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PROLOGUE

The Johannesburg Moment

KARL VON HOLDT

Forty years ago, in the early 1970s, Durban experienced a ferment of new ideas that were to profoundly shape resistance to apartheid. The central figures in this ferment were two charismatic intellectuals, Steve Biko and Rick Turner. Biko and his comrades founded the Black Consciousness movement and its organisational forms, the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black People’s Convention, from which emerged a new generation of political activists who went on to organise trade unions, community organisations and the United Democratic Front. Rick Turner’s ideas about participatory democracy and the projects he initiated to support a nascent black trade union movement, partly in response to the challenge of Black Consciousness, influenced many of those who contributed to the building of the trade union movement.

The Durban ferment was not only about the ideas of intellectuals; it was also about a shift in popular consciousness. In 1973 some 100,000 workers participated in a wave of strikes in Durban, breaking with the quiescence of the 1960s. By the end of the decade both Biko and Turner had been killed by the Security Police. Their ideas, however, continued to shape the resistance movement in different ways throughout the 1980s.

This was what Tony Morphet – drawing on Raymond Williams’s idea of a structure of feeling – called the ‘Durban moment’, constituted by profound shifts in ideas and consciousness among intellectuals and workers, and setting off far-reaching reverberations across South Africa, way beyond the immediate locale of Durban (Morphet, 1990: 92–93; Webster, 1993).

That was the Durban moment. This book is subtitled ‘the Johannesburg moment’. What do we mean by this?

At the simplest level, the title is a reference to the fact that the book grew out of a series of lectures on Pierre Bourdieu, the great French sociologist, given at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2010. The significance of the reference to place is not simply that the lectures took place here, but that they presented an occasion for interrogating the relevance of Bourdieu’s work to South Africa – and, more importantly, confronting the meaning of South Africa for Bourdieu’s theory. It is through exploring the significance of this interrogation and confrontation that we can arrive at some sense of the possible meaning of a ‘Johannesburg moment’.

In contrast to the Durban moment, the Johannesburg moment is a post-apartheid moment; that is to say, it is a moment of political rupture with apartheid – a moment of the new Constitution, democracy, reconstruction and transformation.

Yet in our book – which presents a multilayered conversation, not only between Bourdieu and an array of interlocutors presented by Michael, not only between ‘Johannesburg’ and Bourdieu, but also between Michael and myself – I argue that this place (Johannesburg and its hinterland) is distinguished by a fractious and turbulent set of social contestations, both small and large, over the shape of an emerging social order in post-apartheid South Africa. So sharp is this contestation, so multi-centred and diverse, that we may speak of multiple local moral orders, a social fragmentation and a profound disordering of society, which are evident in many different ways, among them an argument deep in the heart of our society over the meaning of ‘law’ and ‘order’.

Thus, from the start, the Johannesburg moment is one that disrupts the stark binary of oppression and freedom and the comforting trajectory of transformation and reconstruction. Nor should we imagine that such arguments and contestations take place only on the far peripheries of our city, in places like Trouble (discussed in the main body of the book), from which its towering buildings and twinkling lights cannot even be seen. They take place as well in its heart, in those buildings and their streets, as well as its leafy suburbs.

One of the icons of Johannesburg is the Constitutional Court and the wider Constitution Hill precinct. It symbolises the new post-apartheid order in South Africa – the order of democracy and human rights. The Constitution and its Court are supposed to rise above society, just as they rise above the cacophony of Johannesburg on their hill, and preside over all institutions, deliberating, adjudicating and providing guidance in the construction of a new order.

But in reality, what is the reach of the Constitution and its Court? Trouble itself is only 30 or 40 km away from the Constitutional Court as the highway goes, but the Constitution appears to have little force there, just as the law seems to have little presence. If the Republic is defined by the constitutional order, then Trouble belongs in a different Republic; or, perhaps, Trouble is a place of struggle between contending Republics.

Constitution Hill is home to a moving exhibition on the conditions of the apartheid jails and the role of these jails in securing the apartheid order. Visitors can be forgiven for imagining that there are no longer jails in our constitutional democracy, and that if there are, conditions for prisoners are decent and humane. The truth is very different – our jails are more overcrowded than ever before, and violence and corruption continue to pervade many of them. What role do they play in securing the post-apartheid order? The Constitution no doubt seems remote both to the incarcerated and their jailers.

