NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND

VYGOTSKY IN DIALOGUE

This book draws together two domains of psychological theory, Vygotsky’s

cultural-historical theory of cognition and narrative theories of identity, to
offer a way of rethinking the human subject as embodied, relational and
temporal. A dialogue between these two ostensibly disparate and contested
theoretical trajectories provides a new vantage point from which to explore
questions of personal and political change.
In a world of deepening inequalities and increasing economic precar-
ity, the demand for free, decolonised quality education as articulated by
the South African Student Movement and in many other contexts around
the world, is disrupting established institutional practices and reinvigorat-
ing possibilities for change. This context provokes new lines of hopeful
thought and critical reflection on (dis)continuities across historical time,
theories of (social and psychological) developmental processes and the
practices of intergenerational life, particularly in the domain of education,
for the making of emancipatory futures.
This is essential reading for academics and students interested in Vygots-
kian and narrative theory, and critical psychology, as well as those inter-
ested in the politics and praxis of higher education.

Jill Bradbury is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of the

Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She teaches in the fields of nar-
rative psychology and psychosocial childhood studies. Her research focuses
on intergenerational narratives, sociohistorical theories of personhood, the
transformation of higher education and the (im)possibilities of individual and
social change. She is a principal investigator on the interdisciplinary research
project, NEST (Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation).
Concepts for Critical Psychology: Disciplinary
Boundaries Re-thought
Series editor: Ian Parker

Developments inside psychology that question the history of the discipline

and the way it functions in society have led many psychologists to look
outside the discipline for new ideas. This series draws on cutting-edge cri-
tiques from just outside psychology in order to complement and question
critical arguments emerging inside. The authors provide new perspectives
on subjectivity from disciplinary debates and cultural phenomena adjacent
to traditional studies of the individual.
The books in the series are useful for advanced level undergraduate and
postgraduate students, researchers and lecturers in psychology and other related
disciplines such as cultural studies, geography, literary theory, philosophy,
psychotherapy, social work and sociology.

Most recently published titles:

Madness and Subjectivity

A Cross-Cultural Examination of Psychosis in the West and India
Ayurdhi Dhar

Decolonial Psychoanalysis
Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies
Robert Beshara

Subjectivity and Critical Mental Health

Lessons from Brazil
Daniel Goulart

Psycurity
Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination
Rachel Jane Liebert
NARRATIVE
PSYCHOLOGY AND
VYGOTSKY IN
DIALOGUE
Changing Subjects

Jill Bradbury
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Jill Bradbury
The right of Jill Bradbury to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with Sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-55180-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-55187-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14782-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
 For Siyanda Ndlovu
25 March 1982 – 5 April 2010
In memory of all your beautiful futures
Siyaqhubeka
CONTENTS

Series editor preface ix

Author preface xi
Acknowledgements xvi

SECTION 1
Changing subjects: theorising personhood 1

1 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 3

2 The subject of psychology: a narrative of Vygotsky and

critical psychologies 30

SECTION 2
Conceptual tools from the south: changing the
subject of psychology 57

3 Ubuntu: reconceptualising personhood 59

4 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 80

viii Contents

SECTION 3
Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds 103

5 The question of potential: a narrative of Vygotsky

in action, then and now 105

6 Educating (our)selves: narratives of (un)learning

and being 133

7 Histories and hope: acting, thinking and being in the

present 154

Bibliography 173
Index 191
SERIES EDITOR PREFACE

This book reconfigures the academic boundaries between narrative

psychology and Vygotskian work by exploring in a richly contextualised
reading of local institutional and state practices what it means to be “sub-
ject”. Clearly the “subject” or discipline of academic and professional
psychology is not up to the task, and critical psychologists who are
searching for alternatives and building sub-disciplinary perspectives on the
self and culture need to go well outside the discipline; to be “changing
subjects” in this sense necessitates, as Jill Bradbury argues so cogently,
rethinking the boundaries of psychology. The link between culture and
psychology was made by Lev Vygotsky a century back and is being
remade today through narrative approaches. The interweaving of those
two traditions allows us to appreciate how important the meaning of
“subject” as grammatical function is; we are subject to language, and the
application of the two theoretical frameworks to personal and collective
processes of change requires that we attend in detail to how that language
works. There is a third “subject” who speaks in this text, however, the
subject as agent; empowered through the process of constructing con-
tested readings of narrative, this active acting subject is able to reflect on
who they are and who they could become in relation to others.
This book, Narrative Psychology and Vygotsky in Dialogue: Changing Subjects,
looks at first glance as if it is about an old psychologist – Vygotsky, Russian
pioneer researcher into the nature of subjectivity grounded in the specific
language of a dominant culture and working at the contradictions which
speak of alternative conceptions of what it is to be a human being after
x Series editor preface

a revolution – but it is actually as much about specific contexts of work

a century later; it is as much about the way that black subjectivity is concep-
tualised in the work of South African phenomenologist Chabani Manganyi
writing during the revolutionary struggle against the apartheid regime. That
startling shift of perspective and focus as we read the book poses a question.
How could it be that two specific-context writers could also be writing
about something universal? The answer being that what is universal is not
the psychological content of their work but the method they lead us to and
the focus on language which narrative psychology gives us the tools to
explicate.
The double-lesson of narrative and Vygotskyan critique is that different
senses of subject must be situated in social context, not merely concerned
with personal change – though personal change is the prerequisite and con-
sequence of this radical work – but also concerned with changing the
world, with changing worlds. Those are the stakes of the proposed synergy
between Vygotsky’s relational dialogical subjectivity constituted in an
engagement with the African concept “Ubuntu”. The boundaries that are
being transgressed and traversed in this book are therefore disciplinary,
grammatical and agentic; and it is then clear how and why the standard
psychologised binary opposition between what is interior to the subject and
what is exterior to them must also be disturbed, challenged and tran-
scended. This necessary book teaches us not only that the conceptual
resources we need are as much outside the discipline of psychology as lying
hidden in our history – Vygotsky as the resource we needed always already
there if we had cared to look for him – but also that the narratives we
now construct as alternatives to psychology must operate at the edge of the
disciplinary boundaries, as “outwith” them; in and against them.
Ian Parker
University of Manchester
AUTHOR PREFACE

A narrative of the text coming into being

This book draws together two domains of psychological theory that are
generally considered quite disparate, namely, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical
theory of cognition, and narrative theories of identity or subjectivity.
Although some concepts from Vygotsky’s theory of mind have been
widely taken up in educational psychology, most notably, the “zone of
proximal development”, the implications of Vygotsky’s theory of
consciousness have been less thoroughly explored or articulated in relation
to the critical psychology project of reconceptualising psychological life.
Conversely, while narrative theory is deployed, together with both phe-
nomenological and discursive psychologies, for theoretical and empirical
research purposes, these approaches are typically mobilised for sociopolitical
purposes and often resist articulation with psychological or interior worlds.
While the binary between internal and external realities is widely recog-
nised as false, we lack the conceptual tools for speaking differently about
psychosocial phenomena and processes. I suggest that there is a productive
commensurability between Vygotsky’s theory and Narrative theories and
that linking these domains will contribute to rethinking the disciplinary
boundaries of psychology, and to informing new forms of praxis. The
“changing subjects” of the title therefore refers to multiple senses of the
“subject” that play on its semantic and grammatical ambiguities: (1)
the subject or discipline of psychology; (2) the subject as subjected (sub-
jugated) to social life; and (3) as the agentic acting subject of social life.
xii Author preface

The question of change needs to be engaged in all of these senses and

new theoretical resources are released by placing Vygotskian theory and
narrative psychology in dialogue.
Those looking for a comprehensive (or even partial) overview of these
vast theoretical terrains will be disappointed. In mitigation, the loose ends
and frayed edges of this text may offer readers possible threads to tug
at and from which to weave new and different lines of theoretical enquiry
and praxis. Narrative psychology provides not only the content but also the
method of the text, crossing multiple time zones, the spaces of the academy
and everyday life, the political and the personal. Vygotsky’s theory-method
that enables us to engage with changing forms and history as possibility, is
part of my own narrative life history, enfolded into my educational praxis.
The project to fuse aspects of these two ostensibly disparate and contested
theoretical trajectories is enmeshed in the very processes of change that are
the focus of my enquiry. With the benefit of hindsight, changes in under-
standings and practices, changes to our earlier selves, seem inevitable. Life,
however, unlike textual narrative, is never complete; we are always in the
middle of the story and, as I began to write this text, the higher education
landscape of South Africa was radically disrupted by the emergence of the
Student Movement, demanding free decolonised quality education. In the
wider national and global context of deepening inequalities and increasing
economic precarity, this political movement challenges the status quo,
demanding accountability from the democratic state and shaking up
established institutional practices. The Student Movement is continuous
with previous decades of struggle as student protests around financial and
academic exclusions have always been a consistent feature of higher educa-
tion in South Africa and, in this sense, these are not new issues. However,
this is a particular historical moment in which multiple disruptions to taken-
for-granted sociopolitical life are occurring across the globe and the South
African Student Movement presents new formations and articulations of cri-
tique and activism, reinvigorating possibilities for change, the effects of
which are still in the making. Writing this text in this context provoked me
along new lines of hopeful thought and critical reflection on (dis)continuities
across historical time, theories of (social and psychological) developmental
processes, and the practices of intergenerational life, particularly in
the domain of education, for the making of emancipatory futures. The
time-space context from which I write thus both requires and makes possible
a unique critical perspective on the (im)possibilities of social and psycho-
logical change, providing interesting entangled threads from which to weave
stories of changing subjects and changing worlds.
 Author preface xiii

Mapping the sections of the text

I have attempted to engage multiple projected audiences in the text, psych-
ologists and non-psychologists, South Africans and those from elsewhere,
and to cross the widening generational gaps between now and then. This
means that, for different readers, different aspects of the text may feel more
or less familiar or foreign. The text crosses multiple disciplinary domains not
only within psychology but beyond, drawing on literary work, philosophy,
educational and social theory, and contemporary political commentaries
beyond the academy. The text is at once a conceptual exploration and
a reflexive account of personal experiences and collaborative projects in the
world of learning-teaching and knowledge-making. I traverse a few decades
of my own life history, working in relationship with colleagues in the South
African academy in changing times, in conversation with the longer history
of psychology and with international scholars who are busy with different
articulations of the project of critical psychology in their own contexts.
The text is organised in three primary sections: (1) theorising human sub-
jectivity; (2) conceptual tools for the subject (discipline) of psychology; and
(3) reflections on contextual engagements in changing intergenerational
worlds. In the first section, Vygotskian theory and Narrative psychology are
placed in dialogue to create an alternative framework for conceptualising
living subjectivities and exploring implications for the subject of psychology.
Chapter 1 provides a psychosocial conceptualisation of personhood that is
embodied, temporal and relational. From a Vygotskian perspective, the
world is mediated by the meanings of others, providing the constraints and
possibilities of culture, and subjecting each generation to the “weight” of his-
tory. However, this mediated consciousness paradoxically enables the narra-
tive subject to generate new storylines for the future through self-regulating
internal dialogues. In Chapter 2, this conceptualisation is inserted into
the history and contemporary articulations of the discipline of psychology,
particularly exploring points of connection to, and differentiation from, crit-
ical “turns” to discourse and more recently, embodiment and affect. The
chapter draws together the two lines of Vygotsky’s development, natural and
cultural, to explore questions about the mutability of human “nature”, and
possibilities for individual and sociopolitical change. The theory of (black)
subjectivity proposed by the South African psychologist, Chabani Manganyi,
is juxtaposed with that of Vygotsky, highlighting productive synergies and
provocations. The (social) construction of the subject of psychology, in the
dual sense of how persons are conceptualised and in the constitution of
the discipline, may contribute to or frustrate possibilities for change in
both subjects and worlds.
xiv Author preface

In the second section, two specific concepts developed through theorising

from the South are explored in more detail in dialogue with Vygotskian and
narrative theory. The first is outlined in Chapter 3, in which ways of think-
ing about psychosocial realities are fleshed out through the African concept
of “ubuntu” in synergy with Vygotskian consciousness, asserting a relational,
dialogical subjectivity that challenges traditional binaries or dichotomies.
The second conceptual exploration in Chapter 4 examines the possibilities
and difficulties entailed in changing our minds and challenging established
understandings of the world. (Mis)understandings are only partly amenable
to challenge by rational argument and evidence and their functional validity
is ordinarily recursively (re)established in our relations with others and the
(social) structure of the world. The pedagogical and political task is to disrupt
these self-perpetuating patterns.
The third and final section of the text focuses on contextual applications
of theories and concepts for engaging individual and collective processes of
change. These chapters present reflections on autobiographical chapters of
my life as an academic, conducting research and teaching across the breach
between the apartheid and democratic systems in the 1990s, through the
first decade of the new century, and into the changing times of the present.
These are neither neatly distinct periods nor linear progressive stages
through which my thinking and practice have developed. In Oscar Wilde’s
witty words, “I am not young enough to know everything!”.
A retrospective narrative remakes earlier events and experiences rather than
simply recollecting them and the story of my pedagogical and political
engagements in questions of change both within and beyond the academy
is inevitably partial and particular, shaped as much by my accumulated
experience as by the current context in which I live, think and work.
Chapter 5 focuses on the radical possibilities of the Vygotskian con-
cepts of potential and the zone of proximal development in the highly
unequal terrain of higher education in the historical moment of change
signalled by the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa. This
(partial) history of pedagogical experiments provides critical resources for
the present, particularly in relation to questions of decolonising curricula
and pedagogies. Chapter 6 presents reflections on learning and teaching as
processes of identity construction and subject formation, about being
rather than solely matters of knowing and thinking. Theorising identity
and subjectivity as narrative becomes infused into my theoretical and
empirical projects, offering a new vantage point from which to think
about processes of change, particularly in relation to history and temporal-
ity. Intergenerational educational relationships have productive potential
but simultaneously have subjugating effects and in this chapter I reflect on
 Author preface xv

my positionality as a teacher committed to a social justice agenda and to

the emancipatory effects of education. The final chapter of the book
extends the narrative to explore how traumatic memory and hopeful
imagination might coalesce in the fluid landscape of the present. While
the process of writing can only really capture meaning in the past tense,
the book ends by articulating a version of critical hope in relation to the
messiness of the changing present and possibilities for the future.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was a long time in the making and its shape and thematic
threads have changed, unravelled and been remade through wonderfully
provocative conversations and exchanges across many different times and
places. I am grateful to the University of the Witwatersrand for sabbatical
leave that enabled me to immerse myself in the slow processes of reading
and reflection so necessary to be able to write anything at all. I am very
thankful to the series editor, Ian Parker, for trusting that this book would
happen even when it seemed unlikely. Thanks to the Routledge editorial
and production teams for their patient attention.
I am thankful for networks of collegial scholarship and overlapping cir-
cles of friendship that have challenged my thinking and sustained my soul
over the years. To Ian Parker and Erica Burman and the Discourse Unit
for providing a home-away-from-home in the years of commuting
between Durban and Manchester; to Michelle Fine, Susan Opotow and
María Elena Torre of the Graduate Centre of the City University of
New York (CUNY) for exemplary experimental and hopeful praxis; to
Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire and Maria Tamboukou of the Centre
for Narrative Research at the University of East London (UEL) for gen-
erating exceptionally robust narrative threads that have become woven
into my thinking and life. Connections to these international circles were
facilitated by two vibrant intellectual projects in the making of critical
psychology in South Africa. Thanks to Grahame Hayes for sustaining the
PINS (Psychology in Society) journal and network over several decades,
and to Norman Duncan and Garth Stevens, and colleagues in the
 Acknowledgements xvii

department of Psychology at Wits for initiating, and welcoming me into,

the Apartheid Archives project. My current thinking, acting and being is
only possible in and through a remarkable collaborative partnership with
Bhekizizwe Peterson in the vibrant space of NEST (Narrative Enquiry
for Social Transformation). Special thanks to the NEST reading group for
our reading, thinking and talking together – you will read yourselves
between the lines! My immense gratitude to all my students past, present
and yet-to-come, the characters that give my narrative life.
Thanks to Joni Brenner for the beautiful cover image of Marigold beads
that tells the story of human connectivity in the interleaving processes of
continuity and change. Heartfelt thanks to Molly Andrews, Hugo Canham,
Jude Clark, Peace Kiguwa, Ronnie Miller and Bhekizizwe Peterson for
reading chapters along the way and giving me critical but kind feedback.
To Ronnie who read every word, thank you for continuing to fix
commas with only mild irritation, for decades of mediational moments that
have revealed new worlds for me, and an exceptional friendship of heart
and mind. Thanks to Judes, Lindelwa, Mthoko and Rejane for animated
conversations about and mostly not-about the book, for sharing your
inspiring and wonderful life-worlds with me, and refusing to let me give
up. Finally, my love and deep thankfulness to Keith, without whom
I could not narrate my-self.
SECTION 1

Changing subjects
Theorising personhood
1
VYGOTSKY’S NARRATIVE SUBJECT

Introduction
Vygotsky’s subject is a storytelling animal. Reframing Vygotsky’s subject (in
both senses, his subject of study, but also his conceptualisation of the human
“subject”) in narrative terms is premised on the pivotal role of language in
his theory that not only serves to carry cultural history and thus construct the
social subject, but is also a natural, universal human capacity. The internalisa-
tion of the contents of social talk, the cultural baggage (or capital) of history
is well recognised as constituting the “social subject”, or reformulates
Vygotsky’s position as “society in mind”. Storytelling or narration enables us
to become quite other than our natural selves, quite different in kind than
even our nearest animal relatives, not only in our capacity to tell stories, but
also through our narration of life. However, this social subject constituted in
the world of language and meaning remains entirely natural, embodied in
the material world. There is nothing more “natural” to human life than the
use of signs and the telling of stories: it is intrinsic to the kind of animal that
human beings are. This first chapter will draw together the resources of
Vygotskian theory and narrative psychology for rethinking personhood as
embodied, temporal and relational. Several themes that will run throughout
the text will be introduced, in particular, highlighting the role of language in
the formation of psychosocial life through internal conversations, dia-
logue and the narration of the self.
Both Vygotskian theory and narrative psychology are approaches more
properly described as theory-methods or innovative ways of thinking about
4 Changing subjects

persons in terms of dynamic processes rather than as circumscribed entities.

In outlining Vygotsky’s “enabling theory-method”, Shotter (2000, p. 234)
emphasises the “responsivity of growing and living forms, both to each and
to the otherness in their surroundings, and on their own particular and
unique ways of coming-into-Being”. Narrative psychology emphasises the
temporal quality of human life that biologically unfolds inexorably forwards
but in psychological terms is constituted through perpetual oscillations back
and forth in time in which each fleeting present moment is infused
with memories of the past and tenuously connected by intention and
imagination to projected futures. This emphasis on the living processes of
changing subjects requires a very different conceptual and methodological
approach to aspirations to science and the taxonomically descriptive
language that characterises much of psychology’s history. Vygotsky’s
theory-method attempts to trace the origins and course of development of
psychosocial functions. His focus is not on the “fossilised” products of
human behaviour in finished current forms but on “the very process
of genesis or establishment of the higher form caught in a living aspect”
(Vygotsky, 1997, p. 71, emphasis added). This conceptualisation of history
does not refer to a static archive but to a flow of activity in which present
forms of life participate: “It is here that the past and the present are fused
and the present is seen in the light of history” (Shotter, 2000, p. 236).
These sociohistorical processes are woven through intergenerational nar-
ratives that both constrain and enable possibilities for change. While history
and culture shape both the contents and forms of our narratives, it is
because we are storytelling creatures that history and culture are possible
at all. The subjects of psychology, human beings, are both subject to and
subjects of change, but we have been slow to recognise the methodological
implications of this understanding, amusingly captured in the injunction
from Harré and Secord (1972, p. 84): “for scientific purposes, treat people
as if they were human beings”.1

Vygotsky’s theory: society in mind

Vygotskian theory is typically understood as an account of the powerful
sociohistorical and cultural effects on the formation of human mind, and
his concepts of mediation and the zone of proximal development are
now established received wisdoms in psychological theory and educational
applications. However, as important as this contribution is in deepening
our understanding of children’s development in context, the more thor-
oughly radical and transformative implications of Vygotskian theory are
often eclipsed or erased: minds are always “in society” (or social contexts)
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 5

but critically, they are also always infused with the social; society is “in
mind”. Thus, Vygotsky provides us with a developmental account of
human consciousness as articulated in and through sociohistorical processes.
Vygotsky’s approach, in similar vein to other stage theorists such as
Freud, Erikson and Piaget,2 focuses on ontogenetic development as
a route to explaining the processes of psychological life.
While Vygotsky and Piaget are often understood as providing antithetical
theories of cognitive development, the two theories provide divergent but
complementary, rather than opposing, explanatory accounts of the human
mind. Piaget explains human consciousness as constructed in and through
the mental operations of mind in transaction with the material world. His
purpose is to neutralise the effects of culture or the malleable historical elem-
ents of human life, which he acknowledged as necessary but insufficient for
cognitive development.3 In this way, his theoretical project is to abstract
ontogenetic, species-specific universals from multiple empirical studies of
children’s engagement with cognitive tasks. By contrast, Vygotsky
acknowledges the necessity of the material fabric of both individual
mental life and collective social life, but focuses on how these resources
are insufficient to either effect or explain development or change.
Collective histories inform our current individual modes of being and
the traces of the past create the contours of present life, and constrain our
imaginative future projections. To put this idea into the psychological
language of development, into Vygotskian language, the world is always
mediated. Unlike the Piagetian baby who crawls and grasps towards the
object desired, the mother of Vygotsky’s baby inserts herself between the
baby’s grasping action and the object, interpreting her baby’s action and
providing the desired object. By conferring meaning on the grasping
action, it is transformed into a gesture of desire, pointing, that is
a meaningful gesture of communication with another person, directing
her attention to the object and “requesting” assistance. In this way,
Vygotsky argues, the “[t]he path from the object to the child and from
the child to the object, passes through another person” (1978, p. 30),
prism-like, radically altering its quality and the form of experience.
The focus on ontogenetic development is thus a theory-method for
Vygotsky, a vehicle for exploring and accounting for the dynamic historical
development of cultural life and the intellectual actions of persons in the
making of human history. Marx’s visceral image of the intertwining of the
past and present resonates:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but
6 Changing subjects

under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the

past. The traditions of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare
on the brains of the living.
(Marx, 1852)

The theoretical lenses of sociohistorical psychology enable us to engage

with the (im)possibilities of changing our worlds and selves in the land-
scape of this living nightmare by recognising that social and psychological
phenomena are intertwined rather than oppositional. Thinking about
change entails attending to both social structure and individual agency,
adopting a stance that Michelle Fine (2018) calls “critical bifocality”. This
requires a willingness to learn new ways of seeing, shifting our focus from
persons to the social world and back again. But these alternations in focus
are an analytic necessity rather than a reflection of the phenomenon of
change. The domain that is currently in sharp focus (whether social or
individual) remains intertwined with the blurry zone that has temporarily
receded beyond our immediate attention. The key to active developmental
processes of change, and to a “bifocal” vision of these processes, both
within and beyond mind, is language.

Language for thought: conceptualising the world

First, I want to emphasise, following Vygotsky, that human language is concep-
tual not just expressive or communicative, although of course this is its most
obvious function, in common with the languages of other social animals.

When we meet what is called a cow and say “this is a cow,” we

add the act of thinking to the act of perception, bringing the given
perception under a general concept. A child who first calls things
by their names is making genuine discoveries. I do not see that this
is a cow, for this cannot be seen. I see something big, black,
moving, lowing, etc., and understand that this is a cow. And this
act is an act of classification, of assigning a singular phenomenon to
the class of similar phenomena, of systematizing the experience, etc.
(Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 249–250)

This abstraction from life is what makes it possible for us to “see” multiple
objects from multiple angles which are, in simple visual or perceptual
terms, very different indeed, as “cows”. As Vygotsky argues, we can detach
the word from the world (the specific object referent) and indeed, further,
detach the meaning from the word. Generalisation, systematisation and
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 7

classification thus underpin all language. In other words, a kind of thinking

is entailed in all language, allowing for the creation of complex systems and
relations of meaning and enabling us to establish new relations between
ourselves and the world. (These complex relations are extended in formal
instruction, writing and other forms of symbolic representation.)
I am from a part of South Africa called KwaZulu-Natal and from there
comes the beautiful book Abundant Herds: A Celebration of the Nguni
Cattle of the Zulu People by Marguerita Poland and David Hammond-
Tooke (2003). The following images of Nguni cattle from the book are
by Leigh Voigt (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2).
These images offer a glimpse of an intricate story about culture and
symbolic naming of the world. Cows are, throughout the world, concrete
material objects of great utilitarian value for their milk and meat and
skins. Moreover, in Zulu culture, as in many other African cultures, cattle
are units of exchange for lobola (often crudely and inaccurately translated
as “bride price” in English) and other practices (such as the payment of
“damages” to repair breaches in relationships or as offerings to ancestors).
In other words, cattle are central to both economic and social relations.
Beyond this, the naming of these individual cows for the visual patterns
of their hides speaks to questions of aesthetics and meaning and cultural
history. Children in these cultural worlds encounter far more than
“something big, black, moving, lowing” and also, far more than simply
the synthesis of these material elements into the abstract category of
“cow”. Tracing a simple dialogical exchange between a 7-year-old child
in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a documentary interviewer in
the BBC Seven-Up series (1992), provides us with a vivid instantiation of
this insertion into language and meaningful histories.

INTERVIEWER: How many cattle are there at your place?

4
LINDA : 19.
INTERVIEWER: Do you know them all?
LINDA: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Which are your favourites? Tell me their names.
LINDA: Tamblain and Holland.
INTERVIEWER: Who names them?
LINDA: When I was born, they were already here, so I don’t know who
named them.
INTERVIEWER: So they were here. Don’t the small ones have names?
LINDA: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: What?
LINDA: One is Wazibula. The others are calves.
FIGURE 1.1 Abundance
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist, Leigh Voigt

FIGURE 1.2 Houses

Reproduced by kind permission of the artist, Leigh Voigt
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 9

INTERVIEWER: Who named them?

LINDA: Elder brother.
INTERVIEWER: Did you name any?
LINDA: No.
INTERVIEWER: Why not?
LINDA: Elder brother says little boys give cattle bad names.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
LINDA: They don’t sound right.

This little boy makes two pertinent observations about the naming of
cows: first, he resists the interviewer’s question about the naming of his
favourite cattle as “they were here before me”. We, each one of us, always
arrive into a social world already structured, in which meaning is already sedi-
mented, a world already named in language. We are inserted into relations of
kinship and culture, into the flows and prejudices of what Gadamer (1975)
calls “tradition” or Merleau-Ponty (2013) calls “sedimentation”. Second, he
repeats his older brother’s observation that “little boys give cows bad names”.
This disciplining of young subjects is ubiquitous; we socialise the young into
our ways of doing and being and through their engagement with others (and
the cultural artefacts of the social world) children are enculturated. However,
we always have the capacity for becoming what Judith Butler (1997) calls
“bad subjects” and perhaps this potential is most evident in the young; each
successive generation is simultaneously trapped and yet escapes the “prison
house” (Jameson, 1975) of language. This is possible because language is
internalised not as an inert set of “instructions” or even a set of potential
meanings that must simply then be articulated anew in the appropriate
circumstances. Rather, language is internalised as dialogue, enabling us to talk
to ourselves and, in Vygotskian terms, to self-regulate.

Mediation: narrating action and dialogical selves

By focusing on the developmental stage of egocentric speech in young
children, catching speech on its route inward, Vygotsky was able to delin-
eate the functions of inner speech. A famous story from Vygotsky illustrates
how talking to oneself enables new relations with the world and transforms
thought and action. A little girl is observed solving a problem of great
importance to any small child: how to obtain sweets that are beyond the
reach of her short arms!

(Stands on a stool, quietly looking, feeling along a shelf with stick)

“On the stool.” (glances at the experimenter. Puts stick in other hand.)
10 Changing subjects

“Is that really the candy?” (Hesitates)

“I can get it from that other stool, stand and get it.” (Gets second stool.)
“No, that doesn’t get it. I could use the stick.” (Takes stick, knocks at the
candy.)
“It will move now.” (Knocks candy.)
“It moved, I couldn’t get it with the stool, but the, but the stick
worked”.
(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 25)

This story demonstrates the way in which, as Vygotsky (1999, p. 50)

says, “children solve problems not just with their hands and eyes but
with their speech as well”. The little girl comments on her actions,
plans what to do next, co-ordinates and re-organises objects and, finally,
concludes with a model of successful action that might be usefully
deployed in future to solve similar problems: “I couldn’t get it
with the stool, but the, but the stick worked.” Language thus enables decon-
textualisation, the restructuring of the perceptual field, the imagining
of alternatives, the possibility of memory, and the transferability of under-
standing to new situations.
While each successive generation is born into a pre-existing (social)
world and cannot escape history or stand outside of culture, the very
nature of language allows us to “slip our moorings”, and contains in
its constraining form, the possibility for creativity. Vygotsky’s analysis
emphasises the polysemous, polyvocal quality of language. The same word
(or longer discursive units of sentences or texts) may have different meanings
and, conversely, the same meaning can be conveyed in different words,
different sentence constructions or textual forms. In The Idea of Culture,
Eagleton outlines the ambiguous power of language to simultaneously
imprison and liberate, and to constitute human life as at once natural (or
material and embodied) and symbolic (or social and transcendent):

Language helps to release us from the prison-house of our senses, at

the same time as it damagingly abstracts us from them. Like Marx’s
capitalism then, language opens up at a stroke new possibilities of
communication and new modes of exploitation.
(Eagleton, 2000, p. 97)

His contemporary Marxist perspective resonates with Vygotsky’s (e.g.

1986, 1994) earlier assertion that the peculiar qualities of human thought
and action emerge through the convergence of two lines of development:
the natural and the cultural. For both Vygotsky and Eagleton, these
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 11

developmental lines are not oppositional; culture emerges from and is

dependent on the natural capacity for language peculiar to humans.

Because they move within a symbolic medium, and because they

are of a certain material kind, our own bodies have the capacity to
extend themselves far beyond their sensuous limits, in what we
know as culture, society or technology. It is because our entry into
the symbolic order – language and all it brings in its wake – puts
some free play between ourselves and our determinants that we are
those internally dislocated, non-self-identical creatures known as
historical beings. History is what happens to an animal so consti-
tuted as to be able, within limits, to determine its own determin-
ations. What is peculiar about a symbol-making creature is that it is
of its nature to transcend itself. It is the sign which opens up that
operative distance between ourselves and our material surroundings
which allows us to transform them into history. Not just the sign,
to be sure, but the way that our bodies are fashioned in the first
place, capable of complex labour as well as the communication
which must necessarily underpin it.
(Eagleton, 2000, p. 97)

Eagleton beautifully captures the thrust of Vygotsky’s analysis of the

human capacity to use tools and signs. The opening up of this “operative
distance between ourselves and our material surroundings” is possible not
because of the communicative function of language but, rather, because
language directed inwards splits the human subject, placing her at
a distance to herself. The Vygotskian, Van der Veer (1996, p. 255), suggests
that “speech is like a two-edged sword” functioning communicatively and
creating particular ways of analysing and conceptualising the world, but
simultaneously, directed towards the interior domain of the self. “Another
way of putting it is to say that by means of words we can act upon other
people and the things that surround us but that by doing so we are at the
same time acting upon ourselves” (Van der Veer, 1996, p. 255). The trans-
formation of material conditions (through the peculiarly human activity of
labour) is possible because language enables us to plan, that is to regulate
our action in advance of our acting in the world and creates the possibility for
projection into the imaginary, not-yet world of possibility, the future. This
is why the marvels of nature (the nest-building of birds and beavers or the
intricate dance of bees) are for Vygotsky (and Marx) trumped by even the
worst human architect or the clumsiest choreographer. Vygotsky declares
this capacity to plan in advance to be pivotal to the development of
12 Changing subjects

meaningful human life, making the strong claim, “The fact that he provides
himself with a tool in advance is undoubtedly the beginning of culture” (1999,
p. 64). It is also what makes individual subjectivity or a sense of oneself as
a person, possible. As Vygotsky says, children become the “subjects and
objects of their own behaviour” (1978, p. 26) or in narrative terms, we
become both the narrators of, and characters in, our own life stories.
Vygotsky’s conceptualisation of the human subject as articulated through
the use of psychological signs, provides the psychological ground for con-
temporary theories of the self as a narrated and narrating subject. What
characterises Vygotsky’s subject is her use of signs to regulate her actions
and herself. Vygotsky (1987, p. 285) could not put it more strongly: “The
meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness”.

Narrative psychology: storied selves

Narrative psychology picks up the story from Vygotsky, the story of the
self, narrating its “self”, creating connections, continuities and coherence
across fragmented experiential disjunctures, disparate spaces and through
time. The split consciousness of the I-me coheres both diachronically and
synchronically (McAdams, 2001) in a (changing) narrative self. An extended
quote from Crites (1986, p. 162) outlines this conceptualisation of narrative
subjectivity, both as a theory-method for psychology and as it is enacted
and articulated by ordinary people in making sense of their lives:

[The self] is a narrative recollection of what no longer physically

exists, is no longer present. In the I-me formulation, I is the narrator,
me is the narrative figure in the life story. In autobiography, the
writer, the I, is the story-teller. The subject of the autobiography is
a narrative figure, the me, constructed from recollection.
Yet this recollected self of my personal story has an immense
psychic importance, My personal identity, without which I do not
know who I am, is at stake in this formative application of narrative art
and the more complete the story, the more integrated the self. The
poignant search for roots that is such a prominent feature of our root-
less age testifies to the acute unease a human being can feel without
a coherent story of a personal past. … Whether the way is rough or
smooth in this respect, being a self entails having a story.

Talking to ourselves, narrating our actions (including our mental mean-

ing-making actions) enables us to escape the immediate exigencies of the
present and traverse multiple paths from this point in time, shuttling
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 13

between the past and future, to re-present that which is absent or lost or
not-yet, or even never-to-be, and the present. In language, we are able
to turn material life into fiction, matter into meaning. As Fay (1996,
p. 197) has observed, this process is not a unidirectional movement from
world to mind: we simultaneously articulate these imagined realities in
action, infusing the world of matter with meaning: “Our stories are
enlived, and our lives are enstoried”.

