The South African TRC as Neoliberal Reconciliation: Victim Subjectivities and the Synchronization of Affects
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Author | Josh Bowsher |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918822139 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(1) 41–64
The South African
ª The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
TRC as Neoliberal
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663918822139
Reconciliation: Victim
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Subjectivities and the
Synchronization
of Affects
Josh Bowsher
Brunel University, UK
Abstract
This article brings new insights from critical neoliberalism studies into dialogue with
recent critical human rights scholarship to develop a theoretically driven analysis of
South Africa’s post-apartheid transition. With South Africa’s post-apartheid settle-
ment becoming increasingly fragile, there is a growing need to revisit the purported
miracle of transition. Recognizing this need, the article critically explores the rela-
tionships between the social transformations wrought by South Africa’s neoliberal
transition and the parallel processes of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC). Understanding neoliberalism as a modality of governing con-
cerned with producing subjects as individualized enterprises, I analyse the TRC as a
mechanism which supported this objective by ‘de-collectivising’ the social and
making it more amenable to the demands of post-apartheid neoliberalism. To do so,
I explore how the TRC’s use of public testimony and mass-media broadcasting
displaced collective struggles against apartheid with a range of subjectivities orga-
nized around human rights victimhood. The overall effect of the TRC, I conclude,
was to constitute post-apartheid society as a thin, individualized and ultimately
fragile ‘community of emotion’ that comfortably sits within the limits of South
African neoliberalism. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for
other transitional contexts.
Corresponding author:
Josh Bowsher, Brunel University, Elliot Jaques Building, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK.
Email: joshua.bowsher@brunel.ac.uk
42
Social & Legal Studies 29(1)
Keywords
Human rights, neoliberalism, reconciliation, South Africa, subjectivity, transitional justice
Introduction
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, a growing field of critical neoliberalism studies
has emerged as a response to the failures of neoliberal globalization, which, while
seemingly discredited by the crash, also stubbornly lives on both as a globally hegemonic
set of economic policies and a ‘way of being’ rooted in a ‘common sense’ that has proven
difficult to shake (Mirowski, 2013). A key objective of critical neoliberalism studies has
been to better define a term which often seems like a loose and shifting signifier (Brown,
2015). This has been achieved through a historical mapping of neoliberalism’s origins in
an intellectual project of the early 20th century which came to material fruition in the
late-1970s (Dardot and Laval, 2013; Foucault, 2008), and theoretical discussions that
identify the key characteristics of a hegemonic sociopolitical and economic project, that
is nonetheless varied across space and time (Brown, 2015; Davies, 2014).
Although not directly informed by this work, ‘neoliberalism’ is also becoming an
important concept in critical human rights scholarship. Scholars are now interrogating
the interrelations between neoliberal globalization and human rights by situating their
entanglements in both historical and theoretical perspectives (Marks, 2013; Moyn, 2014;
Odysseos, 2010). Furthermore, a nascent body of scholarship has now begun to unpack
these interrelations in the study of transitional justice (TJ) (Franzki and Olarte, 2014;
Gready, 2011). Adding to these urgent, ongoing debates, this article brings work from
critical neoliberalism studies into further dialogue with critical human rights and TJ
scholarship, showing the utility of these approaches by bringing them to bear on
under-theorized dimensions of the South African transition.
While South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is well trodden in
sociolegal scholarship (see Christodoulidis, 2000; Moon, 2006, 2008), recent events
have shown that South Africa is a politically urgent case that warrants fresh attention.
The neoliberal trajectory of post-apartheid South Africa appears to be unravelling;
growing, radicalized inequalities (Finn et al., 2011) are now accompanied by social
unrest. The 2012 Marikana massacre, in which a series of wildcat strikes in Marikana’s
platinum mines were met by the lethal violence of South Africa’s police force (Alex-
ander et al., 2012), is indicative of a considerable shift in the relationships between Black
South Africans and their traditional political and economic institutions. Corruption
scandals and a mounting electoral crisis now engulfing the African National Congress
(ANC) are further evidence of this shift. Taken together, these developments demon-
strate a post-transitional reality markedly different from the vision articulated during the
transition.