Nor can the Constitution remain above the fray. The Constitutional Court itself is increasingly at the centre of controversy, ranging from the dispute between Judge Hlope and some Constitutional Court judges to the process of appointing a new chief justice. There can be little doubt that the same contestations, the same battles over the nature of order, the same cacophony of Johannesburg will necessarily penetrate its inner workings. The progressive liberal consensus that characterised its early years may well give way to sharp differences that reflect wider divergences, each with substantial constituencies in society, over such questions as social conservatism or the relative power of the executive branch of government.

Johannesburg is also the city of head offices, and the streets outside the headquarters of the African National Congress (ANC) in 2011 were witness to violent clashes between the police and the supporters of the president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, protesting against the disciplinary hearings brought against him and his executive by the ANC. This provides a dramatic image for ‘a profoundly unstable ANC which at the same time exists in a state of profound paralysis’ due to the fierce struggles between different factions of the elite, as well as different constituencies of the Tripartite Alliance, over the control and direction of the organisation (Von Holdt, 2011a). Authority and discipline have become extremely unstable and highly contested within the organisation, much as they have in the broader society. Indeed, the ANC general secretary warns that the ANC is ‘imploding’ because ‘chaos and anarchy are good forests for mischief’ (The Star, 21 September 2011).

Thus, Johannesburg confronts us with all the contradictions and tensions of post-apartheid reality at their most intense. By virtue of its dynamism and scale, the city serves to refract them so that the dynamic interaction between order and disorder, between multiple orders and the jagged edges of ruin, become most visible and most intense in this place. Johannesburg was always at the centre of the making and remaking of the South African order. However, this moment is different, characterised, as noted above, by an historic rupture.

New forces, new problems and new questions come to the fore as we emerge from the ruins of the old. Many of our assumptions are questioned and much of what we took to be true breaks to pieces. We find we have to think again. Clashing narratives provide us with alternative ways of naming ourselves, evident in the multiple meanings assigned to our city. Are we a ‘world-class African city’ in the making, as the city authorities would have us believe? Is Johannesburg the second-greatest city after Paris, as Johannesburg artist William Kentridge’s title so ironically proclaims? Are we a Third World slum? Are we a site of the African Renaissance, or are we another anecdote in the tale of Afro-pessimism? Is London a suburb of Johannesburg, in another of Kentridge’s musings (Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev & Coetzee, 1999: 109)? Is Johannesburg a suburb of Lagos, or Harare? Whose story is it in which we play out our roles?

Again, we are reminded of the sharp contrast with the Durban moment. The latter was founded on two binaries – the class binary of worker versus capitalist and the racial binary of the black oppressed versus white domination. Both of these binaries designated the agents of history and located them in master narratives of progress. Both narratives provided for a triumphal ending after long periods of suffering and struggle. The Johannesburg moment is that ending, however, it disrupts those neat binaries. The master narratives and their moral certainties are no longer clear. In its place we have multiple symbolic orders in contention over such matters, paralysis in our present and uncertainty in our future.

It is perhaps inevitable that the situation should give rise to an attempt to assert a new binary – that between order and disorder. Thus, we have the strengthening of social conservatism and the assertion that the erosion of morality and authority must be countered with a new authority, embedded in institutions such as the executive organs of the state or the social structures of patriarchy. We have the increasingly violent responses of the police to both crime and social protest. We have new attempts to control information, to limit the space of the press.

It is easy for progressives to fall back on moralistic responses to this kind of assertion of conservative order and counterpose the progressive values of the Constitution. But we might do better to interrogate more carefully the sources of this response, and to think more deeply about why there is a pervasive sense that morality and authority are in crisis. Many people in places like Trouble long for an orderliness within which to conduct their daily lives. And where the state fails to guarantee that order, we have the forceful authoritarianism of vigilante mobs and xenophobic crowds imposing a very different kind of order on communities.

We explicitly present the Johannesburg moment – like the Durban moment before it – as a moment of theoretical endeavour: indeed, the disruption of master narratives and their attendant certainties makes a fresh engagement with theory imperative. So we turn to Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu is primarily a theorist of order and its reproduction. We confront this Bourdieu with the argumentative, unruly and violence-laden social realities of South Africa – with, precisely, the Johannesburg moment. And in this theatre, we conduct a series of conversations between Bourdieu and (mostly) Marxist intellectuals and theorists, exploring the intersections and divergences between their theories and his. This is a doubly appropriate endeavour, because, in contrast to Bourdieu, Marxism is a theory of struggle and change, and because, as a theory of change, it has been hugely influential both in the struggle against apartheid and in the scholarly field in South Africa.

