South Africa's President Jacob Zuma ahead of the ANC 5th National Policy Conference in Soweto, South Africa, June 30, 2017. SIPHIWE SIBEKO/Press Association. All rights reserved.In
many parts of the world, there is a growing crisis in the hegemony of what has
commonly been called the ‘neoliberal’ project and its domination of the global
order. Whether we are talking about the
unexpected lurches that have characterized British politics since Brexit, the
crisis that seems to have descended on US governance with the election of
Donald Trump, or the rise to power of populist demagogues like Modi, Duterte,
Erdoğan, Orbán or Zuma, a new kind of politics appears to be afoot.
As a
result, we seem to be living in a world very different from the much more
stable, possibly more conservative but certainly more legible world order presided over by the likes of Obama, Clinton
and Mbeki. While the details differ from
place to place – there’s worlds of difference, for instance, between the
modalities of kleptocratic state capture in South Africa and the chaotic politics of Brexit Britain – there are also many uncanny
resemblances and resonances, particularly at the level of political style and
strategy.
Post-truth populism?
Most
fascinating and perplexing is the key role played in these new forms of
populism of what is popularly called ‘post-truth’ politics. This in itself is a
bit of an unsatisfactory term, often used as a short-hand for a wide range of
dissimilar phenomena: the increased dissemination of gross lies and untruths in
political discourse; the undermining and hollowing out of institutions of
public science; the erosion of the authority of experts, scientists and
professionals in political life; and an impatience with the limitations of
constitutionalism, good governance and the institutions of statecraft. Much is often made of the connection between
these phenomena and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. What are
we to make of them? Are they coincidences?
Are they merely dramatic manifestations of perennial aspects of politics
(‘the big lie’, ‘disinformation’, ‘mob rule’) that are not very novel after
all? Or are we witnessing something novel and distinctive, the development of
new strategies of rule and contestation systematically different from those
that characterized the global political since, say, the fall of the Berlin
wall?
Neoliberal technopolitics
One
interesting vantage point from which to consider these questions relates to the
study of what I called the government of poverty.
For
the last 10 years or so, my research has been concerned with trying to
understand the potential and the limitations of present-day poverty and
development research as a
field of activity. In particular, I
have argued that social and pro-poor policymaking in post-apartheid South
Africa has happened within a distinctive framework of socio-technical
deliberation.
My
working hypothesis has been that the best way to understand the enormous
resources devoted to ‘pro-poor’ and ‘social cluster’ knowledge production and
policymaking is to grasp that their key purpose is neither ‘social
transformation,’ nor to bring about a major change in South Africa’s
macro-economic environment or growth path, but rather to manage, contain and
ameliorate the negative consequences of jobless growth and rising inequality.
This
has obviously inter alia involved the
purely instrumental mobilization and distribution of economic resources to
ensure political stability. But much more is going on here than the rolling out
of cash transfers or social programmes as a calculated strategy to prevent radicalization. Rather, what has happened is the displacement
of a political practice of popular mobilization and social transformation by a
new technocratic rationality of government that seeks
to construct poor populations (and poverty as such) as objects of
scientific knowledge, understanding and technical intervention.
One
important component of this shift was the development of an enormous body
of ‘poverty knowledge’ that sought to
make poverty visible and available for intervention by a (mostly quantitative)
focus on the characteristics of poor populations and the attributes of their
members. Another was the increasing
prominence of a usually fairly positivistic and often technocratic discourse
concerned with promoting ‘evidence-based policymaking.’ This was a kind of meta-political project
concerned with the ‘government of government,’ aiming to ensure the centrality
of spaces of technical liberation in the policy process, and to
institutionalizing the power and voice of a distinct cadre of technical experts
and professional bureaucrats.
Together, these shifts have helped to constitute
a distinctive form of biopolitical
deliberation, in which sociological and economic knowledge are deployed in
the day-to-day calculations that agencies of government make about the
investment or withdrawal of resources into the wellbeing and survival of
vulnerable and marginal populations.
This
is, of course, a fairly familiar picture. Perhaps the most well known example
of this approach is provided by James Ferguson’s seminal work
in The Anti-Politics Machine, in
which he showed how development discourse functioned to obscure the nature of
social change in Lesotho, entrenching a mystifying narrative about the stakes
and consequences of capitalist incorporation and presenting as merely technical
and value free changes and decisions that were deeply political in nature. Other
critics of processes of the ‘rendering technical’ of political issues have
argued that they are intrinsically anti-democratic, giving power to unelected
officials or technocrats, and marginalizing popular voices or spaces for
democratic deliberation.
The politics of ‘the
government of poverty’
Valid
though these critiques often are, I think they can also miss much of what is
interesting and important about the emergence of the ‘government of poverty’ as
a political project.
–
For one thing, the kinds of resources that can be mobilized and
redirected within these spaces and through these forms of technical
deliberation can of course be significant, and are not to be dismissed. Billions
of Rands are at stake, and for many of those affected access to the resources
so redistributed can literally mean the difference between life and death.