Memory: past–present
Like all living creatures, we live in time, inexorably moving forward,
unable to turn back the clock. Who we are in the present is both the
accumulation of past experiences and the effect of past events, and we can
use this narrative framing to understand ourselves and the lives of others as
stories with plots and characters. In the stories of our-selves, the protagonist
is also the narrator, an almost omniscient narrator in that she carries the
accumulated clutter of memory into each new present moment of experi-
ence. Yet, despite the fact that her memories are hers and hers alone by
virtue of their embodiment in her body, the same body across time and
place (even if it doesn’t necessarily look or feel “the same”), the narrator is
never fully in control of her own memories or her own story.
It is now a taken-for-granted fact that memory is not just about repro-
duction or recollection or accumulation of the facts of the past. Our inner
stories are more than chronological records of past events and experiences.
Indeed, both social histories and personal life stories are perpetually rewritten
and once-central events may slip to the periphery as merely incidental or
even be entirely forgotten, depending on their significance or relevance to
current circumstances and present interlocutors or audiences. The wonderful
novelist (and superb non-psychologist analyst of psychological life) Siri
Hustvedt (2012, pp. 94–95) notes that:

Memories are revised over time, and their meanings change as we

age, something now recognised by neuroscience and referred to as
the reconsolidation of memory. … Memory, like perception, is not
passive retrieval but an active and creative process that involves the
imagination. We are all always reinventing our pasts.

As Vygotsky (1978) demonstrated, through the most empirical aspects of

his work, the mental processes of perception, attention and memory that
we share with other animals are not only quantitatively enhanced or
expanded but qualitatively transformed by the use of symbolic systems
14 Changing subjects

(most notably language), directed towards ourselves. “The very essence of

human memory consists in the fact that human beings actively remember
with the help of signs” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 51). By utilising what he
called the “experimental–developmental” method, the processes of atten-
tion and memory are demonstrated in their developmental trajectories.
Drawing on experiments conducted by Leont’ev and Luria, Vygotsky
demonstrated that older children and adults not only remember more
than young children, they also remember differently (Van der Veer &
Valsiner, 1991). Initially, external aides-memoires were variously (and,
admittedly, somewhat anachronistically from our contemporary perspec-
tive) provided by concrete symbols such as coloured cards or other
objects or stimuli. Adults presented with these tasks quickly internalised
(or independently generated) mnemonic systems to facilitate and organise
their engagement with these tasks whereas younger children’s actions and
talk is more erratic and spontaneous. Sometimes they are able to make use
of external aids but arbitrary shifts in the organising system (such as switch-
ing the “meaning” of the colour of a card) made the task confusing and
more difficult, indicating that the corresponding mental inhibitors and trig-
gers of encoding and recall were still in the process of formation.
These experiments demonstrate that what is stored in human memory is
not simply an impressively increasing volume of isolated facts but
a systematically organised set of “invented links” (Van der Veer & Valsiner,
1991) and relationships between these experiential elements, including
complex connections between both internal (personal) and external (social)
memory. The intergenerational nature of human life (necessitated and
facilitated by the lengthy physical dependency of human offspring) means
that memory stretches beyond the individual lifespan, encoded and carried
forward in multiple cultural forms. Oral histories, song and other ritual
forms such as dance or practices associated with life-transitions such as birth
and death, instantiate the processes of objectifying (in the sense of external-
ising) memory. The technology of writing extends the historical reach of
memory dramatically and has transformative effects on cognitive processes
and material actions. Whether we lament these effects as eroding the
power (and linguistic beauty) of oral traditions as Plato did, or celebrate the
creative possibilities that are released by the relinquishment of the burden
of reproductive memory (see, for example, Ong, 1982), the impact of writ-
ing (first, and later, print) on intergenerational cultural life and knowledge
production is undeniably significant. These earlier inventions precipitate the
whirlwind exponential force of digitalisation that characterises contemporary
life and promises (or threatens) the imminent advent of the so-called fourth
industrial revolution.
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 15

However, despite these elaborate systems to preserve and transmit

memory, remembering always inevitably and simultaneously entails the
converse process of forgetting, not simply as a failure to remember or
recall, but as a process that (consciously but often unconsciously) infuses
and shapes memory (Brockmeier, 2002). As Ricoeur (2004, p. 21)
observes: “the deficiencies stemming from forgetting … should not be
treated straight away as pathological forms, as dysfunctions, but as the
shadowy underside of the bright region of memory, which binds us to
what has passed before we remember it”. Narratives of the past are never
the “whole story”, never the “whole truth and nothing but the truth”
and always contain traces of that which is inarticulable, that which is not
remembered or perhaps even actively forgotten for either psychological
or political reasons (or both). The human capacity for remembering even
ostensibly unimportant details is captured in the English saying, “An
elephant never forgets”. Partly of course this allusion rests on the sheer
size of the elephant’s brain which must surely enable it to store a great
deal of information. But we all know that while size matters, it is not all
that matters. The human brain is in real terms far smaller than the brain
of an elephant but larger in proportion to our bodies, with a remarkable
ability to organise rather than just store information. The idea of the brain
as a “storehouse of memory” or the accumulation of one-damn-fact-after-
another, has long been rejected, beginning with Piaget’s constructivist
account of the active developmental making of mind. Remembering entails
re-membering, recreating a past than we cannot directly access. The con-
testations about the possibilities for “truth” or even for “knowing” at all
are well documented in debates about narrative theory. It is evident that
whatever our conclusions about the implications for both the practice of
research or knowledge-making, and the practices of life itself, we cannot
ever reverse the insight that memories are constructed, and that personal
and collective histories are not inert substrata to our daily lives but are
always alive and emergent in the present. This is the more pertinent quality
of elephant memory for thinking about human remembering: not that they
“never forget” but that they re-member what is no longer present.
Elephants, like humans, are among the few species of mammals who attend
to their dead in practices of mourning, covering the bodies of the dead
among them with leaves and twigs, “burying” them and returning to these
“graves”, and gently turning over the bones of dead elephants when they
encounter them on their migratory routes (see Figure 1.3).
The human past is never fully dead and buried, re-membered or
restored to presence in individual life histories and collective narratives,
and in cultural practices, rituals and inscribed in the built environment.
16 Changing subjects

FIGURE 1.3 Elephants mourning

Reproduced by kind permission of the photographer, Clive Millar, Safari & Guide
Services

Vygotsky (1978, p. 51) makes the link between the processes of individual
cognitive memory and collective cultural histories:

It has been remarked that the very essence of civilization consists of

purposely building monuments so as not to forget. In both the knot
and the monument we have manifestations of the most fundamental
and characteristic feature distinguishing human from animal memory.

Memorials to the dead may take triumphant forms, most often in the
celebration of conquests but also in the valorising of victims of conflict,
those who gave their physical lives for the symbolic worlds that were
once imagined futures and are now present realities. The postcolonial and
post-apartheid landscape of South Africa is a highly contested symbolic
space in which competing histories are articulated and fixed in memorial
architecture. Bunn (1998, p. 94) notes that “South African monuments,
to put it bluntly, find it almost impossible to be the bearers of collective
meaning; instead they are inhabited by contradiction, because of their
reluctance to imagine the idea of citizenship outside the boundaries of
race”. The cityscapes of South Africa are liberally dotted with statues
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 17

erected in honour of colonial or apartheid “heroes”, usually single male

figures often on horseback. The first focal protest action of The South
African “Fallist” Student Movement that began in 20155 was the demand
for the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes that stood in the
most central prominent place on the campus of the University of Cape
Town. While monuments may become invisible in their familiarity
(Kros, 2012), the Rhodes statue became highly visible, valorising an
oppressive racist colonial history and proclaiming the perpetual exclusion
from and alienation of new cohorts of black students in the university.
The removal of this statue symbolically initiated the ongoing project of
decolonisation and triggered the subsequent country-wide protest actions
focusing on multiple dimensions of alienation experienced by students on
university campuses, including financial exclusions and pervasive gender-
based violence. (See further discussion of decolonisation and the student
movement in Chapter 5.)
Bunn (1998, p. 100) points to African memorial practices that are quite
unlike the statues that seek to cement and concretise victory: “memorial
performances, burial sites and ancestral presences, sacred groves and the
ubiquitous stone cairns known as isivivane”. Re-membering always
entails loss and absence, and in memorials to the dead we attempt to sub-
stantiate this loss. At the intimate level of families, tombstones that bear
the names of the dead simultaneously mark their presence and their
absence, and graveyards are, in all cultures, considered places of sanctity
and fear, connecting the worlds of the living and the dead. Marschall
(2010, p. 41) remarks that, particularly in societies where recent history
remains alive in personal memory, public memorials may be less about
conquest and more about mourning those lost: “memorials as meant to
evoke empathy and instil a sense of respect – both for the victims of the
past and by extension for all members of the present society, as descend-
ants of the heroes of the past”. In this way memorials paradoxically
inscribe absence in the present. A moving tribute to erasure and loss is
the inconspicuous Bebelplatz memorial in Berlin, the empty white space
sunk below ground that marks the place of the Nazi book-burning in
1933.6 More recently, the apartheid regime of South Africa, similarly cen-
sored, banned and burned books that were considered incendiary (Dick,
2018) (see Figure 1.4).
This burning of books is a literal instance of attempted “evidentiary
genocide” (Mangcu, 2011) but the desire to erase black culture, memory
and history was all-pervasive in the apartheid project. Archbishop Desmond
Tutu (2010, pp. 1–2) indicates the critical importance of memory for both
individual and collective identity:
18 Changing subjects

FIGURE 1.4 Apartheid-era book-burning

Reproduced by kind permission from the Archives of the University of the
Witwatersrand

My identity is very intimately linked to my memory. … What

I know is what I remember, and that helps to make me who I am.
Nations are built through sharing experiences, memories and
a history. That is why people have often tried to destroy their
enemies by destroying their histories, their memories, that which
gives them an identity.

The imaginative project of narrating our individual lives, making our

identities, is thus entwined with the wider historical processes of collect-
ive life. In a concept that resonates with Jameson’s (1982) notion of
a “political unconscious”, Freeman (2010) articulates how history lives on
in the “narrative unconsciousness” of successive generations. Although
this idea is not synonymous with the psychoanalytic unconscious, it does
refer to an interior psychological domain and in that sense, it is
a property of persons, constituting selves as including aspects of being that
lie outside of our control, or knowing, outside of our agentic sense of who
we are. Although Freeman refers to this as a “narrative” unconsciousness it
is not always easily articulated and may not follow the recognisable shape
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 19

or neatly analysed emplotted form. This concept is highly relevant for

contexts where traumatic, conflictual political histories live on in the
told (and silenced) stories of successive generations, particularly in the
“hinge generation” (Hoffman, 2004) who did not themselves live
through the events of political conflict but live in community with
the older generation who did. Where past traumas are unspoken because
they are unspeakable, they continue to haunt the present, creating
a perpetual inescapable state of melancholia (Fine, 2018; Peterson,
2019a; Sharpe, 2016). In a provocative, melancholic and poetic eulogy,
Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to post-slavery black life as “in the
wake”. She metaphorically evokes multiple allusions, oscillating between
the past and the present to describe lives: (1) caught in the slipstream of
the slave-ships, in disturbed choppy waters; (2) cursed by the wakefulness
of insomnia, unable to recuperate, rest or dream; and (3) as watchful vigils
for the dying or dead.

Interlocution: stories for others and ourselves

An individual life history is entwined with the wider historical processes
of our collective life and the narrative self is never disconnected from the
narratives of others, past, present and future. We tell the story of our lives
to others and can only tell these stories in the words or language of
others. The narrative is experience recollected and reformulated; the
story worth telling (re)presents a life “worth living” and the dominant
narratives of our contextual time and place will affect the content and
form of what counts as worth living and telling. Scheibe (1986) suggests
that stories of interest and by implication, lives worth living, are those
characterised by adventurous movement rather than stasis. Bauman’s
(1996, p. 19) conceptualisation of identity as a “verb, albeit a strange
one to be sure: it appears only in the future tense” traces the different
travelling characters of pilgrims, strollers, vagabonds, tourists and players
in the making of our (post)modern selves.
Scheibe (1986) suggests that sports and electronic gaming may provide
alternative adventures to physical activities such as climbing mountains or
swimming oceans or even the ultimate “adventure” of war but regardless
of the particular form of action, it is the elements of risk (of danger or
loss) and uncertainty that make for adventure. In narrative terms, these are
activities worth telling; overcoming dangers, succeeding against the odds,
and Scheibe argues that potential future audiences for the recollection of
experience may influence the kinds of experiences we seek out in the first
place. The speed and reach of sharing of experience has been exponentially
20 Changing subjects

accelerated by social media. However, those who have suffered the effects
of centuries of colonial exploration and conquest would not frame this his-
tory in heroic or triumphant terms. Further, Mary Gergen (2001) observes
that women are less likely to frame their narratives in the narrow terms of
individual action, including talk of love, families and bodies in the telling
of their lives. Despite the perpetual resilience of the trope of adventurer
(particularly, sporting greats or celebrity icons) there is a counter-current to
value diversity of experience and evaluate both lives and narratives in more
capacious ways. A less-than-inspiring expression of this diversity may be
the peculiar phenomenon of “reality TV” (which was of course only
a precursor to social media platforms) in which the unadventurous domestic
life features as an “adventurous” sphere in its own right, with audiences
(admittedly, sometimes including me!) watching the cooking, gardening,
renovating or parenting skills of others. An optimistic interpretation is that
this genre reflects a more inclusive valuing of other domains of life beyond
aggressively masculine and heteronormative activities. However, it may
conversely simply reflect the increasing penetration of competitive con-
sumerist values into the most intimate “private” spheres of family and per-
sonal life, creating homogenising improvement projects in the image of the
market. We may, however, reject these dominant competitive narratives in
favour of a search for alternative forms of “narrative integrity” (Freeman,
2010, p. 200) or coherence and relatedness. The making and shaping of
human subjectivity thus entails questions of both “aesthetics and ethics”
(Freeman, 2014, p. 9).
The critical point is that these questions cannot be answered independ-
ently; the life story is not self-contained, the “self” (or human subject) is
not that which remains once we extricate the individual from the social.
We know ourselves or come to be ourselves, through the stories of others,
through the cultural texts that we encounter.

In contrast to the tradition of the cogito and to the pretension of the

subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that
we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of
humanity deposited in cultural works. What would we know of
love and hate, of moral feelings and, in general, of all that we call
the self, if these had not been brought to language and articulated
by literature? Thus what seems most contrary to subjectivity, and
what structural analysis discloses as the texture of the text, is the
very medium within which we can understand ourselves.
(Ricoeur, 1981, p. 143)
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 21

In this view, the self is not a circumscribed entity set against or formed in
opposition to the social world, rather, social and psychological realities are
“interpenetrating” (Sampson, 1989, p. 4). The self becomes herself, can
indeed only become herself, within traditions, in relation to historical and
contemporary others. Through the internal regulative function of lan-
guage, the individual subject is infused with the historical meanings of
others and develops the split form of human consciousness that incorpor-
ates relational others through inner conversations, simultaneously creating
resistances to and possibilities for change.

Vygotsky’s approach to inner speech is interesting precisely because,

within a systematic psychological theory of mind, he describes import-
ant details of its structure and dynamics as underlying a crucial aspect of
human consciousness, namely, that the latter is structured by relatedness
and otherness. Instead of accounting for the unity of a unitary
consciousness, he claimed that consciousness only comes in the form of
the difference and borders with others, as foreign consciousness.
(Larrain & Haye, 2012, p. 4)

Recognising these relational and historical processes in the formation and

articulation of individual subjectivity raises critical questions about power,
change and resistance. Which cultural traditions are valued and strength-
ened in the practices and language of everyday life? Which narratives of
experience are worth telling and listening to? How are children and
young people inducted into the “long detour of the signs of humanity
deposited in cultural works”? (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 143). Education,
particularly in the formal institutions of schooling, intergenerational con-
versations in families and, increasingly variable forms of community,
including social media and other forms of global culture and media, may
serve to empower and affirm particular dominant identities and subjectiv-
ities. In the context of reactionary regressive political movements across
the globe, in which the Trump presidency is a florid instantiation of,
rather than an extreme exception to, the general zeitgeist of the times,
these forces of tradition take new menacing, mutating forms. However,
without overplaying the “liquidity of modernity” (Bauman, 2000) these
different domains and modalities of culture are increasingly heterogeneous
and contradictory, offering children the material of multiple “traditions”
in which to recognise and from which to construct themselves. In a more
hopeful framing of the relations between the past and the future, the
cracks and fissures, conflicts and synergies between multiple histories and
22 Changing subjects

contemporary cultural resources, may offer opportunities for resistances to

alter the direction of the forward flow of these traditions.
From the possibly surprising quarter of neuropsychology, in his last
lovely book before he died, The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks
(2017, pp. 121–122) provides a strong argument for the linkages between
history, memory, narrative and individual consciousness:

Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and
ourselves – the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such
subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory and follows
from its basis and mechanisms in the brains we have. … We, as
human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities,
frailties, and imperfections – but also great flexibility and creativ-
ity. … It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter
into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the
whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind,
the general commonwealth of knowledge. Memory arises not only
from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Likewise, Freeman’s concept of the “narrative unconscious” (2010) suggests

that culture (the stories of others’ experiences) is internalised and lies deep
within us rather than, as is typically suggested, in external social contexts
that surround and influence persons. This is Vygotsky’s cultural-historical
subject. Hoffman’s analysis in her book, After such Knowledge (2004), of the
secondary transmission of trauma provides an account of how the events of
history and the stories (both told and silent) of these events may come to
structure our psyches. In South Africa, we often speak of “the legacy of
apartheid” as referring to the continuing material effects of inequality and
poverty. However, this legacy is also less material or tangible and forcefully
felt in the visceral traces of racism that the segregationist system that no
longer exists has left in our collective (un)consciousness.
Again, the idea that the individual is thoroughly social, that the self cannot
naively be accessed outside of culture, resonates so strongly with Vygotsky’s
social self. Even when we are alone, there is always an audience for our-
selves, an internalised social other for whom we perform, who is our interlo-
cuter. As Fay (1996, p. 34) points out, “selves can stand outside themselves”
and this means that “in an important sense a self can be other to itself”. What
is internalised with language is not just the contents of social talk, the cultural
baggage (or capital) of history but, more importantly, the structure of conversa-
tion. The possibility of dialogue with one’s self that enables new relations
with the world through the child’s “internal socialisation” or “social
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 23

interaction with oneself” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 254). This inner conversation

creates a play of possibility and critical distance on our lives and our-selves.
In this process, it becomes possible to treat “oneself as another” as
suggested by Ricoeur (1981), and we become simultaneously agents who
act and are acted upon, narrators and protagonists, speakers and listeners,
creating a social (dialogical) subjectivity in which we can only be our-
selves through the incorporation of the internalised “other”. In particular,
our earlier remembered selves and projected future selves become subject
to our present interpretation and action. Vygotsky (1997, p. 77) refers to
this “dual nature of consciousness” and comments that, “the notion of
a double is the picture of consciousness that comes closest to reality”.

I am conscious of myself only to the extent that I am another to

myself, i.e., to the extent that I can again perceive my own reflexes
as stimuli. In principle, there is no difference in mechanism whatsoever
between the fact that I can repeat aloud a word spoken silently and the
fact that I can repeat a word spoken by another.
(Vygotsky, 1997, p. 77)

The possibility of dialogue with one’s self enables new relations with the
world, the possibility to imagine alternatives and transform the present
parameters of our situation.7 To the contemporary eye and ear, this
formulation of consciousness as “doubled” is remarkably resonant with
Du Bois’s (1903) idea of double consciousness that was being developed
at the same time across the globe from a very different position for differ-
ent theoretical and political purposes. Du Bois (1903, p. 3) conceptualised
this doubling of consciousness as created under conditions of oppression,
entailing “a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others”. Paradoxically, this oppressive positioning offers those who are
oppressed “second sight” and a clearer vision of the oppressor’s world and
being. However, it also conversely robs them of a sense of their own
“true” selves and creates a psychic “twoness” of “unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals”. Du Bois argued that for black people this psychic
dislocation would be resolved through merging this “double self into
a better and truer self”. This “merging” does not imply the erasure of
identities or the loss of “older selves” and, by implication, would not
excise the internalised voice of the other nor reduce consciousness to
a monolithic entity. Rather, when the oppressed self is not divided against
itself through the internal regulation of a hostile other, a new emanci-
pated consciousness enables her to fully participate as “a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture” (du Bois, 1903, p. 3).
24 Changing subjects

By the internalisation of language and the structuring of consciousness8

as dialogical, culture not only forms us but is formed by us, enabling us
to “create new worlds that were not there before” (Manganyi, 1973,
p. x). We are both made by and makers of the world, both narrators and
characters in our own life stories, subjected to histories and the subjects
of present experience and future imaginings. Manganyi (1973, p. x) refers
to the making of culture through these imagined possibilities and trans-
formative actions as a “shared human necessity”, definitive of rather than
a superfluous variable addition to human life. This inner dialogue is
“tensed” in that the split-subject both speaks and listens, taking up dual
interlocutionary positions and talking to herself as both remembered and
imagined characters with whom she is identified and yet differentiated.
Speaking to our earlier past and future potential selves releases us from
the exigencies of the immediate present and in the tension between past
and future, intentional action and change become possible. Like all living
creatures, we live in time, unable to turn back the clock but, unlike other
creatures, we are able to imaginatively talk the clock backwards and for-
wards. Our inner stories are not woven through the simple accumulation
of past events and experiences, rather they are continually reworked (some-
times consciously but mostly in less conscious ways). New patterns of sig-
nificance and coherence emerge through perpetual cycles of remembering
and forgetting in relation to current events and present interlocutors or
audiences. While our bodies can only live forwards, our narrated inner
stories are not linear, oscillating between past and future, forgetting and
remembering and changing direction.

Narrative imagination and mediated futures

Even in the stories of ourselves that we might be expected to be intim-
ately attuned to, the plot unfolds unpredictably, sometimes in line with
the precipitous force of the past or our intentions, sometimes producing
surprising twists that remind us that narrators have only partial control
over how things will “turn out”. Kierkegaard’s best-known adage power-
fully alerts us to the historical or retrospective quality of meaning-making:
“Life is lived forwards but can only be understood backwards” (cited in
Crites, 1986, p. 165). The significance of a particular event can only be
identified in terms of its later effects. Good storytellers may be able to
lead us to surprising and unpredictable outcomes but which nonetheless
seem to have a kind of narrative inevitability or fictional truth about
them. However, contrary to the explanatory aspirations of social scientists,
life must continue to be “lived forwards”, and may be unpredictable and
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 25

often incoherent, unfolding in ways that often take us by surprise

although we may all with hindsight be soothsayers.
While our bodies can only live forwards, our narrated inner stories are
not linear, oscillating between past and future, forgetting and remembering
and changing direction. Brockmeier (2009, p. 227), following Bruner, sug-
gests that “narrative imagination” is definitive of human agency, generating
new possibilities for action in the fusion of “the real and possible with the
impossible”. He argues that

narrative is our most powerful device to ‘subjunctivise’ the world. It

opens up the hypothetical, the possible, and the actual. It invites us to
live in more than one reality, in more than one context of meaning, in
more than one order of time”
(Brockmeier, 2009, p. 228).

Living in more than one order of time, imaginatively entering the

worlds of others, being prepared to tell and listen to stories of the past
and generate storylines for imagined futures, is what makes (social and
personal) change possible. This temporal movement is beautifully
described in Eva Hoffman’s (2009, pp. 63–64) words:

And it is hard to imagine any human act or endeavour that does

not depend on the ability to conceive the existence of time beyond
the immediate moment. We could not have intentions or decide to
go out of the house, or build dwellings or voyage across the sea
and savannah, without some projection into the future. We could not
recognise ourselves each morning as the person we were yesterday
without the mind’s constant reach into the past through memory. We
could not even register the awareness of a fleeting moment without
the perception of time’s fleeting progress.

It is in this imaginative fusion of past and future horizons that we are

least like our distant-cousin zebras. Each generation of zebras repeats the
pattern of life of the previous generation, a pattern that is strikingly mon-
otonous to the human eye. Zebras eat grass. They eat grass pretty much
all day long, sleeping a mere 15 minutes in a 24-hour cycle. They eat
grass in order to survive to eat more grass. And each generation does it
just the way it was done before. Critics of theories that view human life
as formed through the process of socialisation (even as complex and
sophisticated a version of this as Vygotsky’s sociogenesis) argue that this
would imply an inevitable zebra-like repetition of history or, more
26 Changing subjects

accurately, an inability to create history at all, as each generation would

simply reproduce the life of the previous one, clones rather than vibrant
offspring. While of course in some senses we do reproduce the patterns
of the past, we also escape them. A student of mine9 sent me this picture
after I had insistently reiterated in class for the umpteenth time, “We are
not zebras!”. This image whimsically suggests that human beings are
always imaginatively, innovatively unravelling what is there in the world
to remake it anew (see Figure 1.5).
The symbolic trope of the zebra, or its imaginative unravelling, repre-
sents the counterpart to the narrated, imaginative life of human beings,
not just in its artistic inscriptions or the texts of literature, but as Molly
Andrews (2014) alerts us in her wonderful book, in “everyday life”, in
the practices of learning and teaching, in magic tricks, as we age and in
the child’s play of climbing trees. We are not zebras! Of course this
imaginative projection is not only innovative and positively transformative
and entails “the insinuation of duplicity, ambiguity and suspicion into all

FIGURE 1.5 Zebra unravelling

Image sourced from www.Deviantart.com
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 27

speech, into human consciousness itself” (Cohen, 2013, p. 173). In this

way, imagination is implicated not only in formulating possible futures
but also, in re-presenting or making present, the past, in making of memories,
revising and rewriting ourselves:

A coherent life experience is not simply given, or a track laid down

in the living. To the extent that a coherent identity is achievable at
all, the thing must be made, a story-like production with many pitfalls,
and it is constantly being revised, sometimes from beginning to
end, from the vantage point of some new situation of the ‘I’ that
recollects.
(Crites, 1986, p. 160, emphasis added)

Conclusion
Vygotsky’s conceptualisation of the human subject as articulated through
the use of psychological signs, provides the psychological ground for
contemporary theories of the self as a narrated and narrating subject. To
conclude, what characterises Vygotsky’s subject is her use of signs to
regulate her actions and herself.

Therefore thinking and speech are the key to understanding the nature
of human consciousness. If language is as ancient as consciousness
itself, if language is consciousness that exists in practice for other
people and therefore for myself, then it is not only the development of
thought but the development of consciousness as a whole that is
connected with the development of the word. … The word is the
most direct manifestation of the historical nature of human consciousness.
(Vygotsky, 1987, p. 285, emphasis added)

Both Vygotsky and narrative theory offer us a way of re-centring the

human subject; however, this subject is not the naive, original locus of
control, the individual disembodied mind set in opposition to the social
world. The subject who carries on an inner conversation, who narrates her
self into being, does so in the collective languages of culture, for a social
audience, even if this audience is only herself, and she does so in time, in
history. Unlike Bourdieu’s (2006) fish in water, we are more like hopping
frogs, amphibiously moving between possible worlds, able to be surprised
by and imaginatively enchanted by the ordinary. Being storytelling animals
is the most natural thing in the world but it is also simultaneously what
makes it possible to alter nature, to imaginatively create new worlds and
28 Changing subjects

new modes of being both personally and, importantly, culturally and col-
lectively. Paradoxically, therefore, the process of self-regulation by inner
speech (Vygotsky, 1986, 1999), dialogue or conversation (Archer, 2000)
inserts us into culture and inserts culture into us. Individual subjectivity or
a sense of oneself as a person is thus formed in language which simultan-
eously constrains us and creates capacity for intentional action, through
memory and imagination. The Narrative Subject is both subjected to the
(historical) stories and meanings of others and, in the grammatical sense of
the term, the subject of present and future-tensed utterances and actions.

Notes
1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented in a conference paper, “Cows,
zebras and elephants: animal metaphors for thinking about narrating humans”,
Narrative Matters: Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir, Paris, France, 23–27 June 2014.
By utilising different animals to highlight aspects of human subjectivity, I am fol-
lowing Vygotsky’s argument that human (cognitive, social, cultural and affective)
life emerges through the convergence of two lines of development: natural and
social. In this way, he dismisses the ludicrous nature-nurture debate that has
dominated psychology for decades and remains virulent in more serious contem-
porary framing of the issue such as that explored by Rutherford (2018) in The
Book of Humans. If Vygotsky were able to offer an opinion, I think he would say
that we are both like other animals and not at all like them, products of the long
(pre)history of evolution and the faster-paced cultural revolutions of our own
making. And it is these latter processes of change that most interested him and
in relation to which his theory has most to offer.
2 Although stage theories have been widely critiqued (e.g. Burman, 1994/2008/
2017) for describing and explaining psychological development as biologically
determinist and progressively teleological, misrepresenting culturally normative
processes as universal, these theories have in common a focus on processes of
dynamic change. It is an error to consign these theories to a section of the psych-
ology curriculum called “developmental psychology” or even “child psychology”
assuming that psychic dynamism ceases once the destination of adulthood is
reached. Further, while these constructivist “grand narratives” may be insuffi-
ciently fluid and flexible for some postmodern tastes, their attention to changing
processes stands in contradistinction to the (still) pervasive focus on states that is
adopted by statistical modelling and in the measurement of individual differences.
Psychoanalysis, in particular, can be understood as a retrospective, historical or
narrative project, in which development always remains incomplete and problem-
atic, in contrast with the predictive and scientific pretensions of many disciplinary
branches of psychology (Gergen & Gergen, 1986).
3 I am indebted to Ginsberg and Opper (1979) for this distinction between neces-
sary and sufficient conditions for (cognitive) development as they outline in Pia-
get’s theory of intellectual development: an introduction. This critical distinction is
glossed over in the assertion of the standard objection that Piaget failed to
acknowledge the importance of social interaction and cultural practices in the
making of mind. Given that Piaget’s early work focused very specifically on chil-
dren’s language and symbolic play, and he also wrote on the sociology of
 Vygotsky’s narrative subject 29

childhood, it is ironic that this received view is reproduced without nuance in

both introductory textbooks and in more advanced work in the field of cogni-
tive science, and rendered almost incontestable. Piaget recognised that the social
context is necessary or essential for children’s (cognitive) development as without it
no development would be possible at all. However, focusing exclusively on the
social context is insufficient; a further surplus must be incorporated into
a comprehensive account, a surplus of thought and action provided by the child
herself.
4 Although Linda is conventionally a girl’s name in English, this name is typically
masculine in isiXhosa, Linda’s home language. As is standard for African
naming practices, the meaning of the name is still vividly accessible in the lan-
guage rather than consigned to forgotten origins as is usually the case with
English names. Linda literally means “wait” and may be a shortened version of
a longer name such as “Lindokuhle” (waiting for the good).
5 The South African “Fallist” Student Movement is discussed in greater detail in
Chapter 5. For accounts and analysis of this recent history from diverse per-
spectives, see, for example: Booysen, 2016; Hefferman and Nieftagodien, 2016;
Langa, Ndelu, Edwin & Vilakazi, 2017; Rayner, Baldwin-Ragaven & Naidoo,
2017; Gillespie & Naidoo, 2019. For a view from Vice-chancellors, Jansen,
2017; and for opposing views, contributions by student activists themselves:
Chikane, 2018; Chinguno et al., 2017; Motimele, 2019.
6 See Brockmeier (2002) for an engaging discussion of the emblematic monu-
ment to remembering and forgetting, the Bebelplatz book-burning memorial.
My own attempts to find this memorial on a visit to Berlin, provoked by
Brockmeier’s article, initially proved futile. The glass ceiling through which
one sees the empty memorial space below one’s feet had been covered over by
a modelling ramp for the Mercedes Benz Fashion week.
7 Lacan’s (1977) mirror stage offers a way of thinking about this split subject as
simultaneously enabling us to think about ourselves from the perspective of
others who can see our bodies in the round. However, because this projected
image is always only a two-dimensional representation, this condemns us to an
inevitable sense of fragmentation and perpetual misrecognition (méconnaissance)
in the eyes of others and in relation to the world of representation.
8 In Lacan’s (1977, p. 41) extension of, rather than departure from, Freud’s psycho-
analytic theory, the “unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other”.
Language informs not only conscious experience but also the contents of the
unconscious and its very form: “The Other is (in some respect) the unconscious
and the unconscious is (according to Lacan) “structured like a language. It there-
fore must be the case that the Other (at least in some sense) is language (or is in
language, or comes out from or out of language)” (Murray, 2016, p. 147).
9 Thanks to Zehl Delport for the gift of this image.
2
THE SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGY
A narrative of Vygotsky and critical
psychologies

Introduction
This chapter will bring Vygotsky into the narrative of psychology in
the 21st century and explore explicit links to contemporary notions of
subjectivity and critical ways of doing psychology: social constructionist,
discursive and narrative psychologies. These fields are all extremely con-
tentious, multiple, diverse and resistant to definition – perhaps, one could
even argue, by definition! While some scholars (notably, Harré, 2000;
Shotter, 2006) and many students of psychology label Vygotsky a “social
constructionist” it will be argued that this retrospective historical confla-
tion inaccurately characterises the theory in ways that conceal more
radical implications for conceptual and political work in the present, and
in projected social and disciplinary futures. There are evident links between
the Foucauldian notion of “technologies of the self”, discourses of power,
and Vygotsky’s concept of “self-regulation”, and many contemporary cri-
tiques of Vygotsky point to the limitations of focusing on the dyadic form
of mediation (Burman, 2017; Henriques, Holloway, Urwin, Venn &
Walkerdine, 1984; Jovanović, 2015). The claim is that this restricted focus
excludes questions of authority and power in the family and educational
systems that may perpetuate and reproduce unequal societal forms and
practices in the course of socialisation and “development”.
However, the inverse challenge that Vygotsky presents for social con-
structionism and the relativist world view lies in the question of how
self-regulating embodied individuals immersed in intergenerational social
 The subject of psychology 31

life nonetheless produce new, novel ideas and even emancipatory

possibilities. Miller’s (2011, 2014) elaboration of different orders of mediation
provides an important extension of Vygotsky’s notion of mediation, linking
spoken instruction to the material world of cultural artefacts, and to macro-
level social structures. Vygotskian theory has been inflected in particular
ways in the South African context that may offer a productive challenge to
ways in which he has been taken up in the USA, predominantly, in the field
of CHAT (Cultural historical activity theory) and to the discursive, social
constructionist turn that is more strongly represented by UK psychologists.
Whereas CHAT and discursive approaches may erase or at least displace the
subject (albeit in different directions), suggesting that we are in a post-human
era, reading critical psychologies through Vygotsky’s theory and re-reading
Vygotsky retrospectively through contemporary theories offers a way to
reconceptualise psychosocial realities and possibilities for change.

