The coloniality of representation and black African subjectivity
3.6. Subjectivity and the coloniality of ‘the human’
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still the idiom necessary to any defensive agenda” (Lloyd, 2019: viii). Smith opens his book on decolonising research by referring to how ‘research’ is a dirty word. In other words, she is arguing that representation is a dirty word. Lloyd notes that “the constitutive relation between the concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of the disciplines that articulated them and that we now term the humanities” (2019:
2). He posits a concept of a racial “regime of representation” built on Cedric Robinson’s concept of “racial regimes” and Patrick Wolfe’s idea of “regimes of race”. According to Robinson (2007),
“racial regimes” refer to “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power”. According to Wolfe (2016), the “regimes of race” marks “regimes of difference with which colonisers have sought to manage subject populations”. Lloyd argues that
“though I seek to maintain their mutual focus on how such regimes articulate relations of power and domination, my aim is to elaborate the ways in which the aesthetic structures those relations, even in the name of universality, through a complex conceptual matrix of representation” (Lloyd, 2019: 7). We now turn to the coloniality of ‘human’ as the subject.
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While modernity came with the idea of a unified and centred subject, there have been moves towards a “‘decentred subjects’ because we lack a centre – we have no fixed sense or locus of self”
(Webb, 2009: 64). Butler notes that the role of representation is to give us ‘this lack’ and then fill it to stabilise our identities (1990: 43). This provides us “with a sense of presence and hence security” (Webb, 2009: 70). In a sense, representation “gives us the tools to name and frame ourselves as concrete and coherent identities, and to find a position from which to represent ourselves; thus to move from being objects (that which is spoken about) to being subjects (that which speaks)” (2009: 70). As a result, we “develop a fiction of an integrated self by becoming part of the social world – people able to vote and enter into commercial contracts” (Webb, 2009:
70).
The idea of subjectivity refers to the space of the self, the self and the factors contributing to the constitution of the self and its agency in the world (Corner, 2011: 86). Corner posits that there are many complex intersecting vectors in the construction of subjectivity and, as a result, there are complexities around its modes of operation around different types of social action and interaction (Corner, 2011: 86). In that they have always been a formative factor in consciousness and what people are and what they think they are, the media become central to issues of subjectivity (Corner, 2011: 87). The tendency has been to “assume less and investigate more, to place the relations between ‘media’ and ‘selfhood’ within a denser sense of plurality, of the interactive, of the contradictory and of movement (subjectivity as, essentially, process)” (Corner, 2011: 86 – 87).
However, it is important to note that “the subjective” is always at the centre of any “production and circulation of knowledge” as the “site of imagination, of desire and of fear as well as of practical rationality. It is part of the grounding of political and social order” (Corner, 2011: 87).
Subjectivity is “the space where the dominant structural coordinates of class, ethnic identity and gender produce differences in self-perception and perception of others, often in the process reproducing inequalities” (Corner, 2011: 87). This dissertation is interested in focusing on the
“general positioning of the media in relation to questions of subjectivity …” (Corner, 2011: 87).
Corner proposes numerous ways of looking at the relationship between the media and subjectivity, first he suggests a focus on “‘cultural taste’ as a long-standing issue in discussion of how the media
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work to reflect and construct ‘sensibility’, the individualized as well as socialized forms of relationship with the expressive and aesthetic world, in ways that carry
both cognitive and affective implications” and second he refers to “the idea of the ‘political self’
or the ‘civic self’ as this has become recognized as a highly media-dependent aspect of consciousness and action” (2011: 87).
