their
terrifying violence. It has also spawned political fields in which
sovereignties are asserted, collaterally and in shifting proportions,
by corporations, the state, NGO's, organized crime, religious orders,
ethno-polities, and others. It is the broadsides of this dialectic
that we seek to document: a dialectic, we stress, that is
under-determined and full of surprises, one that
does not recapitulate
the telos of modernity or its reverse, one that defies both received
Marxisms and Hegelian liberalism.
This
is half of our "counter-evolutionary" story. Note that
"counter," here, is intended to mean not just inversion but
also negation.
We deploy it to point to irony, not to teleology. The other half of
our story has to do with the contemporary history of Euro-America,
one of rising carceral populations, rising unemployment, a rising
politics of the belly and the bellicose, spiraling inequality,
spiraling crises of social reproduction and generation. It is not we
who first noted that the "new normal" of the North appears
to be replaying the recent past of the South, ever more in a major
key. Which is why, in many respects-note, many,
not all-Africa, Asia, and Latin America seem to be running ahead of
Euro-America, prefiguring its history-in-the-making. And why the
Global North appears to be "going south."
Even
some of the more apparently outrageous claims in this respect are not
easily sloughed off. Take the rotting urbanism spreading through
parts of the Global North. Montreal may not resemble Lagos, as
Ferguson rightly says, but large parts of Chicago do. To be sure,
Youngstown, Ohio, an all-American wasteland, would actually like to.
The point? When, after Rem Koolhaas (Koolhaas and Cleijne 2001; cf.
Comaroff and Shepard 1999), we say that Lagos is a hyperbolic
frontier of the 21st century conurbation, we do not merely have in
mind the fact that real estate on Victoria Island is more expensive
than its equivalent in Manhattan, nor that Chicago has inner city
slums little different from those of Lagos, nor even that the
patterns of rampant inequality in the two contexts are running in
pathological parallel. We intend, technically, that urban scapes, as
global phenomena, have strongly convergent tendencies-in respect of
property relations, political life, patterns of trafficking, claims
to sovereignty, local economies, and the like-because of the way that
capital, and its cultural mediations, tend to play themselves out
under specific demographic, infrastructural, and sociological
conditions; conditions that, again, are most graphically visible in
places like Lagos. Not everywhere, nor all in the same way-hence,
again, our anti-teleological insistence-but in ways that materialize
the hydra-headed configurations of contemporary capitalism as it
takes its historical course. These configurations, we stress, are
ill-captured by terms like "deterioration" or "advancement"
or any of the other dualisms that we seek so carefully to avoid
in Theory
from the South.
Which brings
us to the third question:
Why,
in speaking of "the South," and of the putative evolution
of the North in its direction, do we take Africa as paradigmatic,
rather than, say, Brazil or India, the economic success stories of
the contemporary moment? Or better yet, why not focus on China, the
biggest story of all?
The
most immediate answer to this question, raised here by Ato Quayson,
is that Africa is the place from which we enter the world; as
Ferguson observes, all knowledge is situated somewhere. Southern
Africa is where we do our scholarly work, where we live much of our
lives. Note that "we," here, already implies a situated
deixis, a contextual relativity of person-and-place that captures a
central dimension of our argument. Our anthropology, like the
phenomena we observe-whether it be the figurations of finance, the
politics of life, or the fetishism of memory-take manifest shape in
an African locale. But they are also the products of translocal
processes and multiple crossings, of dialectical engagements of
varying scale. Africa, to reiterate, provides a fertile forcing
ground for many of the most destructively rapacious and the most
urgently inventive faces of advanced capitalism. It is both a
frontier of and a window onto the signature operations of our
polymorphous global economy, an economy that has many more-or-less
interdependent, quasi-autonomous mutations and emplacements-and no
unencumbered centers of Archimedean leverage.
That
said, the question is not whether Africa or China or Brazil
is the vanguard
of the planetary economy. Each makes evident a distinct dimension of
the ways in which capitalism at its most energetic is plying its
course, seeking to solve its mounting contradictions, exercising its
sovereignty over biopolitical life-and running up against its
ecological limits. China might indeed have become the workshop of the
world. It certainly is a
critical node in the new global imaginary, one that writes modern
history again as an evolutionary narrative, this time with East Asia
as its endpoint.
... China might indeed have become the workshop of the world. It certainly is a critical node in the new global imaginary, one that writes modern history again as an evolutionary narrative, this time with East Asia as its endpoint. But, as its internal crises mount, we must beware of mistaking Chinese capital ... for Chinese capitalism as a realized formation...
But,
as its internal crises mount, we must beware of mistaking Chinese
capital, however huge its impact on the global economy, for Chinese
capitalism as
a realized formation-which, in its etatist form,
has generated its own particular character, one toward which the rest
of the world is not evolving. It has its own dystopias, global
dependencies, and contradictions, some of them with palpably African
foreshadowings. As Mbembe points out, China and Africa are likely to
develop in vibrant symbiosis, both to decenter American seigniorage
and to set up new kinds of south-east-south axes. BRICSA, note -the
economic alliance of Brazil, India, China, and South Africa-has
already been conjured into existence.
To return yet again to our
under-title, then, our ironic invocation of Africa here was meant
less to argue for a unique harbinger of a capitalist or
post-capitalist world than simultaneously to invoke and to dismantle
the kind of Hegelian thinking for which Africa has long served as the
negative pole; this in order to tell a very different kind of story
of the present and future.
Which,
finally, takes us to the last of our four questions:
What
do we intend here by "theory"?
