The need to resist being 'constructed' by divisive discourses

One often gets the impression that what is known as social constructionism has won the day, in so far as people seem to be slaves to the belief that everyone is conclusively “constructed” — that is, “determined” — by the cultural practices and beliefs they have adopted in the course of growing up. This is not the case, and there are several cogent reasons to resist the relativistic (and, in the final analysis, racist) implications of social constructionism.

In terms of discourse theory one might say that social constructionism amounts to the claim that one is “spoken by discourse’, specifically by the dominant discourse of the day. For instance, according to this perspective, during the apartheid era, the dominant modern racist discourse, according to which one is essentially determined (culturally, intellectually, socially, etc) by the pigmentation of your skin, would have shaped whites and blacks alike — whites, to believe, without exception, in their unalterable supremacy, and blacks to believe, across the board, in their inevitable inferiority.

However, the very fact that some black people could adopt a critical counter-discursive stance — for example, Biko’s discourse of black consciousness — towards such a racist discourse, is already ample demonstration that social constructionism is misguided: one never has to be a slave to the discursive influences in one’s life-world.

Similarly, the emergence of feminist thought and practice demonstrates the validity of Foucault’s claim, that, where a discourse (in this case patriarchy) exercises its power (by structuring social and political life along the axes of asymmetrical power relations — something that discourses unavoidably do), the possibility of a counter-discourse is created.

It is unfortunately the case that many, if not most people choose (not even consciously) to submit to the dominant, mainstream discourses that comprise the social space of their lives. In the present era this is predominantly the discourse of neoliberal capitalism, and it is easy to understand why most people submit docilely to its sway — the lure of material wealth is difficult to resist when one witnesses the advantages and privileges enjoyed by the wealthy, in contrast to the sufferings of the poor. And the discourse of empathy for the poor, as it was practically enacted by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, among others, does not seem to have much of a purchase on people’s lives these days (although pockets of admirable charity continue to exist). We live in a self-centred, materialistic (as opposed to “materialist”, in the philosophical sense) era.

In South Africa it is especially imperative that certain discourses not be accorded hegemonic status, given their potentially divisive, if not explosive, status, in the wake of the murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche. It would be easy, on both sides of the racial spectrum, for a resurrection of the crudest racist discourses to occur — where the promise of a politically, culturally and racially diversified, but nevertheless “nationally” unified, South Africa fades, while the spectre of a politically, culturally and racially divided country raises its ugly head.

As with all discourses which eventually attain mainstream, dominant status, such divisive discourses could start small, with only a handful of people succumbing to the illusion of, for example, some kind of political and social utopia of either white cultural purity, hermetically sealed off in an impossible geographic domain, or its antithesis, an exclusively black South Africa, supposedly purged of white “settlers” or ‘boere”. Overreacting to Terre’Blanche’s death could feed the first illusion; imitating Malema’s superfluous, demagogic performance of a song that ought to be disowned by the ANC — which, in case its members have not noticed, is now a political party, and no longer a liberation movement — could feed the second.

One can only hope that the Malema phenomenon is not a case of the logic that both Baudrillard and Foucault have discerned as operating in certain domains — leading Baudrillard to comment that Disneyland exists to hide the fact that all of America is Disneyland, and Foucault to observe that prisons exist to hide the truth, that we live in a carceral (prison-like) society. The implications of such a logic should be clear: as long as certain ostensible contrasts can be maintained, the pervasiveness of a homogeneous, deleterious state of affairs remains unnoticed. Work it out. I, for one, would prefer to believe that this is not the case with Malema in relation to the ANC as a whole.

Fortunately, however, there are unmistakable signs that many, if not most South Africans are not susceptible to the potential discursive dominance of the rhetoric surrounding the anachronistic resurgence of either black chauvinism or white political extremism. The cultural richness of South Africa, often obscured by the simplistic polarisation of its people into “blacks” and “whites”, is such that this country could — if good sense prevails — be a model of democratic co-existence of different cultures and different people (right down to the level of different individuals who may seem to share the “same” culture). To fall prey to polarising discourses of any kind would represent a serious retrogression — one that would undo a lot of the salutary developments that have occurred since the demise of apartheid.