Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
"Eyes of the storm: reflections on sacrifice, alterity and political violence in (de-industrializing) South Africa"
Keynote Lecture
Date:
May 3, 2018
Time:
04:15 PM - 06:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker:
Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia University)
Location:
MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
Room:
Library Hall
Industrial capitalism did not merely transform the nature of production, Walter Benjamin reminds us; it made waste a source of value. But if the slag-heaps and refuse dumps of industrial production have become the locus of new economic and social forms, they are often also zones of informality and exception, abandonment and precarity—from which the institutions of law and policing have been withdrawn.
In South Africa, the violently enabled plurality of the spaces
associated with natural resource extraction are now undergoing a second
set of transformations, as mines close, de-industrialization commences,
and scavenging for gold becomes a means of accessing money in the
aftermath of wages. Here, a striated world of visibilities and
invisibilities has emerged beyond the eye of the state. Here, a rhetoric
of visual exposure, and a longing to be seen vie with each other as the
idiom within which the contemporary world is grasped. Here, too the
task of constituting something like a political order is undertaken in
the mode of sacrificial violence. This paper, based in two decades of
ethnographic research in the gold mining regions of South Africa,
considers how the specter of radical alterity figures in this process,
how ‘justice’ is constituted in the mode of mimetic, sacrificial
violence, precisely in order to obviate the even more threatening
prospect of fully politicized violence. At once an ethnography of
the closure of the gold mines, and a theoretical exploration of
violence’s transformations, the paper asks what it means to ‘look’ at
such questions from the point of view of an aesthetico-political
analysis.
