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In the 1790’s in Germany, Immanuel Kant proposed a division of the modern university into a higher faculty and a lower faculty ^[i]. The higher faculty – higher in its closeness to the state – consisted of the faculties of law, theology, and medicine. The lower faculty consisted of the human sciences including the arts, philosophy, theoretical sciences, and what later came to be called the social sciences (to the extent they existed). Kant’s aim was to respond to pressures to conform to the state’s authority, and to renounce his unorthodox writings on religion and theology. In doing so, Kant articulated a division of knowledge and power that has persisted in the structure of the modern, national university in Europe, with resonances elsewhere, since. The higher faculties followed the imperatives of the state, while the lower faculties were to constitute a critical public sphere that was to improve state policy by subordinating it to a disinterested search for truth. For this public sphere to function, the human sciences and theoretical sciences had to be insulated from state influence, left to determine their own courses of study and to freely disseminate their findings among the educated classes.

There remains something compelling in Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, although a bit naïve in the context of modern information systems, industrialism, military-industrial complexes, corporate funding of universities, and the enormous investment of social organization and management in university knowledge systems. The state remains fixated on enlisting the university in its drive for political and social control, to stem the flows of knowledge by channeling them into state prerogatives. The drive to subordinate critical thought to the state, and now to imperatives drawn from the latest phase of capitalist globalization, one involving unprecedented networking of finance, production, and knowledge, remains depressingly familiar across national borders.

The enlisting of university knowledge in current forms of political domination provides a background to the present volume of essays on the possibility for the renewal of critical social theory in post-apartheid South Africa. In the neoliberal university, critical thought is no longer attacked so much for its unorthodoxy, but for its irrelevance. As university teachers we are told to teach our students to think critically, but only in the sense that “critical thinking” counts for our students/customers as a marketable skill set. Teaching and emboldening them to think critically about power and to imagine alternatives to orthodoxy are now less threats (although in certain forms and in particular instances and places they are treated as such) than a luxury. In many respects, the current neoliberal regime that marks critical thought as irrelevant is more devastating to it than direct repression, for it encloses pedagogical and educational practices within a system of institutions and relations in which critical thought gains no traction. Dependent on the state, capitalist corporations, foundations responsive to structural needs of global capital, and wealthy alumni for funding, universities are increasingly run as managerial corporations governed by a logic of economic investment. Therefore, programs must pay – they must have measurable outcomes, especially producing marketable innovations in technology along with marketable graduates – and faculty are judged not in terms of their knowledge but in terms of their productivity – numbers of students taught, grant funds brought in, and prestige (including rotating in and out of government positions) that defines the university’s brand and attracts foundation and alumni funding. Meanwhile, our students put up with critical professors in order to get past the requirements, usually in anarchronistic (to the neo-liberal managers of higher education) general education programs, and to get a degree that certifies them to get a better paying, and perhaps, more rewarding job. If radical professors gain too much traction with students, an intense and well-funded ideological and media apparatus in the name of patriotism and time-warn, traditional values, kicks in to ratchet up the pressure against critical thought.

One most often thinks of this dilemma as characteristic of European and American universities. However, this volume demonstrates a depressingly familiar situation in South African universities. The neo-liberal political project has come to define the possibilities of knowledge through its re-making of the university as an institution in which critical thought is largely irrelevant. Against this, these essays testify to the persistent imagination and energy of university thinkers and teachers imbued with the transformative spirit of critical social theory. Several essays, especially those of Michael Neocosmos, Ivor Chipkin and Bert Olivier, as well as the introduction by Vale and Jacklin, directly connect the technicalization of knowledge in the managerialism of the university to a larger depoliticization of the South African state.

This volume, Re-imagining the Social in South Africa, engages this condition in the specific circumstances of South African universities after apartheid and in the wake of the control of the state by the nationalist, and increasingly neo-liberal, ANC. In an echo of the spirit if not the content of Kant’s Conflict, the contributors to this volume ask what role the humanities and social sciences can play in renewing an emancipatory and progressive politics in South Africa. In doing so, the contributors develop analyses and prescriptions that are of value not only in the context of the African experience, but for social theory in universities in other parts of the world subjected to the same strictures of managerialism, privatization, and a thoughtless pragmatism.

Critical intellectuals played a significant role in bringing apartheid to an end. As Vale and Jacklin say in the introduction, this produced real hope for the future of post-apartheid South Africa (21). The critical imagination that helped to bring down apartheid should have produced a thoughtful re-imagining of the South African nation. But it didn’t. The distinctive “mélange” of Western and African thought, of new and old ways of thinking and acting, that held promise for a democratic political future, has come to be subordinated to crass managerialism and to the market. Instead of continuing the traditions of critical thought, the ANC power structure came to act like a state, one enthralled with its own power and with integrating itself into the neo-liberal globalist market.

