Abstract
In his work on “wound culture” and the “pathological public sphere” Mark Seltzer (1997) identifies “addictive violence” as “not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public space cross” in late modernity (1997:3). For Seltzer the convening of the public “around scenes of violence” (such as rushing to the scene of an accident, either an on-the-scene event or a voyeuristically experienced multimedia happening) is constitutive of so-called wound culture. The latter is the “public fascination with torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1997:3). Likewise, it is noteworthy the “wounded attachments” that Wendy Brown describes (1993) have saturated identity politics over the past few decades. In post-apartheid South Africa the fin de siècle saw a different manifestation of wound culture in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), during which the public witnessing of private wounding constituted a convening of the public around what were sometimes even rehearsed “scenes of violence”. In the process the pathological public sphere of apartheid was laid bare. The trends set in train in the wake of the TRC remain robust in post-apartheid writing, particularly autobiographical forms of witnessing and testifying, both in reconstituting the past (such as Antjie Krog’s Begging to be black) and in coming to terms with a wayward present (Mzilikazi wa Afrika’s Nothing left to steal). Seltzer seeks to explore the processes by which the public sphere is “pathologised” in late modernity, as well as the conditions that underpin this process. For him, the scene of private wounding is taken up in communicative relays via a “media a priori” such that it gathers a mass of public spectators. At such mediated events, witnessing is at once voyeuristic and deferred. Critically, though, such witnessing enters into the reality of the event, becomes part of it, as the live radio traffic report contains both the event and its doubling in the act of mediated observation.
In South Africa, as elsewhere, such hypermediated events often have pronounced socio-political determinations, whether it is a killing, an accident, or a political service delivery scandal resulting, for example, in electrocution by pirated wires in shackland conditions. The “scene of the crime” in such cases is not confined to the physical site of the event, but includes its doubling in the media, where onlookers feel the wounding of referred pain. The case of Andries Tatane is pertinent here: during a service delivery protest in Ficksburg in the Free State in 2011 he was beaten and shot with rubber bullets in full view of onlookers and the media. The video clips of his beating, shooting and death on the scene quickly went viral, sparking outrage and disgust with the conduct of the South African Police Services some 17 years into democracy. Here, as elsewhere, the grief of the family is redoubled and affectively witnessed by masses of individuals as part of the event itself. While in such cases (accidents, crimes, or the effects of incompetence and/or corruption) the onlooker-citizen is affectively engaged on behalf of the victim(s), the citizen experiences a simultaneous, personal sense of injury – a more general effect of plot loss, assaulting any claim to personal security in a climate where cheek-by-jowl neighbours, fellow citizens, are subject to deadly conditions. In the wake of the events that arise from such conditions, social media memes proliferate, each more toxic than the last, so that this sense of personal injury accelerates and deepens, as the movement that has come to be known as Fallism, and the hashtag wars of 2015/16 (#RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, #ZumaMustFall, #FuckWhitePeople and the like), so dramatically demonstrate.
Perceived neglect by those in power (whether they be self-absorbed politicians or distracted university vice-chancellors) is felt to be atrocious and shameful, eliciting a sense of disgust – personally felt – that is instantly communicated in a digital cascade where genuine outrage is, one must add, often indistinguishable from virtue-signalling. The contact zone between the private and the public, the scene of the “accident”, then, is also the place where the actual and the professed are played off against each other, and “political bullshit” is exposed. There is a keen appetite for such exposure, which involves the unmasking of people and institutions that are seen, or perceived, to be distorting the truth. Among new media reader-writers, such deception is seen as hard to swallow after the propaganda and lies of apartheid. Consequently, citizens (including figures as influential as Ronnie Kasrils and Moeletsi Mbeki) feel a strong need to bear witness to the unveiling of what they perceive as massacres of truth, and it is no surprise, therefore, that the commentaries of Max du Preez, Justice Malala, Sisonke Msimang, Richard Poplak and Raymond Suttner, among others, not to mention the cartoons of Zapiro and others, enjoy significant social media uptake. The reading or viewing of such commentaries, which blend reporting and opinion about what’s happening on the ground, under the radar, or behind the smokescreen, is largely an affective experience. In new media upwellings, arising from what Mbembe calls the politics of impatience, the sense of plot loss looks beyond the failures of government alone, embracing a more general “decolonisation” and a radical dismantling of perceived, pervasive, white post-apartheid hegemony.
A reading of Mark Gevisser’s 2014 non-fiction work Lost and found in Johannesburg resonates with many of the above notions. The book as a whole, in literary terms, is premised on the play between cartography – in particular the various street-mappings of Johannesburg – and the reflexive gap that forensic observation reveals about the actual territory represented by the maps, all of which is rendered in sharp reportage. It is an acutely considered, second look at spatial and social boundaries, how they are represented over time, and how people find ways around them.
Further, the narrative is frequently interspersed with old family photographs, that is, with pictorial evidence that speaks in a register different from the visual data of the maps, and from Gevisser’s own prose, so that the book is experienced as multimodal, despite the fact that Gevisser is leading the reader by the hand, so to speak. To enrich the reflexive play, Gevisser combines this visual evidence with his own, considered interpretation of the various data he offers up for inspection. Still, this leaves interpretation open to a reader’s further potential revisions (the reader’s viewing of the photographs may, for example, yield divergent “readings” of the visual archive thus presented). However, all of this is bracketed within a larger story of “true crime”, a framing narrative that begins and (almost, but not quite) ends the book. The framing tale is a compelling first-person witness account of an event in which Gevisser, along with two female friends, became the victims of a violent home invasion in Killarney and were held hostage for almost three hours. This gripping tale, which, in its telling and public mediation via Lost and found becomes an instance of true crime, not only frames the narrative, but functions as a kind of conditional clause in the story: if this can happen, then what do we make of everything else we know about our situation? As such, the robbery relativises Gevisser’s own attempts at relativisation in which social ills are shown to be remediable. Instead, the criminal incursion literally holds up the story, both in a temporal and in a criminal sense. It also threatens to derail the values the author is seeking to uphold. Gevisser’s attempts to rescue his narrative from becoming an “atrocity exhibition” are then taken into critical consideration.
Keywords: media era; new media; post-apartheid; post-apartheid literature; public sphere; referred pain; scene of the accident; true crime; wound culture
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans: Postapartheid as wondkultuur binne ’n patologiese openbare ruimte: Mark Gevisser seLost and found in Johannesburg
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