Study and revolt

Abstract

This essay is an inquiry into the forms of life and writing that emerge in the relation between study and revolt. After an initial sketch of the problem of “normal emergency” as it presents itself in post-apartheid South Africa, the essay then turns to a first reading of Richard Rive’s 1990 novel Emergency Continued in order to ask about the relations of study and revolt under conditions of a state of emergency. To deepen its reading of Rive, the essay makes a detour into the utopian theory of education set forth in 1972 by Richard Turner. The essay then turns to a second reading of Rive’s Emergency Continued in order to elucidate the unexpectedly utopian kernel of that text. The essay concludes with a reading of Zoë Wicomb’s short story “A Clearing in the Bush,” and a reflection on the relation between study and revolt under contemporary conditions.

Keywords:

• Emergency
• leisure
• revolt
• Richard Rive
• study
• Richard Turner
• Zoë Wicomb

Acknowledgements

This paper was prepared for the Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar, co-hosted by the History Department and the Centre for Humanities Research at The University of Western Cape. It was first presented there on August 12, 2014. A later draft was presented on November 6, 2014 in the Political Philosophy Workshop at Brown University. I thank the participants, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comments. I thank Laura Merchant and Siraj Sindhu for their help preparing this text for publication.

Notes

¹ See, on these points, Desai, We are the Poors, 10 & ff.

² Desai, We are the Poors, 72.

³ Ibid., 12–13.

⁴ Section 36 (1) of the Constitution of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996. Courts are moreover instructed to take into account the nature of the right to be limited, the importance of the purpose of the limitation, the nature and extent of the limitation, the relation between the limitation and its purpose, and whether there are less restrictive means to achieve this purpose.

⁵ Rive, Emergency Continued, 8. As Anthony Mathews put it, “[t]here is something decidedly artificial about discussing emergency legislation and the rule of law in South Africa. ‘Ordinary’ and permanent legislation has already brought about a ninety-percent destruction of the rule of law and put the country into a permanent state of emergency.” See, on this point, Mathews, Freedom, State Security, and the Rule of Law, 265.

⁶ See, among so many others, Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 112–123.

⁷ Sitze, The Impossible Machine, 285–6 n12.

⁸ Desai and Pithouse, “‘But We Were Thousands,’” 260.

⁹ Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 58–70.

¹⁰ Coates, Between The World and Me, 48, 115–6.

¹¹ Agamben, State of Exception, 64.

¹² Ibid., 29–37, 76, 98–105.

¹³ Ibid., 31–7, 82.

¹⁴ Ibid., 177–8.

¹⁵ Ibid., 75, see also 95–8.

¹⁶ Ibid., 181–3.

¹⁷ See, for example, Rive, Emergency Continued, 155–8.

¹⁸ Rive, Emergency Continued, 5, 23. “Faction,” of course, is one among many Latinate translations of the Greek stasis, which designates conflict within the family or polity as distinct from polemos, which designates conflict between polities. Rive, a renowned teacher of Latin, is unlikely not to have known this.

¹⁹ Sitze, “Emergency Continued,” 65–94.

²⁰ Turner, The Eye of the Needle, 1. We should not pass over in silence the Christian theology informing Turner’s social ontology: from Spinoza to Hume, from Kant to Hegel, the “miracle” is defined by modern philosophers as that act which makes the impossible possible. Although this is not the place to attempt an analysis of “impossible” and “miracle” as keywords in South African politics, suffice it to say that from Solomon Plaatje (who, in 1916, called the native reserves “impossible places”) to D. F. Malan (who, in 1950, said of total segregation that “it does not pay any party to endeavor to achieve the impossible”), from Bessie Head (who refers despairingly to the impossible in “A Period of Darkness”) to Michael Neocosmos (who takes Alain Badiou as a point of departure for a discourse on the impossible as the foundation of politics), from the doctrinal definition of parliamentary sovereignty (parliament has the power to do everything that is not “naturally impossible”) to Nelson Mandela (who not only set for himself the task of “making government impossible” but also declared that “it always seems impossible until it’s done”), “the impossible” would seem to be central – in ambivalent and volatile ways that call for analysis – to a minor lexicon of politics that shadows, and arguably has been parasitized by, the major lexicon centered on “the miracle.”

²¹ Ibid., 66–7, 70. Each of these declensions of “discipline,” it should be noted, are for Turner related to the place and function allotted to the university by the policy of “separate development,” which he understands dialectically as a white supremacist attempt at subjugation that nevertheless could double as an occasion for black autonomy. See Turner, The Eye of the Needle, 73, cf. 140.

²² Ibid., 69, emphasis in original.

²³ Rive, Emergency Continued, 157.

²⁴ Turner, Eye of the Needle, 67.

²⁵ Ibid., 72.

²⁶ Ibid., 72–3.

²⁷ Ibid., 71.

²⁸ Ibid., 73.

²⁹ Mamdani, Define and Rule, 122.

