Criticism and Knowledge Production of the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa – a Reaction to Thiven Reddy

 

Jeppe Strandsbjerg

 

 

Marginalisation and differentiation has become central concepts in the academic work that seeks to challenge traditional social scientific approaches as they have been informed by the scientific ambitions of social science consolidated in the post war period. It has been established how language is not separable from the world, and hence how the production of knowledge is intrinsically implicated in forming the very world it is supposed to know about. It has also been established how knowledge and power are closely interlinked, thus, how the academic pursuit of knowledge cannot be without political consequences. Furthermore, and importantly, it is argued how both of these insights are ignored by dominant social science.[1] Thiven Reddy’s contribution to this volume is informed by and can thus be located as part of this trend whose writings pose a significant challenge to conventional social science. Yet, as I will argue in this short somewhat polemic intervention, it does not only pose a challenge to mainstream established traditions – it also poses a difficult challenge to itself.

Thiven Reddy’s chapter: ‘From apartheid to Democracy in South Africa: A reading of dominant discourses of transition’ [TBC] is an important one – a paper that raises serious issues. I agree with the arguments, and find the analysis convincing, but it nevertheless raises some significant questions of an epistemological character, which I believe it is worthwhile considering in the context of South African memory and history writing. From a political science[2] perspective, Reddy’s chapter touches upon the question about how we should study and interpret the so called transition to democracy in South Africa. It does so by a critical reading of what is labelled a dominant discourse on ‘transitology’[3] informed by traditional positivist social science principles. Now, the question I wish to pose as a reaction to Reddy’s chapter is: what is the relationship between the dominant discourse, which is criticised, and the alternative voices that are articulated? I will justify these questions below as I first discuss Reddy’s critique, secondly, I will argue that critical approaches face a serious challenge in finding their own ground – not as a critical approach but one that can contribute in its own right, i.e. without being dependent on a dominant discourse.

I am not arguing that the critical challenge to conventional social science should develop a new sovereign paradigm but rather suggest that criticism depends on something to criticise, and thus cannot ‘survive’ without the persistence of ‘the dominant.’ Therefore, there is a danger that the marginalized will forever be condemned to critique from the margins, and as such the very criticism reaffirms the marginalized identity. To overcome this, is the bigger challenge facing the critical voices like Reddy’s.

 

Reddy’s Critique

Allow me to begin with a personal experience. In 1997 I wrote a thesis on the transition to democracy in South Africa for my BA in Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. The relevance of this is that the theoretical framework I used was exactly that which makes up the framework of ’transitology,’ which is the target of Reddy’s critical reading. Interestingly, this was the kind of literature I was advised to look at, and there was no questioning that this could in any sense be problematic – instead I produced a very traditional piece of political science writing that was relatively well received. The point is, that the discourse deconstructed by Reddy is very much alive and plays a significant role in informing students of political science.

                      This also serves to underline that I am very sympathetic to Reddy’s paper, hence, the arguments I draw out from Reddy’s paper in the following simply serves as an entry point to the more general arguments I wish to make, and also as illustration of the issues at stake. Reddy argues that mainstream approaches “…share a positivist-empirical approach, valuing objectivist social science,”[4] and it is recognised that this is not a specific problem for ‘transition theory’ but also holds for a wider range of social sciences. He concludes that the dominant narrative of ‘transitology’ “domesticates the messiness of the process of change”[5] and this is problematic because the dominant discourse presents a narrative of the regime change which has an almost teleological process with a clearly defined starting point and clearly marked end point. Worse though by operating with narrow definitions and focusing on institutions, the violence, the unrest, and the experiences of the everyday life is completely brushed aside as being insignificant for the scientific explanation of the regime change. Therefore we should embrace the messiness of change, and try to seek out those discourses that challenge the dominant narrative.