–
Secondly, it is important to note that the ability to frame a social
question in terms that are not overtly political or ideologically
overdetermined can play an important role in protecting vulnerable or marginal
groupings, or in directing resources to groupings that are otherwise not
powerfully represented. (To mention only one current example, consider the role
played by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office in the course of
Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the USA).
–
Thirdly, it is also important to note that the process of ‘rendering
technical’ does not in itself end
political contestation or make partisan or political challenges
impossible. It merely means that
political contestation and political challenge has to proceed in a different way.
(A good example from South Africa is provided by the political struggles around
HIV/AIDS policy, in which the politics of abandonment advocated by the Mbeki
administration was contested and eventually defeated through the development of
detailed economic and sociological arguments by the Treatment
Action Campaign.)
Technopolitics as a form of political reason
It
should be clear that these considerations raise bigger theoretical and
political questions, questions that relate to much more than the immediate
concerns of pro-poor and social policy.
For
what is at the bottom of this, of course, is how to imagine and frame the role
of states and state-like structures in the context of late capitalism.
If
the interests of ‘society’ are not immediately and transparently available as a
kind of luminously evident plenitude – if government requires a process of
adjudicating and judging between competing demands, interests and
definitions of the common good –
deliberative spaces are needed where the answers to questions of social
allocation and the design of ‘distributive regimes’ are not simply
ideologically or politically overdetermined. How are those spaces constituted?
What kinds of reasoning are to take place within them?
This
requires moving beyond the use of ‘neoliberalism’ as a kind of readymade
category of analysis or opprobium (for more on
this, see e.g. Collier,
2012; Lemke,
2001). Rather than programmatically dismissing the practices and
arrangements of late-capitalist ‘poverty government’ or ‘development
management’ out of hand, a more interesting line of enquiry is to carefully
investigate the strengths and the weaknesses of the forms of biopolitical deliberation that take shape in South Africa
and elsewhere. Take South Africa. Not all kinds of
technopolitics are the same. What are the different kinds? To what extent do
they make space for transformatory forms of political practice?
From
this point of view, it becomes interesting and profitable to consider the
possibilities and limitations of techno-political deliberation as a form of
political reason. For not all kinds of
techno-politics are the same. What are the different kinds and formations of
technopolitics? To what extent do they make space for more (or less)
transformatory forms of political practice?
– One important source of difference, for instance, is related to the
different kinds of underlying ideological framework or moral-metanarrative that
informs and animates a technopolitical project.
This seems to be, for instance, at the heart of Tania Murray Li’s
critique of the politics of ‘making live and letting die’ in the context of stalled
agrarian transitions in south-east Asia: are biopolitical calculations only
ever to be informed by a primary consideration of people’s value as workers,
producers and consumers, or can a biopolitics be conceived that considers human
lives as intrinsically valuable?
Similarly, James Ferguson’s recent discussions of the politics of
distribution pivot on the distinction between welfare systems situated within a
narrowly productionist approach, where social transfers are seen as parasitic
on the labour economy, and systems based on the notion of a rightful share.
– Much also rests on the details of the functioning, operation and
dynamics of technopolitical deliberation in specific institutional contexts.
Aside from the consideration of underlying ideologies and moral meta-narratives
it is also useful to consider the details of specific technopolitical
assemblages: what is the object or
concern around which a forum is constituted? Who is included and who is not? What
is sayable, and what isn’t? What are the ways in which decisions are reached,
and how are they given effect?
– Finally, it is important to understand the relationship between these
spaces of technopolitical deliberation and political processes elsewhere in
society. How are different groupings, interests, or institutions
represented? What are the processes of
translation or intermediation that allow political questions and problems to be
made available for technical deliberation? What are the institutions, and who
are the actors, that can act as intermediaries or brokers? Here, I am
particularly interested in the extent to which there is scope for kinds of
political reasoning that can form connections with popular or plebeian
politics, or for agendas and demands that can be connected to forms of social
agency that include the marginal.
All
this, of course, forms a framework from which to look at the potential and
limitations of the ‘government of poverty’ as a particular form of late
capitalist biopolitics. For the past ten years they have formed part of my own
thinking about the politics of pro-poor policymaking in South Africa.
Politics without policy
Can
these points of reference help us understand the present conjuncture? As I
noted in the beginning of this essay, there are many places in the world where
the forms of rule and government that characterized development politics since
the end of the 1980s are being thrown into disarray.
It
may be that the distinctively neoliberal forms of biopolitics that have been
instituted in much of the world since the collapse of the Berlin wall, are themselves
now being displaced. Certainly we seem to be witnessing the rise of a new kind
of populism that seems to be less about taking ‘control’ of the state and the
institutions of governance, and more about subverting and abandoning them. One
of the more alarming aspects of these changes is that neoliberal forms of
biopolitical governance may be in the process of being replaced by something
altogether more dangerous.
In
South Africa, an example has been provided by the transition from Mbeki’s
presidency, which might be characterized as South Africa’s moment of ‘high
neoliberal’ governmentality, to that of Jacob Zuma.