³⁰ More, Utopia, 1, 36, 46–8. A reflection on Utopia’s title page allows the point to be made even more forcefully. Before one begins reading the text that gives itself the name “Utopia,” one encounters a text that designates itself as a “six-line stanza on the Island of Utopia by the Poet Laureate Anemolius The Son of Hythloday’s Sister.” The stanza presents a play on the name “utopia” in which the name “Plato” provides the hinge that allows the two meanings of the word “utopia” – “no-place” and “good-place” – to pivot into one another. Reference to “Plato” thus provides the condition on which the very word “Utopia” itself is able to achieve the wordplay (no-place, good-place) that, in turn, establishes its self-relation and self-definition. Read to the letter, therefore, any reference to “utopia” always already also implies a reference, however occluded or oblique, to Plato.

³¹ Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 18–19, 27, 37, 159–160, 162, 211–212. See also Jouët-Pastré, Le jeu et le sérieux, 31–37. On Jouët-Pastré’s read, “play” is so essential to Plato’s Laws that it can even be considered the political foundation of the city itself. On the postwar misreading of the “playful” or “ludic” dimension of philosophic lawgiving in Platonic thought, see Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 253–5. For the influence of Plato’s Laws on More’s Utopia, see Lisi, “Contemporary Readings of Plato’s Laws,” 11, 15–16.

³² Plato, Laws, 643d. “Education” here is closer to “culture” understood as “formation,” as in the German Bildung or the Latin humanitas.

³³ Ibid., 685a-b, 769a, 803d.

³⁴ Deleuze, Masochism, 81–2, translation modified.

³⁵ Sitze, “Nomos as a Problem,” 163–175.

³⁶ Hythloday at one point refers to morosophi, which Clarence Miller translates skillfully as “foolosophers.” See More, Utopia, 21.

³⁷ On satire in More’s Utopia, see Marin, Utopics, 61–83; Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 22–41.

³⁸ Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 6–7; Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 52–8. Compare Arendt, The Human Condition, 82–3 (distinguishing between scholē and idleness); Arendt, Between Past and Future, 19–21 (on the paradoxical centrality of scholē to Marxist thought); Arendt, On Revolution, 123 (distinguishing between scholē and otium).

³⁹ More, Utopia, 16, 64, 102.

⁴⁰ On scholē, work, and play in the context of the “crisis of the humanities,” see Sitze, “Response to John Mowitt’s ‘The Humanities and the University in Ruins’.”

⁴¹ More, Utopia, 2.

⁴² Because the common (koinonia) is the form that philosophy thinks when it really is thinking, property conceived philosophically necessarily becomes common property. The Platonic tradition is therefore equally the communist tradition. See, generally, Badiou, Being and Event, 31–7; Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis.

⁴³ Rive, Emergency Continued, 82.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 96.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 49.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 85, 92, 94.

⁴⁷ Rive, Emergency Continued, 8.

⁴⁸ Rive, Emergency (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 217.

⁴⁹ Rive, Selected Writings, 75. See also Sitze, “Starting from Scratch,” 157–184.

⁵⁰ Nkosi, Home and Exile, 39, 128, 131, 133. Compare Rive, Emergency Continued, 5, 29, 96, 132, 185.

⁵¹ Rive, Emergency Continued, 132.

⁵² See Emergency Continued, 180, emphasis in original.

⁵³ Ibid., 5.

⁵⁴ Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 185–221.

⁵⁵ Rive, Emergency Continued 5.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 81.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 89.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 132.

⁵⁹ Rive, Writing Black, 129.

⁶⁰ Rive, Emergency Continued, 22, 67–8, 132.

⁶¹ Ibid., 64.

⁶² Agamben, State of Exception, 59. Under conditions of colonialism, as Nasser Hussain has shown, this self-suspension is not the exception but the norm. See Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency.

⁶³ Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 39. This reading tarries with Lalu, “Apartheid’s University,” 45–60; Lalu, “Campus,” 33–57.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 41.

⁶⁵ Nortje, “Scene Near an Ethnic College,” 131.

⁶⁶ Wicomb, “A Clearing in the Bush,” 41–2.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 42.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 61.

⁶⁹ Idleness and vagrancy, as Martin Chanock has shown, were central concerns for the 1903–5 Native Affairs Commission, and the destruction of the spaces of idleness and vagrancy was the reason why the administrative power to “banish” the native was included the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act (no 21) of 1923. During that same period, Chanock shows, dagga became the source of a moral and legislative panic. See Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 92–96, 122, 415.

⁷⁰ It is worth noting that the term “bush college” originated as a derogatory name for The University of the Western Cape, which was established by the apartheid state as a segregated university for “colored” populations.

⁷¹ “Plato’s Academy,” Kant reminds us, “was not an individual building but rather an open place under the open sky among the most outstanding buildings.” See Kant, Lectures on Logic, 262.

⁷² See, on this point, Lalu, “Becoming UWC,” 184. See also Badat, Black Student Politics.

⁷³ See Rive, Emergency, 153–4, 156–7; see also 94.

⁷⁴ Sitze, “Mandela and the Law,” 134–161.

⁷⁵ On scholē, otium, and neg-otium, see Stiegler, For A New Critique of Political Economy, 17, 50–65; Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, 94–130; see Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies, 30–5; Stiegler, The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, 71–8; Stiegler, States of Shock, 151–202.

⁷⁶ Badiou, Infinite Thought, 38, emphasis added.

⁷⁷ Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, 103, 119, 122–3.