Social constructionism: relativist knowing and being

It is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a comprehensive
overview of all the varieties of social constructionism or the related fields
of discursive and/or critical psychology. In his introductions to two spe-
cial issues of Theory and Psychology, the editor, Henrik Stam (2001, 2002),
highlights the difficulties of comprehensively engaging with the multiple
schisms in the field and suggests that these theoretical difficulties are com-
plicated by, on the one hand, the conflation of social constructionism and
postmodernism1 and, on the other, a pervasive confusion of ontogenetic
and epistemic considerations in the (anti)realist debate. The particular
articulations of social constructionism, beyond the “weak consensus
that … human psychological processes are conditional on the linguistic
and cultural practices and structures of human communities” (Stam, 2002,
p. 573) are contextually contingent, as the theory itself would suggest.
However, beyond this “weak consensus” (and the stronger disagreements)
we may yet be able to outline some key contributions, implications and
limitations, particularly in relation to the discipline of psychology and to
the concerns of this book with changing subjects.
In what has become a core text for many psychology curricula, Burr
(1995/2003/2015) concurs that social constructionism is a highly contested
terrain but provides a useful overview of key tenets. The world is not
naturally given a priori but constructed through language and culture.
Things that seems to be part of “nature” and, therefore, unchangeable,
are historically and culturally inflected and demonstrably mutable. Our
knowledge of the world, both common sense or as developed in the
32 Changing subjects

formal disciplines of the academy, does not re-present reality directly. The
language and concepts that we use to interpret and explain experience are
imposed on the world rather than derived from it, and different ways of
knowing construct different worlds of experience. This conclusion typically
leads to a relativist and anti-realist worldview: if “reality” can only be known
through interpretive schema and the invented languages of culture or theory,
it is never independent from and always relative to this meaning system.
These ways of knowing are developed and sustained in social
interactions and through the formal institutional structures of society, e.g.
families, education and in the economic organisation of work. Knowledge
is therefore not neutral and is linked to the unequal hierarchal organisa-
tion of society. In other words, while all knowledge is relative, some
knowledge is privileged and more highly valued. Bourdieu (1986) made
the links between knowledge and power explicit by referring to know-
ledge as “cultural capital”. Those who possess the dominant forms of
cultural capital and are linked into powerful social networks (“social capital”)
are able to translate both what and who they know into socioeconomic
capital. In this way, the world and the people in it are organised through
these understandings that reinforce and perpetuate intergenerational
unequal hierarchies and asymmetries of power.2 Bourdieu’s analysis of the
“modern” capitalist system and its positioning of individual persons is
a precursor to more fluid social constructionist versions of how power
circulates in language and informs social worlds and subjectivity.

Multiple forms and flows of power

Class hierarchies and economic inequality remain stubbornly rigid,
intransigent and globally pervasive. However, it is now clear that this
structural oppression manifests in multiple ways in different geographical
and historical contexts. An exclusive focus on material conditions offers
limited resources for the analysis of subjectivity that is simultaneously
raced, gendered and queered. Feminists and Black consciousness theorists
and activists have demonstrated that although race and gender coincide
with class, (the exploitation of women and black people is part and parcel
of the capitalist system), the experience of being female and/or black
exceeds and complicates a reductionist materialist view. Black feminists
have also convincingly demonstrated that these categories are not additive
(or subtractive) but “intersectional” (Crenshaw, 1991). Being black (or
white) and female (or male) is a gestalt rather than sequential or alternat-
ing dimension of identity, even if some aspects become more or less salient
at different times and in different contexts, in relation to different others.3
 The subject of psychology 33

Hall (1996) describes this motility in identity as a process of identification

and othering, connecting with, and distancing ourselves from, others. While
this implies an “us” (with whom we identify) and “them” (whom we other),
who is incorporated within or excluded from these designations shifts as
these processes are fluid and negate conventional dualisms.
Mama (1995) argues that an exclusive focus on a single dimension of
identity is inadequate to understand lived experience, particularly in the
postmodern/postcolonial world.

My own experiences as a feminist raised and educated as both African

and European, as both black and white, and with intimate connections
to a good many other places and peoples besides these has always made
a nonsense of all these dualisms. … I view the historically produced
category of “black women” with the eyes of an insider and an
outsider, seeing multiplicity and differences between and within
individuals and the struggle to construct coherences and commonalities
out of a potentially infinite set of possibilities.
(Mama, 1995, p. 13)

Add into this mix, multiple lines of identity, class, sexuality, ethnicity, lan-
guage, nationality, belonging to generational cohorts, living in rural or urban
homes, and the intersectional possibilities proliferate. This complexity is
further challenged by queer theory that rejects the notion of binaries
altogether (even if along multiple intersecting lines). Queer subjectivities
include many more than two genders or sexualities, and any other categories
of identity can be similarly queered. The discursive and performative qualities
of language mean that power circulates actively and more fluidly, positioning
people in complex ways. “Poststructuralism proposes a subjectivity which is
precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being constituted in
discourse each time we think or speak” (Weedon, 1997, p. 32). The socially
constructed person is made, and makes herself, and is articulated in and
through, these languages and discourses of power. Subjectivity is constrained
but not determined by material conditions and, although multiple lines of
oppressive power may coalesce, people also always possess and express the
potential for creative resistances.

Psychology and discourse: disciplining and displacing

the subject
The challenge of social constructionism and discursive theories to binary
notions of the subject is highly pertinent to psychology. Despite the
34 Changing subjects

ostensible focus on a universal abstract individual, the project of psychology

has always been concerned with variation and, in its popular interpretations,
the uniqueness of each individual person. However, although these
variations occur across a continuum, this is a spectrum with an average
reference point, fitting the bell curve in which outliers are dismissed as
aberrations. It could even be argued that this is the core business of the
profession of psychology: the assessment and diagnosis of variation in rela-
tion to normative standards, differentiating healthy from unhealthy, and
normal from abnormal ways of thinking, doing and being in the world.4
Psychology, thus, has the effect of “inventing man” (Foucault, 1970) in its
own image.5 Although this construction of difference from the norm is
construed as neutral, the “science” of psychology, particularly as exercised
in its testing apparatus, is highly susceptible to misuse in support of discrim-
inatory frameworks such as racism, sexism, hetero-sexism and transphobia
in which difference is construed as deviance.

Methodologies for making the subject

The “object” of psychological enquiry has been the subject matter of
philosophical or religious enquiries throughout history and ordinary
people are constantly interpreting themselves and others. However, Fou-
cault’s (1970) “man” is invented and (re)made in and through the
methods of science. In efforts to establish these scientific credentials, early
psychologists sometimes adopted a more positivist stance than the natural
scientists they sought to emulate (Danziger, 1990). In particular, the
multiple variables at play in any psychological phenomenon necessitated
complex experimental design to control conditions and isolate effects.
Although behaviourist laboratories have shut up shop in many, if not
most, places, the burgeoning quasi-medical field of neuropsychology and
the new technologies of MRI and brain imaging make it possible to do
what behaviourists argued was impossible: look inside people’s heads.
(But this does not mean that we can read their minds!) Beyond this par-
ticular sub-discipline and the walls of laboratories, it is the quantitative
methods of statistics that have the greatest ongoing and pervasive influence
on psychological methodologies.
Statistical procedures are presumed to be theory-free or neutral,
the numbers reflecting the patterns, trends, averages and outliers in the
population out there in the world. This results in a “cookbook approach”
(Danziger, 1990, p. 152) to the subject of research methodology in which
matters of conceptual or ethical controversy may be considered extraneous.
This focus on techniques rather than content leads to what Danziger (1990,
 The subject of psychology 35

p. 154) wittily refers to as a “methodological fetish” or “methodolatory”.

Einstein’s delightful aphorism springs to mind: “Not all things that count
can be counted, and not all things that can be counted, count.”
In addition to a proliferation of research with little explanatory power,
this approach works to whittle away and reduce the richness of people’s
lived experience and sense of themselves.

This is not to say that quantitative methods necessarily make

researchers dehumanise people, but there is a powerful tendency for
the systematic fracturing and measurement of human experience to
work in this way. That approach also fits with the surveillance and
calibration of individuals in society outside of the laboratory.
(Parker, 2015a, p. 10)

In the South African context both the “science” of neuropsychology

and the associated fields of practice, traumatic brain injuries and foren-
sics, and the statistical mapping of social trends, are considered high
forms of cultural capital in psychology departments with the potential
for cashing in on the market. Students often tell me that they “love
research” in the abstract without expressing curiosity about anything in
particular that they think we could know more about or know differ-
ently. Many also take on trust the apparatus and forms of professional
practice, including testing, assessment, therapeutic contracts and definitions
of (ab)normality. Psychology in our context is a strange mix of scientific
research (predominantly quantitative in approach) and therapeutic practices
that are often psychoanalytic in orientation and sometimes aligned with
religious counselling and/or traditional healing practices.6 Although
ostensibly incongruous, these orientations address both the demands of
the market and a pervasive romantic, nostalgic desperation for meaning
and certainty. As Danziger (1990, p. 147) observes: “Quantitative psy-
chological knowledge [is] a species of esoteric knowledge that [is] held
to have profound social implications. The keepers of that knowledge
were to constitute a new kind of priesthood, which was to replace the
philosopher or theologian”. Sanders (2010) explores the “complicity”
of intellectuals (specifically in apartheid South Africa but his arguments
apply now and elsewhere too) in wider processes of oppression.
Knowledge generated in and legitimated by the academy has effects,
“politically, socially, or in the intimacy of mental colonization and the psy-
chological inscription of the body” (Sanders, 2010, p. 15, emphasis added).
The discourses of psychology work at the most intimate level of
people’s sense of themselves and, particularly, of themselves in relation
36 Changing subjects

to others, positioning people (individually and collectively) on a spectrum

of normality in ways that may have pernicious effects.

Qualitative methods: discursive and narrative resources

Qualitative methodologies from different paradigmatic frameworks are
presented in social constructionist language, promising to avoid the ethical
pitfalls of quantitative methods and, moreover, to contribute in progressive
ways to emancipatory possibilities. From a phenomenological perspective,
the focus would be on the ways in which people make sense of their
experiences and themselves. From a more critical discursive perspective,
attention shifts away from people’s own (reported) meanings to how
discourses of power are infused in people’s talk and sense-making. Both
perspectives assume the social constructionism of meaning but differ in
adopting a “hermeneutics of faith or suspicion” (Josselson, 2004). Because
persons and discourses are not mutually exclusive categories, research may
be “bifocal” (Fine, 2018), combining attention to experiential narratives
and social discourses and the politics of subjectivity (Livholts & Tambou-
kou, 2015). The project of discursive psychology might be broadly concep-
tualised as deconstructionist or critical and shifts attention away from the
internal psychological plane:

This movement represents a critical reflexive shift away from the

search for mental paraphernalia inside each individual’s head and
towards a socially mediated and historically situated study of action
and experience. This is an endeavour that postmodernism both
encourages and sabotages.
(Parker, 2015b, p. 30)

However, this correction to the worst errors of quantitative scientism and

the rational self-contained individual by emphasising the social construction
of the subject, may do little more than invert the problem. Danziger
(1990, p. 195) cautions that we should not:

now replace the naïve naturalism of the past with a simpleminded

sociological reductionism. To say that psychological knowledge bears
the mark of the social conditions under which it was produced is not
the same as saying that it is nothing but a reflection of these conditions.

Switching focus from the psychic interior to the social exterior world
does nothing to deconstruct the problematic binary framework in which
 The subject of psychology 37

social and psychological phenomena are construed as opposing realities. This

split reality is not peculiar to psychology; social sciences such as sociology
and political science are situated on the other side of the fault-line and so
jumping the gap does not solve the conceptual problem. “[R]etaining
dualism reproduced an equivalent but opposite set of problems for social
theory, namely that the latter, in its turn, remained blind to the process of
subjective change” (Henriques et al., 1984, p. 91).
Although, as will become evident, this is not a firm position, in his most
social constructionist voice, Parker (2015c, p. 13) argues that psychological
theories are “no more than fictions”, implying that they are indistinguishable
in truth terms from the narratives from any other source, grandmothers,
journalists, artists, priests, rabbis or imams. While this may have the desired
effect of questioning the false authority of methodolatory and challenging
ethnocentrism, relativism taken to the extreme is self-defeating in that its
own claims are likewise relative and thus indefensible (Fay, 1996). The
relativist view is often further distorted in support of discourses of individ-
ual uniqueness that are pervasive both within and beyond psychology.
Social constructivism (as opposed to constructionism) recognises that each
individual person has a unique personal history that shapes her view on the
world: interpretation becomes a matter of personal opinion that cannot be
challenged as it is relative to the particular individual’s own life which
cannot be known or experienced by anyone else.7 By asserting individual
and cultural freedoms as beyond dispute, extreme relativism may serve to
support the status quo, closing down debate about how things could be
different in the world, with potentially regressive epistemic and reactionary
political consequences.

Subjective histories and futures: the politics of people and

psychology in contexts
Social constructionism coincides with and is compatible with postmodern-
ism historically and epistemologically but the idea that culture (including
language and other forms of symbolic representations and practices) shapes
collective and individual life is hardly new. Migration, which is as old as
human history, has always brought people into contact with others who do
things differently, organise their social relationships in ways that seem
strange to an outsider or, in the early anthropological vision, exotically
interesting. Of course this interest in difference and otherness was (and is)
very seldom expressed as innocent curiosity. The intensification of move-
ment and conquest in the colonial project was infused with two apparently
opposing but actually mutually reinforcing responses to difference: (1) as
38 Changing subjects

expressed in proselytising Christianity (or Islam), to convert people, to re-

make “them” in “our own image”; and (2) to exploit the labour and
belongings (particularly land and natural resources) of others who were
considered less human. The social constructionist world view is a forceful
challenge to the ethnocentric conversion narrative: all forms of cultural life
are constructed in response to contextual demands, rather than given by
god or nature and, therefore, equally valid. However, this strength is also
its weakness as it is not necessarily as effective in countering questions of
power that are most overtly articulated in the exploitative dehumanising
discourses and practices that occurred (and continue to occur) in synergy
with the conversion narrative.
In its most progressive articulations and most emancipatory implica-
tions, social constructionism widens our view on human life, enlarging
the boundaries of what is thinkable, loosening the edges of psychological
disciplinary knowledge and expanding the horizons of psychosocial sub-
jectivities. However, Parker (2002) notes some troublesome political
implications of relativism for those that are interested in going beyond
interpreting the world to engaging with possibilities for changing it. First,
acknowledging differences and variability in experiences and world views
may splinter and diffuse the social justice agenda8; second, if power is all-
pervasive and operates not only hegemonically but also in resistant forms
of agency, this undercuts imperatives for systemic change; and third, the
demand for reflexivity in the research process may recentre the subject of
the researcher deflecting attention from the subjectivities and experiences
of participants, leading to an unproductive tentativeness about “interven-
ing” to change things in any way.9

Beyond social constructionism

The intractability of the relativist-realism debate is partly a semantic
problem because the term “real” has multiple meanings: essence, truth
and materiality (Burr, 1998). The first two senses of the term pose few
difficulties for contemporary psychology. The view that there is
a singular essential legitimate form of human life, or that there are reli-
able scientific methods through which to establish unquestionable truths
or predictable laws about human behaviour, is no longer dominant and, in
this sense, we might all be social constructionists now. Stam’s (2002,
p. 293) conclusion is that “most social constructionists are so in the epi-
stemic sense, namely they are constructionist about descriptions rather than
the entities that are so described”. This may be a way to socially construct
our cake and eat it!
 The subject of psychology 39

However, even at the level of ontology (or the material that makes up
the cake), there is still a social constructionist challenge for psychology. As
Hacking (1999, p. 103) observes,“[t]here is a big difference between quarks
and children”. Because human life or ways of being a person in the world
are culturally rather than (only) naturally formed, epistemological construc-
tions, or ways or thinking and talking about the world, act back on this
world of acting and experiencing, altering ontological (or at least experien-
tial) realities. This is precisely the argument of social constructionism:
people’s experience of the world is shaped (in strong versions, determined)
by discursive and cultural meanings. In Vygotsky’s terms, “language-based
tools ‘backfire’, that is, serve to influence the inner world of the subject”
(Van der Veer, 1996, p. 256). Psychology is thus a rather strange discipline
in which it is difficult to provide a straight answer to Hacking’s question:
“The social construction of what?”. Surely children are different to quarks
but perhaps the peculiarity of the discipline is that its rubric includes both
quarks and children (and children too, include quarks!). The frequent
confusion between these kinds of phenomena leads to the epistemological
and political troubles that characterise the seemingly endless crises of the
discipline. Hacking’s “looping kind” of humanity takes embodied form and
so he cautions us to always ask the question that is also the title of his
book: “The social construction of what?”.10 People matter and, while they
cannot be reduced to it, the matter that makes them up matters in the task
of making up meaning about them.
Although he acknowledges the problematic implications of relativism,
Parker remains a vocal advocate for discursive methodologies that expose
the socially constructed forms of taken-for-granted realities. To avoid
messy entanglements with the embodied experiences of human subjects,
Parker advises that critical psychologists take texts (literally) rather than
people as data. This certainly may be a possible route for some
researchers: language and discourse are evocative and intriguing fields that
demand rigorous enquiry. However, the claim that this is a kind of
(critical) psychology is only sustainable if we link these discourses to per-
sons. He suggests that his earlier version of discursive psychology as
aligned with critical realism which he outlined in Critical Discursive Psych-
ology (2002), before the “after series”, was mistaken. But I think that he is
mistaken about being mistaken! I agree that labels such as “critical real-
ism” or “critical psychology” are not particularly useful and may in fact
lead us down theoretical tracks to dead-end camps. But the task that
Parker undertook in that earlier work (to link discursive psychology to
structuralist accounts of the psychosocial world, notably those of Freud
and Marx) clearly remains a central concern in his later writings. He
40 Changing subjects

explicitly links his critique of psychology to four theoretical strands:

Marxism, feminism, Foucault, psychoanalysis, that (with the possible
exception of Foucault) are antecedent structural accounts to discursive
psychology, linking the realms of discourse and the material world. I do
not mean to suggest that the material world (including bodies) is itself not
also “socially constructed” (in the weak sense that we (humans) always
attach meaning to this material world and indeed transform it). But
bodies and brains, and trees and rocks are “indifferent kinds” (Hacking,
1999), indifferent to the meanings that we make of them, and different in
kind to human psychic and social life.
Narrative psychology may offer a way to connect the embodied tem-
poral processes of life with the discursive meanings that inform and derive
from these experiences. Crossley (2000, p. 530) argues that the narrative
approach “appreciates the linguistic and discursive structuring of ‘self’ and
‘experience’ but also maintains a sense of the essentially personal, coherent
and ‘real’ nature of individual subjectivity”. This reassertion of a (critical)
subjectivity resonates with Archer’s (2000) project of “resisting the dissol-
ution of humanity” (or persons or selves). She argues that it is possible to
distance oneself from both the enlightenment project of rational control
and individuality and the postmodern dissolution of the human subject. She
grounds the human subject in the embodied practices made possible by our
evolution as a species and the evolution of the worlds (both natural and
social) in which we live. Both Archer (2000) and Eagleton (2000) argue
that prioritising discourse (or culture) over the material world of bodies and
practices (or labour) creates not only theoretical but also political (or moral)
problems. It is difficult to argue that ciphers or puppets can either be vio-
lated by or resist the discourses said to produce them.

Human embodiment
Decentring the human subject in favour of an exclusive focus on disem-
bodied discourses negates the powers of nature and of the social world
beyond language. This has the strange (surely unintended) consequence of
prioritising11 (in both senses of temporally antecedent and being most
important) and centring the socially constructed space of words and lan-
guage. For all the rhetorical flourishes of the relativist argument in the (in)
famous death and furniture debate (Edwards, Ashmore & Potter, 1995),
this seems little more than philosophical play. Tables may be beautiful or
not, may serve as surfaces for eating feasts or for repairing broken cell
phones in a workshop. Scientists and medics may argue about whether the
time of death is when the heart stops or other organs fail, whether bodies
 The subject of psychology 41

kept functioning by machines or frozen in capsules are “alive” or not.

There is immense cultural variation in the interpretation of the meaning of
death and in the imagination of an “after-life”. However, bodies still bump
into tables and chairs, and anyone who has sat with the dying, or lost
someone whom they love, knows that death may escape definition but
overwhelms the bodies of both the dead and the living. I share Hustvedt’s
(2016, p. 350) observation:

As vital as I believe language is to delineating both my experience

and my perceptions and to the creation of an autobiographical nar-
rative for my own life, which is indeed a form of fiction … I have
found myself intellectually and emotionally dissatisfied with the airy
postmodern subjects that seem never to put their feet on the ground.

Cromby and Nightingale’s (1999) answer to their own question, “What’s

wrong with social constructionism?” is that it fails to address both the sources
and effects of discourse in the material world, particularly in the body. While
we all know that “race” is socially constructed, it is potently real, inscribed
on our bodies and realised in experience. Patriarchy and capitalism similarly
are clearly socially constructed, invented discourses that conceal and defend
unequal distributions of power, with very real material effects. Perhaps Hack-
ing (1999, p. 35) is right: “The metaphor of social construction once had
excellent shock value, but now it has become tired”.
Harré (2010) has proposed a hybrid psychology that draws together
the two domains of meanings and molecules that he differentiated in his
earlier work. The dual nature of psychology as a discipline is evident in
that affinities with very disparate cognate disciplines may be easier to
identify than unifying fields within the discipline: at one end of the spec-
trum, with the biological (and medical) sciences, and at the other, the arts
and the meaningful practices of culture. “Hybrid psychology depends
on the intuition that while brains can be assimilated into the world of
persons, people cannot be assimilated into the world of cell structures and
molecular processes” (Harré, 2010, p. 33). Perhaps a hybrid approach
may be sensible and possible or perhaps it will prove a bridge too far as
quite different methods must be used to understand these phenomena and
sub-disciplines may develop in even more differentiated ways. Either
way, it would be unwise for practitioners in either field to dismiss the
importance of the other in understanding human life. “[T]o dismiss the
neurological is to retreat to the comfort zone of familiar dualist schisms”
(Cromby, Newton & Williams, 2011, p. 224). But to reduce all of psych-
ology to this level of explanation would be equally problematic and there
42 Changing subjects

could be no better authority for this position than the world’s most cele-
brated neuroscientist:

The constructions of science or biology, may be lyrical, but are

impersonal and theoretical. There is no “story” in the life of an
orchid or earthworm – no personal story, no drama, no plight, no
predicament. Therefore the art of storytelling, of narrative is not
necessary for its description. But with human life, human nature, it
is wholly different: there is drama, there is intentionality, at every
point. Its exploration demands the seeing and telling of a story,
demands a narrative structure and sensibility and science.
(Sacks, 2014, p. 527)

Hustvedt (2016) provides a challenging and inspiring example of intrepid

transdisciplinary travels, an artist delving into psychoanalysis, cognitive sci-
ence and neuroscientific terrains with meticulous and rigorous attention to
connections and divergences. She offers us a remarkably beautiful depiction
of the peculiar synergy of bodies and discourses that make us who we are,
not one thing or the other, nor one thing after the other, but embodied
meaning-making creatures in the relational flows of life lived with others:

Human beings are animals with hearts and livers and bones and
brains and genitals. We yearn and lust, feel hunger and cold, are
still all born from a woman’s body, and we all die. These natural
realities are inevitably framed and understood through the culture
we live in. If each of us has a narrative, conscious and unconscious,
a narrative that begins in the preverbal rhythms and patterns of our
early lives, that cannot be extricated from other people, those to
whom we were attached, people who were part of shaping the sen-
sual, muscular, emotional rhythms that lie beneath what become fully
articulated narratives intended to describe symbolically the arc of
a singular existence, then each of us has been and is always already
bound up in a world of others.
Hustvedt (2016, p. 335)

It is a “grammar” of the body (or organism) that Harré (2010) suggests as

the connecting tissue between molecules and meaning for a new hybrid
psychology.12 Bodies mutate and can be subjected to artificial manipula-
tions of all kinds. Everyday practices constantly alter our natural bodies:
shaving, dying, straightening or curling hair, make-up, perfuming and the
tattooing and piercing of skin. Medical technologies enable pacemakers to
 The subject of psychology 43

do the work of bleeding hearts, some of us can move about on prosthetic

limbs that are able to respond to electronic stimulation of the brain,
implants can change our sexy curves and gender reassignment surgery can
rename us and change our social relations in dramatic ways. Bodies are
interpreted and crafted but they are pivotal in the making of meaning and
exceed our control of the meaning-making process, inserting us into the
material world of objects and others. The mutability of the body is not
infinite: it may grow fatter or thinner, fitter or creakier, but always older,
never younger. In theorising personhood from the margins of the discipline
of psychology several decades ago,13 the South African psychologist
Manganyi (1973) centred the body as pivotal in the formation of human
subjectivity and, hence, for our understanding of personhood and, in
particular, the implications for “being-black-in-the world”.

The body is the nexus of all the fundamental relations (dialogue)

which an individual person develops with others, with objects and
with space and time. If the integrity of the body is violated, as it is
has been in the case of black people, the other existential relation-
ships also become distorted.
(Manganyi, 1973, p. 52)

Embodied humanism: an African perspective in dialogue

with Vygotsky
Erasmus (2017) frames her exploration of ‘race’ (the quintessential socially
constructed category) as an engagement with “rehumaning our times” to
“forge a new humanism for South Africa”. Neither she nor I would claim
that ‘race’ is any less real for being socially constructed and, thus, imagined
new capacious notions of humanness may similarly be asserted as concepts
worth realising. It strikes me as somewhat odd that just as some people are
claiming their status as “human”, the category is consigned to the post-
phenomena litterbin of history. Humanism may be tainted by its colonial
roots, but post-humanism seems to leave us with dirty bathwater rather
than a squirming infant idea that might develop into something virile.

For what I am calling humanism can be provisional, historically con-

tingent, anti-essentialist (in other words, postmodern) and still
be demanding. We can surely maintain a powerful engagement with
the concern to avoid cruelty and pain while nevertheless recognising
the contingency of that concern. Maybe then, we can recover within
postmodernism the postcolonial writers’ humanism – the concern for
44 Changing subjects

human suffering, for the victims of the postcolonial state … while

still rejecting the master narratives of modernism.
(Appiah, 1992, pp. 250–251)

Manganyi (1973) is quite clear that his treatise, Being black in the world,
proposes distinct modes of being for black and white bodies due to our
historical constitution through centuries of colonialism. His approach is not
premised on the rejection of humanism but on the project of claiming it
for new forms of theorising and living that may provide the threads from
which to weave a critical, relational humanism.14 The humanity that he
theorises is embodied, temporal and relational. In broad paradigmatic terms,
there are striking synergies with Vygotsky’s theory of consciousness and
aspects of the two theories are interwoven here, highlighting connections
and differences between them. The dialogical structure of human life entails
being in relation to, first (and foremost), one’s own body as an “existential
fact” and the “significance” of this fact in both sociological and psycho-
logical terms (Manganyi, 1973, p. 18). Vygotsky (1994, p. 41) similarly
suggested that consciousness is a “correlative activity of the human body
with itself”. The body is not merely an inert substrate; rather, it “constitutes
an individual’s anchor in the world. It is the physical body which makes it
possible for an individual to be given a name, to tell all and sundry who he
is – to constitute lived space” (Manganyi, 1973, p. 52). In other words, it is
only through the body that our social relationality is possible, particularly
through communal networks of family, kin and geographical neighbour-
hoods. In Vygotskian terms, the formation of human consciousness occurs
through the mediational other (parent, teacher, more capable peer) who
links children into intergenerational social life. This relationality may be
characterised by the mutual recognition or reciprocity implied in family
interactions but Manganyi also outlines how we constitute one another in
the racialised relations of “us” and “them” entwining interpersonal inter-
actions in the fabric of political life.
In line with Vygotsky’s emphasis on how the intentional meanings of
historical others are inscribed in the tools and objects of culture, Manga-
nyi outlines modes of life in which the objects of material culture create
and re-create meaningful practices and constitute identity. But again, he
extends Vygotsky’s frame to explicitly include the effects of oppressive
relations with the material world. The relational attitude and potential
creative effects of engagement with cultural artefacts, performances and
practices is juxtaposed with materialist consumerism that erodes the self
through the insatiable desire for the acquisition of objects of culture.
Finally, Manganyi theorises subjectivity as constituted in time and space,
 The subject of psychology 45

constrained by context and histories but activated and articulated in

relation to anticipated futures. Each individual person “should be free to
constitute his lived-space on the basis of an open appeal to time. An indi-
vidual has potential. Time appeals to this potential to be realised freely.
Such potential may only be realised in freedom-in-security” (Manganyi,
1973, p. 32, emphasis added). As elaborated in Chapter 1, the realisation
of potential in Vygotskian terms is possible because the decontextualising
power of language enables us to go beyond the here and now, imagining
and planning for potential futures. Manganyi highlights how the oppres-
sive conditions of colonial histories, poverty and systemic racism rob
people of futures and thwart their potential: “In the absence of freedom-
in-security, planning becomes existentially meaningless and the individual
life becomes provisional” (Manganyi, 1973, p. 33).
Parker (2002, p. 135) argues that “a thorough-going discursive psych-
ology is strongly ‘anti-humanist’ and is suspicious of the notion of a unified
‘self’ that lies beneath discourse”. He rejects both humanism and relational-
ity as liberal shreds of the enlightenment project rather than radical
responses to questions of change, presumably because the macro-politics of
socioeconomic structuring of society are occluded by interpersonal micro-
level analyses. This may be the case in some neoliberal interpretations and
applications but this is clearly not the relational humanity of African
thought outlined above and a feminist lens reminds us that interactions
between people do not take place in an apolitical sphere; the personal is
always political. A critical humanist position need not imply a “unified”
self nor imagine that discourse is overlaid on top of this anterior entity. On
the contrary, appeals to the discursive realm to displace the grounding of
experience in the body may perversely lead to a reification of language,
discourse and culture that creates a new kind of orthodoxy that closes
explanations in circular arguments that chase their own tails in the error of
infinite regress. If meanings are inscribed in discourses (including discursive
practices and objects) outside of us (which they surely are) who inscribed
them there? If one is not to resort to the possibility of divine intervention,
the only feasible origin of culture is in the meaningful actions of other
humans living in history. This knotty problem seems to be produced by
two conceptual confusions: psychological phenomena are processes rather
than entities, and social discourses are not outside of and opposed to the
interior subjective world.
Despite his resistance to humanism, his political commitments mean that
Parker remains vehemently opposed to what he believes are the dehumanis-
ing effects of psychology’s practices in scientific laboratories and therapeutic
rooms. Although his critique of psychology continues to be infused with
46 Changing subjects

remnants of Marxist thought (even “after” everything), Parker relies on

Foucault’s more fluid notions of power, particularly disciplinary power as
articulated in knowledge-making both within and beyond the academy.
However, he concedes that even in this discursive scheme of things,
embodied persons seem to make a (ghostly) appearance: “Foucault … some-
times seems to call for spontaneous acts of resistance that presuppose an
inner subject, or at least a body with some remaining untamed pleasures”
(Parker, 2015c, p. 32). Our bodies may be “docile” much of the time but
they remain enervated to the ways in which they are subjugated, even
when resorting to uncomfortable strategies of resilience, always potentially
resistant and infused with transformatory potential.
From a Vygotskian point of view, the potential for this transformation
lies in the mediation of the outer social world and the inner psychological
world, the membrane between which is a thin, permeable skin. The psy-
chological plane of consciousness and the natural processes of perception,
attention and memory are transformed through the cultural line development
and, conversely, the domain of cultural life is imagined and enacted by
embodied human persons.