In these engagements, we see theoretical work as a dynamic endeavour, with intellectuals building onto and borrowing from what went before, or demolishing it and making use of the rubble afresh, as they confront the theoretical constructions of their forebears and opponents while attempting to wrestle into coherence the social world around them. The accumulated weight of social order in the West and in the Western sociology of Bourdieu – and of Mills, and in the Marxism of Gramsci and Beauvoir and Burawoy – is contrasted with the making and remaking of social order in the post-colony, where the old order is ruptured and the new order seems unable to come into being, weighed down as it is with the legacies and conflicts of the old, as well as with new and contradictory claims and battles and confusions – a world for which two of our interlocutors, Freire and Fanon, in turn attempt the remaking of Marxism.

Our Johannesburg conversations are not simply a critique of Bourdieu from a Marxist perspective. We explore Marxism as a living encounter between individuals and generations. Fanon wrote that decolonisation, ‘which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder’. The disorder of the Johannesburg moment presents a challenge not only for Bourdieu, but also for Marxists.

Marxism and Bourdieusian theory share their point of origin and their reference points in the development of Western society – they can be seen, in other words, as elements in what Bourdieu called ‘the imperialism of reason’. The challenge of the Johannesburg moment is to disorder and reorder Western theory so that it is better able to name our own world. Not only that, though: the point is to so rework theory that it enables a rethinking of the West, a renaming of what appears so solid and dominant. In short, the goal, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), is to provincialise Europe.

This is not a project that limits itself, or can limit itself, to Johannesburg or South Africa. The Johannesburg moment is linked to Mumbai, São Paulo, Istanbul, perhaps Cairo, perhaps Lagos, perhaps Beijing (Yongle, 2010), perhaps Moscow, other cities of the global South, or outside of the West, with the accumulated cultural and intellectual resources to undertake such projects. Indeed, Johannesburg is a latecomer to this scene – we have only recently won our political freedom – but we can draw on resources from our past. Explicit in the work of both Biko and Turner, for example, was a questioning of European ‘civilisation’.

Nor is the project limited to a set of questions about theory. These questions have urgent practical implications, and if we develop the wrong answers, the consequences could be disastrous. As an illustration, in the first decade of democracy, the ANC government adopted orthodox Western policy prescriptions regarding economic policy, and at the same time took a radically heterodox position on the nature of HIV and AIDS. The result was the deepening of both inequality and the ravages of disease in our society. If the opposite positions had been taken – medical orthodoxy and economic heterodoxy – South Africa might have found itself in a very different position today.

In this book, we begin a process of putting Western theory through the grinder of Johannesburg, probing and reconstructing it in a way that helps us understand our world and name it afresh. At least, that is our ambition. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether it is successful.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first of all like to express my huge gratitude to Michael for inviting me to participate in this project. It has been a wonderfully exciting and productive journey of exploration that totally disorganised my plans for the two years we have been working on it – but that is just another of the hazards of the Johannesburg moment. I would also like to thank my colleagues on the collaborative research project into collective violence embarked upon by the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation – Malose Langa, Sepetla Molapo, Kindiza Ngubeni, Adele Kirsten and Nomfundo Mogapi. I have drawn so much from this research, and from our continuing conversations about its meaning and implications, in my engagement with the work of Bourdieu and the other interlocutors in this book. I want especially to thank Adele Kirsten, my partner, for those many conversations over breakfast or tea in which I first tested some of the ideas that have gone into this book. I am grateful too to the colleagues who took the time to read and comment on various of the pieces I wrote for the book – Khayaat Fakier, Brahm Fleisch, Sarah Mosoetsa and Eddie Webster – as well as the wonderfully engaging audiences at Michael’s lecture series at Wits.

Belinda Bozzoli, deputy vice chancellor for research at the time; Tawana Kupe, dean of the Faculty of the Humanities; and the Faculty Research Committee all contributed to making Michael’s visit possible, while the award of a Mellon Distinguished Visitor’s Grant provided the necessary financial support and Christine Bischoff provided seamless organisation. I would particularly like to thank Veronica Klipp of Wits University Press for her enthusiastic response to the idea of this book, and the other members of her team – Melanie Pequeux, Alex Potter and Tshepo Neito – for so efficiently piloting the processes of production, editing and marketing. To Veronica and Darryl Accone, thanks for inviting me to present the opening address at the 2011 Mail & Guardian Literary Festival, so forcing me to present a trial run of the ideas that have gone into this prologue.

Publication of this book is also an occasion to acknowledge my friend and comrade, Moloantoa Molaba. I mourn his untimely death. We worked together as a team for so much of my research into violence and state functioning and our conversations about our experiences were so lively that I cannot think about what I have written in this book without remembering him. Lala ngoxolo, mtshana.