One important task of contributors to this volume is to analyze how this came about from a vantage point within the university. One persistent theme is the need for social theory to think outside and beyond the state, to re-imagine the South African community in ways that embolden political action on the part of the people who remain marginal to the statist modes of thought that have become dominant. Ivor Chipkin’s analysis of how the ANC/nationalist state has disabled critical thought connects nicely with Michael Neocosmos’ critique of statist politics, drawing on the French thinker Sylvain Lazarus, together with a range of African thinkers. Others, such as Suren Pillay, probe the possibility of decolonizing the language of transformation by interrogating the legacy of the critical academic discourses in South Africa. John Higgins also develops the theme that a critical account of the language of critical social theory is a prerequisite to an emancipatory post-apartheid critical theory.

The conception of social theory that informs this volume breaks down the given boundaries of disciplinary knowledge. While this volume is comprised of contributors from a range of disciplines, they treat social theory as a common project. As Theodore Schatzki puts it: “[T]he entwinement of the humanities and social sciences has been abetted by the development of social theory as a non-disciplinary-specific domain of thought.(35)” This “non-disciplinarity” opens up a critical space in that it demands an interrogation of the traditional language of social theory, and allows social theory to address the ways in which received categories of thought have delinked theory and practice.

For all of the authors in Re-imagining, the question of responsibility in academic life and knowledge production is a question of opening up new emancipatory political possibilities for South African society. They argue that the social sciences and the humanities comprise a singular mode of thought in which political alternatives for South Africa can be thought, while they recognize them as at the same time an imposition with imperial overtones. This doubleness is at the heart of both the problem and the critical possibilities of social theory in South Africa and not only there: this doubleness seems to me an important feature of the complexity of the newest instantiation of the globalization of social and political relations. Richard Pithouse puts it nicely: "Given that, at least in some universities, there is sufficient space for free thought and action the question arises as to what to do with this imperfect but nevertheless extant freedom(161)." Olivier’s analysis of what he calls the pharmakon nature of disciplines of knowledge -- that is, their doubleness as simultaneously complicit with power, as elements of a system of domination, and as creating space of freedom and thought – gives this theme a trenchant analysis that speaks to the South African condition as it intervenes in wider debates. Together the essays in this volume make a strong case that critical social theory, imbued with a spirit of critic and historical engagement, can provide ways to think through the current impasses that the humanities and social sciences face.

These essays argue that the humanities and social sciences are crucial to the promotion of imagination, of alternatives to the statist malaise and failure to realize the promise of the emancipatory energies that brought down apartheid. To accomplish this social theory needs to engage in a critique of the imposition of categories of thought that are depoliticizing, whether they come from the imposition of western modes of thought or from the history of local critical thought (Pillay’s argument). Neocosmos argues: “…in the absene of an emancipatory project, social science is…a slave to modes of thought that simplty fall into a conception of politics that is reduced to the state, (or to class, history or nation) and disables an understanding of politics as independent practice (116).” It is the distinctive “closer connection with thinking politics” in the global South than in the west that constituted the imagination Therefore, Neocosmos argues, adopting the characterizations of South Africa “as exceptional in Africa because of its ‘industrial base’ and more recently because of its apparent ‘democratic stability’” pose “a major obstacle to thought, particularly to thinking politically (117).”

The critique of statist modes of thought is connected to the prescription that re-imagining the social in South Africa requires recognizing and participating in grass-roots forms of politics, to refocus attention on politics as a subjective practice. Space needs to be opened up for the occluded and silenced voices of the marginalized to speak and be heard. This is in part a problem, as the critique of language demonstrates, of interrogating the way the previous language of academic discourse has marginalized some while claiming to speak in their name. Several contributors here turn to a conception of political subjectivity that refuses to allow the academic discourses to speak for “the people”. Specifically, this involves a reconsideration of the categories of race, class, and colonialism both in terms of their representations in the apartheid regime and their effects in post-apartheid analyses of transformative possibilities in contemporary South Africa. Suren Pillay’s and Premesh Lalu’s critiques of the subordination of critical thought to economistic narratives of capitalism that represent race as a function of class or that reify race in ways that depoliticize its effects within transformational post-colonial political conditions connect nicely to the critiques of depoliticization of Neocosmos, Olivier, and Pithouse.

The theme of depoliticization runs through many of the essays in this volume, linking again the structural conditions of neoliberalism in the universities with the critique of representation in the humanities and social sciences in South Africa. Instead of relying on the given representations of the political situation of South Africa, and post-colonial conditions more generally, these essays draw on a range of thinkers, from Mandami and Fanon, to Lazarus and Badiou, and to Chatterjee and Guha to think the spaces in which academics might speak with a flourishing of grass-roots political activism. In this respect Pithouse’s critique of civil society as a space in which NGO’s depoliticize the political landscape, imposing their visions on local grass roots political movements is apropos while others such as Pillay look at the way the adoption of Western critical discourses in the universities has represented South African history in ways that have now led to a paralysis of critical thought.

This volume should gain wide readership. For anyone interested in the conditions of knowledge production in South Africa, and in rethinking possibilities for politics in South Africa, this volume is essential. It will also be of interest for but among academics engaged in debates about current themes in critical social thought – the meta-critique of the state (the critique of the focus of critical discourse on the state); the subjectivization of politics; depoliticization of the social imagination; the hegemony of managerialism; the globalization of capitalist hegemony – both for the ways in which it intervenes in those discourses, but also for interjecting perspectives from the global south into those debates.