The first law of the development and structure of higher mental

functions which are the basic nucleus of the personality being formed
can be called the law of the transition from direct, innate, natural forms
and methods of behaviour to mediated, artificial mental functions that develop
in the course of cultural development. This transition during ontogenesis
corresponds to the process of the historical development of human
behaviour, a process as we know, did not consist of acquiring new
natural physiological functions, but in a complex combination of
elementary functions, in a perfecting of forms and methods of think-
ing, in the development of new methods of thinking based mainly
on speech or some other system of signs.
(Vygotsky, 1998, p. 168)

A Vygotskian narrative of mediated selves

In tune with the “turn to language” long before psychology twisted itself
into this frame and before the stories of discursive or narrative psychology
began, Vygotsky’s theory places language at the heart of human life as the
animating force of human subjectivity, joining together and entwining the
natural and cultural lines of development as described above. His conceptu-
alisation of language foreshadows both structuralism and poststructuralism
or postmodernism.
 The subject of psychology 47

In this respect the word’s meaning is inexhaustible. The word

acquires its sense in the phrase. The phrase itself, however, acquires
its sense only in the context of the paragraph, the paragraph in the
context of the book, and the book in context of the author’s collected
works. Ultimately, the word’s real sense is determined by everything
in consciousness which is related to what the word expresses. Accord-
ing to Paulhan, the sense of the Earth is the solar system, the sense of
the solar system is the milky way … We may never know the com-
plete sense of anything, including that of a given word. The word is
an inexhaustible source of new problems. Its sense is never complete.
Ultimately, the sense of a word depends on one’s understanding of the
world as a whole and on the internal structure of personality.
(Vygotsky, 1987, p. 276)

In this, Vygotsky seems to leapfrog straight into the heart of contemporary

linguistic theory, foretelling both Chomsky’s deep and surface structures
and the developments of socio-linguistics that focus on language in use
(parole) rather than as a structural system (langue) and even points to the
deconstructivist emphasis on play of difference in a system that makes for
meaning. (It is the system not associative meanings or referents that creates
the possibilities for meaning.) From Vygotsky’s perspective, this system of
meaning-making is not idiosyncratic and can only function in social “webs
of interlocution” (Taylor, 1992) where meanings are shared, providing the
nexus for the “interpenetration” (Sampson, 1989, p. 4) of social and
psychological life in the formation of the subject.
Stam (2002, p. 574) suggests that Vygotsky (and Mead) “made construc-
tionism possible”, in other words, that his constructivist theory of inter-
psychological development and the internalisation of the symbolic tool of
language was antecedent to the more thoroughly social constructionism of
the late 20th century. This may well be true but I would argue that in line
with a more fluid understanding of the sociohistorical trajectories of know-
ledge-making, the relation is more complex and that Vygotskian theory
also enables us to read social constructionism retrospectively, as if it were
a later rather than earlier development. Stam (2002, p. 574) notes that, in
social constructionism (and I would add, similarly, in the CHAT version of
activity theory), “the internal relation of thinking and speaking has been
downplayed in favour of an external relation between speakers”. In Vygots-
ky’s conceptualisation, consciousness is not evacuated into the social world
but transformed through the convergence of the natural and cultural lines
of development.
48 Changing subjects

A narrative take on Vygotsky’s self-regulating inner conversation

extends our sense of what it means to be the subject and object of our
own behaviour; the stories that we tell ourselves not only regulate our
actions in the world, but generate the contours of our being, our selves,
our subjectivity. This formulation of the self in language has elsewhere led
to a view that there is no subject, no psychological reality, only language
that construes our experience “as if” there were a self.15 I have argued that
it is fallacious to conclude that the subject is a mere artefact of language
and that this conclusion is premised on a separation of the realities that
Vygotsky’s theory brings together: the world of language and meaning is
part of the natural world, part of our species-specific embodiment: “when
Vygotsky speaks of a uniquely human psychology defined by higher mental
processes, he shifts the traditional boundaries of psychology and, in effect,
initiates a discipline or domain of enquiry that lies at the interface between
nature and culture” (Miller, 1989, p. 11).
This conceptualisation of subjectivity as both embodied and symbolic is
commensurate with Archer’s (2000) position outlined earlier in which she
rejects the notion of a rational locus of control in the enlightenment sub-
ject but simultaneously refuses a full postmodern erasure of the subject.
Her version of human subjectivity emerges in the embodied practices
made possible by our evolution as a species and the evolution of the
worlds (both natural and social) in which we live. From a narrative per-
spective, Freeman (1993, p. 70) likewise suggests that the while we may
make our-selves and our worlds in language, these imaginative construc-
tions are no less “real” for that: “yes, self and world are fundamentally
products of the imagination. But no, they are not merely imaginary, in the
sense of being essentially fictional creations”.
The Vygotskian notion of mediation typically refers to face-to-face inter-
action between adults and children. The younger generation is inducted
into the world by parents, teachers or older children, (Vygotsky’s, (1978)
“more capable peers”). Ways of doing and being are transmitted partly
through demonstration and imitation but, most importantly, through verbal
instruction that directs and guides the child’s attention and action. This is
the full force of the process of mediation: the child (or learner or initiate)
does not act independently (or spontaneously in Piaget’s terms) on the basis
of her own understanding or grasp of the situation but, rather, acts under
regulation, on the basis of the other’s understanding. Vygotsky’s famous law of
sociogenesis proposes that cultural development occurs first, interpersonally
and then intrapersonally. Self-regulation therefore originates in social inter-
action and it is the language of the other that becomes the inner voice of
private speech. In addition to talk that has didactic or at least overtly
 The subject of psychology 49

directive or instructive purposes in reference to immediate daily life, all cul-

tures are storytelling cultures. Canonised narratives (such as fables or fairy
tales) are passed down by word of mouth, carrying meanings and values
from the past. But narratives are also generated spontaneously in the con-
text of everyday life to capture and communicate the ordinary shared
events and experiences of “what happened at school” or “who did what to
whom”. Children’s worlds are full of stories: sometimes fun, sometimes
scary, always meaningful!
The processes of change in individual lives are most evident in
children’s development as they grow up and take on adult roles in the
social world. From a range of perspectives, (including trajectories of
empirical and theoretical work initiated by Piaget and Freud) develop-
mental psychology has mapped the stages of ontogenetic development as
unfolding towards adulthood within a social context that is assumed to be
relatively stable. The adults in children’s worlds model the social roles
into which each successive generation will grow. In these formulations,
developmental psychology is ahistorical and apolitical, occluding both the
agentic actions of persons and the structural effects of society that pre-
exist each life. By contrast, individual lives are lived in time, growing up
and growing old (with narrative beginnings, middles and ends) in the
flows of changing social patterns and collective histories. The making of
a personal identity in the recollected memory of experience is not neatly
contained within the passage of the individual life but is linked to the
historical passage of time, the histories of others who have lived before us
in time, and communicated through intergenerational conversation and
shared life experiences.

Orders of mediation
Miller (2011) proposes that Vygotskian theory implies two additional
inter-related orders of mediation or ways in which the child’s world is
shaped by intergenerational history: the second order of mediation is
instantiated in cultural tools, and the third, in the social structures and
institutions by which society is organised. (Both of these orders of medi-
ation are engaged with or implicit in Manganyi’s theorisation of relational
being outlined above.) To illustrate these orders of mediation and how
they work together, I will use the example of a hammer.16 The hammer’s
function is inscribed in its design: it is for banging. Any small child who
picks up a hammer quickly discovers this and parents are equally quick to
contain the possible consequences, “Hammers are for hitting nails not
people!”. And hammers are ordinarily not for children but for adults, and
50 Changing subjects

while the toolboxes of many households may contain a hammer, it (and

various technological advances on its original design) is also a standard
tool of the trade for builders of houses and skyscrapers and all kinds of
physical structures in between. But the hammer in the hands of one
person is only one part of the collective action necessary to make the
exceptional built environment of human settlements and, particularly,
cities. The use of this tool (and others), designed to be held and wielded
by an individual human hand, is co-ordinated or regulated at the social
level in collective patterns of action, subsumed as one small cog in the
functioning of national and global economies. The young child who
learns how to use a toy hammer to slam shaped objects into their respect-
ive holes or the slightly older child who assists a parent to hang a picture
with a “real” hammer, is learning about her own physical world and
hand–eye co-ordination, about actions and consequences, about objects
and people. But she is also simultaneously being introduced to the wider
mediated world of tool use and the social structures of labour.
In much the same way as the hammer concretely exemplifies these
orders of mediation, narrative functions at multiple levels to transmit
intergenerational knowledge and modes of being. In the telling of and
listening to stories, perhaps in culturally prescribed settings such as fireside
oral histories or bed-time story reading, the voices of adults in dyads or
larger communal conversations carry the meanings of history, typically as
instructions for the regulation of behaviour and social interactions. How-
ever, Valsiner & van der Veer (2014) emphasise that mediation is not
solely dependent on the physical presence of another person (or her
voice) as each child must construct her understanding for herself. The
meanings of the absent “other” are however not entirely absent.
The second order of narrative mediation is the inscription of meaning in
cultural texts, most obviously through the technology of writing in books
but also in other forms and modalities such as film, media, dance, art and
music. The making of these cultural artefacts entails technological know-
how and symbolic or artistic skill and expertise, but can be “used” with
relatively little explicit verbal instruction. These narrative objects are open
to “anyone who can read” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 192) and can be appropri-
ated by each generation of new audiences in the making of personal and
collective meanings for living their lives. The processes of generating and
engaging with these cultural objects or narrative artefacts occur within
a third order of mediation, which we might think of as the discourses
that circulate in society and constitute the social structures that organise
and regulate social life. The transmission and internalisation of these
discourses of how the world works may be formalised in the disciplinary
 The subject of psychology 51

traditions of knowledge in educational institutions, serving to frame and

legitimate certain cultural artefacts rather than others (second order medi-
ation) and transmit these forms of knowledge through expert instruction
(first order mediation). This transmission of knowledge (art and science)
is enabling in that each generation does not have to reinvent wheels or
hammers, or theories of relativity, afresh. This is the way in which culture
is not only transmitted but also created and re-created, changing across
time and place as new subjects articulate its form and content in new
contextual conditions. However, these discourses may not provide incon-
trovertibly positive resources for all people. In much the same way that
the social structures that organise collective tool use may be inequitable
and exploitative, discourses or grand narratives may serve to reinscribe
and validate various forms of inequitably distributed power such as class,
race or gender, rendering the mediated world “natural” and inevitable.
Small children may learn that hammers are “boys’ toys” laying the foun-
dations for later life in which particular gendered, raced and classed
bodies are the ones who are expected to hammer things into existence
under the instruction of others. Construction sites become buildings that
are then inhabited and enacted in socially sanctioned and culturally
accepted ways. In the home, each family enacts or resists gendered
patterns in kitchens and the relaxing spaces of lounges and bedrooms, and
over dining-room table talk. Economic power buys occupation of the
corner office or the penthouse suite, reflecting social status. In most coun-
tries, and certainly in South Africa, growing homelessness and the failure
to provide low-cost housing reflects not a lack of physical resources or
limited tools or skilled labour but the highly unequal socioeconomic
structure of society and the political priorities of those in power. Ques-
tions of what is built where, why, by whom and for whom entail many
more possibilities and dangers than the initial question solved by the
invention of the hammer: how to intensify the strength of the human
hand to act on and create shelter from the natural world.
In summary, mediation is effected by the simultaneous articulation
of these different orders: (1) interpersonal social interactions in which lan-
guage plays a crucial communicative role; (2) the sociohistorical trajectory
of the development of the tools (artefacts) of culture that transforms the
natural world (in Marx’s sense of “labour”); and (3) the consequent struc-
tural formations of society (or relations of production in Marxist language)
that regulate social interactions and organise tool use. However, we do
not only internalise the discourses of society and enact the roles or take
up the positions that social structures prescribe for us; our actions are not
completely constrained by the design of the tools that we use nor are
52 Changing subjects

our-selves solely informed by the cultural texts available to us; we do not

always listen to our mothers or our own internalised voices! People also
generate these very narratives, make these tools, form and transform the
complex social networks that we call “society”.

Conclusion
For those interested in change, the three orders of Vygotskian mediation
suggest various entry points for theory and activism: in dialogical exchange,
in the creative construction of new objects of knowledge and practice, and
in resistance to and reconstruction of institutional social formations.
Although the impetus for radical change may appear to lie in subversive
texts or the circulation of discourses in the virtual world, or in mass move-
ments that take to the streets, these actions can only be effected by human
agency: “culture cannot creep into the system from the bottom up but
must march in at the top and annex the system of self-regulation” (Miller,
1989, p. 9). In other words, no change to social structures or to the lived
experiences or subjectivity of individual persons can happen without
animating agents who imagine, plan and act in the world. What makes this
possible, despite the powerful discursive effects to which we are subjected
(and subjugated), is that the subject is an embodied, dialogical, narrating
person in whose mouth and mind new versions of herself and the world
may be made in the old stuff of language. Discourses may float in the ether
but dominant and counter-narratives are told and lived by embodied
persons in relationship with one another, living and breathing, talking and
acting in time. The language of Vygotsky’s subject is inside her head and
for this reason she has a say in what happens to her and what she does in
the world.

Notes
1 Appiah (1992) highlights a similar problematic conflation of postmodernism and
postcolonialism that complicates engagement with these ideas even further, par-
ticularly in geographically and intellectually colonised territories, such as the field
of psychology in South Africa.
2 Although the social constructionist argument includes the natural sciences, this
is a larger, contentious debate and I have, therefore, confined my argument to
disciplines that focus on psychological and/or social life as the central concerns
of this text.
3 The recognition that there are multiple ways to be a person in the world
leads to questions of authority in speaking and writing about these realities;
who gets to say what about whom? Appiah’s (1992, 2005, 2006, 2018) opus
of work on identity troubles the boundaries of identification and othering
 The subject of psychology 53

(Hall, 1996). Fay (1996) explores whether “one has to be one to know one”
and in his exemplary expression of the classic form of academic argument,
concludes yes and no. These issues are obviously imperative for psychologists
who are explicitly engaged in the business of making knowledge about other
people. This debate far exceeds the bounds of this text; however, I will
attempt some further engagement with this conundrum in Chapters 5 and 6.
In the context of the South African Student Movement and in the context of
South African society that is unambiguously not postrace, the answer to Fay’s
question is, for many people, an unambiguous: yes!
4 Psychoanalytic theory is an important exception to this binary frame in that the
same unconscious processes that constitute the developing psyche in functional,
socially adaptive ways may also cause psychic distress in later life and require
unravelling through therapy. Typically, rather than this serving to normalise
psychological troubles or shifting attention to the conditions of society that may
contribute towards this psychological dis-ease, the implication is to render all of
us in need of therapeutic intervention. Conversely, in its articulation of the
connections between psychological and social troubles, the Frankfurt school
(including psychologists such as Adorno, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich)
located both the origins and solutions to these troubles at the societal rather
than individual level. The contemporary field of Marxist psychology that
emerges from this intellectual tradition is typically (and perhaps surprisingly for
outsiders) strongly associated with psychoanalysis, linking the social and uncon-
scious domains of human life. Instantiating this theoretical interface, the second
Marxism and psychology conference held in Mexico in 2012 provided an inter-
national forum for some of the key debates. (For a helpful overview of this
event that serves as introduction to the problems and possibilities of conjoining
these theoretical fields, see Painter, 2012.)
5 Appiah (1992) outlines the parallel “invention of Africa” that served the
colonial imaginary well in extending and establishing the reach of industrialisation
and subsequently global capitalism. Many have argued that these processes were
symbiotic: the invention of the ostensibly universal “man” of psychology and the
social sciences simultaneously entailed the invention of the sub-human “other”.
6 In South Africa, the training of professional psychotherapists happens in aca-
demic psychology departments. I am aware that this is not the case in the UK
and this sometimes means that the “psychology” at which the critique of
Parker (and others) is levelled is a somewhat more narrowly defined discipline.
In particular, although cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and other
approaches proliferate, the psychoanalytic orientation is a dominant rather than
marginal framework for practice and (neo)Freudian theory is an integral part of
any psychology curriculum in South Africa.
7 This meaning of constructivism distorts the origins of the term in a very different
psychological tradition. In Piagetian (and Vygotskian) theory “constructivism”
means something antithetical to this sense of solipsistic individuality, describing
species-specific universal mental processes, shared by all people, regardless of time
or place, that construct human intelligence.
8 The argument that emancipatory politics requires a unified focus was entailed
in what is now referred to as the two-stage political process in South Africa in
which the first and primary project was to deracialise society and, in particular,
for black South Africans to take control of formal political and institutional
structures. The second phase of liberation would then address questions of
54 Changing subjects

socio-economic inequality and other dimensions of oppression such as gender.

Current conditions of gross inequality and widespread gender-based, homopho-
bic and transphobic violence provide an empirical challenge to the effectiveness
of this strategy, and the agenda of new political movements such as the Student
Movement is increasingly articulated in intersectional terms.
9 See the discussion of these dynamics of power in the educational process in
Chapter 6, and the caution from bell hooks (1994) that teachers who are too
cautious about their own power in classrooms may inadvertently disempower
their students.
10 The medical procedure of an “awake craniotomy” provides a dramatic demon-
stration of the neural processes of the talking, meaning-making subject. The
Guardian (23 December 2018) reported that at a public hospital, Inkosi Albert
Luthuli, in Durban, South Africa, surgeons operated to remove a tumour on
the brain of jazz guitarist, Musa Manzini. Not only was he conscious during
the operation and able to talk to the surgeons but he played his guitar while
supine on the operating table so that they could carefully monitor the effects of
their excisions. The physical precision of the surgeons’ hands and instruments
in combination with the talking music-making person ensured that after they
closed the flap of skin over his brain, it was not just his body but his person,
Musa Manzini, the musician, that was restored to wholeness.
11 Archer (2000) highlights the double meaning of “priority”: temporally prior
or antecedent, and of importance or significance. She argues for the priority
of practice, in both senses, in the perennial agency-structure debate.
12 The evolutionary psychologist Plotkin, (1994), frames the relation between
the instincts of the human body and intelligence (or, in Vygotsky’s terms, the
natural and cultural lines of development) as a “nested hierarchy”. In contrast
to the oppositional Cartesian split, it is the body and its instinctual functioning
that makes mind possible.
13 Manganyi’s context is not incidental in his development of a complex psychology
in which the body is so central long before the currently fashionable notion of
embodiment and the turn to affect. In his 2016 memoire, Becoming a black psych-
ologist under Apartheid, he describes how he was barred from the established sites
for supervised internships on the grounds of his race. Under apartheid, it would
have been unthinkable for a black intern psychologist to attend to white clients
and no psychological services were provided for black people. Instead, he was
assigned to work in a neurology ward in a public hospital. By virtue of his black
body, Manganyi was turned away from conventional psychological practices to
focus on the brain and somatic processes of psychic life. In this way, his thinking
is informed by, on the one hand, the politics of discursive constructions of the
raced body and, on the other, by a focus on the substratum of natural physical
processes through which minds work.
14 See the discussion of “ubuntu” in Chapter 3 for further discussion of this
African conceptualisation of dialogical, relational subjectivity.
15 Harré’s (1998) “self” is a grammatical fiction, a way of talking about some-
thing that doesn’t exist, imposing a unity on three disconnected versions of
the self as (1) a collection of traits; (2) others’ constructions of me (I can only
be an object in the gaze of the other); and (3) a curiously ahistorical locus for
viewing the world.
16 Miller wonderfully illustrates these orders of mediation using the example of
a pair of scissors (see 2011, pp. 397–404). The hammer is a less than original
 The subject of psychology 55

example for explaining the qualities of human action, having been extensively
elaborated on by Heidegger in his formulation of the processes of human
“being”. Heidegger’s hammer is simultaneously “ready-to-hand”, a material,
functional object that elicits and facilitates particular kinds of practical action,
and “present-at-hand”, composed of and constituted by a totality of referential
meanings that locate both makers and users in relation to the object in a field
of action (Cerbone, 1999).
SECTION 2

Conceptual tools from

the south
Changing the subject of
psychology
3
UBUNTU
Reconceptualising personhood

Introduction
Current debates in South Africa (that have resonances elsewhere) about the
decolonisation of the academy, in general, and psychology, in particular,
are framed in terms of demands for the indigenous genesis of knowledge-
making and the relevance of such knowledge to the concerns and needs of
the contemporary social world in which we live, learn and teach, and
work. Resistance to economic and political colonisation is rightly coupled
with resistance to the totalising effects of knowledge developed elsewhere
for different purposes that is asserted as universally explanatory. The project
of developing new (even if not entirely novel) bodies of knowledge and
forms of practice is, however, complicated by the necessity of using the
very disciplinary tools of the established theoretical canon that is the target
of critique. In this way, both the content and form of disciplines are per-
petuated, reshaped only minimally by the inflections and accents of new
voices, or by extension or limitation in empirical application to new con-
texts. This is not to suggest that there is nothing to be gained by these
incremental adjustments, particularly in relation to the learning and teach-
ing of psychology for new cohorts of students. It is, however, unlikely that
this process will lead to a Khunian-type paradigm shift or enable the con-
struction of a decolonised or “Africa(n) centred” (Ratele, 2017) psych-
ology. These more radical possibilities are currently being creatively and
contentiously explored by a number of contemporary South African
scholars, at least partly as a reaction to the demands of the South African
60 Conceptual tools from the south

Student Movement (#MustFall) that gained momentum in 2015 and often

in public dialogue in the media (see discussion of these developments in
the third section of the book, particularly in Chapter 5). This political and
intellectual project is in motion and offers new possible horizons for know-
ledge-making, curriculum and pedagogy.
Chapters 1 and 2 have provided a broad reframing of the human subject
and the discipline of psychology in Vygotskian and narrative terms. In this
chapter, I adopt a more specifically focused approach by utilising a core
theoretical concept from (South) African philosophical thought, “ubuntu”,
to rethink the subject of psychological enquiry by placing it in dialogue
with Vygotskian theory. As is being argued throughout this book, although
Vygotskian theory is widely utilised in educational applications, it is not
centrally deployed in delineating the subject of psychology. Similarly, while
the ethical implications of ubuntu are well known and clearly important,
the concept offers a broader theoretical contribution that generally remains
unrecognised. Ubuntu (Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu1) literally means that
a person becomes a person through others. This idea of individual persons
being relationally constituted resonates very clearly with Vygotsky’s notion
of sociogenesis and theories of relational or dialogical selves (e.g. Bertau,
2014; Hermans, 2001). The chapter will draw together these perspectives
suggesting remarkable synergies between ancient African philosophy and
a theory of psychology developed in the early decades of the Soviet
Union, offering resources through which to reframe what is understood as
“psychological” in the Western tradition. I suggest that both Vygotskian
theory and the African concept of “ubuntu” provoke and enable more fun-
damental revisions of our disciplinary parameters, potently reconceptualising
the subject, or the ontological phenomenon under investigation. In
a nutshell, the synergy between these approaches lies in a reformulation of
the relations between individual and social realities, or the psychological
and political domains of experience and epistemology, offering possibilities
for the required paradigmatic shift.

Psychology and apartheid: service, resistance and

the aftermath
The colonising effects of particular strands of psychological theory and prac-
tice have been particularly pernicious in the South African context; I think
here of psychometrics and related practices of measurement, classification
and diagnosis. The history of IQ testing is implicated in racist (and sexist)
ideologies worldwide but very overtly so in the South African context in
which the science of psychology was expressly coupled with religious
 Ubuntu 61

discourses to legitimise the discriminatory and segregationist system of

apartheid.2 In the clinical domain, assessment is similarly framed by dichot-
omous constructions of (ab)normality that can be identified by diagnostic
categories to inform individual treatment. The complicity of clinical psych-
ologists in the implementation of apartheid and other authoritarian systems,
particularly in contexts of conflict or war, is well recognised. For example,
psychologists with official backing from the APA (American Psychological
Association) participated in devising and implementing interrogation and
torture tactics such as those utilised in the American Abu Ghraib prison
particularly post September 9/11 (see for example, Riesen, 2015). In South
Africa, psychologists administered electric-shock conversion therapy for gay
white men in the apartheid-era defence force (see for example, Kaplan,
2001) and often worked alongside medical doctors in the assessment of polit-
ical detainees, effectively legitimating torture and both physically and psy-
chologically abusive interrogation techniques. The complicity of the medical
profession was dramatically exposed in the death in detention of Stephen
Bantu Biko in 1977; medical doctors Lang and Tucker had examined the
detainee shortly before his death and failed to provide medical care or register
any objection to the clear evidence of systematic physical torture. Active
intervention could have saved Biko’s life. The extent of, particularly physical,
abusive interrogation practices was documented in a dossier compiled by
Dr Wendy Orr in the late 1980s and the complicity of medical professionals
was also further corroborated in a subsequent study by NAMDA (National
Medical and Dental Association) (Dowdall, 1991). Perhaps the most chilling
complicity of the medical profession is personified in the medic Wouter
Basson who led the apartheid state’s project for the development and use of
chemical weapons (earning him the label “Dr Death”) .
Psychologists may have been less explicitly implicated than their medical
counterparts in the implementation of torture and abuse of human rights
under detention and beyond in the brutal policing and military control of
townships and everyday life for black South Africans. But the profession’s
complicity was inexcusably manifest in

bland inattention to the human and psychological effects of the

oppressive social engineering experiment of apartheid, and in the face
of evidence of torture. … Attempts to raise these issues at congresses
of the Psychological Association of South Africa [SAPA] raised
heated arguments, walk-outs by sections of the audience and charges
that certain members were attempting to intrude politics into what
should be a professional forum.
(Dowdall, 1991, p. 53)
62 Conceptual tools from the south

In 1961, a break-away “whites only” organisation, the Psychological

Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA), was formed, evidence
that a broadly anti-racist stance (at least in relation to membership) had
prevailed within the existing professional body.3
There were always some pockets of more radical (although incomplete)
resistance to the disciplinary effects of the discipline within the academy
and by extension, in applied practice. The theories and techniques of
clinical psychology were harnessed to provide therapeutic interventions and
support to the victims of apartheid, particularly to survivors of brutal state
violence or to families of detained or murdered activists. The formation
and programmes of action of OASSSA (Organisation for Appropriate
Social Services in South Africa) (Dowdall, 1991; Hayes, 1986; Vogelman,
1987) provide a notable example of these resistant practices. The organisa-
tion began in 1983, establishing regional branches and holding four national
conferences (1986–1989) in various locations across the country on
the campuses of the University of the Witwatersrand (1986 and 1989) the
University of the Western Cape (1987), the (then) University of Natal
(1988). Particularly through OASSSA’s Emergency Services Group in col-
laboration with activist groups such as DESCOM (Detainees’ Support
Committee) and NAMDA (National Medical and Dental Association)
psychologists (alongside social workers and other healthcare practitioners)
used their training in the service of social justice goals with an expressly
political agenda (Vogelman, 1987). “OASSSA became the social conscience
for psychology” (Hayes, 2000, p. 336). More ambitiously, there were some
who thought that OASSSA might contribute to the formation of “A social
science of liberation” (Webster, 1986, p. 38) or provide a forum for the
development of theories of and alternative practices for “intervening with
the political psyche” (Hayes, 1986, p. 44).
While OASSSA may have been (necessarily) primarily practice orien-
tated in response to the psychological and social damage of the inhu-
mane system of apartheid, the context did also provoke an emerging
tradition of critical theoretical psychology. Chabani Manganyi’s seminal
text, Being black in the world, published in 1973 by Ravan Press, provided
a complex engagement with the processes of psychic life in our raced
context. However, as is clear in his recently published autobiographical
reflections, at the time and throughout the decade of the 1980s, he was
consigned to work on the margins of his chosen field, severely limiting
the impact of these ideas on the discipline. Often drawing on the work
of critical psychology in the West (as discussed in Chapter 2 of this
book) a small but significant group of South African psychologists were
engaged in thinking about the (ir)relevance of their discipline for their
 Ubuntu 63

context. The South African journal PINS (whose agenda is reflected in

its title: Psychology in Society) was launched in 1983 and published much
of this work. Other practices of knowledge construction from outside of
the discipline of psychology during this period such as the literary works
of Es’kia Mphahlele and Njabulo Ndebele and, of course, Steve Biko’s
conceptualisation of “black consciousness”, have been retrospectively
recognised as not only of cultural and political value but also having
psychological import.
However, it is interesting that these theoretical developments were
(and, to a large extent, still are) parallel to, and relatively marginal to,
the practice of psychology. In the mode that Ratele (2017) calls “psych-
ology in Africa”, the priority was to extend therapeutic understandings
and practices of care to the most vulnerable in society, in this case, to
those oppressed by colonial history and victimised by the apartheid state
apparatus. In other words, the recognition that psychological trauma
may have sociopolitical rather than individual or biological roots, does
not necessarily dislodge or challenge essentialist conceptualisations of
psychological life. Many such interventions were quite conventionally
framed in psychoanalytic or therapeutic terms to ameliorate “damage”
done to individuals and find ways to recuperate mental health in social
conditions that did not seem amenable to change anytime soon. While
this was extremely important in both psychological and political terms,
as Hayes (2000, p. 337) self-critically reflects, “OASSSA’s successes were
primarily located in the sphere of practice, and yet failed to transform
the conventional understandings of the causes of social and personal
problems”. As we know with the clarity of political hindsight, OASSSA
was operating in the dying days of a repressive regime, soon to collapse
and give rise to the phoenix of the “new” South Africa. The question
of what the “post” landscape of apartheid means is as contested as all other
phenomena labelled “post” and had particular implications for the evolving
practices of psychology with an agenda primarily framed negatively in
terms of apartheid as an inhumane system or, more generally, as anti-racist.
The discipline was now confronted with new challenges of praxis but these
were now mostly aligned with the new political order. However, again,
rather than an articulation of a forward vision of alternatives, many progres-
sive psychologists were initially engaged in a retrospective project to resolve
and “heal” the psychic traumas of the past through an adaptation of
Freud’s “talking cure” in the form of the national Truth and Reconcili-
ation Commission. The TRC focused our collective attention on the past
on the assumption that the dual imperatives of truth and reconciliation
would provide the basis for healing and nation-building.
64 Conceptual tools from the south

The particular framing of the process of nation-building as entailing

uncovering “truths” that would provide closure for victims and amnesty or
the possibility of forgiveness for perpetrators has most often been linked
to the Christian practice of confession, the association re-inscribed by the
proceedings being presided over by the Archbishop of the Anglican
Church, Desmond Tutu.4 However, there are also resonances with African
philosophical principles and political practices that predate colonialism and
have a continuous, mutable vitality both through and post the colonial era.
Peterson (2019a) traces the first mention of ubuntu to two decades before
the British colonial conquest of the Zulu nation and expressly links the
notion to kinship structures, age-cohorts and communal relationships to
land. He also outlines multiple social and poetic forms (such as the practices
of lobola or creative orature in celebrating clan relationships or performing
proverbial “truths”) of this communal life that strengthened both hierarchical
and more horizontal connections between people or served reparative and
reconciliatory purposes when these connections were ruptured or damaged
in some way.
This history confirms indigenous notions of justice that resonate
with and inform the more overtly religious manifestations of the TRC
framework or, perhaps, offers us a conceptual route for understanding the
particular African inflections of Christianity that underpin the unique path
taken by South Africa. In the synergy between these worldviews, justice
is premised on dialogical exchange and consensus decision-making, and is
achieved through reparation (or possibly reconciliation) rather than
(solely) by punitive consequences. Both Tutu (1999) and Gobodo-
Madikizela (2016), who served as commissioners, have made these links
explicit in their writings about the TRC.

The ethics of ubuntu

The concept of “ubuntu” has been widely taken up in philosophical (and/
or spiritual or religious) considerations of ethics (e.g. Metz, 2007, 2011;
Peterson, 2012, 2016) and deployed particularly for anti-racist and other
humanist political agendas (e.g. Tutu, 1999, 2004). In the worldview of
ubuntu, our well-being is inextricably connected to that of others and the
needs of individual selves are subject to communal responsibilities of care.
In its current formulation, it is widely utilised quite loosely in the national
narrative of South Africa to create a sense of an “imagined community”
(Anderson, 1983), sometimes functioning productively to enlarge our
circles of care across race and other lines of difference such as gender,
sexuality or linguistic identities.5
 Ubuntu 65

In order to develop the concept and explore its value in psychological

theory, I will utilise a working definition provided by Desmond Tutu in 1999:

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It

speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give
high praise to someone we say, “Yo, unobuntu”; “Hey, he or she
has ubuntu.” This means they are generous, hospitable, friendly,
caring and compassionate. They share what they have. It also means
my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs. We
belong in a bundle of life.
(Tutu, 1999, pp. 34–35)

Ramose (2015, p. 69) similarly claims that

botho/hunhu/Ubuntu is not readily translated into humanism

… [rather, it is] opposed to any ism including humanism for this tends
to suggest a condition of finality, a closedness or a kind of absolute
either incapable of or resistant to any further movement.

In contrast to this idea of a categorical or taxonomic definition, he

argues that ubuntu is more process than product, better translated as
“humanness”: “a condition of being and the state of becoming, of openness
or ceaseless unfolding” (Ramose, 2015, p. 69).
Whenever a term or word is difficult to translate from the source lan-
guage into the target language or languages, this is indicative of different
conceptual roots, suggesting alternative systems of meaning or a different
worldview. This presents us with both difficulties and opportunities,
requiring and enabling a process of “negotiating” meaning (Eco, 2004),
doing conceptual work. The concept of ubuntu is typically asserted as
a kind of antidote to the “individualism” (for which read “selfishness”) of
Western systems of both thought and social organisation. Interdependence
and mutuality replace the enlightenment subject: “the single individual is
incomplete without the other” (Ramose, 2015, p. 70). In this formula-
tion, “ubuntu” offers an ethical alternative that is communal or collective,
stressing the preservation or restoration of relationships between people as
essential to our humanity. Where these relations are strained or damaged
or even ostensibly destroyed beyond repair, rather than punitive justice,
“ubuntu” both requires and makes possible “the healing of breaches, the
redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships” (Tutu,
1999, p. 5). These relationships extend to include the “dead-yet-alive”,
linking the day-to-day practices and face-to-face encounters to the
66 Conceptual tools from the south

present-absence of the ancestral community. Mphahlele (2002, p. 154)

offers a similar perspective on the spiritual dimensions of ubuntu:

African humanism was originally a religious state of mind producing

moral action; attachment to the soil; social relationships; the art of
healing; the sense of community and its welfare; and a sense of organic
unity or oneness in the universe in which man is the principal partici-
pant, and which is the process permeated by the Supreme Being.

As has already been observed above, this formulation of an African cosmol-

ogy predates colonialism (Peterson, 2019a) and this long history alerts us to
the problematics of assimilating this worldview to later Christian templates.
In particular, the central emphasis on an ethical relation between humanity
and the earth was alien to early colonising morality and remains antithetical
to contemporary dominant philosophical paradigms and the global political
engagements of late capitalism. This organic sense of human life in tune
with the natural order resonates with Nkrumah’s (1998) notion of
consciencism which emphasises balance, motion and wholeness. From this
perspective, in addition to its evident economic value, land becomes more
than simply the material ground for communal living or solely of economic
value (without negating this), and takes on symbolic significance in the
processes and interactive practices of social relationships. From the agonised
position of exile, Mphahlele (2002, p. 340) speaks of the importance of
place in the making of selves and the experience of belonging: “geograph-
ical place, which, however brutal, will never let you go. The very memory
of it gives you identity”. Ubuntu as a system of ethical human relationality
(or the breach or disruption of these empathic relations) has personal,
geographical and cosmological significance.

