Aesthetics of Superfluity

If there is ever an African form of metropolitan modernity, then Johannesburg will have been its classical location. The idea of the metropolis in European thought has always been linked to that of “civilization” (a form of existence as well as a structure of time) and capitalist rationalization. Indeed, the Western imagination defines the metropolis as the general form assumed by the rationalization of relations of production (the increasing prevalence of the commodity system) and the rationalization of the social sphere (human relations) that follows it. A defining moment of metropolitan modernity is realized when the two spheres rely upon purely functional relations among people and things and subjectivity takes the form of calculation and abstraction.

One such moment is epitomized by the instrumentality that labor acquires in the production, circulation, and reproduction of capital. Another moment is to be found in the way that the circulation of goods and commodities, as well as the constant process of buying and selling, results in the liquidation of tradition and its substitution by a culture of indifference and restlessness that nourishes selfstylization. Yet another is to be found in the ways that luxury, pleasure, consumption, and other stimuli are said to affect the sensory foundations of mental life and the central role they play in the process of subject formation in general.1 This study is highly speculative. It uses the notion superfluity to revisit the biopolitics of Johannesburg as a “racial city” and its transition to a metropolitan form. In the wake of the collapse of apartheid (an insidious form of state racism), the collage of various fragments of the former city are opening up a space for experiences of displacement, substitution, and condensation, none of which is purely and simply a repetition of a repressed past, but rather a manifestation of traumatic amnesia and, in some cases, nostalgia or even mourning.2 In the process, an original form, if not of African cosmopolitanism then of the performance of worldliness, emerges. It is structurally shaped by the intertwined realities of bare life (mass poverty), the global logic of commodities, and the formation of a consumer public. Today, the nervous rhythm of the city and its cultural pulse are made up of an unrepentant commercialism that combines technology, capital, and speculation.

As I use the term here, superfluity does not refer only to the aesthetics of surfaces and quantities, and to how such an aesthetics is premised on the capacity of things to hypnotize, overexcite, or paralyze the senses. To my mind, superfluity refers also to the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things. It refers to the obfuscation of any exchange or use value that labor might have, and to the emptying of any meaning that might be attached to the act of measurement or quantification itself, insofar as numerical representation is as much a fact as it is a form of fantasy.3

But the abolition of the very meaning of quantification, or the general conversion of number into fiction, is also a way of writing time, of forgetting and remembering. Moreover, I argue that the postapartheid metropolis in general, and Johannesburg in particular, is being rewritten in ways that are not unlike the operations of the unconscious. The topography of the unconscious is paradoxical and elusive because it is bound to several distinct modes of temporality. So is the psychic life of the metropolis. This psychic life is inseparable from the metropolitan form: its design, its architectural topographies, its public graphics and surfaces. Metropolitan built forms are themselves a projective extension of the society’s archaic or primal fantasies, the ghost dances and the slave spectacles at its foundation.

Superfluity

Johannesburg began as a mining camp of tents and corrugated iron buildings during the Witwatersrand gold rush of the late nineteenth century. As South Africa was consolidated as a white supremacist state, Johannesburg developed into a colonial town. Like every colonial town, it found it hard to resist the temptation of mimicry, that is, of imagining itself as an English town and a pale reflection of forms born elsewhere. Johannesburg’s earliest settlers did not experience a sense of having genuine ties with the world surrounding them. To a large extent, this tradition of mimicry continues to determine if not the language of the city today, then at least part of its unconscious. This might explain the level of “falsehood” many analysts identified in Johannesburg’s cultural life: what appears alternatively as a mélange of and a deep antagonism between provincial and cosmopolitan ways.4

That the city started as a tabula rasa did not mean that the new could be inscribed upon it without reference to a past. As in every settler colony, the past was to be found elsewhere, in the myth that Johannesburg was a European city in a European country in Africa.5 It was a tabula rasa, too, in the sense that, with the displacement of earlier frontiers of accumulation (land and cattle), Johannesburg became the first site on the continent where capital, labor, and industry came together. In contrast to what happened in other regions of Africa, here the extraction of primary resources did not necessarily lead to marginalization within the global economy. People’s experience of the market was constantly disciplined and brought into line with formal and, most often, coercive institutions. Money was one such institution, but so were numerical and legal frameworks for the valuation of people, property, contracts, and credit.6 Early on, the city was inscribed within increasingly wide networks and complex, long-distance interchanges and transactions. In the process, a distinctive commercial civilization emerged that was based partly on race, in particular through the sale of people as property. In this way, Johannesburg became a central site not only for the birth of the modern in Africa, but for the entanglement of the modern and the African—the African modern.7

But even cities born out of mimicry are capable of mimesis. By mimesis, we should understand a capacity to identify oneself or establish similarities with something else while at the same time inventing something original.8 More than any other African city, Johannesburg has evidenced this capacity to mime. In the process, the city has developed an aura of its own, its uniqueness. The mimetic structure of Johannesburg is still evident in the city’s contemporary architectural forms or, more simply, in its mania for wealth, for the sensational and the ephemeral, for appearances.

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Notes

This study is part of my ongoing research on “Les geographies de la richesse dans le Gauteng.” The project is part of WISER’s Meanings of Money and Cultures of Economic Rationality flagship program. The research is partly funded by AIRE-Développement, a program of the French Institute for Development Research in Paris. I owe a great intellectual debt to my colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). I especially drew a lot from exchanges with Deborah Posel and Jon Hyslop. For extremely helpful comments on this study, I am indebted to Matthew Barac, Deborah Posel, Jon Hyslop, Stefania Pandolfo, Ato Quayson, Lindsay Bremner, Lars Buur, and David Theo Goldberg. Some of my conversations with Jane Nuttall have found their way into the text. Without them knowing, I also owe a great deal to conversations with Paul Gilroy, Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, Judit Carrera, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Bogumil Jewsiewicki. As always, Sarah Nuttall has been a generous, encouraging, and vigilant critic.

1. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–39. For a critique, read Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).
2. This is not a peculiarly South African condition. Commenting on the connections between recollection and loss and what she calls the “archeology of metropolis” and “local cosmopolitanism” in Prague, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, Svetlana Boym writes, “The urban renewal taking place in the present is no longer futuristic but nostalgic; the city imagines its future by improvising on its past. . . . In some cases, such as Prague or St. Petersburg, urban cosmopolitanism is not a feature of the present but rather an element of nostalgia. . . . Places in the city are not merely architectural metaphors; they are also screen memories for urban dwellers, projections of contested remembrances.” The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 75–77. On nostalgia, mourning, melancholia, and disavowal in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Germany, see Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
3. For a further discussion, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
4. According to Jon Hyslop (e-mail communication, May 12, 2004), some periods in the life of Johannesburg were more metropolitan than others. The more metropolitan periods tended to coincide with periods of opening to the world (1886–1914 and 1990 to the present). The external linkages of the city from 1914 to the 1950s tended to be more narrowly with the British Empire. A strong element of autarky and isolation characterized the apartheid years.
5. Thus, while recognizing that in Johannesburg, “there is the controlled civilization of Europe on the surface [and] the primitive unrestraint of Africa beneath,” Sarah Gertrude Millin could nevertheless declare that “for all its individuality, Johannesburg is English.” The South Africans (London: Constable, 1926), 95.
6. See Deborah Posel, “A Mania for Measurement: Statistics and Statecraft in the Transition to Apartheid,” in Science and Society in Southern Africa, ed. Saul Dubow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 116–42.
7. We should understand the modern not so much as a rejection of tradition or uprootedness but as both techne and sensibility. See, along similar lines, David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 18.
8. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).