The ruinous vitalism of the urban form: ontological orientations in inner-city Johannesburg

Abstract

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2011 and 2016, in unlawfully appropriated buildings, or the ‘dark buildings’, of inner-city Johannesburg in which thousands of the city’s marginalized black populations live, including many cross-border migrants. It argues that responses to traumatic and debilitating events, including fires and building collapse, invoke an unstable ontological multiplicity oriented around the fragility of the urban form. ‘Ruinous vitalism’ refers to this instability and malleability of urban infrastructures, the scars and traces these leave and the capacities for social relations and regeneration they provoke. Ontologies here are not thought of in terms of sets of pre-existent beliefs or essences, but rather modes of orientation. Ontological orientations involve attempts to interpret, stabilize and reconfigure relations of existence through embodied and material practice; they also encompass wider social and metaphysical relations through which meaningful personhood can endure. In particular, the boundaries between insiders and outsiders are formed around the unstable materialities of the city. Furthermore, these orientations are not ahistorical, but emerge in relation to the historical and contemporary conditions and inequalities of the post-apartheid city; they traverse the attempts by municipal agents and private developers to contain and control urban space.

Cet article s’appuie sur un travail ethnographique sur le terrain dans des bâtiments qui ont fait l’objet d’appropriations illégales, ou les « bâtiments obscurs », du centre-ville de Johannesbourg ayant eu lieu entre 2012 et 2016 et dans lesquels des milliers de membres de la population noire marginalisées de la ville vivent, y compris de nombreux migrants transfrontaliers. Il affirme que les réactions à des événements traumatiques et incapacitants, comme les incendies et les effondrements de bâtiment, impliquent une multiplicité ontologique instable qui s’oriente autour de la fragilité de la forme urbaine. Le « vitalisme ruineux » fait référence à l’instabilité et la malléabilité des infrastructures urbaines, aux cicatrices et aux traces qu’elles laissent, et aux capacités de relations sociales et de régénération qu’elles invoquent. Les ontologies dont il est question ici ne sont pas considérées en tant qu’ensembles de croyances ou essences préexistantes, mais plutôt en tant que modes d’orientation et de stabilisation. Les orientations ontologiques impliquent l’interprétation, la stabilisation et la reconfiguration des relations d’existence à travers la pratique incarnée et matérielle; elles englobent aussi des relations sociales et métaphysiques plus vastes auxquelles l’expression de la personnalité individuelle peut survivre. En particulier, les limites entre les personnes intégrées et les exclus sont formées autour des matérialités instables de la ville. De plus, ces orientations ne sont pas ahistoriques, mais elles émergent en lien avec les conditions et inégalités historiques et contemporaines de la ville post-apartheid; elles traversent les tentatives par les agents municipaux et les développeurs privés de contenir et contrôler l’espace urbain.

Keywords:

• vitalism
• ontology
• Johannesburg
• migration
• Ruination

Mots-clefs:

• Vitalisme
• Ontologie
• Johannesbourg
• Migration
• Ruine

Acknowledgements

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is a researcher based at the African Centre for Migration & Society, at the University of the Witwatersrand.  Elements of the section ‘Making Rubble’ were reworked from the narrative piece ‘Dispossessed Vigils’ in the African Cities Reader (Wilhelm-Solomon, 2015). The author would like to thank Adriana Miranda da Cunha for her support in this research, the editors of Critical African Studies and the two blind peer reviewers for their invaluable comments on this piece, and the many interlocutors who shared their time and stories. This piece is part of the special issue Vital Instability: Ontological Insecurity and African Urbanisms edited by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Peter Kankonde Bukasa and Lorena Núñez Carrasco.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://joburg.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&id=126&Itemid=9 (last accessed June 15 2017).

2. http://popstats.unhcr.org/en/overview (accessed 15 June 2017). A screenshot of this date is available here – https://www.evernote.com/shard/s256/sh/f3321ec9-f34c-44fd-b79f-832d365066ed/988155fb8f2dbef5919b7ab826d40bbc (last accessed 15 June 2017).

3. These data were generated and analysed by the author through the Statistics South Africa interactive site – http://interactive2.statssa.gov.za/webapi/jsf/dataCatalogueExplorer.xhtml (last accessed 15 June 2017). The data analysed are for Johannesburg wards 60 and 123 where most of the research was carried out. They should not be generalized to the inner-city as a whole. A screenshot of the data can be found here: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s256/sh/9ec06989-d50b-4c71-8cf3-145ddbcc7c59/d8922576ebb0242f92ec4ea106816154 (last accessed 15 June 2017). A ward map of the areas can be found here – http://www.demarcation.org.za/index.php/gauteng/gp-prov-wards2010/jhb/6842-jhb-ward-123-1/file (last accessed 15 June 2017).

4. Bennett’s conception of material vitalism has been accused of idealism and attributing a spiritual quality to matter (Žižek 2014). However, my reworking of Bennett’s perspective here makes no speculative claim regarding the metaphysics of matter; rather it aims to grasp, ethnographically, the ways in which material vitalism is manifest as a disorienting force within particular socialities, leaving traces and scars, and requiring social and ontological re-orientations within these.

5. See http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2008/1.html (last accessed 28 February 2017).

6. All individual names used in this text are pseudonyms other than those already on public record.

7. Personal email correspondence from Robert Mulaudzi, City of Johannesburg, 3 August 2015.

8. Personal email correspondence from Thabo Rangwaga, City of Johannesburg, 15 August 2015.

9. http://beta.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/fatal-hijacked-building-blaze-sparks-anger-1557553. [last accessed 15 June 2017]

Additional information

Funding

This paper was developed as part of a project grant by the Volkswagen Foundation Knowledge for Tomorrow - Cooperative Research Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa programme, entitled ‘Salvaged Lives: A Study of Urban Migration, Ontological Insecurity, and Healing in Johannesburg’ and conducted in collaboration with Prof. Dr Hansjörg Dilger of Freie Universität Berlin, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.