Ubuntu: justice, reconciliation and forgiveness

Drawing on this philosophical (spiritual) tradition and blending it with
notions of both confession and forgiveness in Christian thought, the
South African TRC adopted this approach to justice: truth as a basis for
reconciliation and forgiveness rather than judgement or punishment.
Muruthi (2006) suggests that ubuntu is an approach to conflict resolution or
peace-making, to be exercised in sustaining, developing or reconstructing
cohesion and community. Ubuntu offers a way of “managing disputes in
a way that preserves the integrity and fabric of society” (Muruthi, 2006,
p. 25). Nadubera (2005, p. 2) similarly suggests that ubuntu is a proto-legal
concept to be deployed in dispute resolution through “conscious
 Ubuntu 67

application” where harmonious relations between people have been dis-

rupted. And, although Metz (2011) is primarily interested to elaborate an
ethics based on the concept of ubuntu, he too has explicitly linked the
concept to legal frameworks and practices of justice.
But, in addition to this public collective notion, ubuntu is also under-
stood as a quality of individual persons, an admirable character trait that
one may possess more or less of, a normative value or attitude that guides
ethical choices and ways of acting in the world. The enactment of
ubuntu entails acts of altruism, “kindness” or generosity towards others in
need but the effects of these actions are reflexive, as much about the
actor as about the other or others with whom one identifies, or with
whom one acts in solidarity. Rather than a transaction between individuals
or a transfer from one person to another, ubuntu is reciprocal or relationally
developed, and individual well-being or psychological health is dependent
on the well-being and health of others. Metz frames this “sharing” in
a more reciprocal way:

The favoured moral theory is that actions are right, or confer

Ubuntu (humanness) on a person, insofar as they prize communal
relationships, ones in which people identify with each other, or
share a way of life, and exhibit solidarity toward one another, or care
about each other’s quality of life.
(Metz, 2011, p. 559, emphasis added)

In Metz’s analysis, ubuntu is more than an impersonal proto-legal concept

and he goes so far as to associate it with friendship or filial affection. In a
similar move beyond the legal obligations of citizenship or encoded sys-
tems of ethics that govern societal formations and practices, Sanders
(2002) suggests a more generous interpretation, linking the concept to
“hospitality” extended to strangers who are neither kin nor friends but
maybe angels in disguise! Philips and Taylor (2009) provide a provocative
exploratory history of the concept of kindness and argue for the revitalisa-
tion of what has come to be taken as an irrational, weak and ineffectual
mode for interacting with others. Mark Freeman’s (2014) text, The priority
of the Other, explores the conditions and possibilities for prioritising others
over the self in both aesthetic (or hermeneutic) and ethical terms. In
Freeman’s framework, the “other” that demands priority is anything
that is outside of the self, variably identified as the sensuous stimuli of
experience, a task or project to be undertaken or to be done, or cultural
objects such as texts or performances to which we surrender ourselves.
However, the primary force of the other that requires our attention is in
68 Conceptual tools from the south

the face (Levinas, 1963) of an-other person who calls on us to recognise

ourselves in them.
These (filial, kind, ex-centric or empathic) relationships between the self
and others are affective and embodied rather than abstract or conceptual. It
could be argued that African kinship systems and communal modes of life
foster and strengthen these relational bonds of ubuntu and confirm the
reciprocal dignity of persons (Peterson, 2012, forthcoming). Conversely,
that colonial and capitalist modes of life destroy social relations, reducing
people to an isolated individualistic existence. As Philips and Taylor (2009,
p. 6) observe: “Independence and self-reliance are now the great aspir-
ations; ‘mutual belonging’ is feared and unspoken; it has become one of
the great taboos of our society”.
There is some Afrocentric literature that goes beyond this to suggest
that only Africans (with varying associative meanings of place/culture/
race) are both deserving of, and capable of, “ubuntu”. Gade’s (2013)
review of the concept demonstrates a wide range of opinion on this that
predominantly seems to hinge on the contested concept of personhood.
Only persons (rather than animals) may be characterised by ubuntu but
some persons may lose ubuntu (and by extension, their status as human)
through immoral actions or ruptures in social relationships, including rela-
tions with the ancestral community. Gobodo-Madikizela (2013, p. 493) cites
a fellow TRC commissioner, Bongani Finca: “That sense of community is
what makes you who you are, and if that community becomes broken, then
you yourselves also become broken”.
Perhaps the historical injustices of colonialism mean that white people
or those who live in the global north (who are necessarily, by definition,
settlers rather than of Africa, or hostile outsiders) are inevitably severed
from this communal harmony with others and with the land. This seems
to be the unexplicated assumption underpinning a position such as that
expressed by Mkhize (2004) and others that there is a distinctive “African
personality … grounded on the assumptions of a common African world-
view and the Africentric paradigm” (Nwoye, 2015, p. 97). The place of
the continent of Africa is asserted as inextricably linked to this worldview,
culture and the particularities of personality (or personhood). However,
similar6 relational concepts exist in other indigenous languages and
cultures, such as in the holistic worldviews of Native American, or of
other first-nation or Aboriginal peoples from, literally, opposite ends of
the earth (the Sami of northern Lapland and the Australian Aborigines or
Maori of New Zealand). These cultural and conceptual commonalities
likely reflect similarities in (precolonial) relationships to nature and in the
practices of human community. To illustrate, the Filipino notion of
 Ubuntu 69

“kapwa” provides a particularly beautiful example of this synergy across

very different and distant contexts. Translation into English is fraught but
the convoluted attempts below suggest that without the necessity of
a mediated detour through this mutually alien language, translation
between Filipino and African languages might be less challenging:

Filipino-English dictionaries generally give the words “both” and

“fellow-being” as translations of kapwa. … It should be noted how-
ever, one word that comes to mind is the English word “others”.
However, the Filipino word kapwa is very different from the English
word “others”. In Filipino, kapwa is the unity of the “self” and
“others”. The English “others” is actually used in opposition to the
“self” and implies the recognition of the self as a separate identity. In
contrast, kapwa is a recognition of shared identity, an inner self
shared with others.
(Enriques, 1992, p. 52)

It is also worth noting that the idea of a distinctive “African personality”

may have less than progressive origins and applications. Manganyi (1973)
and Mama (1995) both report racist caricatures of the “African personality”
or the “African mind” in colonial records. As Böhmke & Tlali (2008, pp.
144–145) note, this idea of an essential African was very commensurate
with apartheid ideology and deployed, “[f]irst in order to justify the infer-
iority of Africans and, second, to enable the control and modification of
African behaviour”. Ratele (2017, p. 320) also highlights that conversely
constructing Africans as “exceptional” and as defined by morally superior
cultural resources may uncritically conceal “prevalent and injurious African
cultural practices”.7
In as much as face-to-face relations or a “shared way of life” may serve
to knit people together, they may also serve to exclude people with
whom one does not share either a way of life or a geographical communal
space. Tutu and Ramose (as examples of this perspective) explicitly claim
the force of the concept of ubuntu lies in its universal scope, as defining
of humanity, and of continuing critical relevance in less personal and
more diverse social formations. Gobodo-Madikizela (2009, 2012, 2013,
2016) similarly emphasises the importance of mutual recognition and
empathic imagination and suggests that this was the purpose and power
of the TRC process. Various and multiple criticisms of the TRC have
been extensively documented (e.g. Abe, 2014; Mamdani, 2002, 2009;
Mangcu, 2003; Meintjies, 2013; Ntsebeza, 2005; Peterson, 2012; Ramphele,
2008) and are increasingly prevalent not only in academic circles but also in
70 Conceptual tools from the south

the popular press and on social media, as we live forward in the aftermath of
that historic moment. The analytic, political and psychosocial shortcomings
of the process include: (1) the reduction of the long history of colonial
oppression to the specific short history of apartheid; (2) the focus on individ-
ual acts of interpersonal violence to the exclusion of more systemic practices
of violence such as the dispossession of people from their land, exploitative
labour practices and the abusive effects on the poor through the discrimin-
atory provision of basic services such as health and education8; (3) the
extremely limited provision of material compensation afforded to victims
was little more than a token; and (4) an over-emphasis on reconciliation
rather than truth (and justice).
However, despite these limitations, Gobodo-Madikizela (2016, p. 10)
argues that

[t]he TRC transformed the silence of trauma – the wordless speech

of trauma – and restored victims’ sense of agency by providing an
environment in which victims were able to break their silence in
front of a national audience. Being recognized leads to the experience
of healthy subjectivity.

In addition to the transformative power of recognition by providing

a national audience for the traumatic narratives of victims, the TRC also
afforded perpetrators a “context within which a new perpetrator subject-
ivity unfolds, one that seeks integration of the uncomfortable reality
within the self at a deeper internal level” (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2016,
p. 12). Mirroring the transformative effects for victims who experienced
recognition, confronting the effects of their past actions, particularly
when this confrontation happens in an encounter with victims or their
surviving family members, perpetrators may experience remorse, a feeling
that entails “recognition of the pain that the perpetrator’s actions have
caused the victim. It is, in other words, an expression of the perpetrator’s
empathic response to the victim’s pain” (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2016, p. 12,
emphasis added).
In this approach, ubuntu has the potential to extend and widen our
networks of belonging and concern beyond those who are “like us”,
whom we know and love, suggesting a need to think about ethics (or
ubuntu) in a “world of strangers”. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame
Anthony Appiah (2005, 2006) offers us a nuanced application of Benedict
Anderson’s (1983) concept of nationhood as an “imagined” rather than
actual community in the African context, to explore the inclusionary
effects beyond the “natural” bonds of kinship and neighbourliness to
 Ubuntu 71

an abstract impersonal category while simultaneously erecting boundaries

of exclusion.

[N]ationalism … exhorts quite a loftily abstract level of allegiance –

a vast, encompassing project that extends far beyond ourselves and our
families. (For Ghanaians of my father’s generation, national feeling was
a hard-won achievement, one enabled by political principle and dis-
passion: though it did not supplant the special obligations one had
with respect to one’s ethnie, matriclan, and family, it did, in some
sense, demote them.) … Nations, if they aren’t universal enough for
the universalist, certainly aren’t local enough for the localist.
(Appiah, 2005, p. 239)

Through the capacity for imaginative empathic thought (Gobodo-

Madikizela, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2016; Peterson, 2012; Philips & Taylor,
2009) and acts of compassion towards or in solidarity with others, and
through enlarging the scope of inclusion of others to whom we are con-
nected and accountable, the individual’s own ubuntu or humanness is
expanded, strengthened, deepened or grown. The inverse effect when
we fail to exercise ubuntu when the situation demands it or, more
abstractly, fail to recognise the humanity of the other, is that our own
humanity is eroded and emaciated. In the post-conflict society of the
German Democratic Republic, the political psychologist Molly Andrews
conducted narrative interviews with activists immediately after the
Berlin Wall was dismantled and again 20 years later. Countering
the idea that forgiveness is the task and burden of victims, one of her
participants, Katja Havemann, made the following poignant and pro-
found statement about the Stasi who had spied on, harassed and tortured
anti-state activists: “They still can’t forgive us [for] what they did to us. … We
are the living guilty conscience. … We’re still alive, we experienced it all.
We are also still witnesses” (Andrews, 2018, p. 2, emphasis added). Being
confronted by one’s own lack of ethical action (or worse) in the eyes of
those whom we (or our ancestors) oppressed and treated inhumanely makes
it difficult for the perpetrator to forgive him/herself and, in a move that mir-
rors the classic psychoanalytic defence mechanisms of displacement and pro-
jection, displaces this guilt and projects the lack of forgiveness onto the
victims whose presence sears the “living guilty conscience”.
There are thus dehumanising effects for the perpetrator who dehumanises
the other. As Mphahlela (2002, p. 151) expresses it: “When you commit
a wrong against others you are hurting yourself, your own soul”. And, again,
this idea resonates beyond the continent with the Filipino framework:
72 Conceptual tools from the south

“Without kapwa ones ceases to be Filipino. One also ceases to be human”

(Enriquez, 1992, p. 76).
In this inversion of the ethical impetus of ubuntu, we find the seeds of
a more comprehensive conceptualisation of personhood: the best and
worst of what we might become is formed through relations with others.
Muruthi (2006, p. 26) suggests that the concept of ubuntu is a response
to two different questions: “What does it mean to be human? What is –
or ought to be – the nature of human relations?” While the second is
a critical question not only for theoretical ethics but also for all of us
interested in a more equitable world and for the ethical practice of psych-
ology, the first is a (possibly even, the) properly psychological question.
And the answer that ubuntu provides us with is that humanity is defined
relationally, not only when these relations are positive and humane, but
inevitably and inextricably. The dialectical process of our relations with
each other consists of morphing syntheses of good and bad, beauty and
terror, competition and collaboration. Our actions towards others impact
not only on their lives but on ours too; selves are formed relationally,
reciprocally and reflexively. From this perspective then, the subject of
psychology is not the “individual” because as Tutu, without elaborating
on his meaning, somewhat enigmatically states, “the solitary individual is
a contradiction in terms” (1999, p. 22). The implications for psychology
is that our unit of analysis cannot be the abstract individual, even where
we explicitly recognise the influences of the cultural, historical and political
contexts within which such individuals live. The concept of ubuntu chal-
lenges this dichotomous framing and provokes us to rethink personhood.

Vygotskian theory: relational consciousness

Mirroring the argument I have just developed about “ubuntu” I would
like to suggest that the conceptual force of Vygotsky’s theory is to be
found in his unique analysis of the relations between individual minds
and social relations or societal formations. Although Vygotsky’s name is as
well known as Freud’s or Piaget’s, the impact of his theory has been far
less pervasive both within and beyond the discipline of psychology. The
“zone of proximal development” serves as the touchstone of the theory,
instantiating Vygotsky’s argument that the potential of mind develops in
society, in relation with others.
The world is mediated for human children, who encounter the world
and its objects through others or through the understanding of others. In
this way, each successive generation can (and cannot but) build on and
develop the culture and knowledge of the previous generation whose
 Ubuntu 73

lives overlap with and accompany them in their engagement with the
present. The extended temporal zones of human development in shared
intergenerational life provide the scope for education or the optimistic,
progressive future-orientated zone of proximal development (ZPD). In
Vygotsky’s famous law of sociogenesis:

[E]very function in the cultural development of the child appears

on the stage twice, in two forms – at first as social, then as psycho-
logical; at first as a form of cooperation between people, as a group,
an intermental category, then as a means of individual behaviour, as
an intramental category. This is the law for the construction of all
higher mental functions.
(Vygotsky, 1998, p. 169)

While these claims are widely recognised as “true” they have been reduced
to little more than truisms. It is hardly contentious to suggest that children
are socialised or “learn from others” and this formulation is seamlessly
assimilated to reductionist behaviourist social learning theory. Turning the
developmental sequence described here by Vygotsky as first between people
(interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological) on its head, the
burgeoning field of “activity theory” empties heads and disperses their con-
tents into the social world of tools and collective action. In much the same
way that ubuntu has been deployed in critique of “individualism”, these
neo-Vygotskians (e.g. Cole, 1995; Daniels, 2001; Daniels, Cole & Wertsch,
2007; Wertsch, 1998, 2007)9 conflate individual mental processes with
individualism (bad) and collective activity with social collaboration (good).
In the process, they miss the radical conceptual force of Vygotsky’s
perspective. It is a moot point that culture (or “the social”) influences
psychological life and it is also quite evident that because people live in
social groups, they are able to exert exponential control over the natural
environment through tool design and use in collective action. There is
nothing distinctively Vygotskian about these claims.
The contribution of Vygotsky lies in the way that the theory fundamen-
tally alters the dichotomous framing of individual psychological life and
the social, cultural, political and historical world. It is not simply that the
individual person’s meaningful experience of the objects and landscape of the
world is filtered through the understandings of others; rather, her person-
hood is formed through interactions with others. Meaning (or thought)
occurs first between people and is subsequently internalised providing the
very substance for the construction of individual personhood. The child
becomes herself, through others. And doesn’t that sound familiar!
74 Conceptual tools from the south

Miller’s (2011, p. 197) explication of Vygotsky emphasises his conception

of the “social self”10 and the inextricable links between the processes of
psychological and social life that are formed in and through language:

[T]he thinker or person engaged in the drama is not “social”

because she is compelled, or constrained, or encouraged, or enabled
to act in conformity with some external “social” or “cultural” or
“historical” force. Such forces may exist and certainly other people
exist with whom we communicate and interact. But in verbal
thinking, the social other is not out there but is part of the social
interaction with oneself. … This concept of the person as a social indi-
vidual, a person who is socialized not from the outside but from
within, a person for whom the other is also me, my-self, a person
who does not live in opposition to society but who by living
constitutes society, culture, and history, stands at the very core of
all his [Vygotsky’s] thinking and serves to unify the various strands
of his theory. Social activity may originate in interaction with others
but it culminates in an inner dialogue.

As outlined in Chapter 1, from a Vygotskian perspective, the process of

development is one of increasing individuation rather than the reverse but
this “individual” is formed in and through the shared medium of language
that moves inward from the social terrain of communication to enable
“[s]ocial interaction with oneself” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 274). The intern-
alisation of language means that the psychic interior is permeated by,
and never severed from, shared social system of meanings.

Speech for oneself has its source in a differentiation of an initially social

speech function, a differentiation of speech for others. Thus, the cen-
tral tendency of the child’s development is not a gradual socialisation
introduced from the outside, but a gradual individualisation that emerges
on the foundation of the child’s internal socialisation.
(Vygotsky, 1987, p. 259, emphasis added)

In this way, we develop a social (dialogical) subjectivity in which we can

only be ourselves through the incorporation of the internalised “other”,
in which it becomes possible to treat “oneself as another” as suggested by
Ricoeur (1992). Vygotsky (1997, p. 77) refers to this as the “dual nature
of consciousness” and comments that, “the notion of a double is the pic-
ture of consciousness that comes closest to reality”. Self-regulation may
be seen as constraining possibilities for innovative thought and action due
 Ubuntu 75

to the internalisation of the regulatory language of social prescripts and

prohibitions, whereby we police ourselves through what Foucault (1988)
terms the “technologies of the self”. In Du Bois’ (1903) theory of race
and psychic life, the concept of “double consciousness” entails
a damaging fracturing of the self. (See Chapter 1.) Manganyi (1973) like-
wise refers to two schemas for the body, individual and sociological, that
may be congruent (for white subjects) or conflictual (for black subjects).
This splitting is thus a form of psychic damage inflicted on marginalised
subjects (by race or other dimensions of identity such as gender or sexuality)
who are denied wholeness or singularity.
However, while marginalised subjects may experience a dislocation
between the internalised other and the “true self”, Vygotsky’s theory of
human development suggests that dual consciousness or the splitting of
the self (as both the I who acts and the me who is observed and regu-
lated) is a defining feature of human psychological life.11 The capacity for
self-regulation that produces the anxieties and dislocations that Du Bois
describes above, simultaneously creates the psychic distance from current
realities (including one’s experience of one’s self in the world) to enable
resistance, in which the “two warring ideals” may be overcome, effecting
change in the self and possibly in the world. We are never entirely sub-
sumed either by the regulatory other (as an external social interlocutor or
as the internalised self-regulator) nor by the exigencies of the present
material world. Du Bois recognises this contradictory quality of the
“double consciousness” in his articulation of the “second sight” afforded to
raced (or otherwise marginalised) subjects who, unlike those in dominant
or privileged positions, always have access to more than a single (ignorant)
perspective on the world.
In other words, the splitting of the self and the capacity for self-
regulation is simultaneously the means by which we can dialogically
become distinctly ourselves, agentic and creative actors in the world.
Without the internalisation of the other, without the internalisation of
the language and meanings of intergenerational life, the individual child
would not develop recognisably human forms of life, would not be individu-
ated. Ratele (2017, p. 325) asks: “Is it possible then to conceive of subjects as
primarily part of others, as some cultures are wont to do?”
Paradoxically, we can only become individual persons capable of inde-
pendent ethical choices and agentic actions to change present (inherited)
conditions and shape different futures, through our interdependent rela-
tionships with others. These others through whom we become ourselves
offer us the resources of culture not as dead relics of knowledge but as
living traditions within whose tides each subsequent generation, if they
76 Conceptual tools from the south

are not to drown, must learn to swim or surf. “[H]uman life presupposes
a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the
intellectual life of those around them” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 88). Contrary
to conceptions of personhood as individual subjectivity, culture provides
“the very medium within which we can understand ourselves” (Ricoeur,
1981, p. 143). These historical legacies, the cultural air that we breathe or
the tides of tradition that we ride are not unequivocally positive or good;
on the contrary, much of what we inherit is, at best, only partial under-
standing or erroneous and, at worst, violent, traumatic and damaging.
However, we cannot escape being implicated in these histories, they are
the stuff from which we make ourselves.
Although this process of individuation, of becoming ourselves is develop-
mentally delineated in Vygotsky’s theory, this does not imply culmination in
adult identity as a final, fixed form. While the process of becoming our-
selves may be more evidently active as children grow up in the socialising
domains of the family and education, the self remains a process rather
than a product, perpetually encountering the world through others and
engaged in a flow of internal conversation. In the words of Margaret
Archer (2003, p. 193):

As human beings, we all know that we live a rich inner life: that
we are in continuous communion with ourselves and that we
engage in a continual running commentary with the events going
on around us. We are aware of how our inner lives monitor our
responses to external situations in which we find ourselves and
indeed modify some of the circumstances to which we willingly
expose ourselves, be these natural, practical or social.

The dialogical structure and narrative flow of psychological life that are
constituted by and, in turn, constitute the social interactions of communal
life, produces a form of psychic power that defines human agency. The
notion of individual uniqueness or the idea of a particular individual per-
sonality in opposition to the social (or cultural or political) world is very
firmly entrenched in the discipline of psychology and more widely in the
post-industrial world. But it is a static misconception that conceals both
oppressive conditions and possibilities for individual and social change.

Vygotsky’s conception of a person as a social individual is one of

the major contributions of cultural-historical psychology to our
understanding of what it means to be human; a human be-ing.
Although social activity may originate in interaction with others, it
 Ubuntu 77

culminates in an inner dialogue that is the expression of conscious

awareness or self-consciousness. … Herein lies the key that unlocks
some of the intractable theoretical problems in psychology, and
beyond that are often formulated as unbridgeable oppositions
between mind, on the one hand, and body, matter, environment,
and society on the fingers of the other hand. Underlying these
oppositions is an inner-outer or inside-outside dialectic that stubbornly
resists the collapse of one pole into the other, despite vigorous attempts
to accord primacy to one or the other.
(Miller, 2014, pp. 43–44)

The conventional split between psychological (or private) life and the
political public world is challenged by this alternative framework that
enables me to think of my-self as an-other and conversely, the other as
my-self. Therein lie both theoretical and political (or ethical) implications
and provocations for new forms of psychological praxis.

In conclusion: rethinking personhood

Psychological life cannot be understood through attempts to isolate individ-
uals as natural bounded entities from social life but neither will we make
much progress by attempts to negate the interiority of human life to focus
solely on social life or collective practices. Vygotsky’s law of sociogenesis
and the concept of ubuntu both emphasise the formation of personhood
through others. But neither framework of thinking erases individuality or
interiority.12 While ubuntu offers a distinctly African perspective on psy-
chological life, I have argued that it does not define a peculiarly African
psyche but rather, is a productive reconceptualisation of psychological life,
of all human psychological life. My argument is thus in line with Ratele’s
(2017, p. 316) objective to delineate a psychology that is “not provincial or
essentialised” and to “produce Africa(n) centred knowledge that is at home
in Africa as well as within global psychology” (emphasis added).
In this way, the concept of ubuntu offers a radical shift in theorisation,
and possibilities for resistance and renewal in developing the discipline.
I have argued that this reconceptualisation resonates with Vygotskian
theory which emphasises the internalised other that creates a “double
consciousness” or the capacity to treat “one’s self as another” (Ricoeur,
1992). This splitting of the “self” enables the converse empathic construction
of the “other as self” in relations of ubuntu. The self is thus, by definition,
a “social self” formed in language, in relation with others. Culture, history
and the social world do not form an external backdrop to personhood but
78 Conceptual tools from the south

infuse the inner world of the self, are the very stuff of which we are made,
through which we narrate our individual and collective identities, connect-
ing the present to the past and future, and ourselves to imagined others in
different places and times.
From both perspectives, what is suggested is not the evacuation of the
psychological into the social, or the erasure of interior subjectivity.
Rather, these conceptual resources articulate the movement of the social
within, enlarging the scope of what is termed psychological and reframing
possibilities for understanding what it means to be human, and the
dynamics of both individual and social change. In place of the “individual
psyche” in opposition to the “collective communal social world” we
have a psychosocial phenomenon that is relational, reciprocal and reflex-
ive – a dialectical process of being and becoming rather than an inert
entity. This rethinking of personhood has important implications for both
the theory and practice of psychology.

Notes
1 The term “ubuntu” and this definition, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (or some-
times “Ngabany’ abantu” – more literally, other people), are in the Zulu language
but the concept exists in almost all indigenous South African languages and also
beyond in sub-Saharan Africa. The seSotho term “Botho” is also commonly utilised
in official contexts in South Africa and defined as “motho ke motho ka batho”.
2 In the domain of education, resistant practices include attempts at translation (of
tests into indigenous languages or at least from American into South African
English) and attention to the cultural relevance of test items. The pointlessness of
this project is explored in greater detail in Chapter 5 of this book. For now, suf-
fice it to say that this kind of surface level tinkering does nothing at all to shift the
underlying premise of the approach: that psychological life (in this instance, cog-
nitive processes or intelligence) is a quantifiable substance that is differentially and
normally distributed among people, producing universal standards by means of
which to categorise individuals.
3 For more detailed discussions of the history of psychology in South Africa,
see Long, 2016; van Ommen & Painter, 2008. Sanders (2002) offers a rich
history of psychological questions about “race” and humanity addressed by
Afrikaans intellectuals within, but mainly without, the discipline of psych-
ology in the formation of the apartheid state.
4 The Anglican church in South Africa is also referred to as the “Church of Eng-
land” and represents a particular form of Christianity that retains the important
emphasis on confession that is typical of Catholicism. These traditions of confes-
sion, forgiveness and reconciliation resonate with both the TRC and the African
concept of ubuntu. However, as noted by sociological theories (particularly,
Weber) about the processes industrialisation, there are other protestant traditions
that underpin the highly individualised units of labour required by capitalist for-
mations of society. Foucault (1988) has linked these forms of work and social
organisation to the “confessional” form of therapeutic practice. These disparate
 Ubuntu 79

discursive strands were likely all influential in the constitution and experience of
the TRC, and continue to inform analysis of this crucial historical process.
5 However, the notion of “ubuntu” may be misused to distract attention from
failing state provision in a severely asymmetrical society by insisting on some
inherently African sensibility of “community” that will ensure social cohesion
and care for those most marginalised. The democratic order has struggled to
deliver adequate basic services (such as housing, water, sanitation, electricity,
security, health and educational facilities) to large numbers of South Africans.
These failures of the state cannot be absolved by an appeal to noble African
values of communal reciprocity and responsibility.
6 Noting these similarities does not imply homogeneity. On the contrary, the
notion of holism incorporates widely diverse interpretations and practices
across time and place. However, the linkages between these modes of life and
meaning-making are useful to displace the dominant formulation of these
questions in terms of oppositions between Africa and “the West”.
7 Although he does not elaborate on what these “injurious” practices might be, we
may legitimately extrapolate from Ratele’s scholarship on African masculinities
that culture is gendered and differentially rather than homogenously experienced.
8 The Apartheid Archives project established at the University of the Wit-
watersrand was an attempt to engage with ordinary people in the narration
of everyday life experiences under apartheid and to engage these realities
from a psychosocial perspective (see Stevens, Duncan & Hook, 2013). This
project has continuities with, but more importantly discontinuities from,
the collection of narrative testimony in the TRC. It is noteworthy that the
project was initiated only in 2008, more than a decade after the TRC pro-
cess had been completed, reflecting a kind of hiatus in both political and
theoretical work that was sadly characteristic of many fields of (academic)
life in the initial post-apartheid period. (For example, see Chapter 5 for
a discussion of how political and intellectual energies were deflected and
lulled in higher education in South Africa during this period.)
9 See Yasnitsky (2012) for a critique of activity theory framed as a “revisionist
revolution” in Vygotskian studies. Miller (2011) provides a detailed analysis of
Vygotsky’s texts in support of his scathing critique of activity theory, including
a particularly incisive dismantling of Wertsch’s explanation of mediation as
a form of distributed cognition. In a much earlier critique, Miller (1989, p. 5)
suggests that activity theory involves an “inside-out transformation of Vygotsky
into a social learning theorist”.
10 For an extended discussion of Vygostky’s “person as a social individual”, see
(Miller, 2014, pp. 40–44).
11 William James (1962, p. 189) similarly conceptualised the self as consisting of
an “I” and a “me”, “being as it were duplex, partly known and partly
knower, partly object and partly subject”.
12 In another disciplinary context, Njabulo Ndebele (1986) alerted us to the ways
in which protest literature (and other forms of art) while speaking critically to
oppressive political conditions, inadvertently re-inscribed colonial perspectives
that focused on Africa as an arena of spectacular action, flattening the interiority
of African subjectivity.
4
(MIS)UNDERSTANDINGS AND
ACTIVE IGNORANCE

Introduction
This chapter creates a conceptual dialogue between ideas taken from the
disciplines of psychology and sociology to explore the ways in which we
make knowledge about the world and, yet, simultaneously and almost
more vigorously, actively defend our ignorance. In similar vein to the
focused conceptual exploration of ubuntu in Chapter 3, this chapter utilises
a particular key concept, in this case, a concept that is conventionally asso-
ciated with cognitive psychology and may be productively articulated in
Vygotskian language: (mis)understanding. However, by connecting
this psychological theorisation of the process of “changing minds” to
the problematics of power and political change, the chapter extends the
conceptualisation of human subjectivity provided in Chapter 1 and chal-
lenges the content and form of the discipline of psychology as explored in
Chapter 2. Two South African theorists provide the conceptual touchstones
for the exploration of this issue: (1) Ronald Miller’s idea (2011, p. 407) of
mis-understanding as a kind of “absolute understanding”; and (2) Melissa
Steyn’s idea (2012, p. 11) of an “ignorance contract”. I bring these
two theories into dialogue with one another out of both theoretical and
practical interest. My sense of the limits of the boundaries of psychology is
partly informed by my own learning history that has entailed many detours
and diversions off the beaten disciplinary track and, partly, informed by
the particular conceptions and historical trajectory of psychology in the
South African context. As described in Chapter 2, the curriculum for
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 81

undergraduate studies reproduces the “standard” divisions of the North/

Western textbook (personality, development, social and cognitive psych-
ology including all the classic experimental studies and grand narrative theor-
ies) while the postgraduate curriculum is predominantly conceptualised
as professional training focused on therapeutic interventions in response to
individual problems formulated in the binary terms of (ab)normality. Neither
of these formulations (which are of course mutually reinforcing) has proved
particularly useful to me theoretically, practically or politically in the domains
in which I work. But then again, simply abandoning the disciplinary ship for
alternatives in philosophy, sociology or literary discursive theory is not
a viable option for me either in relation to the questions that matter to me
and which are central to the concerns of this book: How is learning possible?
How does change happen? Or, even more importantly, what prevents
learning or blocks change?
A dialogical exchange between these two specific theoretical resources
extends our thinking through these questions. Miller offers a particular
articulation of Vygotskian theory and Steyn interprets and applies the
“Racial Contract” of Charles Mills (1997) to the South African context. My
version of their ideas may not entirely coincide with theirs and, further,
the synergies that I find between their positions may not be recognised by
either Steyn or Miller independently. This is another way of saying any
mis-understandings are mine entirely! The specificities of the South African
context are most certainly relevant to the development of their individual
positions and to my employment of their arguments; in particular, the chal-
lenges of learning-teaching in higher education in a highly unequal and
racialised terrain; and, more broadly, the problematics of understanding one
another across lines of difference in post-apartheid1 society. But the provo-
cations of this particular context may have something pertinent to offer for
all of those who are engaged in knowledge production and, indeed, in the
tricky business of education or in the development of intergenerational nar-
ratives or intercultural dialogues about the world as it is and as we would
like it to be. The past may not predict the future, but the present is never
entirely severed from the past, more continuous with it than we would
like to imagine. The dual shocks of the UK Brexit and the US Trump
presidency are only eruptions along global fault-lines that have long been
present, submerged not too far below the surface. While current global
movements and migrations are accelerated across physical, cultural and
technoscapes (Appadurai, 1990), it is clear that far from the (digital and
terrestrial) game being played on increasingly level playing fields, the terrain
traversed remains rocky and extremely uneven. As is well established in
classical social psychology (most famously in Sherif’s Robbers Cave
82 Conceptual tools from the south

experiment), increased contact between groups of people does not inevitably

lead to increased understanding. Conversely, when the context of interaction
is unequal, contact may increase conflict and deepen misunderstanding.
I will primarily use the South African context to explore these issues because
it is my context, and because it is an intense crucible of historical and
contemporary global conflicts.

