Violence and crime are ubiquitous in South Africa today, and on everyone’s lips. Nevertheless, few of the many discussion programmes or media commentaries succeed in surpassing the mere verbal repetition of violent events such as murder, assault, rape or hijacking by providing an illuminating perspective on it.
By contrast stands Johann Rossouw’s illuminating use (Die Vrye Afrikaan, November 17 2006) of the three spheres that play a structuring role in every society — the religious, the political and the economic — but which occupy different positions in a hierarchy of dominance and subordination.
He points out that the religious sphere was dominant in the pre-modern Middle Ages and the political sphere in the course of the modern era (until approximately the middle of the 20th century).
The economic sphere occupies the dominant position today, in the postmodern era. This means that the true centre of power in the contemporary world is in the economic realm, in the form of neoliberal economics, and Rossouw’s explanation of the sources of crime in South Africa depends crucially on this.
His illuminating analysis notwithstanding, however, I have reason to believe that a psychoanalytical conceptual framework would not only contribute substantially to the clarification of the immense extent of violence and crime in South Africa since 1994, but also the disconcerting, virtually incomprehensibly violent nature of such acts.
To this end, Jacques Lacan’s three ”registers”, namely the imaginary, the symbolic and the ”real”, are eminently suitable. In ordinary language one could say that each person has, firstly, an imaginary side to her or his personality — what one thinks of as one’s ”self” or ego, with a certain degree of coherence in the case of ”healthy” people.
Secondly, every person has a symbolic side, which is one’s linguistic side — one has a name through which one fits into family structures, which, in turn, fit into a broader community or society in a specific way.
Thirdly (and most difficult to grasp), one has a ”real” side to one’s personality — not in the ordinary sense of ”real”, but in the sense of that side to a person that cannot, even with one’s best efforts, be expressed in language, and which may be thought of as the ”thing” within you that resists all attempts at comprehension. This aspect of one’s personality accounts for the fact that anyone is always ”more” than what can be known about one, even by oneself. Moreover, although it cannot be articulated in language, it has concrete effects on the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic.
Violence in SA
What does all this have to do with violence in South Africa today? To answer this question, another concept has to be used in its psychoanalytical sense, namely ”trauma”.
In the Lacanian variety of this discipline, ”trauma” broadly means the disintegration of the symbolic and imaginary (iconic) horizon or conceptual framework by means of which individuals or people understand their world. A parent who loses a child in a car accident, or a hijacking incident, experiences the full impact of trauma, manifested as an initial, paralysing condition of shock, followed (or accompanied) by a kind of blind ”repetition” or reliving of the event.
This can be understood as a desperate (and futile) attempt to ”prepare” oneself retrospectively for something that one was completely unprepared for. Moreover, it paves the way for the integration of the traumatic event into one’s life, regardless of how difficult it may be. This happens at the level of the imaginary and the symbolic.
In other words, trauma, whether personal or collective, forces one to search, via language and imagination, for meaning and sense in something experienced as senseless — something that could occur in the sphere of the religious, the political or the economic (financial bankruptcy, for instance).
It should be added that trauma represents the effect of Lacan’s ”real” on the symbolic and imaginary registers of human existence, and the only way one can address it is at the level of the language (Freud’s ”talking cure”).
At a collective level, South Africans have experienced two successive traumas in this psychoanalytical sense. First there was the imposition of apartheid on black people, something that was manifested in a symbolic framework of its own, no matter how morally deplorable it may have been.
More ‘trauma’
Then, in 1994, South Africans had to face another ”trauma” in the sense of an inescapable transition to a radically different socio-political symbolic framework, fundamentally in the guise of a democratic constitution. This required of citizens to leave the old order of apartheid behind, and henceforth to think and (more importantly) act in terms of the newly sanctioned democratic symbolic order.
But here the present priority accorded to the economic sphere plays a crucial role. With the embrace of global, neoliberal economic principles (the priority of the market) in South Africa, those people who possess the fewest economically marketable skills are also the most vulnerable.
It amounts to this: in the course of reconfiguring the symbolic order — the order of society at large — there is a concentration on doing so in economic terms, the accompanying political noises concerning the ”rainbow nation” notwithstanding.
Moreover, a relatively small percentage of the population is (and can be) actively engaged in economic activities that are susceptible to the economy of globalisation, which typically requires information and communications technology skills. The rest — mainly illiterate and unskilled workers — fall through the cracks.
This is the crux of the matter: the ”normal” connection between the psychic structures of the imaginary, the symbolic and the ”real” has the character of their being different, separate, yet interdependent and necessarily connected. This is indispensable for normal, healthy, interpersonal social relations. But under the social conditions sketched here, where the economic predominates rather ruthlessly, a short-circuit occurs among the three registers, in so far as the symbolic sphere cannot fulfil its indispensable function — to mediate in a comprehensive, universalising, community-creating manner between the imaginary and the ”real”.
What does this mean? The imaginary or iconic order refers to the particular ego or self, which has as its counterpart the ”other ego” (one’s ”neighbour”). The ”real” aspect of one’s psyche pertains to the ineffable, supra- and infra-symbolic ”thing” in each person — that which cannot be symbolised or ”colonised”, and which is therefore not susceptible to ”the law” as it is inscribed in the symbolic order.
Symbolic order
The symbolic order refers to the universal domain of language and concepts, which is simultaneously the sphere of norms and of the ”moral law”. Without the latter (the symbolic), no sense of community or society is possible. In South Africa, the register of the symbolic (in conjunction with the other two) is indispensable for the cultivation of a new sense of community. Failing this, a short-circuit occurs between the other two — that of the ego (imaginary) and of the ”thing” (the ‘real’).
Consequently, instead of being able to see the ”other ego” as my counterpart; that is, as someone who is, just like myself (ego), subject to the moral law (symbolic), which prevents the ”thing” and the imaginary from fusing, this is precisely what happens. Symbolic mediation disappears, and the other ego is experienced as a mere, inhuman ”thing”, corresponding to the ”thing” in the self that manifests itself in the shape of monstrous acts. Under such conditions the person becomes desensitised to the imperative, to treat others as moral beings.
This explains why criminal acts in South Africa are inhumanly horrific and brutal — why parents burn or mutilate their children or each other, and why hijackers (unnecessarily) kill, maim or burn their victims. As long as the severely limited, ”exclusive” economic sphere — within which Rossouw identified ”disturbed desire” among the wealthy, and ”frustrated desire” among the poor — is prioritised in an effort to secure a new symbolic sphere in South Africa, the present slaughter will continue.
To be sure, attempts are made in several other places to contribute to the construction of a new symbolic sphere, but they are not sufficient to counteract the necessarily fragmenting nature of neoliberal economics, which is a process conducive to fragmentation, not community-formation.
A concerted effort at the construction of an inclusive symbolic sphere is the only possible solution, with an important caveat: as long as this is not construed as an exhortation to come up with an all-encompassing ideology. Nothing could be worse that that, for it would seem to imply that an overarching framework or metanarrative could be provided within which all problems, questions, demands or needs could be accommodated, once and for all.
What is meant here by an ”inclusive symbolic sphere” is merely a ”shared vocabulary” (like that of radical democracy, for example) by means of which problems and questions could be negotiated, with the knowledge that no solution is ever final, and that tomorrow will bring its own share of difficulties.
My sincere thanks to Dr Andrea Hurst for her insightful contributions to conversations on this topic
Bert Olivier is a professor of philosophy at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University