All democracies demand discussion. But if there is to be a discussion, rather than sterile polemics, there will have to be at least an agreement on our Foucauldian “history of the present” and our “horizon of ends”. Histories are always written within a particular “space of experience” – the ways that the past is remembered in the present, and a “horizon of expectation” – the anticipation of the non-yet-known future beyond the horizon.
A history of our present, in the words of Columbia University Anthropologist David Scott, demands that “histories of the past ought to be interventions in the present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.” Our “problem space” – the threats and opportunities that confront us in our sociohistorical conjuncture – is inevitable from the different past, even as, concededly, it may have some continuities.
What, then, should be our “horizon of expectation”, towards which we should strive? Criticism is always strategic. What do the critics want as a consequence of their criticisms, narratives, actions, and exhortations? What is their “Good”? While there will never be – for the simple reason that it just cannot be – a single horizon of ends for all of us among the various possibly competing ends; surely, that of a more harmonious society would be there in common in all formulations. Should we not, with the privilege of hindsight, connect the past with the present in a broader narrative that is healing rather than destructive? We cannot change the past, but we can certainly change the future.
Our horizon of expectation must generate strategies that speak to those normative ends, rather than further divide us, as some seem determined to do. They must ask whether their particular narrative of “emerging apartheid states”, or any narrative seeking to connect our past to the present and envision a more positive future, would deliver those normative ends. Another way our problem space is different, even from previous decades, is that the demographics now deny any built-in ethnic majority, and so open up the possibilities of democracy of “in and out”. A constructive narrative cannot, then, picture our opposing groups locked in mortal combat – especially as it was demonstrated in action during elections in 2011, 2015, and 2020.
Crucial to the formulation of a constructive narrative would be what one theorist, Hayden White, labelled the “content of the form” of the narrative – particularly its plot to link past, present, and future. While a popular Opposition narrative of revolutionary romance sets “us” against “them” into a frenzy of nihilistic Fanonian violence – not to mention teleologically promising a future that can never be delivered – Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation. In this narrative, both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil, but between “goods” on which each is making an exclusive claim. Isn’t this the situation that our mutually exclusive narratives of victimhood, with their facile binary oppositions, have delivered us into? Such employment within a narrative should suggest compromise rather than a battle of one side overcoming. That would be a constructive narrative for our time, place, and circumstances.
In noting the importance of narratives in the task of nation-building, Benedict Anderson has identified the importance of newspapers (now extended to social media) that are read every morning in constructing what he has tellingly labelled “Imagined Communities”. “The significance of this mass ceremony – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”
Let us use our media for nation-building, rather than tearing us apart by narratives that are fighting long-gone terrors.
