Archive: Issue No. 82, June 2004

In 1987 I was witness to an act of political theatre which has left an indelible imprint on my mind. This was the first time the SAP had dared to come onto a predominantly white, English campus at UCT. Some NUSAS members had been protesting against the State of Emergency, the War in Angola and the usual anti-apartheid stuff - nothing terribly radical - just a few placard-waving whiteys, who believed themselves to be safe behind the neat picket fence of academia.

I was just 19 and an idealistic day-dreamer with absolutely no clue that I was about to be turned into a "subject" by the Botha-Malan regime - nothing more, nothing less - merely another dehumanised subject, completely stripped of value as an adult, a sentient being.

It is this same critical "subject-ridden" objectivity into which Public Eye has descended, by forgetting that crucial to any radical debate in the arts, is the element of humanity that goes beyond simple heuristics, in other words the object-subject at play is not merely a means of signification but rather infinitely more than a banal, significant other.

To relate - I'm greeted by the sculptor Brendhan Dickerson, who comes jogging past the sports-rec centre. As I imagine the event to be, looking backwards awkwardly from the present-day, where I believe that I had just finished a lecture on Camus and what you could probably call - the absurdist approach to class-struggle.

I see a host of joggers coming towards me - they too are exasperated, panting - some seem to be carrying signs which look like placards. "They're after us" says one. "They're coming at me" says another. I observe, witness "them" and only realise the implication of what is happening existentially, when a cheerful teargas canister comes whizzing past, towards me.

I turn, desperately trying to beat a hasty retreat, fleeing back across the rugby fields - the bottom of Jamie Steps. Then pause - I look back. An entire contingent of SAP pigs in flak jackets, patiently, cogently forming a line where I had only seconds ago been standing.

Blindly, they proceed to lob stun grenades, teargas canisters and rubber bullets, from the front-line, waiting for orders to assault my position on the field, to attack the space-time continuum with military precision.

Jurgen Habermas, a German critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, uses the notion of intersubjectivity to argue for freedom of dialogue and communication as an antidote to fascism. Briefly, the Frankfurt School argued that "positivism rules out of bounds the rational discussion of meaning, values, and experience, leaving those areas open to the kind of irrationality that the Nazi movement exploited." (Grady and Wells)

Whether you are a young Nazi or not, we are all implicated in this struggle, regardless. We are all subjects. If you were a baby, born just the other day, you are implicated and subjugated. If you were just minding your own business, and think bullets know how to mind their own business, you are still implicated and subjectified.

Fascism knows no bounds. It does not stop at a gate or obey the rules of the road. It kicks your door down, and makes damn sure that road runs right over your head. That's fascism for you - first-hand, without the need of short-loan, a reference book, a dictionary.

The smoke thickens. The townships burn. I watch black smoke plumes coming from factories in Epping Industria. A few COSAS members dare to lob a few of the canisters back. The NUSAS mob is nowhere to be seen. I am caught-up in an infernal wind of burning gas that sears at my tonsils and chokes my oesophagus.

Next day - A police helicopter is flying overhead. Teargas everywhere. A man carrying an umbrella, wearing a busby hat and manilla trench-coat reciting anti-war poetry - none other than yours truly. Absurdly I am reminded of Vietnam and Francis Ford Copolla, that line from 'Apocalypse Now' - "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

Yet another scene, the same day, this time Cops are beating pregnant women in the library. Boers are sjambokking innocent first-year students desperately trying to make photocopies of Ch� and Castro so that they can get credits for their next tutorial.

Later an SA Breweries truck aflame - SA-wanneBe-Miller-lite carrying crates of black-label and milk stout, ostensibly for a feminist res. party, is being burnt by predominantly black students, "probably in retaliation at the lack of facilities", says a nameless Professor still trying to look at this picture positively. Come on, who needs warm beer when you're getting shot at four in the afternoon?

According to Habermas and the Frankfurt School, "positivism misunderstands the role of psychological and social structures in constraining our modes of thought, and often sees 'disinterest' where a more acute analysis, one informed by Marx or Freud, would reveal the force of the unconscious or the domination of ideology."

In other words science alone is not sufficient to describe police brutality, nor is ideology enough to motivate the masses to abandon the drinking of beer in favour of something a bit more revolutionary.

For Habermas writing out of the wound of the second world war, "human society was a web of intersubjectivity, created through the actions and interactions of subjects who could become the conscious creators of values."

It is this call to subjective sanity, repeated time and again by intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse that seems to ring most true in this aesthetic debate. It is not enough to remain simple subjects viewing the universe through a supposed objective lens, one must embrace a web of understanding that includes yourself and even your enemy.

Despite the obvious allure of positivism, I find it hard to stand aloof - to look at plastic crates of SAB-Miller beer, visually represented today at Spier as some kind of a colossus but without the irony; to stand back and remark that art is just science and that what you see is really just a couple of crates of beer, nothing more.

When I drink a Castle, however thirsty for intellectual conversation I may be, it reminds me, not of Charles Glass but the class struggle. When I see artists like Jacques Coetzer dabbling with the rhetoric of fascism - the same fascism that gave us Black Labels in the first place, and now an awful Global-lite like Miller, I do not "feel satisfied" about being black or white or privileged.

Instead I feel the need to remind people that not so long ago, this kind of logical-positivism was exactly that which unleashed a horde of pigs, disrupting lectures, interrupting careers, disabling the notion that there can ever be a middle ground between right and wrong. I guess I could deliver a paper on Walter Benjamin and his ethics, or analyse Post-Modernity in the light of the Frankurt School, but that would be giving way too much credence to Adorno, another favourite of mine, and ultimately Marx.

One could also look obliquely at Deleuze's commodity fetish, Noam Chomsky's syntax and how art is being sacrificed in favour of the new international über-brand, but I'm not going to do that at least not today.

REFERENCE
Toward A Rhetoric of Intersubjectivity: Introducing Jurgen Habermas Hugh H. Grady and Susan Wells, available on the Internet as an occasional paper.