UHURU

Introductory Comments

As the initial rationale for UHURU rightly insists, there has been in South Africa a separation between intellectual concerns in the humanities and social sciences and popular politics since the 1990s. This fact is not unconnected with the character of the historical period during which South Africans achieved their liberation. The demise of Marxist analysis and its replacement by what has been called the ‘language turn’ in the humanities has been intimately connected with the collapse of an alternative emancipatory vision to that provided by neo-liberalism at both economic and political levels. The monopoly over the vision of emancipation which neo-liberalism has been able to achieve (most notably illustrated by Fukuyama’s arrogant assertion of the end of history) has been slowly eroding in recent years. This erosion has been most obviously economic (as an effect of economic crises in the West) but also political as evidenced by worldwide revolts which have drawn attention to the limits of an authoritarian democracy which appears as biased against the majority as it regularly excludes popular voices. The most noteworthy of these rebellions have taken place in North Africa, the Middle East and in the European Southern periphery. The continuous unrest in communities throughout South Africa from the mid-2000s can be seen as forming part of this worldwide phenomenon as capital attempts to make ordinary people pay for its financial profligacy while simultaneously, states exclude popular perspectives. The simultaneous rise of right-wing authoritarian nationalisms within apparently democratic countries has not by-passed South Africa either. There is now a globalised xenophobic politics.
Within this global context, the humanities and social sciences have largely found themselves unable to respond to these crises. The reasons for this inability are complex, but are arguably connected to the absence of a coherent vision of human emancipation. Since neo-liberal capitalism has obviously now shown itself to be unable to provide this vision, while its Marxist historical alternative has been tainted by its past association with authoritarian states, there seems to be no other option available. Similar points could be made in relation to the African nationalist project in its statist form. In South Africa in particular, while the ruling party and the state have been plagued by the corrupting influences of capitalism and power, the vision of greater equality and freedom which galvanised large numbers in the 1980s has been heavily compromised so that ideas of ‘the public good’ and of the ‘national interest’ seem to have vanished from public discourse. The humanities and social sciences, apart from in a few exceptional cases, have failed to analyse this process while also largely ignoring the alternatives sometimes emanating from popular discourses.
Most academic work has (with rare exceptions) been concerned with studying identities (including political identities), engaging in (largely technical) policy research or taking the safe road of purely empirical study. But without some kind of
theoretical debate to orientate thought, empirical work simply becomes empiricist and policy work ill-informed. Without a theoretical understanding that people can indeed think politically beyond their identities (whatever these may be) it is impossible to hold consistently to an idea of rational agency as identity politics would simply be overriding reason by simply reflecting interests. Therefore central to what needs to be emphasised intellectually is a re-invigoration of theoretical debates which have been sorely lacking if compared, say, to the 1980s during the period of mass political upsurge against apartheid. Of course such debates would have to be informed by rigorous empirical work, but at their core they would have to be concerned to re-think the whole idea of human emancipation which was central to both the formation of the humanities during the European Enlightenment, and to the struggles for national liberation and freedom on the African continent, as well as in the post-colonial South more generally. In this context it is imperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa to understand that our country forms part of the African continent, an understanding which would sometimes help us to avoid re-inventing the wheel. For example the authoritarian trajectory of post-colonial states on our continent - so clearly noted by Fanon - should have taught us something regarding possible outcomes after liberation, yet the social sciences in particular have shown themselves to be dominated by a South African exceptionalism. Without cutting off our links with the West we should be able to extend our intellectual reference points to be more inclusive of Africa and the South. It will also be essential to place gender, and the theoretical work done on gender issues across the global South, at the centre of the Unit’s work. The possible liberatory features of the matriarchal foundations of traditional African society noted by Cheikh Anta Diop and stressed in the work of Ifi Amadiume for example, have not been sufficiently discussed in this country where the debate on the contradictions between ‘human rights’ and ‘tradition’ has been characterised by the need to emphasise the former over the latter which has tended to be seen as uniformly oppressive of women. The possibility of thinking an excessive politics from within the subjective parameters of African tradition needs to be thoroughly investigated.
In what follows a case is made for how these ideas are to be operationalised within UHURU while simultaneously insisting on the need to produce a cadre of young critical intellectuals who would take such debates and thinking forward into the future. After all, if the prime concern of the humanities and social sciences is not with thinking human emancipation then it becomes quite difficult to justify their existence.

