Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi

Abstract

This paper reframes post-apartheid everyday life against the backdrop of the spectacles of promise and disappointment that have characterized South African public culture in the transitional and post-transitional periods. Inspired by recent work in the field of affect theory that reads negative affect as a potential political resource, I consider iconographies of struggle and difficult emotions in an effort to study disappointment as a form of politics. I suggest that works of quotidian esthetic mediation such as the video installations “Black Smoke Rising” by Berni Searle and “what don’t you see when you look at me?” by Zanele Muholi might help to recast disappointment as a resistant political emotion that disrupts the fantasies upheld by the spectacle of the unfulfilled promise.

Keywords:

• spectacle
• political emotion
• quotidian esthetics
• disappointment
• Berni Searle
• Zanele Muholi.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the research assistance of Jesse Arseneault. This work is based on research supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and in part by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (UID 85999). The Grantholder acknowledges that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in any publication generated by the NRF supported research are that of the author, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Association for Cultural Studies “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference at the Sorbonne in Paris, June 2012.

Notes

¹ Derrida, Specters of Marx, 111.

² Muholi explains that “[t]he title is taken from a collection/series of photographs in [her] publication Only half the Picture” (Muholi, “what don’t you see”).

³ That the public sphere is gendered should go without saying, yet I draw attention to it here in response to the specific entanglements of gendered intimacy and public culture that tend to emerge in Searle and Muholi’s work.

⁴ My usage of the phrase emotional cultures builds on recent work in the field of affect theory on the relationship between emotion and politics, and on emotion as not simply tied to individual bodies but as both shaped by and generative of a variety of cultural and social forces. See for instance John Spurlock and Cynthia Magistro’s New and Improved: the transformation of American women’s emotional culture for a definition of the phrase. In this paper, my understanding of an “emotional culture” is heavily indebted to Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” as I explain shortly, but also grows out of work done by theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love and Anna McCarthy on the sociality of emotions, and on the relationship between intimate affects and the public sphere. See, for instance, Ahmed “Cultural Politics,”; Berlant “Cruel” and many of her earlier texts, Cvetkovich “Depression”; Love “Feeling Backward”; and McCarthy “Reality Television.”

⁵ Ndebele, Rediscovery, 42.

⁶ Papadopoulus et al., Escape Routes, xv.

⁷ Cvetkovich, Public Feelings, 464.

⁸ For further discussion of some of these aspects of their work, see for instance Baderoon, “African Oceans”; Gqola “Through Zanele Muholi’s Eyes” and “Memory”; Lewis, “Conceptual”; Sides, “Framing”; Thomas, “Intimate Archive”; Van der Vlies, “Queer Knowledge”; and Van der Watt “Identity’s Lack.”

⁹ Cvetkovich, Public Feelings, 460.

¹⁰ Gould, “On Affect,” 19.

¹¹ Gqola, “The Difficult Task,” 63.

¹² This is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary’s instructive definition of the term spectacle: “A person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or (b) of marvel or admiration.”

¹³ For an analysis of some of these initiatives see, for instance, Distiller, “English”; Strauss “Hesitating.”

¹⁴ Debord, Spectacle, 12. Writing, for instance, about the commodity as spectacle, Debord explains that, “[w]ith the coming of the industrial revolution, the division of labor specific to that revolution’s manufacturing system, and mass production for a world market, the commodity emerged in its full-fledged form as a force aspiring to the complete colonisation of social life […] The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life” (29).

¹⁵ Numerous public intellectuals, politicians and political commentators have been vocal in their criticism of those (such as socialite Khanyi Mbau and businessmen Kenny Kunene and Khulubuse Zuma) who have openly flaunted their wealth in public exhibitions of consumer excess (see for instance Tabane, “An embarrassment”). Such displays of private wealth prompted Njabulo Ndebele, for instance, to write that “where celebrations of a certain kind occur with the regularity of a trend that takes on the semblance of an obscene public message in a situation of enormous social and economic disparity, they prompt the recall of the legendary utterance of Queen Marie Antoinette, apparently as the clouds of revolution gathered in France. At the very least, they are a display of crass insensitivity. Today, Marie Antoinette, when told the people were angry because they had not bread, would say, ‘Let them eat sushi’” in Ndebele, “Part 1.” The latter is a reference to Kunene’s R 700 000 birthday party, where guests got to eat sushi off half-naked women’s bodies.

¹⁶ Posel, “Races,” 173.

