Africa and the dangers of 'progress'

Africa is part of the developing world. When given the opportunity – likely to be opened up to a greater extent than before by the Fifa World Cup being staged in South Africa — to allow foreign investment here, as well as in the rest of Africa, would it be an unadulterated blessing, or should African countries approach such opportunities with a measure of caution?

My own position on this is that Africa would face the challenge of retaining a measure of autonomy regarding its distinct cultural richness despite its unavoidable dependence on the agencies of development.

As the flood of soccer fans visiting South Africa demonstrates, we live in a world where boundaries between culturally variegated countries are easily crossed by tourists and visitors of all varieties. This is a world whose “multiculturalism” forms the backdrop to the fact of global tourism having become a major source of “cultural consumer” spending and income for countries which are preferred tourist destinations. A crucial reason for being such a destination, of course, is a country’s ability to offer “rubbernecking” tourists something culturally distinct to ogle, sample and enjoy — at a price, of course — while simultaneously reassuring them of their relative safety.

As for the former, there is no doubt that South Africa has much to offer curious as well as more discerning visitors — I have visited many countries, but hardly any can match the natural beauty of this one. As for the second, we have a long way to go before visitors have reason to come here without fear of being robbed, or worse. Add to our natural attractions the distinctly African cultural flavours of the country, and it would seem that we have everything an African country might want to attract foreign visitors.

And yet, I am willing to bet that, as in the case of many other African countries, people here still crave what is commonly thought of as “progress”, conceived of in terms of First World material affluence. So the question becomes: is this really what Africa should want?

Apart from the disturbing indications of future deleterious effects of global heating on the continent — which suggest that safeguarding African forests and wildlife against certain kinds of development is a priority — there are other important considerations. It is difficult to put them succinctly, but I’ll try.

It is no secret that, worldwide, contemporary culture is different from that of the mid-20th century. From one perspective, this has to do with the constitutive differences between so-called “modern” and “postmodern” culture, respectively. Historically, modern culture emerged from the reason-centred European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and structurally, was apparent in the differentiation of reason into the distinctive spheres (each with its own discursive rules), of the cognitive-theoretical (science), the moral-political (law) and the aesthetic (art and art criticism).

One could add the technological, which was historically closely linked to the development of natural science and the industrial revolution. “Modernisation” has therefore followed the trajectory indicated by the specialist domains of science and technology, as well as those of the moral-political and the aesthetic, which resulted in societies which differed significantly, in structural-cultural terms, from pre-modern societies, where religion and myth played a crucial structuring role (and still do in geographically isolated pockets).

“Modernisation” is usually associated with scientific-technological and industrial development. Of the structural moments constitutive of modernity, these have been the ones that have contributed most in shaping modern societies. This also explains why the repeated invocation of the need for so-called Third World countries to “progress”, focuses on scientific-technological development, and not so much on the moral-political and the aesthetic spheres.

“Modern” culture has therefore been characterised by what Lyotard called legitimising, but mutually irreconcilable “metanarratives”, for example that of the increasing actualisation of individual freedom (liberal democracy); that of the increased realisation of social equality and justice (socialism); and that of the “free” (note the scare quotes) economic activity and self-enrichment of individuals (capitalism).

But perhaps the most crucial one of them all — because science itself does not display a narrative form and therefore cannot legitimise itself — has been the Enlightenment-metanarrative of scientific knowledge being the source of emancipation in the dual sense of liberating humanity from its dependence on an intransigent nature through “control” of the latter, and political liberation through social knowledge and “control”.

Even if a younger member of the Frankfurt School, Habermas, has shown, in neo-enlightenment mode, that although instrumental reason has indeed historically “colonised” the human lifeworld with technical imperatives, in this way obliterating many of its constitutive communicative structures, what he regards as the communicative potential of reason has not really been historically activated, much less realised in any significant manner. In this sense Habermas remains a champion of modern culture, a project which, in his assessment, is far from “complete”.

Habermas’s adversaries in this debate are usually seen as comprising the champions of postmodern culture, which is usually understood as having emerged historically in the late 1960s, although its structural possibility was understood as long ago as the middle of the 19th century by Baudelaire. Foremost among theorists of the postmodern, in his early work Lyotard highlighted one of the structural features of the postmodern when he famously described the latter as an “incredulity toward metanarratives”, in other words, a widespread scepticism about the possibility of providing tenable rational-discursive justifications of encompassing, universalising political or scientific theories and practices.

In place of such modern illusions he discerned a society characterised by cultural practices of difference, heterogeneity, ludic competition, paralogy and dissensus, instead of modern, Habermasian homology and consensus.

Things change in his later work, however. The Lyotard of The Inhuman, where he alludes to the contemporary “ideology of development” (p6), is no longer as sanguine about the postmodern as the Lyotard of The Postmodern Condition, and for good reason. Perhaps one would already feel less inclined to celebrate the advent of postmodern culture if one took note of scholars like David Harvey and Fredric Jameson in this regard. Jameson delineates structural features of postmodernity like its spatiotemporal sensibility, embodied in the metaphors of pastiche and schizophrenia or its lack of temporal-historical awareness, its fragmentation, depthlessness (or “flatness”) — its preoccupation with surfaces, and what he terms the “waning of affect” in postmodernity, in the place of which one encounters “intensities” (like the “rush” brought on by fight scenes in The Matrix).

