Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice

Introduction

1 Introduction i “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere,” G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1928, insisting on the necessity—if also the contingency—of marking a limit in the act of making an ethical decision (Chesterton 1928, 780). Yet the act of drawing this line is an art as much as it is a question of morality. A line drawn reconfigures space: It divides yet juxtaposes two entities; it connects two distant points. Figuratively, it includes some and excludes others; it marks a boundary between standing for and standing against, or it traces a path along which places are invested with significance, words are understood, and lives are lived. All of these lines could have been drawn somewhere else. 1. See Tim Ingold’s seminal work Lines: A Brief History, which aims to “lay the foundations for what might be called a comparative anthropology of the line” (Ingold 2007, 1). The last phrase of my sentence echoes Ingold: “Life is lived . . . along paths, not just in places, and paths are lines of a sort” (Ingold 2007, 2). 2 Introduction In this book I am interested in the way in which lines of thought are materialized in the world of sensory perception: in the visual arts, literature , and other forms of cultural production. At the same time, lines of thought—and in Drawing the Line I am preoccupied with thoughts of transitional justice—seem to be generated by what is depicted, uttered, or written , and (facing the other way now) by what is seen, heard, and read. In the relations that arise between artist and viewer, speaker and listener, writer and reader, this book explores the different ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in postapartheid South Africa. My use of the term “aesthetics” is not restricted to its more colloquial sense of “study of the beautiful.” In ancient Greek philosophy, aesthesis refers to “lived, felt experience, knowledge as it is obtained through the senses” (Cazeaux 2000, xv); one of the originary meanings of “aesthetics” (dating back to 1803) is “the science of the conditions of sensuous perception ” (OED). A leading preoccupation in the discussions to follow is the way in which a social setting is calibrated so that some people (or other animals, or things) are seen, or heard, or valued as significant while others are not. What does it take to recalibrate the settings so that what has been unseen, or unheard, or devalued before can now be perceived as worthy of attention? For the most part my discussions are sparked by what might traditionally be considered works of art (that is to say, literature and the visual arts), but throughout the book I use Jacques Rancière’s phrase “aesthetic act” to refer to any event, or speech, or encounter that makes it possible to reset social perceptions of what counts and what matters, especially in relation to questions of social justice and to questions of political and legal identity. In his seminal work The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière speaks in specific terms of “aesthetic acts” as “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity” (Rancière 2004b, 9). In the course of this book, then, I take an aesthetic act to be an incident that brings about a different perception of one’s standing in relation to others. My points of reference—the “incidents” or “aesthetic acts” in 2. The OED tells us that the term “aesthetic” was “misapplied in G[erman] by Baumgarten to ‘criticism of taste,’ and so used in Eng[lish] since 1830.” The question of aesthetic taste is taken to another level in the feud between Apple and IBM. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” says Steve Jobs in the early 1990s, about a decade after the launch of Windows. He goes on to explain: “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product” (Isaacson 2011, 179). Introduction 3 this book—include encounters with works of South African writers and artists (Phaswane Mpe, Marlene van Niekerk, Zoë Wicomb, Ivan Vladislavić, William Kentridge and Willem Bosho...