Importantly, Corner notes that “one prominent form in which questions of subjectivity are raised in social studies, including studies of the media, is as questions of ‘identity’” arguing that this is
“in relation to the formation of class, gender, race, political affiliation, region, nationality and a number of other differentiations and groupings, questions about how identities are produced, both as a positioning by others and as self-awareness and self-definition, are central” (Corner, 2011:
88). Calhoun argues that “the discourse of the self is distinctively modern, and modernity distinctively linked to the discourse of self, not just because of the cognitive and moral weight attached to selves and self-identity. Modern concerns with identity stem also from the ways in which modernity has made identity distinctively problematic. It is not simply – or even clearly – the case, that it matters more to us than to our forebears to be who we are. Rather, it is much harder for us to establish who we are and maintain this own identity satisfactorily in our lives and in the recognition of others” (1994: 10). Calhoun further notes that “however, the formation, and re- formation, of ‘who we are’, both in relation to our own perceptions, the perceptions of others and to the larger structures within which we live, clearly provides the basis for all engagement with the ‘realities’ of the world and judgement upon them” (2011: 89). The media is seen as playing a major role in this process “producing not only continuities of the self, sometimes fragile in their unity, but also changing and composite ‘selves’ in which the play of contradictory elements occurs” (Calhoun, 2011: 89).
Fensham notes that theories of subjectivity have been central to Cultural Studies from Raymond Williams’ work on lived experiences, Stuart Hall’s work on identities, Elspeth Probyn’s work on sexed self and Homi Bhabha’s work on mimicry of the colonial (2000: v). As much as Cultural Studies, as a discipline, has tried to come up with its own theories of the subject, “it has also been confronted by the ‘death of the subject’ (Foucault); the rejection of the ‘subject of feminism’
(Butler) or faced with the ‘oriental other’ (Said) who is never the subject of the West” (Fensham,
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2000: v). In Cultural Studies, Fensham sees subjects as emerging out of or exiting through theory,
“indeed, it could be argued that Cultural Studies, even at its most political and deconstructive, is the intellectual field that has remained most concerned with theorising the subject” (Fensham, 2000: v). The threat to the subject, then means that, “the very idea of theorising the subject, of asking how the idea of a self has been thought and represented […], can only be productive where an idea of the cultural remains of value for mediating experience” (Fensham, 2000: v – vi).
Fensham argues that “subjectivity is cultural theory in process. Whether the subject is political, or personal, our ideas and our experience of being a particular someone at a particular time and place in history have been shaped by theory” (Fensham, 2000: vi).
The study of the subject in the West has a long history and includes “division of theories into those which foreground the subject as fixed structures of meaning—the subject who knows and who speaks—including psychoanalysis, and to some extent, feminist arguments around sexual difference; and those which are anti-subjectivist, from Nietzsche to Foucault to Donna Haraway, where the subject is an effect of power, science or technologies. It also defers to Deleuze and Guattari whose theory radicalises the subject as a potential ‘rhizomatics’” (Fensham, 2000: vi).
There is also “the subject—the self-mediated through discourse—as cultural” (Fensham, 2000:
vi). Derrida refers to the “question of the subject and the living ‘who’ is at the heart of the most pressing concerns of modern societies” (1991: 115). Mansfield refers to subjectivity as “my sense of self …. How is it conditioned by the media I consume, the society I inhabit, the politics I suffer and the desires that inspire me?” (Mansfield, 2000: 1).
Mansfield further points out that the subject “the ‘I’ is […] a meeting-point between the most formal and highly abstract concepts and the most immediate and intense emotions. This focus on the self as the centre both of lived experience and of discernible meaning has become one of the
— if not the — defining issues of modern and postmodern cultures” (2000: 1). This obsession with the subject is seen in that, we now live in a time where “we must consistently confess our feelings:
we answer magazine questionnaires about what we want, surveys about which politicians we like, focus groups about how we react to advertising campaigns; televised sport, war, accident and crime are all designed to trigger emotion” (Mansfield, 2000: 1 – 2). Mansfield notes that, “a world where we once knew ourselves in terms of values and identities has given way to the uninterrupted
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intensities of elation and grief, triumph and trauma, loss and achievement; birth, death, survival, crime, consumption, career are all now pretexts for emotion. Even economics is driven by its painstaking graphs of consumer sentiment” (Mansfield, 2000: 1 – 2).