Nor are these structural features unrelated, as is evident from his assessment of postmodernity in the title of his book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1993). In no uncertain terms, he links the constitutive features of postmodernity to the historical development of capitalism, of which the postmodern is said to be simply the latest phase. Even the much-vaunted proliferation of differences, so typical of postmodernity, is not unrelated to capitalism’s ceaseless invasion of every aspect of human experience or sensibility in its drive for profit.

As indicated earlier, capitalism may be understood as one of the metanarratives which comprise modernity. What is often not understood, is that “capital” far from being a “thing”, is a process, one which can be historically linked with the process of scientific and technological modernisation. As a process, capital infiltrates every domain of human activity and transforms it in terms of the principle of exchange — “all that is solid melts into air”, in Marx’s well-known metaphor. The principle of exchange replaces “use-value”, for example the use value of an oldish, but sound cellular phone, which may be high, with its exchange value, which is low.

Hence, it promotes the continual replacement of “old”, albeit (still) “useful” commodities with new ones, because “value” has been reduced to “exchange value”. But because the principle of exchange value is a reductive principle which tends to assimilate everything (ultimately even individuals) to the capitalist process for the sake of profit, it undermines the political hope inspired by postmodernity as a culture of liberating heterogeneity and difference, and eventually also of justice for minorities and historically disadvantaged people — something that Africa should remember when yearning for “progress”.

This is what Lyotard (1991:6) has in mind when he speaks of the current “ideology of development”, which holds the world in thrall. No one would dare to oppose “progress” or “development”, because it is uncritically viewed as being beneficial for everyone. Few stop to consider that development is usually understood in a narrow, monodimensional, technological sense, where the link between capital and such development is not questioned at all.

Nor is the ultimate effect on the well-being of “developing” countries ever really questioned, because it SEEMS as if “development” respects and leaves intact those cultural differences that define developing cultures. Few pause to ask whether these supposedly beneficiary cultures retain a significant degree of self-determination in the face of the putatively wholly beneficial economic, technological and scientific investment in “development” magnanimously provided by “developed” countries.

Perhaps if development were understood in a sense sufficiently nuanced to include the cultivation of critical reflection on the need for “differentiated development” of truly indigenous potential (cultural and otherwise), developing countries would be less eager to accept everything offered to them in the name of development in the narrow, culturally homogenising (McDonaldising), economic and technicist sense. Some champions of this ultimately materialist mode of development may find it difficult to believe that happiness does not only equal the latest cellular phone, a laptop and a luxury German sedan.

In light of the link between postmodernity and what is known, today, as globalisation at various levels, I would say that one could understand the latter (or, for that matter, “development”) as the new metanarrative, or, perhaps, ideology, given that it is so closely intertwined with what Lyotard terms the “ideology of development”.

It appears to me that, in a globalised world, the salutary differences among cultures, individuals, sexes, and so on (explored extensively by theorists of the postmodern), which manifest themselves “horizontally” when juxtaposed, are increasingly being orchestrated, “vertically”, in the process expanding and securing the domain of transnational capital, ultimately for private profit.
Tourism and sport are no exceptions here — large areas of these activities have long since been colonised by agencies of capital for private gain. In sport, for example, the friendly competition or formalised play from which it originated has been transformed into (often quasi-hostile) competition for icon status and profitability, with sport stars and teams being able to demand millions of dollars annually to perform as media stars. Fortunately, not even this commercialisation of sport has succeeded in annihilating the spirit of play, as evidenced in the present World Cup soccer matches in South Africa, where one often witnesses the true, ludic nature of play coming through (something that merits its own analysis, perhaps in terms of what Gadamer calls the “to-and-fro-structure” of play).
The cynical adage, “winning is not everything, it is the only thing” (itself a metonymy of the essence of capital) often infects even national psyches, with more and more positive results being demanded from national teams by nations. Professionalisation in sport tends to be the process of annihilating sport as public play, exercise and enjoyment for the sake of private gain through its iconisation. Instead of fit, sport-participating nations, one increasingly witnesses large, unfit, peanut-munching, beer-drinking masses of spectators and small numbers of super-fit, wealthy, idolised sports stars.

It is a challenge faced by the richly variegated cultures of the world, namely to resist such economic, and ultimately cultural colonisation, and to retain cultural differences without falling prey to the unilateral, profit-motivated orchestration of these by unscrupulous agents of so-called development.

What I am arguing for is not a complete rejection of the economic opportunities offered by capital, either, though. A “both/and”, broadly poststructuralist approach is called for. The world’s “developing” cultures should BOTH accept what is economically needed for their own “development” and for the eradication of material and intellectual poverty, AND retain an independence of decision-making regarding the direction this development should take in the interest of retaining and strengthening what is distinctive and heterogeneous about their cultures, and to protect vast, but vulnerable, areas of still largely “unspoilt” nature on the continent.
This combination of “progress”, but on Africa’s own terms, could happen especially if developing countries make the most of the so-called information-revolution. It should not ultimately be a choice between heteronomy and autonomy, but a wary acceptance of a hybrid — heteronomy and autonomy.

(Anyone interested in a full article-length version of what is argued here, could read my paper, “Postmodern culture, globalisation, and the lure of ‘development’ ”, in Africanus, Journal of Development Administration, Vol. 34, No.1; September 2004, pp. 22-31.)