Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall
To focus on the time of entanglement, Mbembe shows, is to repudiate not only linear models but the ignorance that they maintain and the extremism to which they have repeatedly given rise. Research on Africa has ‘assimilated all non-linearity to chaos’ and ‘underestimated the fact that one characteristic of African societies over the long durée has been that they follow a great variety of temporal trajectories and a wide range of swings only reducible to an analysis in terms of convergent or divergent evolution at the cost of an extraordinary impoverishment of reality’ (p 17)2.
Jennifer Wenzel’s work (2009) also contributes to a theory of entanglement in its temporal dimensions. She traces the afterlives of anti-colonial millenarian movements as they are revived and revised in later nationalist struggles, with a particular focus on the Xhosa cattle-killing in South Africa. In seeking to understand literary and cultural texts as sites in which the unrealised visions of anti-colonial projects continue to assert their power, she rethinks the notion of failure by working with ideas of ‘unfailure’ to examine the tension between hope and despair, the refusal ‘to forget what has never been’ of which these movements speak. Wenzel explores ways of thinking about failure other than falsity, fraudulence or finality – that is, in terms of historical logics other than decisive failure as a dead end. Failure, she suggests, might involve a more complex temporality, and the afterlife of failed prophecy might take forms other than a representation of failure. It may be read, for instance, in terms of a ‘utopian surplus’ that sees in failed prophecy unrealised dreams that might aid in the imagining of contemporary desires for liberation. Thus Wenzel proposes an ethics of retrospection that would maintain a radical openness to the past and its visions of the future.
Literary scholars have attended to a rubric of entanglement in terms of two formulations in particular: ideas of the seam, and of complicity. Leon de Kock (2004) proposes that we read the South African cultural field according to a configuration of ‘the seam’. He takes the notion of the ‘seam’ initially from Noel Mostert, author of Frontiers (1993), who writes that ‘if there is a hemispheric seam to the world, between Occident and Orient, then it must lie along the eastern seaboard of Africa’ (p xv). While the seam remains embedded in the topos of the frontier, De Kock draws it into his analysis to mark ‘the representational dimension of cross-border contact’ (p 12). For De Kock the seam is the place where difference and sameness are hitched together – where they are brought to self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms: ‘a place of simultaneous convergence and divergence, the seam is the paradox qualifying any attempt to imagine organicism or unity’ (p 12).
De Kock gives a poststructuralist spin to Mostert’s historical account, grounding its tropes within the discourse of postcolonial theory. He does so to mount a reading of race and difference in South Africa – especially the deconstruction of a system of white superiority as a political and epistemological ground. The configuration of the seam remains, in his reading, embedded in the idea of the frontier, as do contemporary race relations in South Africa. Suggesting that the post-apartheid present is engaged in an attempt to suppress difference, he professes an ‘ingrained weariness’ with ‘unitary representation’ (p 20). It is striking that the greatest subtlety of De Kock’s analysis is reserved for the past (such as his reading of Sol Plaatje’s simulation of sameness within the colonial project in order to achieve the objective of political equality, in a terrain he well understood to be riven with difference), and his bibliography attests to only a minimal engagement with the sources of the ‘now’. What De Kock characterises as the recurrent ‘crisis of inscription’ that defines South African writing, Michael Titlestad (2004a) wants to consider as improvising at the seam. Titlestad writes about the ways in which jazz music and reportage have been used in South Africa to construct identities that diverge from the fixed subjectivities constructed in terms of apartheid fantasies of social hierarchy. Jazz, because of both its history and its cultural associations, writes Titlestad, is persistently ‘a music at the seam’ (p 111).
The theoretical import of the notion of ‘complicity’ as a means of approaching the South African cultural archive has been given powerful expression by Mark Sanders (2002). Sanders argues that apartheid and its aftermath occasion the question of complicity, both in terms of glaring instances of collaboration or accommodation – in which he is less interested – and via a conception of resistance and collaboration as interrelated, as problems worth exploring without either simply ‘accusing or excusing’ the parties involved (p x). Sanders works from the premise that both apartheid’s opponents and its dissenting adherents found themselves implicated in its thinking and practices. He therefore argues that we cannot understand apartheid and its aftermath by focusing on apartness alone, we must also track interventions, marked by degrees of affirmation and disavowal, in a continuum of what he calls ‘human foldedness’. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) stages the question of complicity, he shows, by employing a vocabulary that generalises ethico-political responsibility (referring, for instance, to the ‘little perpetrator’ in each of us). Literature, too, he argues, stages the drama of the ‘little perpetrator’ in the self, calling upon a reader to assume responsibility for an other in the name of a generalised ‘foldedness in human-being’ (p 210).
Sanders employs a reading strategy which calls upon the reader to ‘acknowledge one’s occupation by the other, in its more and less aversive forms’ (p 210) – a strategy which draws out what is both most ‘troubling’ and most ‘enabling’ about human being(s) (p 18). Sanders argues that this manner of reading applies equally to texts we are accustomed to thinking of as ‘black resistance texts’. The question of complicity as a context for assuming responsibility is integral to black intellectual life and to the tasks that have faced black intellectuals, he argues, a point he goes on to demonstrate in readings of the work of Sol Plaatje, Bloke Modisane, A C Jordan and others. Such a reading strategy is one that is profoundly consonant with Sanders’s overall argument, in that it refuses in itself the stance of being ‘merely oppositional’. It has no choice but to project itself ‘beyond apartheid’. Sanders suggests a theory and a practice which are beyond apartness as such.
Sanders’s work draws on a complex interleaving of post-TRC debates in South Africa and debates in international scholarship about a reconstituted ethics. The TRC gave rise to, and publicly brought into being, the relation of self to other as an ethical basis for the post-apartheid polity. The focus globally on ethics in literary studies and other disciplines has been reinvigorated by Foucault’s revaluation of the category of the self, conceiving of the care of the self as an ethical project, combined with the emergence of Emmanuel Levinas as a model for literary-ethical inquiry. Whereas previously ethics was seen as a ‘master discourse’ that presumed a universal humanism and an ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject, and became a target of critique (the critique of humanism was the exposé of ethics), work drawing on Foucault and Levinas attempts to do ethics ‘otherwise’ (Garber et al 2000).3 Such work nevertheless leaves us with further questions about who accords a greater humanity, or ethical sensitivity, to whom, and the limits of that gesture. Sanders’s notion of complicity in its wide (rather than punitive) sense enables us to begin the work of thinking at the limits of apartness.
The fourth rubric I want to consider is an entanglement of people and things. Although Tim Burke (1996) does not use this particular term he argues that Marx’s definition of commodity fetishism does not leave sufficient room for the complexity of relations between things and people, nor for the imaginative possibilities and unexpected consequences of commodification, or the intricate emotional and intellectual investments made by individuals within commodity culture. Bill Brown (2003) has argued that cultural theory and literary criticism require a comparably new idiom, beginning with the effort to think with or through the physical object world, the effort to establish a genuine sense of things that comprise the stage on which human action, including the action of thought, unfolds. He concedes a new historicist desire to ‘make contact with the real’4 but more than this, he wishes to locate an approach which reads ‘like a grittier, materialist phenomenology of everyday life, a result that might somehow arrest language’s wish, as described by Michael Serrès (1987, p 111), that “the whole world … derive from language”’.5 Brown tells a tale of possession – of being possessed by possessions – and suggests that this amounts