christopher l Teggatz*

 

 

The Decline of Theory in South Africa

 

Notes I delivered at the conclusion of the 2001 SCALI conference in South Africa.

 

South Africa before the transition had four major theory programs. Today, it has only one, at UNISA. As an American theoretician, I find the very notion of a “Department of Theory” quite astounding and wonderful. It really doesn’t exist in America, except in comparative literature, and here wedded to a wider discipline. As theoreticians, we can’t help but be aware that our position in academic discourse in South Africa is increasingly remote and marginalized.

This is because of a variety of factors, such as the perception that artistic discourse must be wedded to wider social goals, and the concurrent perception of theory as overly abstract, in some way “removed” from actual art or discourse, or in some epistemological way irrelevant to the needs of contemporary South African society. There are also a number of ideological trends, such as a move to interdisciplinary, the vogue for cultural studies, and so on, which have fragmented literary theory and wedded it to wider disciplines. Probably most important when all is said and done, the institutionalization of certain points of view, such as liberation, empowerment, feminism, post-colonialism, postmodernism, and a few others, has resulted in ideology coming to be seen as theory, and displacing other approaches to the text. For example, structuralism is rarely taught or discussed in contemporary academe, despite the fact that nobody questions the existence of discursive structures. This systematic ignoring of formal theory in many ways reduces the richness of the text.

Not surprisingly, new research on the formal aspects of discourse is at a low level in South African academe. Theory, as a discipline, is not being taught any more in a rigorous or comprehensive manner. To people such as myself, or Scholes in The Decline of English, or the participants at the 2001 SCALI conference at the University of Potchefstroom, this is a bad trend. Literary theory as a discipline needs graduate students conducting research on theory. For this to happen, the discipline needs to be attracting undergraduates to theory. We need to sell theory, attract and entice students. For theory to be read by our colleagues, we need to make theory relevant to what they’re thinking and writing. In terms of money, which is what determines the very notion of a Department of Theory, we need to show precisely why theory is necessary in South Africa.

At the moment, all this means we must wed the formal aspects of discourse (our true topic) to subjects currently in vogue, subjects that currently use theory and need theory. Cultural studies as a concept is closely wedded to theory, as is ideology of any kind. We must ask ourselves why young people are enrolling in cultural studies, or why the ANC enjoys overwhelming support today, and what we can say about all this in a rigorous, theoretical manner. We must also ask ourselves which ideology currently holds the microphone, the money, and the printing presses. Perhaps this is regrettable, but it seems a clear practical necessity. Personally, if I can't teach theory in a South African context, then what use has my entire intellectual life been?   

On an ideological level, we must recognize that in the current climate, we can’t simply talk about the formal aspects of text. This is because nobody is listening.  We do have one distinct advantage in cultural studies however, namely, that any aspect of localization is viewed as significant. Thus, localized theory is significant. In South Africa, I think it wise to actually broaden the notion of localization, to include Africa as a whole, and also by extension, to colonialist literatures such as the French Algerian. This will involve co-opting Camus “back’ from France, but the co-option is one Camus himself would have approved of: he considered himself first and foremost an Algerian. In African literature as a whole, there does exist a corpus of theory, a corpus hitherto largely ignored in South African academe, and we can and should engage with it. This means engaging with Nigerian theory, and Francophone theory, for example, along with major trends in African literary history such as Negritude. There is a body of local theory. In English alone in South Africa, we have Brink’s The Novel, Coetzee’s White Writing, Kunene’s Heroic Poetry of the Basotho, and Scheub’s work on the fairy tale, to name just a few. There is a South African discourse about theory. It is localized, and certainly it is significant for this culture.

Theoretical participation in the larger debate about literature has a terrible image problem; we need to overcome theory’s stodgy, old-fashioned image, the image of the crazy old professor. And perhaps we need to overcome our own resistance to current intellectual trends, some of which might seem to have little theoretical merit. We also need to discuss theory in terms of literary cultures other than English or American or French. From the perspective of Afrikaans universities such as Potchefstroom and Stellenbach, marginalized literatures such as Coloured literature and discourse (much of which is in Afrikaans) demand immediate study. Furthermore, from the perspective of cultural studies, Afrikaans, Xhosa, English, and Zulu literatures are indigenous literatures, in a way that Dickens and Shakespeare, however significant, are not. This will attract at least some South African 18-year-old students to literature, and some of them will be interested in theory. There is a common perception in the Skool vir Tale (School of Languages) of Potchefstroom University, where I type these words, that South African kids don’t want to read South African literature. I don’t think this is actually true. I think we just haven’t been talking about the things they want to study.

From an abstract perspective, theory ultimately studies patterns and structures and dynamics in discursive behavior, and we tend to think that these patterns have significance cross-culturally and trans-historically. In the very least, discursive patterns present informative comparisons and contrasts between cultures or historical eras, and act as models to explain. Theory can tell us much of what is being “said” in South Africa, what the collective dialogue might be at a given point in history.

We need to broaden our notion of text. The main reason we need to do this is to attract students, and demonstrate the relevance of our discipline to society today. Text is not simply a novel; it is also whatever medium currently in vogue, or for whatever reason significant in contemporary society. Barthes showed us that wrestling is a text. Certainly in America, the most influential text of the 20^th century was film. In South Africa, to name just a few, we have culturally-significant texts such as popular music lyrics, the Tswana word-play of insulting, television plots, Zulu praise poetry, political debate, propaganda, juris prudence, the cinema, journalism, and quite literally any symbolic pattern of behavior in society, such as protest, and its reception, and its part in the collective dialogue. This seems the only way we can ever justify a Department of Theory. And I think we have been asked, given the dramatic decline in Departments of Theory in the New South Africa, to justify our existence.

 

www.teggatz.com l christopherteggatz@yahoo.com