Beginnings

This work, Undoing Apartheid, is motivated by the need to escape [Richard] Rive’s quandary by arguing that only an aesthetic education attuned to a desire for post-apartheid freedom can properly prepare for a future beyond apartheid, especially with regard to an apartheid of the everyday, known as petty apartheid.  Understood as an operation of racial interpellation that traps certain life forms in a near-mechanical existence by blocking pathways to the enchantments of freedom, the aftershocks of petty apartheid would be felt long after apartheid had been laid to rest, thwarting desire and bedevilling creativity wherever it left a trace. The question then, as now, is how to re-enchant the desire for freedom against the backdrop of a racial modernity that took shape under the sign of petty apartheid. 

A brief caveat followed by a proposal for how best to proceed is necessary at this point. Since petty apartheid has at best proven elusive to critical currents of theories of the state in South Africa, and while it is mostly unavailable as a trace in the archive, the work of unravelling its effects may be best apprehended in the patterns of everyday life formed in repertoires of object theatre. A key aspect of object theatre is its reliance on mnemotechnic objects – instrumentalities of communication used to record, recall and replay – that offer a rare glimpse of the psychic breach orchestrated in the guise of petty apartheid. But object theatre is not simply beholden to the scripts which it enacts. It is rather an exemplary model of aesthetic education, drawing us towards the realms of techne, or the work of crafting that is not reducible to a distinction between a world of contingencies and necessity, but a way of knowing in which things can be otherwise. Where a racial modernity is pressured by a yearning for a future beyond it, object theatre may very well marshal the resources of an aesthetic education towards outwitting the uncanny returns of race. 

What is needed is a form of education capable of surpassing the circular causality of race that paradoxically destines modernity to return to a partitioned fate. A model of political education that seeks mastery over this wretched predicament, or one which proceeds via methods derived from anthropology and history to recollect that which has been forgotten, will no longer suffice for the task of undoing apartheid. The double-bind of apartheid’s discursivity solicits a twofold approach. While training the senses on the attractions of the object, where the consiliences of the arts and sciences that resulted in a modern concept of race are made available for scrutiny, it simultaneously calls attention to how the object might be put to work in the interests of a viable concept of reconciliation endowed with a truth content and capable of overturning apartheid’s sordid rationality. If race, as I argue, came to signify the drift towards mechanized life in modernity, apartheid’s end must necessarily be scripted in a manner that releases the energies appropriated to the technical circuits that sustained a facile and psychically debilitating orchestration of a racial modernity. 

Fortuitously, on the cusp of a much-vaunted transition to democracy in South Africa, the quagmire of a racial modernity resurfaced in three theatrical works – two by William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company, and a third written by Jane Taylor – that thematized the human and technological entanglements of petty apartheid. Faust, Woyzeck and Ubu Roi were originally conceived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Büchner and Alfred Jarry respectively, at times when the human condition seemed imperilled by uncertainty regarding the rapid expansion of technological resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This European hermeneutics of theatrical suspicion, I argue, paralleled the proliferation of origin myths of race that ensued with the abolition of slavery. With, we should add, one significant difference that resurfaced on the eve of the demise of apartheid: as Europe turned its back on the figure of the slave in 1834, from the vantage of the Cape Colony, the slave bore witness to an afterlife inscribed in a signifier of race that disparagingly degraded life into elementary parts. 

Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld and Ubu and the Truth Commission compositely brush up against the demand to de-constitute a modern configuration of race as it suffused an emerging field of experimental psychology, or psychotechnics, that presumed a disaggregation of the apparatus of sense-perception. The garnering of a theatrical response to this inheritance reclaims an element of surprise directed at the task of making history, rather than merely recording or recalling the past. Harnessing figurative and literal references to labour, discipline and power, in their South African incarnations Faustus, Woyzeck and Ubu disclose subjectivities embroiled in a turbulent struggle between human and machine that belies the otherwise calm appearance of the co-evolution of object life in modernity. Whether in fears of displacement of the human by technology (Faustus), the depletion of sensory resources (Woyzeck), or the collisions of unrequited love in ideals of truth and reconciliation (Ubu), each revolves around a contradiction of instrumental reason that came to pass as petty apartheid. Thematization of the human and machine thus refracted via the medium of a theatre of objects in a South African setting helps to craft an image of localized life in a struggle to stave off the overwhelming technological reorientations underway in the world. 

To bring about a twist in the tale of fate, the works under discussion here exploit an indecision about apartheid’s place in the co-evolving story of the human and technology. They confront those anxieties regarding an enlightenment in which the slide into mechanized forms of life unfolded as a story of an incremental racialized modernity. The audience is encouraged to reconsider the problem not at the level of grand design of political programmes, but in intricate mechanisms and techniques that threaten to overwhelm life at its most individuated encounter in a changing world. This is achieved by deftly assembling elements of myth and machine that held sway in the shifting relation between subjects and objects – in a bid to flip object life into a renewed scene of freedom. 

Excerpt from “Introduction: Apartheid’s Double Binds” in Undoing Apartheid, 6-9, Polity Press, 2023. 

Stevens, Garth. Review of Undoing Apartheid, by Premesh Lalu. Afrika Focus, vol, 36, no. 1, 2023, pp. 143-148, https://doi.org/10.1163/2031-356x-20230108.

Neocosmos, Michael. Review of Undoing Apartheid, by Premesh Lalu. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/00219096231190527.

Luxon, Nancy. “Undoing Apartheid’s Mechanisms of Reproductive Power”. South African Journal of Science, vol. 119, no. 11/12, November 2023, https://doi.org10.17159/sajs.2023/16546.

Conversation on Undoing Apartheid

Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape), Su-Ming Khoo (University of Galway), Garth Stevens (University of the Witwatersrand), moderated by Maurits van Bever Donker (University of the Western Cape).

February 3, 2023

Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change Book Conversation with Premesh Lalu University of Minnesota
March 2023

To watch, visit: https://mediaspace.umn.edu/media/t/1_l245waiz/197902193

Theory from the Margins
May 2023

To watch, visit: https://www.facebook.com/theoryfromthemargins/videos/2428505677330097/

What politics of knowledge, form of study, mode of education, will get us to the substantive work of undoing apartheid in the present? This is Premesh Lalu’s abiding and forceful question. To get there, we must go back, and deeper, into histories less of grand than of petty apartheid, newly alert now to how the latter both wedged itself in the circuits of sense and perception, he avers. These circuits left little room for escape or desire and found substantive contestation, one we would do well to harness today, Lalu suggests, in a cinematic consciousness, forged from the bioscopes of Athlone in 1985, growing behind the catch-all sociologies of ‘school boycott’ and ‘mass movement’. It was there, via the interval or gap of film form, that thought emerged and forged a mode of freedom to come. This was a sensibility of the after apartheid that, Lalu contends counter-intuitively, was closer to hand than what followed in its aftermath. In this desire was a redistribution of the senses that pointed, and points still, to an education, a form of study, that is able to charge and create the conditions for a freedom which cannot be known in advance. Lalu finds in object theatre a radical play of modes of racialization and freedom that give form to other futures surpassing the circularities of apartheid logics. Although questions of the post-apartheid and of non-racial futures have come under duress in recent critiques, Lalu offers a recalibration of how we might approach aftermath and regeneration and what we might need to in order to hear and see their minor keys, potentialities, and entanglement with future time.

-Professor Sarah Nuttall, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

The Critical Tasks of the University, Panel 3: New Cartographies of Knowledge
Panel Respondent: Premesh Lalu
June 2017