Considering this crisis, my aim is to re-examine the TRC as a constellation of prac-
tices central to legitimizing and thus sustaining the trajectory of post-apartheid neoli-
beralism. Drawing insights taken from critical neoliberalism studies, I characterize
neoliberalism as a project that has relied on practices of social, political and economic
‘decollectivisation’ to support its broader objectives of reconfiguring both the social in
Bowsher
43
the image of the market and the subject as an individualized entrepreneur. Using this
schema as a way of understanding the social, political and economic dimensions of the
transition, I then conceptualize the TRC as a set of practices that performs some of the
political work of ‘de-collectivisation’ necessary to the broader imposition of neoliber-
alism in South Africa.
Noting the centrality of the TRC to the legitimacy and sociocultural imaginary of the
transition (Wilson, 2001), my argument is that the Commission responded to
the challenges of neoliberal transition by constructing a singular ‘collective memory’
of the past, a narrative which re-articulated the meaning of ‘apartheid’ from a history of
systemic violence and struggle to a ‘conflict’ marked by violence against suffering
bodies. Articulated through human rights discourse, this narrative depoliticized apart-
heid by foregrounding the ethical rejection of physical violence over the politics of
struggle against systemic violence. The efficacy of this narrative vis-a`-vis neoliberalism,
I argue, was in its capacity to transform subjectivity through affective practices. Such
practices did the necessary work of dissembling and deactivating the political relations
of the struggle in ways that prefigured and supported the individualizing demands of
South African neoliberalism.
Developing this theoretical exposition through a reading of TRC documents, testi-
monies and secondary literature, the article examines the Commission’s practices of
‘truth telling’, which could ‘produce’ individuals as human rights victims. I argue this
production of subjectivity usefully dissembled prior political imaginaries through an
ethics of reconciliation that venerated the suffering body. The article then turns to the
TRC’s use of mass-media broadcasting as a set of practices that are distinct but inter-
related to truth-telling, and which also engender the production of new subjectivities.
Drawing from the work of Virilio (2012), I explore the ways in which mass-media
practices engendered a ‘synchronisation of affects’ that established South Africa as a
community of emotion through a shared sympathy for human rights victims and the
cathartic performance of reconciliation. Taken together, these practices prefigured the
neoliberal transition by reconstituting the past in ways that produced subjects who are
more amenable to the individualizing, entrepreneurializing demands of post-apartheid
neoliberalism.
Human Rights and Neoliberalism
Although the politics of human rights has often been contested (see Brown, 2004;
Odysseos and Selmeczi, 2015; Wilson, 2006), a growing literature has become con-
cerned with the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism. Scholars have
shown that the rise of the human rights movement and related practices cannot be easily
disentangled from the rise of neoliberal globalization in the late-1970s, which signalled a
turn to the now ‘common sense’ policies of privatization and market deregulation that
combine neoliberalism’s overlapping principles of marketization and ‘state-phobia’.1
Although this work has yet to fully engage with the insights offered by recent work
from critical neoliberalism studies, it has developed several useful historical and theo-
retical resources.
44
Social & Legal Studies 29(1)
A recent debate between Moyn (2012, 2014) and Marks (2013) suggests that there are
important historical and theoretical linkages between human rights and neoliberalism.
Moyn (2012: 121) has shown that the rise of the human rights movement was a reaction
to the broader political trends of this period, particularly the pessimism of the 1970s
whose oil shocks and social discontent birthed a loss of faith in the ‘programmatic
endeavours’ of both revolutionary communism and the welfarism of social democracy.
For Moyn, human rights emerged in this context ‘as a minimalist, hardy utopia’, whose
emphasis on negative freedom from state coercion rather than affirmative programmes
of social justice meant it could survive neoliberalism’s ‘harsh climate’ (ibid.). Human
rights, Moyn (2014) concludes, emerged as a powerless companion to the neoliberal
revolution rather than one of its key...
To continue reading
Request your trial