                      What is important here is that Reddy, at least implicitly recognises that people like Huntington would not necessarily disagree with his critique. Indeed, they seek to establish abstract categories which can help to explain an otherwise messy and unintelligible reality. This is a very conscious strategy and Huntington states that the narrow definition of democracy enables empirical verification.[6] The abstraction of reality is considered necessary, and significantly, the conventional political science, I would suggest, refer to a field of political practice which likewise depends on abstraction of social life that enables large scale planning and co-ordination.[7]

                      Hence, being sympathetic to Reddy’s critical reading, we are still left with a very important question about how we should study these issues that are typically a matter for political science? One answer to this has been an increasing interest in history. As the discipline of Political Science ‘turned scientific’ during the 20^th Century, time understood as history became marginalized.[8] The science of politics should aim to set up scientific models and laws of social behaviour with a universal applicability across time and space. This favoured synchronic analysis over diachronic analysis; since scientific laws should reflect repetition and predictability, time was not important, and a firm division of labour consolidated the parting of history and political science.

                      Now, Reddy’s argument falls into an interesting juncture of historical events and academic rupture. As Colin Bundy notes elsewhere in this volume, the challenge to mainstream social science and history from poststructuralism and postcolonialism gained momentum at the same time as the established truth of the apartheid regime was collapsing. But it is not only the discipline of history that has been challenged but the majority of academia, and the positive outcome has been an increasing interest in history from social science, which facilitates a questioning of how the world we live in came into being instead of taking this for granted as a point of departure for analysis. Yet, as I will argue subsequently, the real challenge is not to criticise and deconstruct the history-less and so called scientific approaches but to seek to go beyond criticism. I will explicate this argument below.

                       

The Challenge

The above mentioned critical trend has produced a double challenge which is acutely relevant, I believe, for writing the political history of South Africa. It underlines how critical readings of dominant discourses are both a political and an intellectual challenge; intellectual because the epistemological challenge undermines the notion of truth obtained through a peculiar form of empirical research; political because the collapse of the regime and episteme of apartheid in very practical terms illustrates the connection between power and knowledge. I will focus on the self-inflicted challenge faced by critical readings of dominant discourses, which is a challenge evolving on epistemological grounds. As already indicated it is basically a question about how ‘political science’ should be conducted but the reason behind the question is a bit more complicated than this.

                      In order to proceed I will make a very short detour into International Relations, because a parallel debate is taking place there. International Relations has, at least internally, a reputation for being very conservative and reluctant to change. Yet, during the 1980’s it was – of course – subject to the same challenge as discussed above, namely a radical questioning of the philosophical foundations informing the conduct and identity of the discipline. In 1988, Robert Keohane presented a seminal address to the International Studies Association in which he at least partly recognised the validity of some of these challenging voices.[9] Nevertheless, this recognition allegedly completely missed the point in that Keohane demanded that the challengers – which he called reflective approaches in contrast to rationalist (essentially positivist) approaches – would be able to set up an independent research programme which could be employed by researchers.[10] These thoughts have to a large extent been used to show how mainstream political science does not understand the point in the critique because Keohane continues his conclusion by arguing that the reflective approaches must be empirically testable; i.e. the critical theories are not theories before they look like the rationalist theories that they criticise – and this is obviously an ignorant statement to make. Yet, despite this there is one point that is worth picking up from Keohane, and that is the independent research programme of the critical approaches.

                      Let it be clear, that I do not intend to make any sort of argument that there is no independent research programme outside conventional positivist social science. What I am aiming at is the specific conduct of criticism, and the consequences of establishing an argument as a critique which is often the case, as it is with Reddy’s argument. The following arguments are to a very large extent informed by Jens Bartelson’s discussion of criticism and authority which he presents in ‘The Critique of the State’[11], and the essence of the problem is the authoritative role which the ‘dominant discourse’ plays within the critical discourse. In Reddy’s paper we find a fair amount of hostility towards the dominant discourse, yet, I will argue that without this dominant discourse Reddy would face a grave challenge in giving a proper account of the transition to democracy.