Mis-understanding, understanding and not understanding

As a departure point for his argument, Miller (2011) uses Vygotsky’s
(1987, p. 182) concept of “conscious awareness”, a composite term that
captures the distinction between “knowing of ” or the awareness derived
from experience, and “knowing about” or the meaning that we attach to
our experiences. This distinction is very clear in the different meanings or
conceptions that children and adults attach to the same situation or
experience as demonstrated by both Piagetian and Vygotskian theories
of cognitive development. Using the distinction between awareness (of-
ness) and consciousness (about-ness), Miller distinguishes between differ-
ent kinds of understanding (or knowing). The term “innocence” refers to
the absence of any awareness or consciousness of something. But the
term “ignorance”, unlike innocence, refers to a kind of knowing and
non-knowing. We cannot ignore (be ignorant of) something we know
nothing about. The act of ignoring involves excluding certain experiences
or shutting down our awareness of the situations we wish to ignore.
Ignorance, then, is a state of consciousness in which awareness is limited
and produces gaps in our knowing or what we could refer to as non-
understanding. Although we may choose to ignore (to be ignorant of)
certain things or situations, a state of ignorance may also be thrust upon
us; chosen for us by powerful others such as parents or teachers or media
informed by state or business interests, or it may simply be a function of
age such that our experience is limited or distorted in ways that, although
we may know about something, our understanding remains incomplete as
non-understanding. Here the analogy is with the term non-entity that
does not refer to a not-entity or nothingness but to a limited or restricted
kind of entity.
Unlike ignorance that derives from a failure or absence of awareness,
there is another kind of lack of, or limited, or distorted understanding
that Miller calls not-understanding. In this case, it is consciousness or the
about-ness of our experiences, the meanings we attach to our awareness,
that are problematic. The radically different ways we can understand,
conceptualise or rationalise our lived experience is well captured in the
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 83

Marxist concept of “false consciousness” as opposed to a conscientised class

consciousness2: the same “facts of the matter” are understood in radically dif-
ferent ways. Not-understanding, then, is a problem of consciousness (of
meaning or conceptualisation) rather than awareness. Hearing people speak-
ing an unfamiliar language captures this sense of not understanding very
clearly; we are aware of the sounds and are even aware that these sounds are
meaningful to those happily conversing in Zulu or Swahili or Spanish, but
do not understand their meaning. Similarly, we may have an awareness that
domains of knowledge exist although we cannot ourselves participate in
these fields as we do not understand their particular forms, techniques and
conceptual language. This kind of general surface knowing that something
exists is of course typical in the internet information age and puts a new spin
on the old adage “a little knowledge is a bad thing”. I myself have this clear
sense of “not-understanding” the concept of imaginary numbers despite my
scientist partner repeatedly explaining it to me. I can follow the English
words that come out of his mouth and even reproduce the explanation fairly
accurately in a way that sounds quite sensible but, nonetheless, I know that
I don’t really “get it”. In cases such as these, we know that we do not know,
that we do “not understand”! The condition of “not-understanding” entails
awareness but without the attachment of meaning or understanding to the
experience. We may have a sense that there is a domain of meaningful
action and thinking belonging to others but for us, this remains a blurred,
out-of-focus field. This kind of not understanding is of course very typical in
classrooms where we are busy learning to know about something that is not
yet known and are doing so deliberately. But as teachers, we also know that
if students can tell us what it is that they do not understand, the problem is
half-solved, and the more precisely they can put their finger on what is “not
understood”, the easier our task becomes.
A far greater problem confronts us when students do not know that they
do not understand and may even be very certain of their understanding but
it is simply, from our perspective, wrong! Miller argues that this absolute
form of not understanding or “misunderstanding” occurs when we
inappropriately impose an “aboutness” or meaning on an event or task.
And in this sense, misunderstanding is a form of “absolute understanding”
(Miller, 2011, p. 407).

The paradoxical nature of misunderstanding is that it is experienced

as understanding. To misunderstand a situation is to attach an incor-
rect aboutness to the awareness of a situation that produces a kind of
perseveration of experience in which consciousness and awareness are
locked together. In this sense, misunderstanding is a condition of
84 Conceptual tools from the south

misplaced consciousness. Consequently, misunderstanding cannot be

experienced as such but only as understanding. Misunderstanding can
only be recognized by another person and what the other person
recognizes is confusion; a joining together of an awareness and an
aboutness that do not belong together, at least from the perspective of
the other person. Because misunderstanding is experienced as under-
standing, it presents a formidable barrier to learning.
(Miller, 2011, p. 407)

Although we may pay lip service to the notion that no learner approaches
a task with an “empty head” we often implicitly reframe this as a “half-
full” head which simply requires topping up. Conversely, in some
academic circles, there is a growing timidity among teachers who are
(perhaps in many cases not without reason) less certain than they once
were of their pedagogical authority. This may lead to uncritical validation
of what learners already know in some misguided expression of solidarity
or, at best, the provision of favourable conditions for learning to occur
without teaching, through exploratory trial and error. Neither of these
responses will lead to what Vygotsky (1978, p. 89) called “good learning,
in advance of development”. Miller (2011) alerts us to the problematics
of a zone of proximal development in which that which is already known
may be an obstacle rather than a building block to facilitate new learning.
In Piagetian terms, “schemes of assimilation rush to apply” (Pascual-
Leone, pers. comm, 2018) and the act of understanding always entails the
active imposition of pre-understandings. Miller refers to the preoperational
child’s failure to conserve3 as an example of misunderstanding, where the
child attaches or imposes a particular form of meaning on the task (assimi-
lates to the scheme of the level of the water as the sole indicator of
volume) that cannot be dislodged either by providing new meanings
(explaining what the task is about) or by increased awareness through
repeated experiences of the task.
The phenomenon of misunderstanding (experienced by the learner as
understanding) may be of particular pertinence in instances where different
learning histories coalesce, or where the pre-judgements of tradition (Gada-
mer, 1975) may be inappropriate for new problems or situations, resulting
in what Ortega (1960, cited in Miller, 2011) refers to as “blindness”,
a metaphorical reference to the literal blind spots that are subsumed in
an apparently complete field of vision. In Siri Hustvedt’s (2012, p. 138)
collection of essays entitled Thinking, Looking and Living, she references the
substantial body of research on what is termed “change blindness”, the
phenomenon of simply not seeing changes that are made to images or film
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 85

sequences. Having viewed something once, our frame of reference means

that we see what we expect to see rather than what is before our very
eyes. Perhaps the most well-known example is the “Invisible Gorilla”
experiment conducted by Simons and Chabris (1999) in which a person in
a gorilla suit walks through a basketball game. Despite this very unusual
disruption to the scene, more than half the viewers, who had been
instructed to count the number of passes between the players, fail to regis-
ter the “gorilla’s” presence – they simply do not see it! This mode of
attending exclusively to that which is expected may work very well for
repetitive, routine situations. Freeman (2014, p. 11) refers to this mode as
“‘ordinary oblivion’, the condition of our being caught up, mindlessly, in
the frantic movement of our lives” and implies this may even be
a necessary and functional response in the face of too much information
and stimulation. However, this inattention to detail, or failing to register
that which is unexpected or novel in a given situation, is less effective for
dealing with dynamic scenarios. In the same way that our attention may be
directed towards some elements of the perceptual field and away from
others, our thinking or knowing may be similarly constrained to exclude
significant facts or even chains of argument that do not fit with what we
already know. The blind spots in the rear-view mirrors of cars or the
degeneration of peripheral vision are so dangerous for a driver precisely
because her field of vision appears complete and she does not know that
there are spots that she cannot see. So, too, such ignorant blind spots in
our knowledge are not experienced as absences or lacunae; rather, they are
concealed and our understanding seems comprehensive and coherent.
Miller articulates a theoretical and pedagogical response to the cognitive
obstacles in teaching and learning that cannot be solved by incremental
developmental accretion or simply supplying additional new information.
In this context, the task of the teacher is to change the definition of the
situation, to create a new way of seeing what it is about, to teach for un-
learning. Critically, this will entail a reframing of the situation for the
learner, creating conditions in which the application of what is already
known is disrupted rather than reinforced.4

[P]erforming these [familiar or known] actions may serve to

entrench the existing understanding that must be overcome if new
understanding is to be achieved and in this way pre-understanding
may serve to block and hinder the acquisition of new understanding.
Hence, the necessity on the part of the learner for a moment of
surrender or letting go in order for the learning-teaching process
to succeed. For the teacher, this means that instead of trying to
86 Conceptual tools from the south

“teach” new understanding, helping the learner to shed inappropriate

pre-understanding may be more productive.
(Miller, 2011, p. 378)

In her remarkable autobiography, Tara Westover (2018) recounts the

extraordinary journey that she undertook to earn herself the title of her
book, “educated”. Growing up in rural America and denied regular
schooling by a father who was a religious fanatic (and surely also by
Westover’s own assessment, psychologically disturbed) when she finally
began to participate in the world of books and theoretical knowledge, she
became consciously aware of her “mis-understandings” and changing
knowledge. Most learners simply take these changes for granted as they
acquire new understandings about the world, forgetting previous (mis)
understandings or covering over gaps in their knowledge in new apparently
seamless ways of thinking. A dramatic example of this changing subjectivity
is captured in Westover’s recognition that history is an interpretive human
endeavour:

I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected –

a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world.
Now I needed to come to terms with how the great gatekeepers of his-
tory had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if
I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was
the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe
I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people
agreed upon was not the history I had been taught … from the ashes
of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the
ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.
(Westover, 2018, p. 275, emphasis added)

In her characteristic capaciousness of thought, she imagines that respected

scholars might, in the ways that she has, have to deal with retrospectively
recognising their “own ignorance and partiality”. This imaginative sense
of how thinking and knowledge develops not only for individuals but for
communities of practice leads Westover not into fashionable cynicism or
sceptical despair but into the practice of constructing possible grounds for
new and different understanding that are always incomplete and open to
further developments and insights. The question of mis-understanding is,
however, importantly not confined to classrooms or to the domains of
textual and disciplinary knowledge and she is in the process not just of
understanding the world differently but of becoming a different person.
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 87

As Miller (2011, p. 380) says, “understanding is not simply an adjunct or

product of our cognitive equipment that can be acquired or refined but is an
essential aspect of our being”. And so we now turn to a second theoretical
thread for thinking about the production and maintenance of ignorance in
the social world and in our relations with one another.

Ignorance, innocence and forgetting

Steyn’s explicit focus is on knowledge of the apartheid past and particular
forms of ignorance entailed by racism or other forms of sociopolitical
oppression. Her engagement with the question of ignorance mirrors
Miller’s concept of mis-understanding as a kind of presence rather than
absence. She argues that the ways in which we remember and, importantly,
forget our social history in a conflictual society like South Africa entails
collective practices of communication that actively construct and maintain
“an implicit agreement to misrepresent the world” (Steyn, 2012, p. 11).
This is not ignorance in the ordinary sense of not-knowing; rather it is an
active assertion of ignorance, whereby what is known is taken as complete,
certain and sufficient, shutting down our attention or closing down any
question or demand to think further or differently about things. Protest-
ations about “not-knowing” are simultaneously claims of innocence or
a defence in mitigation of judgement. As I have already argued from
Miller, ignorance and innocence are not synonymous; rather they are quite
different forms of “not knowing”.
Although authoritarian systems of government exercise their power by
means of overt brutal force, they also critically rely on what Foucault
(1979) termed “docile subjects” who will regulate their own actions and
those of others in society. The apartheid state created these internalised
mechanisms of control by the aggressive assertions of racist ideology
and the repression of different ways of knowing the world and one
another. Ignorance was actively generated not only through the absence of
information or knowledge but also through the active circulation and per-
petuation of myths and taboos about forbidden crossings of race boundaries
through the institutions of religion, education and highly controlled media.
In addition, the physical architecture of “apart-heid” (literally translated as
apart-ness) entailed the separation and segregation by race in all spheres of
life, including where we lived and through the control of, particularly
black people’s, movements and possibilities for work. Apartheid, therefore,
created the conditions for ignorance both in the sense of “about-ness” (by
the propagation of a particular racist version of the world and of unquestion-
able differences between “us” and “them”) but also, crucially, by preventing
88 Conceptual tools from the south

shared experiences or “awareness of” realities across boundaries of race and

culture. Apartheid was quite deliberately and systemically designed to control
all contact, conversation and possibilities for “knowing” one another. How-
ever, despite the powerful machinations of the state, Steyn convincingly
argues that ignorance of racist oppression under apartheid was an active,
deliberate process of “not wanting to know”:

Not to know or not to know enough, you have to turn aside, you
have resolutely to ignore the signals of distress that come our way. In
these circumstances the plea of lack of knowledge is uncompelling. It
treats as an involuntary state what is in fact a choice.
(Geras, 1998, p. 35, cited in Steyn, 2012, p. 12)

Mark Freeman (2014, pp. 68–69) distinguishes what he terms “willed

ignorance” from the “ordinary oblivion” described above, and notes that
this is “a much more purposeful and pernicious form of not-seeing, geared
precisely toward shutting out whatever harsh realities we might encounter”.
Of course, this ignorance or refusal to know was (and is) as Appiah (2006,
p. xviii) says, the “privilege of the powerful” – black South Africans lived
under no such illusions. Although the mis-understandings and active ignor-
ance discussed here might seem to be about the “facts” of history, this
knowledge (or ignorance) of the past produces the grounds for knowing
ourselves and others in the present and is particularly relevant to the inter-
generational transmission of what is typically referred to as the apartheid
“legacy” (which is more like the inheritance of debt than family china!):

Increasingly some white South Africans claim that they did not know
what was happening during apartheid, that it was not their generation
that was responsible for apartheid; but that of their parents; and even
that it was not as bad for black people under apartheid as it is for white
South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa.
(Steyn, 2012, p. 8)

Gobodo-Madikizela (2012), one of the commissioners of the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission, has written about her experiences of using
the testimonies of the TRC to provoke her white South African students
to acknowledge their complicity in our racist past and recognise the con-
tinuing benefits of their subject positioning. In many cases, this entails
recollecting or remembering events of everyday life that seemed ordinary
or self-evident at the time, and recognising the ways in which we enacted
oppression in the everyday acts of using “whites only” buses, benches,
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 89

toilets, schools and, very often, particularly in the relationships and exchanges
between young white children and adult black workers in our homes.5 This
confrontation with “new” facts about the past and recognition of personal
complicity and implication in the asymmetrical power relations of society
produces what Gobodo-Madikizela terms an “empathic unsettlement”.
In tracing the development of his theory through his autobiography,
Erikson (1970, p. 756) speaks of experiencing a “conceptual as well
as a philosophical shudder” on hearing the world referred to as the
“outer-psychoanalytic outerworld”. In this phrase the usual antithesis
between the external social world and the deeply interior psyche is dis-
rupted, causing Erikson’s frame of understanding to shift dramatically.
James Baldwin observed an audience enraptured by speakers at a rally of
the Nation of Islam: “the people looked toward them with a kind of
intelligent hope on their faces – not as though they were being consoled
or drugged but as though they were being jolted” (1993, p. 49). This dis-
placement of what is taken-for-granted creates a shifting of the epistemic
frame that is viscerally experienced. In Miller’s terms, this (un)learning
process entails attaching new meanings to past events, recognising earlier
experiences (such as the events and experiences of an apartheid child-
hood) for what they were about.
The task of remaking the meanings of the past is complicated even
further by the inter-generational “inheritance” of children born or grow-
ing up post-apartheid (in other words, who have not known first-hand,
have no experiential awareness of, apartheid, even as young children).
This is South Africa’s “hinge generation” that Eva Hoffman (2004) has
written so insightfully and eloquently about in relation to the Holocaust.
The positioning of these young South Africans in the present is not
severed from history. The past is present, encountered or (not) known,
first and foremost, through their parents who may: (1) be silent about the
past; (2) continue to actively assert racist mis-understandings of the world;
or (3) make pleas of “not knowing” and, therefore, claims of “inno-
cence”. James Baldwin (1993, p. 6) “identifies white ignorance as an
‘appalling achievement’ that has as a core element that one should not
care to know: ‘It is the innocence which constitutes the crime’”. For
those advantaged by the inequalities of the past (all white South Africans),
this “innocence” is positively asserted as an exoneration of complicity and
in defence of intergenerational privilege. From this defensive position,
neither the past nor the present can be understood differently or from the
perspective of the other. Achebe (1988, p. 491) powerfully captures the
effects of privilege as blunting the imagination by spreading “a thick layer
of adipose tissue over our sensitivity”.
90 Conceptual tools from the south

Languages of (mis)understanding our-selves and others

Despite the destruction of the overt racialised oppression of the past and
the current absence of state mechanisms of racialised control (even the
converse, legislated constitutional equality), the contours of separateness
remain in the tacit, taken-for-granted understandings that we have of
how the world works and of racialised others. Many South Africans
continue to lack awareness of one another’s (racialised) realities and to
assert their ignorance as innocence and their mis-understandings as abso-
lute knowledge or certainty. The role of language in this regard is not
incidental. No one can dispute the centrality of language in the Soweto
uprising of 1976 in which black school learners took to the streets to
protest the introduction of Afrikaans as the sole medium of instruction
at school. Ironically what this did (both at the time and in popular
imagination thereafter) was to eclipse the colonising power of English,
situating it as a liberatory language in opposition to Afrikaans. More
recently, this pro-English/anti-Afrikaans position has been articulated
within the Student Movement of 2015/2016, at the University of Stel-
lenbosch where the retention of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction
(albeit with the inclusion of English translation facilities and some dual
medium courses) has been interpreted as a means to bolster a racist
enclave of whites-only education. The Luister (2015) documentary made
by student activists utilises the injunction to “Listen!” to articulate the
ways in which the language of Afrikaans and the institutional language
policy create barriers to understanding both within and outside of
classrooms.
Most South Africans are of course multilingual but, despite now
two generations of post-apartheid schooling, the majority of white South
Africans remain unable to speak an indigenous African language, and Eng-
lish remains the language of power, education and access to work and all
that flows from these ostensibly meritocratic systems of the democratic
state. Language hierarchies act in concert with the alignment of race and
class, through the institutional mechanisms of education and the market
economy. Neville Alexander’s (2003, 2004, 2011, 2012, 2013) oeuvre on
the critical relations between language and education, and, hence, between
language and knowledge, work and class, is pivotal to thinking about the
constraints and possibilities for such conversations between South Africans.
Aligned with other projects of decolonisation (wa Thiong’o, 1986) and
emancipatory education (Freire, 1972, 1973), Alexander (2004) argues that
mother-tongue (or as he more accurately terms it, first language) instruc-
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 91

tion is imperative, particularly (but not solely) in the foundation phase of

schooling. Alexander’s argument is framed pedagogically: the cognitive
demands in learning both skills (such as reading and writing) and content
(such as life sciences) are exponentially increased if learning in an unfamiliar
language which is in itself still a subject of learning. But Alexander’s
emphasis on mother tongue for education is more than narrowly peda-
gogical, extending to epistemological questions of cultural and social
capital (Bourdieu, 1986), and to considerations of human worth, and
both collective and individual identity.
The role of language is pivotal to the process of transmitting culture,
the taken-for-granted meanings and patterns of life established by previous
generations, joining the natural parameters of physical life in producing
the contours of social life as simply the “way things are” in the world. In
much the same way that the natural world and its constraints are experi-
enced as part of our unthinking bodies (we breathe and walk without
attending at all to the qualities of air and gravity that make these actions
possible), language functions to naturalise the social world and enables us
to live, breathe and walk among others without consciously attending to
the specifics of that world.
Language (and by extension, culture and the law) is imposed from the
outside. In Derrida’s (1998, pp. 39–40) terms this process is most starkly
evident in the imposition of the language and culture of the colonial
other which creates a monolingualism that is also inevitably monolithic
and oppressive:

First and foremost, the monolingualism of the other would be that

sovereignty, that law originating from elsewhere, certainly, but also
primarily the very language of the Law. And the Law as Language.
Its experience would be ostensibly autonomous, because I have to
speak this law and appropriate it in order to understand it as if
I was giving it to myself, but it remains necessarily heteronomous,
for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law. The madness of the
law places its possibility lastingly [à demeure] inside the dwelling of
this auto-heteronomy.
The monolingualism imposed by the other operates by relying upon
that foundation, here, through a sovereignty whose essence is always
colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressibly, to reduce language
to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous. This can be
verified everywhere, everywhere this homo-hegemony remains at work
in the culture, effacing the folds and flattening the text.
92 Conceptual tools from the south

The project of decolonisation (in all domains of cultural life but in South
Africa most immediately and pressingly currently expressed in relation to
higher education) might be understood as resistance to this “flattening” of
the complex warp and weft of the textures of social life, against the thinning
of histories into a single line, against the idea that a single language might
incorporate all legitimate meaning. The limitations of monolingualism are
both epistemic and political. Our ways of knowing (and not knowing or
(mis)understanding) are “confined within the boundaries of our language
and we can only step out of it by stepping into another language” (Van der
Veer, 1996, p. 249). In the South African context, this stepping out of the
dominant language of English and into other indigenous African languages in
both schooling and higher education is long overdue and both the local and
global academy is impoverished by our failure to respond to this imperative.6
In addition to our knowledge losses, monolingualism re-inscribes and repro-
duces inequalities and racial and ethnic segregation. Those who are dominant
(speak the dominant language, have access to dominant intellectual and other
forms of capital) have particular vested interests in “not knowing” about the
lives of others and asserting their ignorance as knowledge. In claims that
seem to me perhaps only slightly exaggerated, Skutnabb-Kangas (1998,
2002) has vociferously and repeatedly argued that monolingualism threatens
world peace and destroys the diversity of knowledge resources in ways that
may ultimately be not only devastating for humanity but potentially fatal for
the planet. Sanders (2010, p. 50) observes that repairing broken social justice
depends on “one’s preparedness to be heard to speak in languages one does
not know … one cannot speak in a language one does not understand. … But
we must all do the impossible”.

Narrative imagination and conversation

Appiah (2006) proposes “conversation” as both the metaphorical and literal
“solution” to the central question of this text: how is learning or change
possible? The very minimal condition for such generative exchange is that
we speak the same language. We must have some shared meaning if we are
to find points of difference or otherness in these meanings. Further, Appiah
alerts us to the interpretive work entailed in dialogical exchange if it is to
have the power to create shifts in understandings. “[I]t is conversation, not
mere conversion, that we should seek; we must be open to the prospect of
gaining insight from our interlocutors” (2006, p. 264). Learning in this way
from others entails more than accumulating new facts or bits of information
from them; rather, it entails relinquishing our position to imagine the
world from another’s point of view, gaining a new sense of what things are
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 93

about. This form of imagination is arguably best triggered by narrative, by

stories of experience rather than rational argument aimed at convincing the
listener. As Bruner (1986) argued, narrative has the power to “subjunctivise”
experience, dislodging us from the here-and-now and suggesting possibilities,
creating “what-if” worlds.
Reading novels or “true” stories, watching film-narratives or engaging
with narratives in multiple visual or aural modalities provides us with
moments or pockets of time in which we can “lose” our-selves (Ricoeur,
1981) and become part of other lives and worlds. From a Vygotskian per-
spective, Valsiner (2015, p. 94) similarly asserts the power of literature
and the performing arts to release and enhance “development”, affording
these imaginative fictions the extraordinary role of leading our ‘real’ lives,
creating futures and (re)directing action:

Such fictional characters are synthetic – they are invented by the

authors, yet they carry with them their believability as if they were
real. Likewise, in real human development we create fictions –
images of our future as rich or poor, married or divorced, honored
or despised. We live our lives forward – imagining the pleasures of
becoming adult and the wisdom or misery of becoming old. We
even invent elaborate images of what happens once we stop
living – hell, heaven and purgatory can be imagined but not visited.
In sum – the human psyche is a perpetual constructor of the
imagined world that leads our real living. The focus is on synthesis
of new forms of feeling, thinking and acting.

If fictive narratives have such extraordinary power, the telling of “real”

stories in conversation with one another may similarly work to release
our imagination if we open ourselves to participate in the everyday stories
of another’s life. Molly Andrews’ (2014) book Narrative Imagination and
Everyday Life explores the imbrication of imagination in ordinary, every-
day life. Rather than polar opposites, she argues, the imagined and the
“real” operate in the same embodied domain of meaning-making.
Ricoeur (1978, p. 143) suggests that the productive potential of language
to release new possibilities of meaning lies in the stereoscopic or simultan-
eous split-reference to the world as it is and as it might be imagined
through the “capacity of metaphor to provide untranslatable information
and … yield some true insight about reality”. This process of imaginative
meaning-making happens by keeping multiple meanings in tension with
one another to “produce new kinds by assimilation and to produce them
not above the differences, as in the concept, but in spite of and through the
94 Conceptual tools from the south

differences” (Ricoeur, 1978, pp. 148–149, emphasis added). This involves

first a “semantic impertinence” (1978, p. 145) or discordance between
the “real” and imaginative domains which is then resolved in a “semantic
innovation, thanks to which a new pertinence, a new congruence, is
established” (1978, p. 146). Ricoeur suggests that these imaginative
insights offer new exploratory trajectories of understanding before they come
to be sedimented in concepts that require abstraction from experience and
the consolidation or resolution of differences rather than allowing them to
remain actively in play. Hermans (2001, p. 250) suggests that this capacity for
imagination enables us “to construe another person or being as a position
that I can occupy”.
Individual life histories offer us ways of imagining the world of others
across time and place and provide multiple cultural and social resources for
the making of ourselves and our own understandings in our present con-
texts. In many ways, this is the attraction of narrative psychology: making
the political, personal and restoring what the cultural psychologist Shweder
(1991) so aptly describes as “the stuff” of life that seems evacuated from
much of psychological (and social science) theory. However, the place and
time from which the story is told, to whom it is told and for what purpose,
are themselves subject to change. In particular, reading the past from the
perspective of the present is fraught by the entanglement of personal lives
in the historical fabric of conflict and how we understand our collective
trajectory. To illustrate this, I offer my father’s story, not his story but my
story of him and not even really that but rather a shifting story of my read-
ing of one aspect of his life and the ways in which it is threaded into my
own. The photograph below is of my father (the little blond boy in the
centre of the image) in his first school and has been a feature of my office
for the past 15 years (see Figure 4.1).
I had heard stories from my father of his early schooling in a single
classroom where multiple grades were taught in the same space by
a single teacher who moved from one end of the room to the other,
switching levels and subjects as she did so. Although this sounds chaotic
and impossibly challenging to my adult (teacher’s) ear, in my father’s
account it sounded fun and creative, and seemed the likely reason that he
was able to skip the third grade, having picked up two years in one by
jumping between groups with the teacher. I received this picture from
my aunt after my father’s death and was mesmerised by this image of
a rural school. My fascination was partly because it concretised the tales
I had heard of my father’s exceptional intellect as a child and re-inscribed
my notion of him as a role model: he was the first in his family to go to
university and became a highly successful engineer. But the present
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 95

FIGURE 4.1 My father’s first school

Family photograph, author’s own

context of my work and life was the main reason that this picture rather
than any other in the photo album leapt out at me. I was working with
optimism and enthusiasm on an alternative selection programme for uni-
versity admissions, aimed at identifying and developing the potential of
black students, many of whom came from schools that looked very like
that of my father, a small single-room classroom, pit latrine toilets and
rough, grassless grounds that were weeded and hoed by the children
themselves.7 The image of my father’s humble beginnings resonated with
my confidence that the potential of these first-generation students would
be recognised and that they would go on to succeed both at university
and beyond in the world of work. And indeed they did. The picture
served to remind and encourage me (and students with whom I shared
the story) that education can lead to dramatic social mobility.
However, this reading of the image naively (ignorantly, not innocently)
conflates historical time zones and with this, critical differences between
my father’s story, mine and the narratives of first-generation black
students in the South African academy. The image is startling because the
children in the picture are white8: no white children of either my gener-
ation or subsequent generations went to schools that looked like this.
And, indeed, often students are puzzled about the picture and take
a while to identify it as a school, sadly not because no such schools cur-
rently exist in post-apartheid South Africa but because the children in the
96 Conceptual tools from the south

image are white. And so the image speaks not only of the power of
education but also of the effectiveness of the elaborate affirmative action
programme of apartheid that provided the supportive context for my
father to do what he did, and that made it possible for me in the next
generation to become the first woman in my family to go to university
and the first (including the boys) to continue with postgraduate study.
The desire to follow in my father’s footsteps and become an engineer
was simply part of who I was as a young child and through my high
school years. But I made a last minute switch to literature (simply
because I loved to read) and psychology (about which I had no idea at
all!). I am always grateful that I had the freedom to make this choice
simply on the grounds of what interested me most. But this “choice”
was of course inflected by my subject positioning in terms of race, class
and gender. I knew from a very young age that I wanted my father’s life
rather than my mother’s (who was, like the mothers of all my school
friends, a “stay-at-home mom”). I was never dissuaded by my parents,
teachers or anyone else from pursuing the (still) male-dominated career of
engineering and was one of only a small minority of learners in my all-
white, all-girl high school to take the requisite subjects of mathematics and
physical science that would make that future possible. However, my relin-
quishment of this dream was also not met with any sanction, partly because
of the pervasive sexism of the social milieu: no one (probably even includ-
ing me although I didn’t articulate this) really imagined that I would work
for life rather than for a brief period before “getting married, having chil-
dren and settling down”. This may seem unthinkable for readers in the
“West” where at that time (the early 1980s) the second wave of feminism
had long since crested, but this is an effect of race and class in the colonised
world and, particularly, in apartheid South Africa. I always feel that my
brother who followed me to university a decade later was paradoxically dis-
advantaged by being a boy: he did the practical thing, studying commerce
to become a banker, rather than literature although he too loved to read
and went further than me in that he was a writer of poetry. Of course
black girls (or boys) did not imagine futures for themselves in which they
would not have to work for a living; neither could they luxuriously choose
to study what they loved rather than what would deliver the best possibil-
ities for earning a living. And the students that I teach now are all
(regardless of race, class or gender) much more deliberate and conscious
about the links between their studies and possibilities for work in an
increasingly precarious world.
This re-reading of family history does not entirely negate the role of
individual agency (including acting on idiosyncratic penchants for some
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 97

things rather than others) nor the critical importance of learning and
teaching, but it does situate these generational family shifts in the political
contexts that produced historical privilege first for my father and then for
me. While these moves were happening, the parents and grandparents of
the current first-generation black students, continued to attend schools
like my father’s rural one-room classroom, probably in many instances,
without the agile, innovative teacher. And so the picture remains in my
office speaking to me of the energy, passion and hope to be found in
learning and teaching but also demanding that I acknowledge my privilege
and angering me that race, class and gender are still key determinants of
possible futures for so many.
The transformative power (both for individuals and social collectives)
of narrative lies in how individual stories are imaginatively connected to
the stories of others across time and place, and articulated with theoretical
networks of knowledge. The dynamic exchange of conversation entails
something qualitatively different to the attendance of a live performance,
even one in which the positions as teller and listener, performer and audi-
ence, shift. Recognising the full humanity of others entails being willing
to look one another in the eye, to recognise one another (Taylor, 1994)
and may entail negating something of oneself, recognising both aspects of
our own identities that have been secured through inhumane and unjust
histories, and recognising the gaps and lacunae in our understanding. In
Levinas’s famous formulation, “Consciousness is put into question by
a face” (1963, p. 352). The face of the other’s humanity has the potential
for changing understandings and subjectivities in the “in-between of
creative and unexpected possibilities that emerge when we open ourselves
up to an otherness that is not of our own making” (Baerveldt, 2014,
p. 545). Embracing such a position of vulnerability and openness may be
discomforting, disruptive and unsettling, even psychically dynamic.
“Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each
other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away” (Baldwin, 1962/
1993, p. 30). While ignorance may constrain our individual and collective
growth and potential for change, knowledge (of the other) may be
considered risky, dangerous and threatening.
“Ignorance thus provides an important ‘insulating medium’ for the
reproduction of a hierarchical racial order, both a consequence and cause
of non-relationality, of living past each other” (Steyn, 2012, p. 21). The
current repetitive reassertion of past ignorances in the present is, there-
fore, a way of “avoiding the truth” or avoiding our past selves, or for the
younger generation, the pasts of those we love, that have delivered unjust
privilege and benefits that continue in the present. For young white
98 Conceptual tools from the south

South Africans, the intense shame of confronting these truths bolsters the
psychic defence of ignorance. Beyond the litany of historical acts of racist
violence themselves, Baldwin identifies this refusal to know, to see or to
understand as the crime for “for which neither I [he] nor time nor history
will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds
of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” (Baldwin,
1993, p. 5, emphasis added).
Gobodo-Madikizela (2009, 2012, 2013) articulates a more fully psycho-
analytic account of both the “forgetting” of painful traumatic memory, and
the assertion of racist knowledge and ignorance, as psychic defences of the
coherence of the subject.9 She suggests that what is needed are “provocations
to empathy” (2013, p. 221) or a kind of imaginative triggering that may
circumvent the hermetically sealed self that is asserted as a knowing subject.
The demand for changing the story, remaking memories and confronting
live histories in the present may be risky and destabilising for subjects whose
stories of them-selves include “narrative smoothing” (Spence, 1986) conceal-
ing lacunae and disjunctures that enable us to “shore up” our identities
against change (Crites, 1986, p. 165). By contrast, we are called on to enter
into new forms of exchange that entail “the kind of intimacy, the kind of
involvement with other people that we both fear and crave” (Philips &
Taylor, 2009, p. 112). They further argue that this ambivalence reflects our
psychological vulnerability; in the classic psychoanalytic formulation, it is our
resistance to these conversations and exchanges that paradoxically reveals our
desire for such intimacy. Likewise, Gobodo-Madikizela (2013, p. 221)
argues that “[t]here is an intrapsychic dynamic at work in the provocation of
empathy, particularly in relation to the pivotal turn to perspective taking and
gaining an integrated view of both the self and the other. In essence, it is
gaining new consciousness – seeing things anew”.

Conclusion
Engaging with intransigent forms of knowing, misunderstanding and active
ignorance is critical to the knowledge production project of the academy
and beyond, to the (im)possibilities for knowing one another across boundar-
ies of difference and other-ness. By using these conceptual tools for analysis,
it becomes evident that the ways in which we misunderstand one another
are not susceptible to change through reasoned persuasion or to correction
by the supply of new information.