¹⁷ As Posel puts it, “[t]he demise of apartheid […] saw South Africa’s reintegration into a global economy in which conspicuous consumption is par for the course, which makes it unsurprising and unremarkable that comparable trends should emerge within the ranks of South Africa’s black population, for whom these opportunities were previously politically curtailed (their white counterparts having embraced consumerist versions of the good life decades before (Hyslop 2005))” in Posel, “Races,” 160.

¹⁸ Barchiesi, Precarious, 247.

¹⁹ Barchiesi, “That Melancholic Object of Desire,” 54.

²⁰ Berlant, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 182.

²¹ Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1–3, 23–4, passim.

²² “SA ‘protest headquarters of the world’—Vavi.” The Wikipedia entry on “Protest in South Africa” similarly lists the country as the “protest capital of the world.”

²³ Gatherings Act incidents refer to protests of fifteen or more people. See Mottiar and Bond, “The Politics of Discontent,” 309. For further details of Social Protests across the country, see The Centre for Civil Society Social Protest Observatory at: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?2,27,3,1858

²⁴ Von Holdt, “Insurgent,” 5.

²⁵ Barchiesi, “That Melancholic Object of Desire,” 54.

²⁶ See, for instance, Neocosmos, From “Foreign Natives,” as well as the essays included in Landau, Exorcizing the Demons; Hassim et al., Go Home or Die Here, for detailed analyses of the 2008 and other outbreaks of xenophobic violence. In their collective study of insurgent citizenship across South Africa since 2008, Adèle Kirsten and Karl van Holdt point out that community protests and xenophobic violence require comparative analysis not least because community protests more often than not involved episodes of xenophobic violence (“Introduction,” 2). See Mottiar and Bond, “The Politics of Discontent”; Kirsten and Von Holdt, eds., The smoke that calls, for analyses of a selection of community protests in South Africa since 2008. I group these seemingly disparate examples of public affect together with an awareness that disappointment as an individualized feeling has been registered in many complex ways and at different moments since the end of apartheid (in fact, for many of the beneficiaries of apartheid, the end of apartheid no doubt registered as a feeling of disappointment that the apartheid project failed). Yet I am not simply tracing the expression of private feelings here, but am reading these events also as part of a larger emotional culture of disappointment.

²⁷ For some initial analyses of the massacre, see Bond and Mottiar, “Movements”; Alexander, Marikana; and D’Abdon, Marikana.

²⁸ “South Africa’s Marikana Mine.” See also Chinguno, “Marikana Massacre”; Bond and Mottiar, “Movements,” 295.

²⁹ Jacobs and Wasserman, “It is Time to be Offended”; Ndebele, “Iph’indlela,” 137. The specific ways in which these events were gendered, and the notable vulnerability of the black male body in these particular conditions of precariousness, still require further consideration, as one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper pointed out.

³⁰ Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” passim. Police brutality has been on the rise in South Africa, with an average of over 900 deaths in police custody recorded in recent years (“Over 900”). There is no question that the South African police forces are under considerable strain. Yet a point made by Jacob Dlamini in an analysis of social protests in the town of Voortrekker in June 2008 bears repeating here: “It is significant that in Voortrekker, as in many other sites of collective violence, police intervention is justified in the name of maintaining law and order. But in the use of rubber bullets and teargas the state is acting as a patron of violence. Clearly the protests cannot be treated only as a law and order problem and should involve inquiries into their causes and exploring solutions through negotiations” (38).

³¹ Ndebele, “Liberation,” 114; Munusamy, “Marikana”; and Ramphele, “True Freedom.”

³² Williams, Marxism, 133–4.

³³ Ibid., 134.

³⁴ Gould, “On Affect,” 32.

³⁵ Ibid., 32.

³⁶ Ibid., 34.

³⁷ Mogapi, “The Traumatic Past,” 124.

³⁸ Highmore, Ordinary, 53.

³⁹ Ibid., x–xi.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 53–4.

⁴¹ Debord, Spectacle, 144–6. Here the spectacle is conceptualized specifically as a form of false consciousness generated by the mass circulation of images under consumer capitalism.

⁴² Searle, “Black Smoke Rising.”

⁴³ Venn, “Identity,” 6. Sense memories of the spectacle of necklacing serve as a particularly potent affective force here. For an analysis of the affective politics of representation that pertain specifically to the phenomenon of necklacing in both apartheid and post-apartheid contexts, see Thomas “Wounding.”

⁴⁴ Williams, Marxism, 133.

⁴⁵ Ahmed, Promise, 29.