Bartelson argues that “…ultimately, criticism shares the conditions of possibility of its object”[12] by which we should understand that the target for criticism is what enables that very criticism. If there were no dominant discourse there would indeed be no point, or possibility, in criticising it. In a peculiar way, criticism in fact reaffirms the authoritative dominance of the dominant discourse because by constructing itself as a critique, the challenging discourse constructs itself in a relationship of dependence to the dominant discourse. To illuminate this, we could ask: what would Reddy’s argument look like without the dominant discourse? And being (over)polemic, one could ask: Yes, it is true that the transitology framework omits the masses and the violence from its explanation – but, so what? How do those marginalized by dominant discourse fit into an alternative production of knowledge? It becomes clear that without the dominant discourse, the author would be forced to make difficult decision about how to produce knowledge about the regime change

It is not quite clear whether the critical discourse of Reddy, which emphasises what is marginalized, should be seen as an add-on, as a replacement, or as a transgression of the dominant discourse. In practical terms, the difference would implicate that three different conclusions could be drawn from the paper; either that the regime change was also violent, or that the regime change was violent, or that since the dominant discourse marginalizes many important factors in the transition, this state of affairs calls for a whole new approach to political change. Now, independent of which conclusion we reach, we are faced with the problem of the constitutive role that the dominant discourse plays within the critique. If we choose one of the two first conclusions, we find that this bringing to the foreground of the marginalized themes presupposes the dominant discourse that marginalized the theme in the first place. And because the critical discourse presupposes the dominant, it cannot be sustained without the continuity of the dominant discourse. If we instead choose the latter conclusion we are left with an epistemological void from where we are given no answer to how we should progress in order to establish a proper narrative of the regime change, again because by superseding the dominant discourse we would also have to leave the critique behind. I do not think these are trivial questions; and essentially, I would argue that in order to provide a real challenge it is necessary also to go beyond criticism exactly because this sort of criticism functions to confirm the authority of the position it criticises.

                      To conclude, my argument is that if Reddy’s paper aims to correct the dominant discourse, and simply gives space to the themes marginalized by the dominant discourse, he essentially confirms the authority of the dominant discourse, and in effect condemns the marginalized to remain marginalized, though, now visible. I agree with Reddy that it would be commendable to appreciate the messiness of transition – but how do we do this? Even if it is true, when Reddy writes that to move themes to the foreground functions to exclude others and place them at the margins, I have argued for a limited function of criticism. I would suggest, that a possibly more fruitful way ahead would be to transcend a criticism based on the dialectics of dominance and marginalized without forgetting that in every narrative or production of knowledge certain aspects and themes will always remain marginalized and some will be moved to the foreground as a result of the choices we make. Yet, I am not suggesting that we should give up all criticism but rather that we should progress not from the critique but from a focus on what we want to generate knowledge about.

 

Conclusion

The challenges posed to traditional positivist social science and history writing seems, as mentioned, of special significance because the project of re-writing the history of South Africa has taken such an acutely concrete turn. The erosion of the apartheid regime leaves at least two possibilities, either to state that previous history was wrong or distorted, and now we can begin afresh and write a new and better history. Or, we could work sincerely with epistemological issues and, as I have tried to argue here, part of this would be to recognise the limits to criticism. In conclusion, I would like to argue that this is very important because the academic contest over how to conduct so called political science is also a political contest. And if this political contest seeks to give recognition to the marginalized it would definitely be a shame if this effort falls short because the voices of the marginalized are articulated in a relationship of necessary dependence to a dominant discourse. I do not mean to discredit all criticism as such – this very chapter is itself indeed a critique – rather, I have tried to point out some limits to possibilities of academic inquiry inherent in this sort of criticism, and put forward the argument that the real challenge for the contenders of traditional social science is not only to criticise but to find a way to move beyond.

 

 

 

Words: ca. 2700 (incl. notes)