Mbeki’s
rule was characterized by significant degrees of centralization of power within
the state via the vehicle of a powerful presidential hegemony within the
framework of a constitutional order, and the central position of the office of
the Treasury within an overtly neoliberal political and economic policy
framework.
The
Zuma regime, for all the overt positioning of Zuma as an ideological opponent
of Mbeki, has not replaced his policy programme with an alternative, competing
ideological project. Indeed, South African policymaking has been characterized
by the erosion of overt presidential control of the formal policy framework. Thus
since 2009, the South African presidency has been presiding over an increasingly
fragmented landscape of ideologically disconnected, politically unaligned
and often competing line departments and political principalities. As the
authors of the recently published Betrayal
Report have made clear, this is partly due to a systematic process of
state capture in which informally constituted groupings within the shadow state
have ‘repurposed’ central elements of the state apparatus to suit their own
ends.
One
of the side effects of this repurposing and fragmentation has been the
increasing incoherence of the policy process. While the work of government goes
on in parts of the state, where officials try to ‘get on with it’, this is
happening in spite of rather than because of the efforts of those in the Union
Building. The serious business of policy making has thus become increasingly
marginalized, at times taking on the character of ineffectual ritual activity,
often subverted by ideological grandstanding and political theatre.
Authoritarian
populism and the crisis of neoliberal reason
Which
brings us to post-truth politics. It is in fact arguable that already from 2008
onwards many of the features of the Zuma presidency foreshadowed some of the
distinctive features of present day politics in the global north.
Far
from Zuma being a South African Donald Trump (a comparison he rightly finds insulting!)
it may be that Trump is the American Jacob Zuma. Or to put it more seriously,
the possibility exists that some of the phenomena connected to the emergence of
authoritarian populism and ‘post truth politics’ may represent instances of
distinctively new forms of late capitalist governmentality: strategies of
government and control that can no longer simply be understood as ‘neoliberal’
and which create radically new challenges for technical policy deliberation as
a form of political reason.
Interestingly,
the earliest use of ‘post-truth politics’ as a term is credited to a blogger
called David Roberts, who defined it in
2010 as “a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media
narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance
of legislation)”. This is a very useful conceptualization, because it suggests
that the problem of post-truth politics is not simply limited to the
dissemination of political falsehoods
or the erosion of the political currency of truth or facticity. In fact, from
this point of view, the insistence on ‘evidence-based policy-making’ that
characterized liberal techno-politics under Clinton, Blair or Obama, and the enormous
emphasis on ‘fact checking’ during the 2016 American election, are as much part of the problem as are
the fact-free political advertisements of the Leave campaign or the ungrounded
Twitter ravings of President Trump. Far from Zuma
being a South African Donald Trump (a comparison he rightly finds insulting!)
it may be that Trump is the American Jacob Zuma.
The
result is, paradoxically, that the neoliberal ‘anti-politics machine’ is being
displaced by a new kind of hyper-political antipolitics defined by the primacy
of the public sphere and the hollowing out of policy content from political
discourse.
Thus
Trump, instead of putting forward a coherent far-right political programme for
implementation by government, seems to be in the process of subverting
government as such, and replacing it by a kind of perpetual political
theatre.
The
same might be said about land reform in South Africa, where the Minister of
Rural Development and Land Reform has for some years now been churning out
green papers and policy documents that seem completely disconnected from the
capacities of his own department – and from the priorities and concerns of land
reform’s actual beneficiaries. The most
thought-provoking formulation of the logic of this new, nihilistic antipolitics
has come from Alan
Finlayson, in an essay considering how the new politics of the Tory party
and the proponents of a hard Brexit seem to involve a denial of the very
possibility of connecting political judgment and rational policy discussion:
“In the emergent
system of communication and information, power doesn’t consist in the capacity
to structure or direct what is thought and said, ‘hegemonising’ it and
connecting it to a system of decision-making which is thereby legitimated.
Instead it rests on the ability to read the ebbs and flows of mood and opinion
so as to anticipate what is coming, find a wave that it is useful to amplify,
and capitalise on the temporary force and intensity of numbers. It is a
practice of politics analogous (not coincidentally) to high-frequency trading
on financial markets or venture capital speculation. And it is the political
right that has so far been best able to exploit it.
The
question is: is this true or not? Are we standing on the brink of a new kind of
nihilistic governmentality, where politics is turned into perpetual theatre,
disconnected from any kind of coherent government programming – a kind of
Ideological State Apparatus without the State?
Is
this increasing disconnection between the apparatus of serious government – the
calculative deliberation about the allocation of resources within the polity –
and the public discourse about
politics turning into a distinctive new modality of rule?
Is
the marginalization of formal systems of state power and decision-making, and
the increasing influence of parasitic ‘grey zones’ and ‘shadow states’, where
fluid networks of alternative power hollow out the apparatuses of government,
becoming the new normal?
Or is
this an overblown reading, just a sensationalist exaggeration of features of
late capitalist governance that have been present all along, and are merely
temporarily more visible?
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