⁴⁶ The N2 Gateway Housing Project is arguably the most ambitious housing project to emerge post-apartheid, with the ultimate aim to provide low-cost housing to people living in informal settlements along the N2 corridor in Cape Town—the highway that stretches from Cape Town to the airport and beyond. The project has been mired in controversy from scratch for reasons that include poor planning, failure to consult with local residents, forced relocations, and substandard building practices and construction materials. In 2009, the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, Geneva, Switzerland, published a report criticizing various aspects of this project, including failures to respect the “right of affected persons to participate in developments that will directly affect their lives and livelihoods” (N2, 38) as well as the manner in which the project has thus far been managed.

⁴⁷ Lewis, “Gendered,” 127.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 128.

⁴⁹ Bauman, Wasted Lives, 6–7.

⁵⁰ Žižek, Violence, 2, 9. That these signifiers are frequently assembled against the backdrop of scenes of natural or pastoral tranquility (as in the representation of a seemingly idyllic natural landscape in “Lull” or of the liquid moonlight that steadily engulfs Table Mountain in “Moonlight”) is significant as a way of complicating tired binary distinctions between the human and so-called natural environment. Such distinctions make it possible to detach our concern for human and non-human life respectively from one-another; it also reinforces the faulty assumption that the natural world is utterly separate and removed from the human world. By drawing the attention of viewers to the complex intersections of these environments, Searle in effect enlarges the scope of environmental concern without capitulating to neoliberal approaches to environmental activism and conservationism, where the latter mobilize concern for the environment to the detriment of interest in other equally important social issues. Thanks are due to Jesse Arseneault for helping me think through this point.

⁵¹ Kennedy and Bourne, “Moonlight,” 598.

⁵² Bauman, “Wasted Lives,” 7.

⁵³ Paraphrased here by Prosser in Berlant, “Life Writing,” 180.

⁵⁴ Coleman, “Why Does Reading Matter?”

⁵⁵ Jones, “Conspicuous Destruction,” 209.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 210.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 209.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 210.

⁵⁹ Muholi, “what don’t you see …”.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Highmore, Ordinary, x, 52. The work of playful re-signification that marks the video installations of Searle and Muholi has long been a hallmark of carnivalesque forms of resistance in, for instance, contexts of anti-colonial or anti-homophobic struggle (pride marches constituting just one example). In post-transitional South Africa, playfulness has been central also to some of the public spectacles contesting the authority of patriarchal power, such as a 2008 march against the treatment of women at some of the country’s taxi ranks (see Lowe-Morna, “Long and Short”). The latter has, as Desiree Lewis puts it, been “[m]arked by the spirited and noisy display of bodies and dress,” (“Gendered Spectacle,” 135) thus revealing spectacles of disappointment as possible arenas for the performance of subversive agency.

⁶² Van Wyk, “Xingwana.” See the chapter in Butler’s Undoing Gender titled “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” for a detailed discussion of this tension.

⁶³ Gqola, “Through Zanele Muholi’s Eyes,” 622; Van der Vlies, “Queer Knowledge,” 152.

⁶⁴ Muholi, “What don’t you see …”.

⁶⁵ Thomas, “Intimate Archive,” 428.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ Gqola, “Through Zanele Muholi’s Eyes,” 624.

⁶⁹ Spivak, Death, 9. In 2009, the South African Minister of Arts and Culture at the time, Lulu Xingwana, walked out of an art exhibition featuring some of Muholi’s work. She took offense in particular at what she considered to be the “immoral, offensive” nature of Muholi’s images featuring Black lesbian intimacy (though in response to charges of homophobia she later claimed that she was “not even aware as to whether the ‘bodies in the images were of men or women or both for that matter’” (Xingwana, “Statement”)). She further suggested that these artworks worked against “nation-building” (qtd. in Van Wyk, “Xingwana”). In some way Minister Xingwana’s statements reflect precisely the kinds of “not” seeing that Muholi addresses in the title of the video installation at issue here. For a fuller analysis of the problems raised by the Minister’s comments, see for instance Thomas, “Intimate Archive”; Van der Vlies, “Queer knowledge.”

⁷⁰ Cited in Muholi, “what don’t you see …?”

⁷¹ Gould, “On Affect,” 26.

⁷² Gqola, “Whirling,” 6.

⁷³ Rancière, Dissensus, 54.

⁷⁴ Rancière, Philosopher, 226.

⁷⁵ Highmore, Ordinary, 48.

⁷⁶ Ahmed, “Multiculturalism,” 126.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Ahmed, Promise, 65.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 67. Emphasis in original.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 223.

⁸¹ Ibid., 216.

⁸² Ibid., 41.

⁸³ Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 111.