In the West, that has always appeared in theory and in practise as a society of individuals, “selfhood is now seen to be in a state of perpetual crisis in the modern West. Alienated intellectuals and suicidal youth; culture wars and volatile markets; endless addictions to food, work, alcohol and narcotics; sexual inadequacy and thrill killers—all feed into education and entertainment industries that keep the intensity of our selfhood perpetually on the boil, nagging and unsettling, but also inspiring and thrilling us with mystery, fear and pleasure” (Mansfield, 2000: 2). Mansfield argues that “it is this ambivalence and ambiguity—the intensification of the self as the key site of human experience and its increasing sense of internal fragmentation and chaos—that the twentieth century’s theorists of subjectivity have tried to deal with” (2000: 2). Mansfield notes that, in the West, “the self—more than family, locality, ethnicity and nationality—has become the key way in which we now understand our lives” (Mansfield, 2000: 2).
He warns that “although the two are sometimes used interchangeably, the word ‘self’ does not capture the sense of social and cultural entanglement that is implicit in the word ‘subject’: the way our immediate daily life is always already caught up in complex political, social and philosophical—that is, shared—concerns” (Mansfield, 2000: 2 -3). In terms of subjectivity, Descombes points out that when philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’, the ‘I’ he described was not limited to René Descartes (1991: 126 – 127). Mansfield adds that “although it does not simply leave his own selfhood behind, this philosophical formulation claims to describe a faculty of reflection that links human interiority together everywhere”
(Manfield, 2000: 2 – 3). Subjectivity is defined as “an abstract or general principle that defies our separation into distinct selves and that encourages us to imagine that, or simply helps us to understand why, our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people, either as objects of need, desire and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience” (2000: 3). He further notes that “the subject is always linked to something outside of it—an idea or principle or the society of other subjects. It is this linkage that the word ‘subject’ insists upon” (Mansfield, 2000:
3). In terms of language, and how it is built “to be subject means to be ‘placed (or even thrown)
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under’. One is always subject to or of something. The word subject, therefore, proposes that the self is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of general truths and shared principles” (Mansfield, 2000: 3).
Mansfield proffers four types of subjects. The first one is “the subject of grammar, the initiating or driving principle of the sentence. We know and use the word ‘I’ first and foremost in this sense, as the origin of the actions, feelings and experiences that we collect together and report as our live”
(Mansfield, 2000: 3). The second type of subjectivity, that Mansfield (2000) discusses, is the politico-legal subject. Mansfield notes that “the laws and constitutions that define the limits of our social interaction, and ostensibly embody our most respectable values, understand us as recipients of, and actors within, fixed codes and powers: we are subject of and to the monarch, the State and the law” (2000: 4). He further notes that, theoretical, “in liberal democratic societies at least, this sort of subjectivity demands our honest citizenship and respects our individual rights” (Mansfield, 2000: 4). The third subject, that Mansfield (2000) discusses is the philosophical subject where,
“the ‘I’ is both an object of analysis and the ground of truth and knowledge” (Mansfield, 2000: 4).
Here Mansfield is referring to Western philosophy and notes that; “in a defining contribution to Western philosophy …, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) outlined the issues that defined the problem of the subject of philosophy: How can I know the world? How can I know how I should act in the world? And how can I judge the world? Here the subject is located at the centre of truth, morality and meaning” (Mansfield, 2000: 4). The fourth subject, that Mansfield (2000) discusses, is that of the subject as a human person. He notes that “no matter how exhaustive our analyses of our selfhood in terms of language, politics and philosophy, we remain an intense focus of rich and immediate experience that defies system, logic and order and that goes out into the world in a complex, inconsistent and highly charged way” (Mansfield, 2000:4). Mansfield notes that the way we present our subjectivity, in this case, is not consistent in that at times we seem simple and unremarkable holding ourselves as normal, ordinary and straight forward and other times as charismatic (2000: 4).
Representation’s domain is in facilitating how we enter subjectivity, what Lacan calls the symbolic order (1977b: 65), a set of “cultural rules organized by discourses of what is right and proper, and of how things should be” (Webb, 2009: 70). How that actually happens is an issue of debate among
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theorists. In his study of governmentality, Foucault posits that what appears as simple acts of recording information about us on public documents such as birth certificates and marriage certificates by the government, is how we are made into subjects. This is seen as announcing and authorising our identity (Webb, 2009: 70). Althusser sees humans turned into subjects through ideological interpellation ([1964]/2014). Webb notes that, here, ideology “names us within a system, or order (‘inter’ – within; ‘appellation’ – naming)” (2009: 70). Webb gives a compelling example of conceptualising subjectivity in Africa that is centred on the concept of Ubuntu.