In
part, we have already addressed this. It has been widely noted, in
Euro-American contexts, that there has been something of a retreat
from theory of late (see above). To wit, a new handbook, currently in
press from the British Association of Social Anthropologists
(Fardonet
al, n.d.),
dwells nervously on the discomfort of the discipline with general
theory of any kind. In the social sciences at large, methodological
empiricism and born-again realism have been re-enchanted. There has
also been a return to the ethical, the theological, and the
biological.
For
many in the South, however, the refusal of theory has long been an
unaffordable luxury. The need to interrogate the workings of
contemporary world-historical processes-to lay bare their
uncertainties and invisibilities, to make sense of their ways and
means, to comprehend their inclusions and exclusions, to court,
counter, mediate their dystopic implications-has become increasingly
urgent. Hence the unveiling in 2009 by the Ministry of Higher
Education in South Africa of a Humanities
and Social Sciences Charter, its
objective being to prioritize the development of "social theory"
and "critical skills." [1] What the South Africans have
grasped is that the courage to theorize is a prerequisite of any
effort to make the history of the future different from the history
of the present. If, indeed, the recent past of the south is becoming
the "new normal" of Europe, and of Arianna
Huffington's Third
World America (2010),
there is clearly a need in the north for a return to Theory. Perhaps
this is a respect in which Euro-America ought to evolve more rapidly
toward Africa.
... By theory ... we do not intend Grand Theory in the high modernist tradition. Ours is not a flight into pure abstraction or into a philosophical anthropology. We mean grounded theory, concrete abstraction: the historically-contextualized, problem-driven effort to account for the perverse patterning of social, material, and cultural "facts" by recourse to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between empirical observation and critical ideation …
By
theory, we stress, we do not intend Grand Theory in the high
modernist tradition. Ours is not a flight into pure abstraction or
into a philosophical anthropology. We mean grounded
theory, concrete abstraction:
the historically-contextualized, problem-driven effort to account for
the perverse patterning of social, material, and cultural "facts"
by recourse to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between
empirical observation and critical ideation and also, in a different
register, between the epic and the everyday. In short, our
predilection is for theory that is neither an all-embracing
meta-narrative nor microcosmically, myopically local. It tacks,
rather, on the awkward scale between the two, seeking to explain
phenomena with reference both to
their larger determinations and their contingent, proximate causes;
this by plumbing the complex, often counter-intuitive points of
articulation among them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003). As we say in
the final chapter of the book, the object of our praxis is to
interrogate the connections between what it is that constitutes the
lived world and the manner in which that world is experienced, acted
upon, and inhabited by sentient human subjects.Theory
from the South is
an argument for just this kind of grounded theory, which, we submit,
has always been the stock in trade of a critical anthropology.
A
final thought. We began the book by reflecting on the genealogy of
enlightenment liberalism, on its presumptions about the subjects and
objects of theory-making. All of this goes back at least to Plato,
to The
Philosopher and His Poor (Rancière
2003), to the conceit that there is one class that reflects while
others do only menial work. Ours is a different genealogy. For us,
theory, particularly critical theory, is immanent in life itself,
which always implies
a degree of reflection, abstraction, inspired guesswork. In this
sense, it need not be an elite practice, even though it is often
dismissed as such. To the contrary, theory often derives as much from
a lived praxis-a praxis grounded in the ordinary-that may occur
anywhere in the "mesh of contemporary wiring," to invoke
the spirit of Walter Benjamin. [2] Nor, in these wireless times, is
theory just "on the ground." It is also in the expansive,
immediate, ethereal-yet-personalized technologies aptly termed social
media, media that in 2011 helped congeal a North African Spring --
and, following it, a European summer of discontent. These, again for
better and worse, are rich new sites of knowing-and-being that have
the capacity to inform and transform theory at its self-appointed
centers, to trouble its assumptions about the motors, mechanisms, and
pathways of history in these, our late modern times.
*
Understanding
these times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is the point,
the provocation, the critical pulse that underlies both the poetics
and the disciplinary practice toward which Theory
from the South aspires.
Whether it succeeds or fails, or does both in some proportion, the
issues that it was written to address remain too important to ignore,
too serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.
AFTERWORD
Soon
after we wrote this piece for the Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in Montreal, there appeared a cover story
in The
Economist (December
3-9, 2011) under the banner heading, Africa
Rising.
Among other things, it reported that, over the past decade, "six
of the world's ten fastest-growing countries were African." In
"eight of the past ten years," it noted, "Africa has
grown faster than East Asia," adding that its rise in
productivity easily exceeds that of the USA (p.15). The
Economist went
on to detail the complex reasons for why it is that the continent
bespeaks both the "transformative promise of [capitalist]
growth" and some of its bleakest, most dire dimensions. In
short, it gives empirical flesh, in a very different register and
from a very different perspective, to precisely the argument
of Theory
from the South.
ENDNOTES
[1]
See Media Statement on the Development of a Humanities and Social
Sciences Charter, Ministry of Higher Education and Training Republic
of South Africa, 6 October
2010; http://www.education.gov.za/dynamic/dynamic.aspx?pageid=310&id=10648 ,
accessed 7 October 2010. The words from the statement quoted here are
those of the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Blade
Nzimande.
[2]
The phrase itself is Simon Schama's. He uses it in describing
Benjamin's reflections on the obligation to "capture memory"in
times of danger through ordinary experience - rather than in the
"[fetishization] of the meditative." See "Television
and the Trouble with History," Simon Schama, The Guardian, 18
June 2002; http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,739347,00.html.
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