Being ignorant is therefore quite a complex state of being. In large

measure, the issue is how much we care to know about each other’s
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 99

lives, past and present and where we recognise the limits of our legit-
imate claims to knowledge of each other to end. Choices around
ignorance, to know or not to know, are deeply implicated in choices
to take or evade responsibility in relation to others (Smithson, 2008).
We do not, in fact, want all the knowledge we potentially could
have because there are costs to having knowledge and shared inter-
cultural and interracial meaning, a consideration which has not often
been recognised.
(Steyn, 2012, p. 22)

The task confronting activists and educators alike is, therefore, to create
possibilities for un-learning, for dismantling and deconstructing ways of
knowing that effectively defend our ignorance and prevent new forms of
both knowing and being in the world. This will entail:

1. Reframing educational tasks to dislodge mis-understandings. In this

view, the zone of proximal development is not about scaffolding10
and extending current knowledge but enabling learners to experience
something new;
2. Hearing silenced versions of the world, and developing what Steyn
(2015) calls “critical diversity literacy”, the ability to read and interpret
and imagine across difference;
3. Engaging in conversations with new and different interlocutors
because our ignorances vary along lines of difference.

In Vygotskian terms, the construction of new understanding for one’s self

entails the ability to self-regulate in new ways by means of an internal
dialogue. But as Miller (2011, p. 406) notes “before we talk to ourselves
in the course of our inner conversations and in order to do so, we first
must talk to others without whom our humanity remains only
a possibility and our souls a singular impossibility”. The challenge is thus
to create moments for conversation between people that disrupt the
powerful and affirm those less powerful; that broaden the spectrum of
knowing in ways that are both destabilising and generative. Through such
encounters, the internal conversation becomes plurivocal and contrapuntal
(Said, 1993) including varied voices with the potential to challenge ignorance
and misunderstanding masquerading as the coherence of innocence and
understanding.
In narrative terms, what we are engaged in is generating new storylines.
This entails not only imaginative projective futures but also imaginative
empathic pasts, retold, re-appropriated in ways that will enable us to
100 Conceptual tools from the south

understand the present in less ignorant or purportedly innocent ways.

Relinquishing our dual-role as author and protagonist in our own narra-
tives to become less central characters (perhaps versions of ourselves that
we have resisted or repressed) in the stories of others may enable us to
build new versions of our-selves. Striving to overcome lacunae in our
understanding of the world, ourselves and others, entails not only the
accumulation of more understanding but the simultaneous unravelling of
misunderstandings. Ethical ways of living and relating to one another are
not to be found in a state of innocence claimed on the basis of ignorance
or forgetting. Rather, recognising our culpability and entanglement with
one another beyond the current moment enables us to imaginatively stretch
backwards into “if only” pasts and forwards into the “what if” futures
(Andrews, 2014) of ourselves and others.

Notes
1 As with other phenomena such as conflict, colonialism, modernity, structuralism
typically now designated “post”, the post-Apartheid era comes chronologically
after but articulates a continuing living aftermath rather than a break with the
apartheid past.
2 This designation of some forms of consciousness as “false” is much debated in
Marxist analysis. A “class in itself” may have consciousness of societal conditions
but may not yet have attained the mobilising perspective of being a “class for
itself”. This does not, however, mean that people’s ideas about social realities
are false.
3 For readers who are not psychologists, the classic conservation experiments
enabled Piaget to demonstrate the qualitatively different cognitive schemes
and operations that are applied by children at different stages of development
in making sense of the world. Two containers of the same shape and size are
filled to the same level with liquid. Once the child is satisfied that there is the
same amount of liquid in both containers, liquid from one is poured (in full
view of the child) into a differently shaped container (e.g. shorter but wider)
such that the level of the liquid in the new container is now different. Despite
having watched this action, the preoperational child is now convinced that
the liquid volumes are no longer identical because they do not appear to be
the same. This task makes it evident that understanding is informed only
partly by perceptual cues. Active mental operations enable the older concrete
operational child (and all adults) to conserve the volume of the liquid across
the physical transformation: identity (“it is the same water, nothing has been
added or taken away”); reversibility (“if the water was poured back into the
original container, the levels would be the same”); compensation (“if one
takes both height and width into account, rather than only one or the other,
the volume is the same”).
4 The pedagogical import of these ideas is more extensively explored in Chapters 5
and 6, including implications for the projects of transformation and decolonisa-
tion in higher education.
 (Mis)understandings and active ignorance 101

5 See, for example, Tamara Shefer’s (2012) work on the emotional labour of
black nannies in the upbringing of white children and the significant position
that they occupy in the symbolic psychic landscape in the recollected narratives
of these children once adults. The work of sociologists Jacklyn Cock (Maids
and Madams, 1980) and more recently, Shireen Ally (2009) demonstrate the
articulations between the public and private spheres and the ways in which the
domestic labour of black women underpins the life of (almost entirely, white
even in post-apartheid society) middle-class, nuclear families.
6 See further discussion of the issue of linguistic and cultural capital in higher
education in Chapters 5 and 6.
7 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the access programme Teach-Test-Teach at
the then University of Natal.
8 Despite the fact that the picture definitely predates (my estimation is circa
1943/1944) the formal legislation of apartheid, segregation of children in
schools was obviously already in force, with only white children in my father’s
first school despite it being situated in the majority-black rural Eastern Cape.
The location of this school would have been very close to the Matatiele
school, King Edward High school, which is currently still segregating learners
(although ostensibly by language) into different racially homogenous classes
(Govender, 2019). The 2019 academic year has begun with media exposés of
this case and a similar case in another part of the country in the small town of
Schweizer-Reneke, where Grade R learners were seated at different tables
according to race (Shange, 2019). These shocking cases make evident how per-
vasive race-thinking and raced inequalities remain in an ostensibly democratic
education system.
9 See Kaminer & Eagle (2010) for an overview of the historical roots and present-
day manifestations of traumatic stress in (post-)apartheid South Africa. They
articulate strong linkages with the well-established literature on Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) but also explore the local particularities of the South
African context and suggest possibilities for (psychoanalytic) therapeutic practice
and other forms of community-based interventions.
10 This notion of scaffolding has been popularised as a Vygotskian concept, even
as the central pedagogical approach to employ in the zone of proximal devel-
opment. Although Vygotsky did use this metaphor, it was popularised by
Bruner in an article entitled, The role of tutoring in problem solving (Wood, Bruner
& Ross, 1976). This source elaborates a building block approach to learning
that presumes a shared framework of understanding, describing learning as
shadowing the regular and inevitable path of development. In this paradigm,
education provides temporary structures or frames into which the developing
intellect may grow. Although this approach may accelerate development, pro-
ducing what Vygotsky (1978, p. 89) called “good learning … in advance of
development”, it is addressed to a situation in which the future shape of the
structure is commensurate with the foundations. This chapter explores counter-
situations in which these conditions do not pertain, in which the foundations and
framework are themselves subject to question, interrogation and unlearning.
SECTION 3

Intergenerational subjects
in changing worlds
5
THE QUESTION OF POTENTIAL
A narrative of Vygotsky in action,
then and now

Introduction
This third and final section of the book will present accounts of applica-
tions of Vygotskian and narrative psychology in the South African context,
both within and beyond the academy, across three time zones: under apart-
heid and in the early transition to democracy (Chapter 5), in the first
decade of the new millennium (Chapter 6) and finally, in Chapter 7, into
the present and projected future. However, these zones of praxis are not
compartmentalised nor linearly sequential and, as much as the past provides
explanatory lines for thinking and practice in the present, the present
vantage point provides for imaginatively reworking and reinterpreting
history. These three chapters will therefore oscillate between past and pre-
sent, weaving together retrospective and prospective imaginaries. Chapter 5
focuses specifically on the possibilities for individual and collective change
through learning and teaching in higher education in the final decade of
the 20th century in the context of South Africa’s changing political land-
scape. However, this earlier period of change will also be explicitly linked
to and rethought through the present historical moment, particularly in
relation to contemporary politics of higher education.
In the inscription of culture in textual and other material objects and
symbolic processes, including language, the sociohistorical meanings of
previous generations remain alive within us, in our formation as narra-
tive subjects. This is the conundrum that must be confronted in any
attempt to theorise the individual processes of learning and change, the
106 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

possibilities for transforming knowledge production, and the wider collect-

ive processes of sociopolitical transformation. The intergenerational quality
of human life means that the present never escapes the past but it is sim-
ultaneously infused with imagined futures and the narrative arc stretches
in both directions: historical traditions weigh heavily on and constrain
the shape of present-day knowledge and practices, but the possibilities of
yet-to-be future worlds that belong to the younger generation have
a simultaneous loosening and enabling effect. Education is focused on this
pivotal moment between past and future: university educators are engaged
in the task of continuing and developing disciplinary traditions and
the induction of a new generation of scholars who will be able to carry
forward existing lines of enquiry and disrupt them, sometimes even reject-
ing them entirely to go elsewhere. The world beyond university walls in
which graduates will live and work creates obligations to pressing present
and future imperatives that inform the aspirations of students (and their
families) in the educational space. In more generous political terms, edu-
cation is also seen as a means to transform the sociopolitical landscape,
creating a future that can transform relations to the past, somehow the
remarkable dragon that sets its own tail on fire. The university is therefore
a peculiar blend of sedimented tradition and youthful energies and future
dreams. It is, in Vygotsky’s most famous and widely used concept, a zone
of potential development.
I will explore this idea of potential by focusing on two historical
moments in South African higher education: first, the late 1980s/early
1990s when the cracks in the dominant edifice of apartheid opened
up space for innovation and creativity, typically on the margins of the
academy; and second, the present unfolding context, after the student
uprising of 2015–2016. It is not coincidental that there is a generational
gap between these two historical moments. The students of today are the
children of the students of the 1980s and 1990s, the “hinge generation”
(Hoffman, 2004) whose parents lived through apartheid and walked into
a democratic future into which their children were born. Despite remark-
able gains, current demands for free, decolonised education highlight the
limitations and failures of the democratic regime in the higher education
sector and beyond. In particular, changes in the racial demographics
of participation rates may be cause for celebration but do not negate the
perpetuation of socioeconomic inequalities in the meritocratic order. The
potential of the past has been, at best, only partly realised and new zones
of potential are opening up, provocatively challenging us all, especially
educators, to imagine new modes of acting, thinking and being. The present
project for the future entails decolonising the discipline of psychology, and
 The question of potential 107

the subject of psychology, the “mind” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986) or, more
generally, human subjectivity.

A wormhole narrative connecting past and present

In the dying decade of apartheid, historically white universities in South
Africa began to incrementally open access for black students. This tenta-
tive movement happened in the context of highly unequal racialised
schooling, requiring innovation to effect fair and accurate assessment of
applicants, and creating an impetus for curriculum transformation. How-
ever, the disruptive potential of the political and pedagogical energies of
this period were interrupted by the transition to the democratic order
which effected a “normalisation” of mainstream practices in education
and multiple other sectors where NGOs, civil society and researchers and
practitioners were at work on the margins, imagining futures that now
seemed to have arrived.1 This produced a hiatus in which these energies
were predominantly invested in national and institutional projects with
the expectation that we were progressing towards the non-racial, non-
sexist egalitarian society promised by the Mandela miracle and enshrined
in our constitution. From the standpoint of the present, that moment
often seems more mirage than miracle.
Nostalgia may delude us into thinking that before subsequent errors
and mis-steps, there was an ethical political impetus or even an alterna-
tive world which might be recovered. From this perspective, all the
fault-lines of the present may be traced to earlier failures that are
patently obvious in the glare of hindsight. This is a dominant narrative
among today’s younger generation who blame their parents, teachers
and political leaders for “selling out”, confident that they would have
done things differently. But, imagining ourselves back into that earlier
context can only be done from the vantage point of the present where
the consequences of those earlier actions and failures are already in play,
already unravelling in new unpredictable ways. Time travelling through
the wormhole between now and then cannot recover the past nor
remake the present afresh through erasing it but the juxtaposition of
these time zones may provide us with ways to imagine alternative
futures. Past actions did not deliver a perfect present and the critique of
the younger generation incisively nails ways in which we faltered and
failed, particularly in ensuring the redistribution of land and other economic
resources that would enable a more egalitarian social structure. However,
this ostensible clarity is not all-encompassing and there are new blind spots in
our retrospective vision.
108 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

The demands of the present are both continuous with and distinct from
those that the older generation had to confront. In addition to the
changing dynamics of our own local history, the global context has shifted
dramatically. The tentacles of global capital are now far more powerful and
flexible than the monolithic multinationals of the past. Climate change is
a real and present threat to the future of humanity and reactionary politics
and violent “othering” are mutating and exploding. The impact of these
global dynamics on higher education is enormous. The ether connects us
to one another across multiple borders and boundaries in liberating ways,
altering the practices and possibilities of research, education and the world
of work. But global connectivity is also homogenising and bureaucratising
higher education, loosening traditions and tightening links to the market.
The coming fourth industrial revolution promises (or threatens, depending
on your perspective) to further accelerate these changes in unpredictable
ways. It is therefore equally erroneous to argue that “nothing has changed”
as it is to argue that “everything has changed” and harnessing history in
present struggles will entail far more than retrospective pronouncements
about what “should have” or “could have” been done. “Articulating the
past historically does not mean recognising it ‘the way it really was’. It
means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”
(Benjamin, 1940, p. 391).
In the storm of history, each generation is compelled to meet the
demands of their time but future visions may be animated by critical
engagement with the past. By oscillating back and forth, we can “reconsti-
tute the conceptual object from a point of view located in the present in
such a way that the history produced is one which has calculated effects
concerning present strategies for action” (Henriques, Holloway, Urwin,
Venn & Walkerdine, 1984, p. 100). We are challenged to engage in what
Foucault referred to as a “thoughtful presentism” which “constructs the
past in order to illuminate the conditionality – not the inevitability – of the
present” (Long, 2016, p. 220). In this way, without collapsing into either
teleological optimism or cynical pessimism, we may be able to follow the
trajectory of the mythical Ghanaian Sankofa bird, flying forward while
looking backwards to gather the wisdoms of the past. Benjamin (1940,
p. 392) enjoins us to “brush history against the grain [because] … what we
call progress is this storm”.

Counting transformation then and now: what counts?

To evoke Einstein’s observation once again, “Not everything that counts
can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”, the
 The question of potential 109

question of transformation in South Africa (which definitely counts) is

a process that is routinely reduced to counting. This counting is suspect
in two senses: first, it inevitably relies on the spurious apartheid categories
of race and, in the process, re-inscribes them; and second, numbers tell
only a partial story about what is or is not being substantively trans-
formed, in particular, about whether society and its institutions are
becoming less racist, more democratic and more economically
egalitarian.2 Nevertheless, if counting cannot tell us everything, it does
tell us something rather than nothing. The first thing the numbers can
tell us is that South Africa’s Gini coefficient has increased rather than
decreased and we have the egregious distinction of vying with Brazil for
the most unequal society in the world. Statistics about “race” must be
read in conjunction with this key indicator of the skewed distribution
of public goods such as (higher) education and, in turn, employment
opportunities and concomitant remuneration.
White privilege is clear in student participation rates in higher educa-
tion. In 1993 on the brink of democracy, 69.7% of white school leavers
continued into some form of higher education whereas only 12.1% of
Black (African) and 13% of “Coloured” (mixed race) did so. Some 47%
of the total student body were white and 40% African, most of whom
would have been first generation students. Some 76% of academic staff
were white (Soudien, 2008). Some shifts in these patterns are notable in
national Department of Higher Education 2016 statistics: black students
are now in the majority (71.9% African, 6.3% Coloured and 5.2% Indian)
with white students constituting only 15.6% of the total cohort. These
figures are beginning to approximate but do not yet completely reflect,
national demographics that were, according to the 2011 census, 76.4%
Black (African); 8.9% Coloured, 2.5% Indian and 9.1% White. However,
these countrywide statistics mask differences between institutions, discip-
lines and levels of participation. For example, although it is less acceler-
ated than in the student body, there has also been a shift in the
demographic profile of academics over the same period, with 52% now
black and 48% white, but this conceals the fact that less than 30% of aca-
demics are black at several universities: Stellenbosch (23%), University of
the Free State (26%), University of Pretoria (26%) and Rhodes (29%)
(DHET, 2018).3 Soudien (2008) notes that the participation of black stu-
dents in historically white institutions entails complex and ambivalent
dynamics of aspiration (to gain access to and succeed in academically pres-
tigious institutions) and alienation (from the culture and traditions of
whiteness). These complex dynamics underpin the uneven, incomplete,
unfolding processes of transformation and decolonisation.
110 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

Schooling: race and class in South Africa today

The conditions of inequality that characterised apartheid schooling have
been well documented (e.g. Alexander, 2003, 2013; Kallaway, 2002) and
do not require rehearsing here. However, these inequalities are not con-
signed to our shameful past, and are perpetuated (and even intensified) in
the present. The distribution of resources such as the basic infrastructure
of classrooms, furniture, water, electricity, (let alone technologies of com-
puters and internet connectivity), learning materials and, critically, effect-
ive teachers, remains unequal. While there are no fee-paying schools to
ensure that every child has access to the constitutional right of education,
90% of schools have no libraries, 42% of classes are overcrowded and
there is a backlog of infrastructure projects to the tune of R153 billion
(Vally, 2015). It is shocking, but perhaps in this context unsurprising, that
80% of Grade 4 learners are functionally illiterate (Farber, 2017). At the
other end of the spectrum, increasing privatisation (including through
effectively privatising public schools through charging top-up fees) means
that inequalities are being entrenched and extended.
This uneven landscape is contoured by the multiple divisions of race,
language, rural-urban dimensions, class and gender. Two narratives poign-
antly illustrate what can only be termed abusive neglect by the state of
children’s rights to education. In 2012 Limpopo schools had still not
received textbooks from the department of education by July, the middle
of the academic year which in South Africa begins in January. Chisholm’s
(2013) analysis identifies a range of distal contextual factors, including the
economic downturn in the South African economy in the immediately
preceding years in the aftermath of the global banking crisis of 2008,
and fractious politics within the governing ANC at both at national and
provincial levels. In this context, specific acts of maladministration and
corrupt behaviour and sheer inefficiency by both government and private
service providers (such as the warehousing company where the textbooks
languished and the transport company) led to what is now referred to in
common parlance as the “Limpopo textbook saga”. It was only resolved
by legal pressure brought to bear by the public interest group Section 27
who successfully argued through the courts that failure to deliver these
textbooks was a violation of children’s constitutional rights to education.
In 2014, Michael Komape, a 6-year-old child in first grade, died after
falling into a pit latrine and drowning in faeces at his school in rural
Limpopo.4 The department of education responded to litigation brought
on behalf of the child’s family by denying that his death was caused by
“wrongful, unlawful and negligent conduct” by the state and its
 The question of potential 111

employees at the school and claimed that the “incident can best be
described as an accident” (Govender, 2017). The callousness of this
response is enervated in Michael’s father’s experience: “This is painful
and I can’t stop thinking about it. The government does not care about
us. Our child died like a dog.” This sickening and tragic story raises questions
not only about the physical safety and hygiene of children in school but also
critical questions of human dignity.
It is important to note that these conditions are not typical of all
schools in South Africa and are, therefore, not simply an inevitable result
of limited financial and human resources. Schooling is officially “open”
and compulsory for all children but the provision of schooling remains
racialised, gendered and, with increasing privatisation at the upper end of
the spectrum, highly unequal. Even where basic infrastructure is in place
and where teaching and learning is happening with diligent seriousness by
both learners and teachers on a daily basis, access to and success in educa-
tion is complicated and convoluted at every level, increasingly so, the
higher up the educational rungs one climbs. Bourdieu & Waquant (1992)
have provided us with an insightful analysis of how ostensibly democratic
educational systems, (even where inequalities are more disguised than
those just described) exercise “selectedness”, reproducing unequal social
structures across generations.

Testing people in testing times

Education (particularly higher education in the intellectual traditions of
other times and places) promises to deliver social mobility for individuals
and developmental progress for societies in which increasing numbers of
people are able to access such educational opportunities. Although the
myth of meritocracy has been robustly debunked (e.g. Piketty, 2015), it
remains resiliently alive in popular narratives of individual aspirational
futures and, in the context of unequal schooling, the question of who
gets access to the limited places at institutions of higher education, par-
ticularly universities, is a matter of both accuracy (predictive of success)
and fairness (in an unfair context). In designing tests for selection, two
different kinds of errors are possible: the test may exclude those who
would have succeeded had they been admitted for study, or select those
who fail (Miller & Bradbury, 1999). The first error is “hidden”, wasted
human potential that is consigned to the margins of the system, whereas
the second is highly visible in student performance and institutional
throughput rates. Because of this, the demand for accuracy takes precedence
in the construction of tests and selection decisions.
112 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

The notion that mental states and processes, particularly that thing that
we call “intelligence”, can be accurately measured is what spawned and
sustains the field of psychometry. The history of psychometrics, particu-
larly IQ testing, is implicated in racist (and sexist) ideologies worldwide
(Rose, 1976) with particularly pernicious colonising effects in Africa
(Mama, 1995). In apartheid South Africa, the science of psychology was
expressly coupled with religious discourses to legitimise the discriminatory
and segregationist system of apartheid (see, for example, Foxcroft &
Davies, 2008; Kessi & Kiguwa, 2015; Manganyi, 1973; Sanders, 2010).
The bias of psychometric tests is typically understood primarily as
a function of culture and language (e.g. Laher & Cockcroft, 2017) rather
than addressing more systemic structural and ideological effects or
questioning the testing framework itself. In the past couple of decades,
there have been attempts at translation of tests into indigenous languages,
or at least from American into South African English, as the independent
development of tests is generally considered too expensive, time-
consuming and entailing multiple problems in relation to standardisation
(Laher & Cockcroft, 2017). Attention has also been paid to the cultural
relevance of test items (Foxcroft & Davies, 2008; Laher & Cockcroft,
2014) and to the cultural nuances of interaction in contexts of implemen-
tation especially, for example, in rural communities, and to combining
psychometric testing with a range of qualitative assessments (Laher &
Cockcroft, 2017). Despite its suspect history both within and beyond
South Africa’s borders, psychometry is a well-established professional field
in South Africa and the prevailing view seems to be that it can be
rehabilitated and utilised in more appropriate and progressive ways,
articulating a version of “psychology in Africa” (Ratele, 2017). The
continuing central positioning of the field is evident in the launch
this year (2019) of the African Journal of Psychological Assessment, affiliated
to PsySSA (The Psychological Society of South Africa).5
In addition to practices and developments in the field of psychometrics,
a number of broader alternative testing protocols have been developed,
particularly in relation to student selection for higher education. When
white institutions began to admit small cohorts of black students in the late
1980s/early 1990s, it was well recognised that school results were
a problematic basis for selection, inevitably reflecting unequal racialised
schooling and learning histories. The task was to find or develop alternative
tests. The project was driven by a unit at the University of Cape Town
which is now named CETAP (Centre for Educational Testing for Access
and Placement). Through many iterations a number of tests (focused pri-
marily on the core competencies of maths and English) were developed and
 The question of potential 113

utilised by almost all universities across the country. The focus of test
development in the 1980s was to provide an alternative to the unreliable
matriculation scores with the hope that these tests would widen access
for talented students despite poor school results (Yeld, 2007). The AARP
(Alternative admissions research project) tests were widely implemented
across the country and utilised for selection and placement, particularly in
specialist elite fields such as medicine. At around the same time as previously
white institutions were opening their doors to black students, the racially
segregated schooling system was amalgamated and a new, single examination
system was instituted. The AARP tests were subjected to a new round of
design and development to become the NBT (National benchmark tests)
that are still being utilised by many institutions today. The NBT assessments
claim to fulfil a dual purpose: first, assessing individual students’ core com-
petencies on a standardised test would enable informed decisions about the
admission and placement of these students, and second, providing
a “benchmark” against which to evaluate the reliability of the standards of
the school leaving examination (Yeld, 2007). There were also claims that
the bands of performance in these test results could inform university teach-
ing and curriculum responsiveness (Cliff, 2015).
However, despite recognising the significance of the teaching and
learning processes that precede and follow assessment, these approaches
are generally aligned with the underlying premise of the psychometric
approach. Psychological life (in this instance, cognitive processes or intel-
ligence) is viewed as a quantifiable substance that is differentially and
normally distributed among people, producing universal standards by
means of which to categorise individuals. Where these tests are utilised
for selection (like the SATs in the USA) they function in parallel with
the assessment of academic merit through the schooling system, creating
yet another hurdle for learners already disadvantaged by this unequal
system. In the current context, where there is a substantial cohort of
black learners in private and semi-privatised “good” public schools (i.e.
previously white suburban schools) and pockets of good teachers and
learners in township and rural schools, it is not at all clear that these
assessment techniques are more predictively reliable than matriculation
scores. Individual opportunities for past learning are still radically unequal
and racially skewed but if our concerns are not with the poor, rural or
marginalised mass of young people, there are sufficient numbers of black
students who qualify for admission to transform the demographic profile
of institutions. More radical changes will entail engagement with ques-
tions of epistemological access (Morrow, 2009) and success, and the
articulation of decolonising pedagogy and curricula.
114 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

A retrospective narrative of potential: Vygotsky in action

In contrast to the quest for a test that is able to “by-pass educational
background and experience, and also that is uncontaminated by socio-
economic factors” (Miller, 1992, p. 99), the assessment of potential entails
engaging in ways that are “designed to alter performance and not preserve
it” (Miller, 1992, p. 101).6 In the late 1980s, the alternative selection pro-
gramme, Teach-Test-Teach was launched at the then University of Natal
under the directorship of Hanlie Griesel, collaborating with academics
across multiple disciplines in the faculty of Humanities. Anita Craig and
Ronald Miller in the department of psychology provided the overarching
theoretical framing for the project and pedagogical training for academics
and student-tutors.7 These were heady times in which I cut my intellectual
teeth in the best mix of research, teaching and what is now referred to as
“community engagement”. Students were recruited through networks
of NGOs and community-based projects (some of which were front
organisations for the underground liberation movement) and invited to
participate in an intensive two-week on-campus programme taught by
a team including senior professors (in the first few years of the project)
or as numbers grew, in workshops taught by academic tutors in multiple
community sites.8
The name of the project encapsulates the idea that any test needs to be
embedded in cycles of teaching that aim to alter performance. This
approach is premised on the “fundamental assumption … that education
provides learning opportunities that alter the very abilities that are
assumed or treated as fixed in the construction of psychometric/edumetric
tests” (Griesel, n.d., in Bradbury, 2000, p. 310). Vygotsky’s concept of
the zone of proximal development was central to the design, develop-
ment and implementation of the programme, providing a prospective
orientation to the potential for future learning rather than a retrospective
description of past learning as consolidated in current knowledge and abil-
ities. It is uncontentious to suggest that young people leaving school and
entering higher education are yet to fulfil their potential as adults in the
world. However, we most often think of the development of this future
potential person as continuous with the past and present, a more mature,
better version of the same self. The educational terrain is likewise seen as
a homogenous plane in which increasing levels of difficulty extend beyond
but are continuous with earlier simpler levels of thinking and acting. How-
ever, in conditions of disjuncture between previous learning and future
opportunities, between earlier selves and new possible identities, potential is
as elusive as the South African rainbow. “By definition, potential cannot be
 The question of potential 115

measured and can only be identified once realised. Any attempt to identify
academic potential must translate into an attempt to provoke individuals to
realise abilities that are not manifest in their previous academic perform-
ance” (Griesel, n.d., in Bradbury, 2000, p. 309). From this perspective, the
task therefore becomes a matter of teaching rather than testing, creating
possibilities for new learning beyond what is already known or developed
through prior learning, and provoking movement and change in the zone
of proximal development.
The TTT programme aimed at creating these zones for learning that
anticipated the demands of university study rather than building on previ-
ous knowledge and experience developed at school. The matriculation
scores of TTT students were way below the minimum requirements for
university entry and therefore all that could be derived from these scores
was the unhelpful recognition that apartheid education had deliberately
underprepared black learners for higher education (and the associated pro-
fessions or kinds of work undertaken by graduates). These provocations
for learning were carefully designed in the form of lectures, tutorials and,
very importantly, textual materials9 and tasks, introducing core concepts
and the modes of thinking, reading and writing typical of the Humanities
disciplines.10 The assessment of potential entails two important departures
from the usual principles of testing. First, the focus is on movement or
change across two or more points in time, in contrast to static measures
or psychological constructs in which time is irrelevant and should have
no effect. As Vygotsky (1978) argued, a performance score may conceal
very different intellectual capacities. It is uncontentious to observe that
a “clever” child may perform poorly on a test because she was feeling ill
on the day or because the room was uncomfortably hot or cold making
it hard to concentrate. Vygotsky argued that in a similar way, the same
performance score may have different roots. Excellent teaching and sup-
port may enable one learner to perform at her very best whereas another
learner, without similar learning opportunities and support, may obtain
the same score. What she has been able to achieve under less than opti-
mal conditions is not a reflection of what her “best” performance may
potentially be. In this approach the actual score is less significant than
how much a learner is able to benefit from teaching and the shifts she
makes from her original starting point even if this is an extremely low
base and even if the final score is not in “objective” terms particularly
impressive. The zone of learning may entail transitions, approximations
and hesitant incomplete movements back and forth (Valsiner & van der
Veer, 2014) in which actions prefigure possibilities for the future. This
was an important strut in our argument that future potential excellence
116 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

could not be predicted by selecting only those who were top performers
at school – and this transformational argument had to be made repeatedly
with university gatekeepers. Second, “peaks in performance” (Feuerstein,
Rand & Hoffman, 1979, p. 34) were treated as indicators of potential.
The conventional approach is to discount performance that is inconsistent,
treat it as an anomaly and flatten its effects in an average score. If we are
less interested in an accurate assessment of consolidated independent per-
formance and more interested in potential for future learning, any “peak”
achievement indicates what the learner is capable of and what will become
possible in a more sustained way in the future. “The phenomena of
emergence, becoming, and transformation become the objects of investigation
in developmental science” (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014, p. 151).

Curriculum innovation: teaching and learning

The research agenda of the TTT programme was to develop alternative
selection procedures that would meet the dual imperatives of equity and
excellence, but the focus on potential shifts attention away from the
products of learning as reflected in test scores towards the processes of
teaching and learning, both before and after testing, rather than on the
products of testing. The ZPD extends in front of the point of entry into
university study where each new student is inserted into traditions of
knowledge. The long trajectory of these traditions are instantiated in the
“fossilised” (Vygotsky, 1978) products of knowledge and in the taken-for-
granted processes and practices of academia. The effect of this is to
conceal the ways in which all knowledge is actively constructed by people
in communities of practice. This is the “hidden curriculum” (Illich, 1971)
of all higher education: students are expected to become active makers of
their own knowledge through an engagement with the heavy weight of
disciplinary knowledge that appears fully formed, concealing its own
historical construction.
In the unequal terrain of South African schooling, then and now,
students’ preparation for university study is extremely variable. In the
language of academic development in the apartheid era, students from dis-
advantaged socioeconomic and schooling backgrounds were (deliberately)
underprepared in a range of ways and it was incumbent upon the univer-
sity to teach and support these students by supplying that which should
have been taught at school but had not.11 The focus was on supplying
missing content and developing skills such as English language competency,
computer skills, study skills, academic literacy and writing skills. Bridging
units (particularly in science and engineering) or foundation courses were
 The question of potential 117

designed and often compulsory for students entering the university via
alternative selection programmes, even where students (unlike TTT stu-
dents) met requirements for direct entry. These academic development
programmes were often premised on a “deficit model” failing to recognise
that in many respects, it was universities and academics rather than students
who were underprepared. It is certainly true that universities and academics
were ill-equipped (and in many cases, resistant) to engage with these new
cohorts of students and, in the context of decolonising curricula and peda-
gogies, there is ample evidence that this remains the case. However, there
is also no denying that many first-generation students who embarked on
university study in the late 1980s/early 1990s needed and benefitted from
these interventions as imperfect as they were and, in cases of best practice,
this experimental educational work had a disruptive impact on established
curricula and pedagogies.
The majority of the first TTT entrants were required to register for
an extended curriculum, taking a reduced load of courses and attending
supplementary tutorials and workshops taught by the TTT team. Our
approach was not primarily skills based, attempting rather to create
a ZPD that would create the architecture for constructivist independent
knowledge-making. Our assumption was that, rather than being under-
prepared, students were overprepared (Bradbury & Miller, 2011), full of
assumptions about knowledge and study that may have served them well
in the school system but were inappropriate for university study, particu-
larly in the humanities. For example, reliance on the authority of teachers
and texts, a view that (scientific) knowledge is indisputable and stable and
must simply be acquired and reproduced. These misunderstandings may
block new approaches to thinking and knowing (see the discussion in
Chapter 4) and may often actually be reinforced by the ostensible
demands of university study where lectures are delivered by experts and
the sheer volume of reading implies that everything that needs to be
known is already there, inert chunks of information to be retrieved,
reassembled and reproduced. These epistemic assumptions cannot be
shifted through the accumulation of more information and “concepts
can’t be taught by drill … [What is required are] different orchestrations”
(Shotter, 2006, p. 25), new shapes and structures for the activities of
knowledge-making. The construction of this zone of learning cannot be
left to chance or to the spontaneous activities of learners themselves.12
The zone of proximal development always entails an asymmetrical rela-
tionship (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991) in which the teacher or “more
capable peer” orchestrates or choreographs the moves. To provoke new
possibilities for learning entails deliberate mediation “controlling,
118 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

directing, channelling” (Shotter, 2006, p. 28) or “framing, filtering,

scheduling” (Feuerstein, Rand, Hoffman & Miller, 1980, p. 16) the
actions of learners in the ZPD, enabling them to act on the basis of
another’s understanding rather than their own.
In a context where the relation between school and university learning
was discontinuous, Craig (1992) argued for a strategy of “defamiliarisation”
rather than building on previous knowledge and ways of doing things which
might serve to block new and different modes of knowledge construction.
(See discussion in Chapter 4.) She applied a matrix of thinking about the
range of familiar-unfamiliar aspects of university tasks in terms of content and
form demands. Although it might seem that the most difficult tasks would be
those which are unfamiliar in both content and form, these tasks may present
exceptional opportunities for learning in that prior knowledge and ways of
doing things cannot be relied upon, opening up a productive and receptive
space for new learning. By contrast, tasks that seem familiar because the con-
tent domain is linked to school knowledge (e.g. literature) or culturally
familiar worlds (e.g. theology or politics) may create difficulties because this
familiarity masks unfamiliar forms of engagement.
In the context of today’s decolonisation debates, defamiliarisation smacks
of alienation or “epistemic violence” (Teo, 2010). However, Žižek (2005,
p. 70) suggests that intellectual pursuits always entail moments of “foreign-
ness” and suggests that “philosophy [and I am suggesting that we interpret
this broadly to mean the domain of theoretical disciplines] … was from the
very beginning not the discourse of those who feel the certainty of being
at home”. There may be joy and delight in this estrangement from the
familiar, releasing possibilities for remaking the “normal”. But for the
unsettling process to be productive rather than alienating, it must entail
respect for what students bring into classrooms, particularly, including
resources from outside of school classrooms, in the longer histories of Afri-
can life, language and meaning-making that have always co-existed with
and resisted colonial attempts to contain and homogenise modalities of
knowledge construction. The creation of this kind of ZPD does not erase
asymmetrical relationships with respect to knowledge but requires an
affirming faith in students’ potential to engage with difficult and complex
ideas, to challenge these ideas and to go beyond what it is that we already
know. In our current context, it is very clear that the notions of “under-/
over-preparedness” that we worked with in the context of apartheid
schooling continue to manifest in similar ways but have also mutated in
relation to the changing national and global scapes of knowledge and edu-
cation. These mutations include more complex intersections between race
and class, and new, much more powerful challenges to the academy’s
 The question of potential 119

complicity in the colonising and oppressive effects of education, and our

under-/over-preparedness to meet the learning-teaching demands of our
students and respond to the changing imperatives of our local and global
worlds. The content and form of the academy is being unsettled but, as
Maldonado-Torres (2016, p. 11) recognises, not “everything produced by
Western modernity is a colonial artefact that cannot but promote colonial-
ism”. In this context, academics have a dual accountability, towards the
knowledge and traditions of the past of which we are human carriers, and
towards our students and their future horizons which lie beyond what we
can see from our vantage point.