Theoretical Orientation

As already noted, the humanities which had played a crucial role in contributing to the fight for freedom via the provision of critical perspectives on both society and struggle, have been isolated - or have isolated themselves - from popular struggles. As a result they have been isolated also from a critique of power from the perspective of the excluded.
In order to begin to overturn this isolation and to simultaneously develop a critical thinking which also questions past failures in attempts at emancipation, it is proposed to begin from a simple affirmation that ‘people think’. What is meant here is quite simply that anyone inhabiting particular circumstances does not simply ‘react’ to their historic social environment through expressing their social location
subjectively. In other words, collective political agency, which is what is of concern here, and the various political subjectivities (or forms of consciousness) which it deploys is not simply reducible to the social categories in which people live. It is always possible for people located within social categories to think beyond the confines of these categories and places which are themselves situated within a historically produced specific division of labour, hierarchy or social structure. In other words ‘consciousness’ does always ‘reflect’ or ‘express’ social location; it may transcend it, move beyond it, or even undermine it or ‘puncture a hole’ in it. That thought or consciousness which is not simply reflective of place can be called ‘excessive’. It reflects the ability which everyone has to reason individually or collectively. In Ranajit Guha’s work, for example, rebellions in colonial India are shown to illustrate the rationality of peasants whose consciousness does not simply reflect their social location. In Jacques Rancière’s work, workers in France in the 1840s are shown to write philosophy. In CLR James (and even more strongly in Carolyn Fick’s work) slaves in San Domingo/Haiti show their collective capacity to strategise and reason. All these examples show that the excluded can move ‘out of place’ and act in a manner that is seemingly outside their limited interests and identities. It is apparent that just because people are workers it does not mean that they will claim higher wages through a union; just because people are poor, it does not mean that they have to be led by others who know what is best for them. It was arguably such a collective process of excess which characterised the 1980s in South Africa as people from all walks of life came together beyond the places allocated to them by the apartheid state, in order to construct an alternative in practice. It is this process which is sometimes referred to as ‘politicisation’.
What follows from this brief account is simply that there is a need to investigate popular subjectivities in their own terms and not simply as reflections of their social location. It is not invariably the case that people’s social conditions determine their consciousness - Marx needs to be transcended on this point. It is possible to understand a process of subjectivation as a process in itself, influenced both by location as well as by a purely subjective ‘excess’ over location. Political subjectivities are not simply deducible from the social, although they are always related to the social in one way or another. An ‘excessive subjectivity’ is always ‘exceeding’ some local context or ‘place’ from which it develops a universal subjectivity beyond interest, such as equality. Such a subjectivity is regularly affirmed from within mass popular struggles, as Fanon had noted of national consciousness in Algeria in the 1950s. The crucial point is to emphasise the fact that the relation between the socially objective and the politically subjective is not to be reduced to an ‘expressive’ relation. It may be ‘expressive’ or ‘excessive’ or both; this is particularly common in periods of mass popular political upsurge such as during the 1980s in South Africa or recently in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. This argument then opens up a whole new area of human activity and agency to rigorous investigation.
Identity politics are clearly the most common, as interests govern most of life in society. Today the thought of interests has become overwhelming in public life and in universities, while thought beyond interest has been sidelined. All struggles for inclusion within the existing system or for a greater share of resources for a particular group are identity politics. There is no normative statement intended here. These may include struggles for (justifiable) increases in wages or equal participation by women in society as well as (unjustifiable) demands for xenophobic exclusion. But the more political subjectivities begin to exceed identity, the more possibility there is for them to take on an emancipatory content, although of course this is not guaranteed. One example worthwhile mentioning is the recent Marikana event which arguably was constituted by both expressive politics (e.g. a wage demand) and excessive politics (workers are capable of organising themselves independently of union and state representation).
In addition, the expressive and the excessive may mutually condition each other making subjectivity even more complex to understand. The rapidity with which a political subjectivity of non-racialism in the 1980s was replaced by a politics of xenophobia and exclusion from the early 1990s in South Africa may be illustrative of this. It is also worth noting that it is only through the exceptional subjectivity characterised by excess over place that the ‘normal’ or ‘habitual’ can be fully understood. For example, there is no way that slavery could be properly understood in the absence of the subjectivity of freedom enacted by the slaves of San Domingo/ Haiti. At the time, as Trouillot has pointed out, the existing conceptions of freedom simply could not make sense of those events, a fact which points to some of the limits of Enlightenment thought. When today Abahlali baseMjondolo say that they are not taken seriously as citizens by constituted power in and out of the state, when they say that there is no freedom for the poor and all they experience is ‘unfreedom’, they should be listened to so that we do not make the same mistakes as the Enlightenment thinkers in Europe and nationalist leaders in Africa did and limit freedom to narrow parameters defined by power.
Research Programmes

Within the questions raised by this perspective and the need to re-invigorate theory, understand political agency, power and the role of the humanities, three research programmes are to be developed within which research is to be located:
- The Humanities and Political Agency in Africa
- The Post-colonial State in the South
- Power and Resistance, Past and Present

These programmes are intentionally broad and overlapping; they will be provided with greater focus by the researchers working within them (senior researchers, post-docs and graduate students). In all three cases, it is expected that analyses will be focussed on understanding processes of agency, subjectivation and political emancipation, past and present for the rethinking of a new future.