Mzamane argues that “the true measure of our humanity is whether we can relate to and honour other humans” (2001). The principle of Ubuntu is “a humanistic ideal that can be loosely translated as, ‘a human being is only human in relation to other humans’” (Webb, 2009: 72). Webb notes that this way of thinking about “‘being’ in community, is in sharp contrast to the contemporary Western representation of humanity, directed as it is at the quest for individual self-fulfilment and individual lack” (2009: 72). Webb further posits that “While the Western tradition struggles to find meaning in the personal pronoun, other cultures find at least the first person plural, ‘we’, packed with content” (2009: 73). She argues that in these cultures such as in Africa and the Pacific, it doesn’t mean that there is no notion of individual subjectivity but that “under the traditional way of being and knowing, a person becomes a person because they have a network of connections, and they are not made in isolation by the chilly hand of representation” (Webb, 2009: 73).
As has been argued in the last sections, this dissertation follows Hall’s conceptualisation of representation as the production of meaning linking thoughts with language to refer to the ‘real’
or imagined world of objects, people or events (1997:3). Cultural signifying institutions like the media are seen as constituting and constructing subjectivities and identities that are then products of representation. Lloyd (2019) advances a critique of representation, as violent, and argues that this is because it (representation) is located in liberal institutions that emerge as part of the racist modernity project. He notes that these institutions, where we can as well include the media industries, promise “democratic inclusivity and enlightened inquiry” yet remain “resistant to the project of racial desegregation” (2019: vii). To link Lloyd’s observations to Hall’s constructionist approach, it can be argued that in postcolonial environments, subjectivities and identities are
“multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions” and “within, not outside representation” (Hall, 1992: 4; see Richardson, 2007:11).
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These subjectivities and identities are socially significant and context specific ideological constructs that become markers for history, social location, and positionality (Moya, 2006, Alcoff, et al., 2006:6).
Lloyd (2019) contextualises the coloniality, and therefore violence, of representation by historically locating it in Enlightenment, the beginning of modernity and through its trajectory in slavery and colonialism up to the neoliberal moment. He argues that, today, the violence of the category of representation is especially tied to the emptiness of the claims to “universality” of the human category “in the face of the increasing relegation of so many to disposability under the neoliberal dispensation” (Lloyd, 2019: viii). In modern societies, the different media have become sites for the production, reproduction and transformation of ideologies which are the
“representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work” (Hall, 1981:90).
It is the prominence of the media, and other cultural industries that makes them central to the project of deconstructing the violence of representation. This is because these institutions emerge as spaces where “the notion of the subject of freedom” has always been thought of in contrast to
“the subordination of unfree subjects” (Lloyd, 2019: viii). In modernity’s racialized and sexist conceptualisation, the ultimate subject of freedom has always been white and male, and the ultimate unfree subject has always been black and female. The history of the media in South Africa exemplifies this in many ways.
Lloyd’s intervention on representation locates it firmly in modernity’s colonial project. Following Hall, he sees a “constitutive relation between the concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity and the racial order of the modern world” (Lloyd, 2019: 2 – 3). In a sense the violence of representation is in that in constituting subjects, especially in (post)colonial societies like South Africa, it is underwritten by a racial “regime of representation” (Lloyd, 2019: 7). In this racial regime of representation, the ‘unfree subject’ emerges on the margins of modernity as: Black, Savage and a Subaltern. Lloyd notes that the black as slave “is the extreme instance of a social condition of material or corporeal unfreedom, economically, juridically, physically” (Lloyd, 2019:
8). The subaltern differs from the Black and the Savage “in that it is not defined in relation to freedom as such but in direct relation to representation […] the negation of representation” (Lloyd,