[E]ducators here stand in relation to the young as representatives of

a world for which they must take responsibility although they
themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or
openly, wish it were other than it is.
(Arendt, 1961, p. 189)

Interdisciplinarity and epistemological access

In the early 1990s there were a number of interdisciplinary courses
developed by colleagues across the Humanities faculty at the University
of Natal to create a core foundation programme for students, for
example, Language, text and context and Individual, state and society. This
conceptualisation of the curriculum beyond disciplinary boundaries entailed
many promising vibrant conversations and battles between academics who,
in attempting to reconceptualise the terrain for students, had to confront
their own commitments to practices, forms and canons of knowledge. The
political impetus for these disruptions of the status quo within the academy
was lost as the war was apparently won in the democratisation of the state.
The most hopeful interpretation of current conditions is that the renewed
imperatives of decolonisation may revitalise and reanimate these debates.
The first of these interdisciplinary experiments was the credit-bearing
course, The development and production of knowledge, offered first only to
cohorts of TTT students and then more widely to students in the faculty
of humanities. The primary vehicle for the organisation of the course was
provided by Bronowski’s (1973) The Ascent of Man. By tracing the roots
and routes of knowledge, he exposes the constructed and changing nature
of knowledge. It was for me, as well as for the students, a remarkable
eye-opening journey, revealing the awe-inspiring ways in which people
throughout history and in places far-flung from our standard reference
point of the colonial English-speaking centre had, through action and
120 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

thought, made the world that we encounter. However, the film and text
declares its celebratory progressive narrative and patriarchal bias in its very
name. From our position in the present, this narrative of human history is
patently partial and inaccurate and, for many contemporary readers, this
text should be destined for burning or at the very least, consigned to
a dusty dungeon where its “epistemic violence” can do no harm. Subject-
ing the enlightenment project to what Charles Mills (2013) calls “black
illumination” reveals its entanglement with colonialism and exploitation.
I do not propose that the text should be dusted off for new cohorts of
South African students to read but in reflecting on the course now, I do
think there may be something to be rescued from the fire. First, the fact
that the authority of a text can shift so dramatically across time is itself
an indicator of how knowledge “develops”. The text is fixed but its
meanings are not and new readers can create divergent or even diametric-
ally opposed trains of thought through encountering an author’s ideas. In
this sense, I have great faith in creativity as a “normal human act … not en-
tailing some kind of herculean effort to shrug off the discursive constraints
of others” (Chomsky, 2006a, p. 18). Second, the best of enlightenment
scepticism entails the rejection of authority (religious or scientific) in
favour of a constructivist epistemology. This orientation is essential if stu-
dents are to become critical, active knowledge producers themselves
rather than passive recipients of revealed or discovered truths. Third,
although Bronowski valorises science, he does so by emphasising that it is
a human practice and refuses to dichotomise technological and cultural
forms, suggesting productive interdisciplinary possibilities. In response to
today’s geopolitical problems, antinomy between science and humanities
is an intellectual indulgence we cannot afford. Finally, this version
of human history is both temporally and spatially wide-ranging but none-
theless excludes more than half the world.13 This should provoke us to
constantly subject existing cannons to critical evaluation and to extend
our attentions elsewhere to articulate alternative histories and ways of
knowing. Histories that have been hidden or muted need to be
articulated in present debates. In the current context of the South African
Student Movement, resistance to science as a “Western” knowledge form
erases the African origins of mathematics in ancient Egypt and negates the
Hindu-Arabic invention of our contemporary numerical system. The
canons of our disciplines and our colonial reference points centre Oxford
and Cambridge rather than the oldest universities of India or the ancient
libraries of Timbuktu.14 New generations of scholars are immersed in the
paradoxical effects of education which is
 The question of potential 121

often a vehicle for the transmission of particular forms of power.

But in the way in which it is constituted, in the ways in which the
disciplines are structured to interrogate meaning, it has within it the
potential for disrupting social, cultural and economic orthodoxy. This
capacity is underpinned by its constituent elements. It is the one
institution that rehearses the practices and modalities for the decon-
struction of knowledges that authorise the disciplines – but also the
methodologies for the reconstruction of self and community.
(Soudien, 2012a, p. 31)

The form and content of psychology

In the second phase of curriculum development in the mid-1990s, as the
numbers of first-generation black students increased, attention shifted
from innovations at the margins to mainstream discipline-based courses at
the then University of Natal. In psychology, we created an entirely new
first year programme that departed from the standard (usually American)
textbook format that was then (and now) in operation (Bradbury, 1995).
The course was primarily focused on developing epistemic and metacogni-
tive engagement with the form demands of the discipline and the mode of
delivery reflected these concerns with active deep engagement. The
number of lectures were reduced, displacing the conventional transmission
mode of instruction in favour of interactive tutorials modelling the form of
academic argument and extended workshop sessions that actively engaged
students in reading and writing. The assessment of students’ work was
based on the analysis of task demands and the kinds of questions that drive
our enquiry in the humanities: factual, relational and conceptual (Bradbury,
2000; Bradbury & Miller, 2011; Miller, Bradbury & Lemmon, 2000;
Miller, Bradbury & Pedley, 1998). This focus on kinds of questions was
not designed to prepare students for tests and examinations but rather to
engage them in the defining form of intellectual engagement. The know-
ledge that we encounter at any given moment, particularly when it takes
authoritative textual shape, in “black and white” appears in the form of
answers concealing the questioning process that produced them. As Gada-
mer (1975, p. 333) says the “logic of the human sciences is … a logic of
the question” and, for students to become part of this tradition, this form
needs to be made explicit.
However, the selection of content was also an important consideration
in the course design. In place of the accumulative empirical (and mostly
empiricist) body of psychological knowledge, the skeleton for the course
was provided by key theoretical frameworks of the 20th century, e.g.
122 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

Darwin, Freud, Piaget and Marx. Each of these theories contribute to an

epistemological framing of psychological knowledge: evolutionary theory
provides a framework for thinking about life as part of the natural world
and simultaneously disrupts notions of the natural world as stable and per-
manent; Piaget accounts for human thought as actively constructed in con-
trast to the passivity of both sides of the nature-nurture debate;
psychoanalysis disrupts normative notions of rationality, and (sometimes dis-
torted) ideas of the unconscious are pervasive in multiple disciplines and in
common sense discourse; Marxist theory connects human consciousness to
action in the transformation of nature through labour, and to the social
world through the structuring of relations to material resources and others.
These grand narratives represent a particular view of the history of ideas,
locate the sources of psychological and social theory in the global north
but are asserted as universal explanatory frameworks. In retrospect it is
remarkable and shocking to me that theories closer to home did not form
part of this core curriculum. Biko’s (1978) theory of black consciousness
and Manganyi’s (1973) theory of “being-black-in-the-world” are obvious
glaring omissions. Together with feminist and queer methodologies, these
theories provide more capacious ways of understanding personhood.
An intersectional approach would provide an orientation to the core psy-
chological concepts of identity and subjectivity that reconceptualises the
relation between selves and the social world. Notwithstanding these serious
limitations to our earlier curriculum innovations, the approach disrupted
the canon of psychology and displaced the tyranny of the textbook.
A contemporary appropriation of this reframing offers more radical possibil-
ities for decolonising psychology than the substitution of an American
textbook with one written by South Africans that simply reproduces the
same flattened flood of information – all of which is in any case available
at the touch of a Google button!

Race, class and access in South African universities today

Education, particularly university education, promises class mobility for
individuals but simultaneously reproduces and maintains the status quo:
“the university, and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear
simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social
class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social
class” (Foucault, 2006, p. 40). In post-apartheid South Africa this tension
in the purposes and prospects of higher education is exaggerated where
many black students are first-generation entrants into the system. By
overturning the racially segregated education system of the past, the
 The question of potential 123

framework of neoliberal equality of opportunity is created. However,

“[i]n moving towards the meritocratic ideal, we imagined that we’d
moved beyond the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies … that’s
not the real story.” (Appiah, 2018, p. 141). The racialised inequalities of
apartheid were highly visible because they were inscribed in the legal
framework of all state institutions and in the architecture of space and
everyday life. By contrast, contemporary South Africa has attempted,
like neoliberal democracies elsewhere, to conceal structural inequalities
in discourses of merit and opportunity. Structural racism and the gener-
ational perpetuation of socioeconomic inequality may be partially sub-
merged but are not erased. The #Student Movement is a significant
rupture of the thin social veneer of post-apartheid society in which a new
generation of students has recognised that the “pursuit of a purely individ-
ual, a merely psychological, project of salvation” is futile and that the “only
effective liberation from such constraint begins with the recognition that
there is nothing that is not social and historical – indeed, that everything is
‘in the last analysis’ political” (Jameson, 1982, p. 20). The politics of the
movement are fluid and unfinished but articulations of the two primary
intersecting dimensions of race and class demonstrate both continuities and
disjunctures with the apartheid past.
Student battles over (academic and financial) exclusion have been
a permanent feature of higher education in post-apartheid South Africa
running in parallel with increased access and inclusion.15 However, for
two decades these battles were often silenced, partly because students
who were excluded are no longer students, returned through failure to
spaces outside of the academy and rendered invisible, and partly because
the primary fields of these battles were the historically black institutions
with less prominence in the social and political imaginary of the “new”
South Africa. In 2015, the Rhodes statue on the prestigious campus of
the University of Cape Town (UCT) became the initial lightning rod
that signalled a new historical storm. The toppling of the Rhodes statue
was a crucial symbolic event that opened the way for the prolonged
waves of protest action across the country throughout 2015 and 2016.
#FeesMustFall exposed the financial precarity of the vast majority of
students, disrupting the complacency of institutions who pointed to
changing racial demographics in the student body as signs of their trans-
formation, and forcing the state to acknowledge its responsibility by
announcing first, zero increases in fees at the end of 2015 and expanding
the national student loan fund (NSFAS) for the poorest students, followed
by the announcement in 2017 of free higher education for the poor and
the so-called missing middle.16 The Student Movement has castigated
124 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

government and the middle-class South African public for responding only
when these protests erupted in the elite institutions of UCT and the
University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Critics of the Student Movement
have highlighted the middle-class status of many student leaders and argued
that their protests are driven by individual entitlement and ambition rather
than a radical transformational agenda (see, for example, Long, 2018 and,
particularly, Jansen, 2017). However, this critique seems to oversimply the
intersections of race and class particularly for this generation of young
South Africans. There is a clear logic for how and why the Student Move-
ment emerged at this time in our history and in these particular locations.
Although these prestigious universities have welcomed the children of the
emerging black middle class, they have failed to recognise that these stu-
dents do not come from families where their intergenerational resources
provide a safety net for students in the form of securities for loans, and by
absorbing accommodation and travel costs. Khunou (2015) highlights the
complex and contradictory dimensions of the black middle class and the
unusual constellation of advantages and disadvantages that come with this
category (which is resisted by many as an inappropriate misnomer). The
lack of secure intergenerational positioning translates into present uncertain-
ties and anxieties about the future. From a different context in the USA,
Westover (2018, pp. 235–236) observes how financial precarity has
a pervasive impact on possibilities for learning:

Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was

absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance
of my bank account, who I owed how much and whether there was
anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars .
I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so
out of terror – of losing my scholarship should my GPA [grade point
average] fall a single decimal – not from real interest in my classes.

It is also pertinent that democratisation in South Africa has coincided with

increasing bureaucratisation and corporatisation of higher education around
the world. This context means increased access for the emergent middle
class, working class and poor students comes at a time that funding for
higher education is universally under pressure, exacerbated by our position
as a developing economy. The demand for market-related qualifications is
also increasingly impacting on the purpose of higher education and is shap-
ing the knowledge that students and their families consider relevant and
useful (Long, 2013). Bourdieu’s (1986) three kinds of capital, economic,
cultural and social, function together to perpetuate structural inequalities
 The question of potential 125

and constrain how we envisage possible personal and collective futures in

the space of higher education.

Language(s) of decolonisation and textual worlds of possibility

The role of language is central to socialisation, particularly in the institu-
tions of family and education, conveying both the contents of knowledge
and meaning-making practices, and the patterns of cultural life creatively
established by previous generations. In this way, the contours of social life
are naturalised and encountered by each new generation of learners or
developing children as simply the “way things are” in the world. Without
requiring conscious attention, we move through the social world in the
stuff of language in much the same automated way that our bodies move
through air and across ground. Language (and by extension, culture and
the law) is always imposed from the outside. In the context of access to
university study, the language in question is almost always English (with
the exception of a few Afrikaans medium universities who are now in the
process of shifting their language policies in favour of English). Academic
development programmes often focused on the difficulties of “second-
language” English speakers and language was used as a marker for race
and class, specifically as manifest in the hierarchies of apartheid in schools.
(See for example, my own writing about this period, Bradbury, 2000;
Bradbury & Miller, 2011; Miller & Bradbury, 1999.) It is disturbing to
note that in the many changes to the school curriculum in the decades
post-1994, hardly any attention has been given to the development of
African languages for disciplinary areas or in materials and texts, and
matriculants are not required to study or even demonstrate basic compe-
tency in an African language. What has changed in the curriculum tells
the same story from a different angle: new subjects or learning areas, such
as “business studies”, “tourism” and “consumer studies”, have been intro-
duced, indicating the kind of world of work for which schooling is pre-
paring learners. Likewise, graduates from public universities can exit into
the world of work without being able to speak, read or write an indigen-
ous language. When this graduate is a psychologist or psychotherapist, she
will only be able to practise the “talking cure” with English speakers,
likely predominantly middle class and white. In a multilingual country
that prides itself on official language status for 11 languages, this is bizarre
to put it mildly! The question of language is tied up with our colonial
and racist histories.
The project of decolonisation (in all domains of cultural life but in
South Africa most immediately and pressingly currently expressed in
126 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

relation to higher education) might be understood as resistance to the “flat-

tening” effects of monolingualism (Derrida, 1998, see the discussion in
Chapter 4). It is impossible for a single (colonial) language to capture and
contain all meaning, and what we “know” is perpetually unravelled and
rewoven in multiple tongues by all people across all domains of life. The
language question is therefore not simply one among many; it is central to
the role of education and research in response to current and future ques-
tions of human life within and beyond the South African context. Alexan-
der (2003, 2004, 2011, 2012) consistently argued for mother-tongue
instruction, particularly in the early phases of education for pedagogical
reasons. But his rationale went beyond the patently obvious observation
that children learn best when they understand the medium of instruction!
Indigenous languages are repertoires of representation and conceptualisation
that enable alternative constructions of selves and worlds. The politically
liberating effects and possibilities of writing and thinking in indigenous lan-
guages have been powerfully argued for by Freire (1972, 1973) and wa
Thiong’o (1986). However, the potential value of multiple languages lies
not only in the experiential zones of individual learning and collective local
political action. In the vortex of the natural and political crises that seem
all-pervasive across the globe, the limits of our current knowledge bases in
the natural and social sciences are all too evident. New conceptual lan-
guages are required to complicate, twist, deepen and change the dominant
languages of research and knowledge-production.

Other regulation, creative selves

While the imposition of meaning from the outside is most clearly visible in
contexts where the language that is learned is literally the language of the
other, a colonial language, all language learning serves to insert children
into the language of others, into meanings derived not from the child’s
own engagement with the world but through others. To put this idea into
the psychological language of development, into Vygotskian language, the
world of the child is mediated. In Derrida’s terms, the child’s mind is “col-
onized” by an-other, usually, in the first instance, the maternal other but
also beyond the home, most critically in the terrain of education where
children’s thought is “schooled” in the “traditions” (Gadamer, 1975) of
knowledge and the understandings of others. Higher education is in this
sense the most rigorous and pervasive form of colonising minds, full
immersion into the specialist languages of disciplines.
As I have argued elsewhere, (Bradbury, 2012) we cannot do otherwise;
it is only possible for us to become ourselves through these collective
 The question of potential 127

frameworks of meaning, through “the long detour of the signs of human-

ity deposited in cultural works” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 143). In this way, our
conscious cognising of the world is socialised, formed through shared lan-
guage, shared understandings and shared meanings. But the most forceful
impact of tradition lies beyond the engagements of parental influence, or
individual teachers’ and academics’ stocks of knowledge. Children (and
students) join the flow of history in ways that are less reliant on the (best)
intentions of adults, developing a “narrative unconscious” (Freeman,
2010) linking them into intergenerational chains of meaning-making.
This heavy baggage of collective memory creates a subterraneous mapping
of the world against which experience is interpreted, determining the
languages in which narratives can be articulated and constraining the
tales that we can tell.
However, despite the essentially communicable character of consciousness
given its creation in shared language, this process is always incomplete, “not
without remainder”, always open to a surplus of mutable meanings. The
remarkable malleability of language is evident in the astonishing pace and
creativity of children’s language learning which led Chomsky (1986) to
resoundingly demolish the faulty logic of behaviourist notions of imitative
learning. Small children produce linguistic constructions that have never
been overheard, indeed, they speak into being, things that have never been
said. In the adult domain of higher education, the primary task of all students
and scholars is to articulate their own individual engagements with the
knowledge of others. The primary mode of knowledge construction and
transmission in higher education is textual, notwithstanding the resilience of
the oral lecture for undergraduates, postgraduate seminar discussions and the
academic conference, all of which are strange hybrids of textual and oral
forms. The paradox of text is that by fixing and preserving the meaning of
the author, new possibilities for meaning-making open up “in front of” the
text as it articulates with the worlds of new readers (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 143).
The moral panic that plagiarism produces indicates that we never expect
students to directly reproduce what they read. Writing is a “crafting of
experience rather than a direct representation of it” (Parker, 2015c,
p. 78), remaking old ideas and releasing new conceptual configurations.
Where education is about the formation of critical subjects rather than
“cloning” (Essed & Goldberg, 2002), the innate creativity and novelty of
language (and its important extensions in reading, writing and visual
texts) and the forms of thought it makes possible, should be nurtured and
facilitated rather than closed down by the process of schooling in discip-
linary languages and traditions. Whereas art or literature (and science)
must always belong to tradition and use the (past) languages of others, the
128 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

best art (and science) always entails innovation rather than mere replication
or reproduction. The best students and intellectuals learn to read not only
texts but also the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987) and in this process we
may rewrite ourselves (Freeman, 1993) and our interpretation of the world
may animate new actions and interactions. Historical constraints are not
fully determining and, although power is asymmetrically distributed, its
ubiquity is not totalising and infuses human subjects with possibilities
for agency (Foucault, 1979, 1988). Somewhat ironically, in a debate
with Foucault, it is Chomsky (2006a, p. 55) who captures these ambiva-
lent articulations of power in and through education:

I think here it’s too hasty to characterize our existing systems of justice
[and education] as merely systems of class oppression; I don’t think that
they are that. I think that they embody systems of class oppression and
elements of other kinds of oppression, but they also embody a kind of
groping towards the true humanly valuable concepts of justice and
decency and love and kindness and sympathy, which I think are real.

Conclusion
Educational projects of transformation in the transition to democracy
seem, with hindsight, to have been infused with an almost delusional
optimism but were, at the time, provocative and productive in both pol-
itical and pedagogical terms. For individual students the TTT programme
was enormously successful in creating pathways into academia and
beyond into productive and interesting work in the world. In the stu-
dents’ demonstrable success, there were also very important gains in rela-
tion to the university. First, ideas of merit and academic standards were
problematised and challenged by the realisation of potential, demonstrat-
ing that commitments to excellence and equity are compatible rather than
contradictory. Second, a group of academics, many of them established
scholars in their disciplines, recognised that, while students are responsible
for their own learning, the academy is also responsible for teaching and
cannot simply relegate this to the schooling system. Third, the active pol-
itical and theoretical commitments of academics can drive change but insti-
tutional structural support is critical for systemic change. Although
bureaucratic and territorial battles were not averted, possibilities for change
were facilitated by the seniority of academics with whom we worked and
the active support of the Vice Chancellor’s office (once the first cohorts of
students had “proved” the approach could work!). Finally, the project was
a response to the political imperatives of the context beyond the university
 The question of potential 129

and entailed linkages and engagement that made the boundaries of the acad-
emy more permeable. However, reflections on the past make clear that
change is not linear or inevitably progressive. Even where we have “made
progress” in, for example, widening access and rethinking pedagogy, “progress
is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and
reimagined if it is to survive” (Zadie Smith, 2018, p. 41). The demands of the
current Student Movement make clear that earlier gains with respect to finan-
cial and epistemological access have been only partially and unevenly realised
or lost altogether. In particular, universities seem to have complacently adjusted
their horizons of social justice to exclude the poorest young people in margin-
alised communities that were the target of the TTT programme from their
range of vision. Students have also shifted the debates beyond the assimilation-
ist language of access to challenge the interactional dynamics and (physical and
symbolic) colonial architecture of higher education. They have also high-
lighted the analytic limits of the structural categories of race and class for
understanding contemporary formations of power and subjectivity. (See dis-
cussion of intersectional identity politics and possibilities for changing subjec-
tivities in Chapters 6 and 7.) Vygotsky’s ZPD may yet provide a radical
concept for educators and activists who are committed to imaginative futures
that do not resemble the past. Higher education entails preparing students for
futures unknown and unknowable by the older generation. Responsive curric-
ula that address these (un)imaginable future challenges may be paradoxically
informed by re-reading earlier experimental pedagogical practices and curricu-
lum transformation. While our present vantage point highlights the limitations
of these engagements and the systemic intransigence of dominant knowledge
systems and institutional practices, this retrospective analysis also provides seeds
for reformulating notions of potential and generating innovative praxis.

Notes
1 I cannot provide a complete overview of the very many academic development
projects that were developed both within and beyond South African universities
during this time. The South African journal of higher education provides a fairly
comprehensive archive of work but there are several lacunae in that record,
indicative of the difficulties in balancing acting, thinking and writing, and of
the ways in which momentum can be lost. This is a caution from one context
of activism to another: reflection and theoretical work is a kind of activism and
academics and students need to be mindful of these critical obligations that
define our particular role in projects of change.
There were a number of radical and creative educational innovations hap-
pening across the country focused on access to university education both before
and alongside degree programmes. For example, Khanya College a project of
SACHED (Essop, 1990), The Natal Workers’ College (Sitas, 1990) and Neville
130 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

Alexander’s PRAESA (Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South

Africa) founded in 1992. The important work of these organisations was cur-
tailed by the advent of democracy and the concomitant reduction in NGO
funding and a loss of people power into formal state institutions of various
kinds. However, PRAESA and Khanya are still in operation and their work
remains vitally relevant as we recognise that post-apartheid education may have
shifted in policy but not in practice.
The hiatus between the period of intense political activism and creative
energy in education in the dying days of apartheid, and the current dynamism of
the Fallist movement, is notable across multiple domains. To a large extent, civil
society and the NGO sector relinquished activity and power to the state and its
institutions on the mistaken assumption that democratic governance would bring
about the kinds of conditions that the ANC’s campaign slogan promised: “A
better life for all”. For example, Nieftagodien (2018) notes that the effects of
democratisation, contrary to expectations, did not lead to burgeoning scholarship
in alternative histories. In the early 1990s there was a vibrant and vital field of
public history, developed through collaborative linkages with political activists in
the independent trade unions and popular movements. Instead of opening up
new possibilities for these intellectual practices, the democratic regime asserted
a new dominant historical narrative of the liberation struggle in which history
serves to support state-funded heritage projects. However, as the post-apartheid
generation has grown up, it has also grown tired of the state’s version of both
history and the present and there is a new impetus for alternative histories to be
written and read through the lens of present conditions and struggles. In the
educational sphere, the membership-based community “movement”, Equal Edu-
cation (founded in 2008) has actively campaigned for social justice in schooling.
Many of these campaigns have been conducted collaboratively with Section 27,
a public interest law centre that mobilises constitutional rights to address inequal-
ities in various sectors of South African society.
2 The name of a conference hosted at the University of Johannesburg in 2018
encapsulates a focus on optics that seems to eclipse more substantive questions
of transformation: “Transforming ivory towers to ebony towers” (Adebayo,
2018).
3 These predominantly white institutions previously utilised Afrikaans as the medium
of instruction, with the exception of Rhodes, which still officially carries the colo-
nial name despite Fallists renaming it UCKAR (the University-currently-
known-as-Rhodes) to signal that this insulting aberration will not last.
4 Although both tragic events recounted here happened in Limpopo, the fail-
ures of basic education are not restricted to this region with some rural areas
such as the Eastern Cape and northern parts of KwaZulu-Natal even more
poorly resourced. Outrageously, Michael Komape is also not the only or last
child to die in this vile way; in 2018 another Grade R pupil Lumka Mketwa
drowned in a pit latrine toilet at her school in the Eastern Cape.
5 This debate about what IQ tests tell us is not trivial nor is it done and dusted. In
1994 Herrnstein and Murray published The bell curve that purported to present
scientific data in support of the racist position that black people are naturally less
intelligent than white people. Their “science” is so patently flawed that an under-
graduate student who has just been introduced to the nature-nurture debate
could demolish the argument. No translation or item refinement will rehabilitate
the underlying purpose of testing: to differentiate individuals and groups accord-
ing to a normative distribution. This alignment to the bell curve is an artefact of
 The question of potential 131

test construction, and a test that does not produce this pattern of results is
considered invalid. Further, these differences are evaluative, re-inscribing and
perpetuating inequalities in the worlds of education and work and, hence,
reproducing hierarchies of political power and economic reward. IQ tests are
ideological tools not neutral instruments of measurement akin to rulers for
height or scales for weight. But despite the authoritative refutation of evolu-
tionary theorists such as Gould (1996), these racist views remain in circula-
tion, fuelled by, and fuelling, right-wing popular discourse and the current
violent anti-immigration politics of the United States and many other coun-
tries across the globe. The “science” of psychology remains complicit, con-
tinuing to train generations of professionals in the use of these and similar
tests for diagnostic purposes.
6 At the University of the Witwatersrand, Skuy (1997) and his colleagues
adapted and implemented Feuerstein’s mediated learning experience for the
assessment of South African children’s potential, focusing on (dis)ability and
multiculturalism, and combining these assessments of learning potential and
instrumental enrichment with conventional psychometric assessments.
7 For a historical overview of the funding and structure of higher education in
South Africa under and post-apartheid, see Bozalek & Boughey, 2012. For
examples of projects of alternative selection programmes, see Griesel, 1992,
2000, 2004; Yeld & Haeck, 2006.
8 By 1995, the numbers had increased exponentially and the TTT programme
became RAP (Regional Access programme) and began to teach and test appli-
cants to all tertiary institutions in KwaZulu-Natal. This programme eventually
closed as entrance to tertiary studies became “normalised” or at least ostensibly
less racially skewed, and institutions began to carve out their own competitive
practices in this new terrain.
9 Introductory texts were written by senior University of Natal scholars from
different disciplines (e.g. Sociology, Maré & Sitas, 1992; Anthropology, de Haas,
1992). However, the texts were designed to do more than transmit introduc-
tory content. The materials design by the series editor, Hanlie Griesel, created
overt models for academic engagement that are common practice for those
who know how but typically opaque for those that do not. For example, the
typical form of academic argument in which a position is asserted only to be
undercut; reading that entails back and forth movement through the text rather
than linear progression from start to finish. With Hanlie Griesel as series editor,
these materials were released in many iterations, culminating in a range of texts
on interdisciplinary topics such as identity, democracy and discourse, among
others for the RAP pre-university preparatory programme, Introduction to Social
Studies. (Each of these conceptual fields included texts with specific foci, e.g.
Fragmented African Identities, Busakwe, 1997.)
10 The principles of the TTT programme were adapted for a programme of
selection and academic development in the sciences (Grayson, 1996).
11 Within universities, a range of academic developments provided support for
students, often in the form of an additional initial year of study to foundation
or bridging courses focused on language, generic critical thinking skills, or dis-
cipline-specific content. This model was typical of STEM disciplines in which
the disjuncture between schooling and university study was conceived as
a “gap” to be bridged in a building-block type approach. While this idea of
prerequisite skills and knowledge also informed pedagogical approaches in the
132 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

humanities and social sciences, particularly in later iterations, curriculum trans-

formation tended to be more integrated into mainstream degree programmes.
(See for example, Boughey, 2002, 2005; Clarence-Fincham, 1992, 2001; Miller,
Bradbury & Lemmon, 2000; Miller, Bradbury & Pedley, 1998; Scott, 2009.) The
National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI) Framework Report (1993),
drew on this base of experience to develop proposals for educational policy in
anticipation of the democratic era. While these projects lost steam and many
were closed down completely as universities settled back into a view that the
academic difficulties of students would be solved in schools, the field of enquiry
and innovation was sustained in pockets or has been recently resuscitated. (See,
for example, Luckett, 2016; Luckett & Shay, 2017; Slonimsky & Shalem, 2010.)
At the University of the Witwatersrand, an action research project exploring
potential for excellence was focused on developing solid academic engagement in
the second year of study in ways that would increase access to postgraduate study.
REAP (Reaching for excellent achievement, 2011–2014) provided a forum for
experimentation in curriculum design and a provocative space for learning
(Bradbury & Kiguwa, 2012a).
12 The construction of the ZPD as an asymmetrical space may seem incompatible
with egalitarian politics and the ZPD has often been incorrectly reframed
as a space of collaboration between peers that resonates more strongly with
Montessori’s exploratory learning through experience or even Piaget’s cognitive
constructions through transactions with the world. Vygotsky included the possi-
bilities for learning from peers rather than adult teachers and parents but these
peers need to be “more capable” with respect to the task at hand or learning will
not happen. This framing does not exclude the possibility that interesting things
might happen in collaborative groups, and conversations between equals always
include the possibility for new insights from a different perspective. Who occu-
pies the “more capable” role will vary depending on the task at hand and, if we
accept the principle of life-long learning, we all always have several zones of
potential in front of where we now find ourselves.
13 A recent BBC documentary The Ascent of Woman (2016) provides one partial
(not very satisfactory) response to Bronowski’s account.
14 Students of the Afrika Cultural Centre in Johannesburg in the 1980s named
their magazine Timbuktu, reflecting the ways in which the project enlarged
the range of reference points for young people by opening up a continental
African vision beyond the boundaries of the apartheid and colonial frame
(Peterson, 2014).
15 Maldonado-Torres (2016) similarly notes that the resistance of decoloniality
does not come after colonisation but is always an active strain of action and
thought simultaneous with colonisation.
16 The “missing middle” are those students whose families are not among the
poorest of the poor but nonetheless cannot afford exorbitant university fees or
provide full financial support their children through higher education. The
threshold household income is set at R600 000 (a little over $40 000 or £30
000 at current exchange rates) per annum, which actually includes all but
a small number of South African households.
6
EDUCATING (OUR)SELVES
Narratives of (un)learning and being

Introduction
This chapter addresses the problematics of education in which the inevitable
asymmetrical relations between all teachers and learners are amplified by dif-
ferences of class, “race” and gender. These lines of difference raise questions
about what kinds of learning and change are required by whom, and what
new forms of knowing and being are envisaged. The chapter reflects on
shifting political positions and the motility of identities that coalesce in edu-
cational exchanges that always include voices from the past in the process of
articulating young people’s futures. These reflections draw on an action
research project, Fast Forward conducted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
in the first decade of the millennium that was informed by a synergy
between the notion of potential (explored in Chapter 5) and the concept of
narrative imagination. Drawing together these different theoretical domains
enables a praxis that recognises the intersection between epistemology and
ontology, between cognition and narrative identity. The learning-teaching
of new ideas entails changing selves. The hope vested in young people
through investing them with knowledge is amplified in newly democratised
contexts where the (re)invention of our identities or ourselves, as a nation
and as individuals, is an overtly articulated project. My own work as an edu-
cator both prior to democratisation and post-apartheid has been motivated
by this very force. I have always understood, as Maria Tamboukou (2000,
p. 464) puts it, “teaching as a way to change the world, or at least do some-
thing about it”. Perhaps the coincidence of particular points in my personal
134 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

narrative and in national history makes this a fruitful moment for reflection on
whether such purposes are (im)possible. In this chapter, I confront the ways in
which the aim of changing “the other” through the learning-teaching encoun-
ter resonates with both the oppressive language of colonisation and the more
nurturing socialisation discourses of mothering, and reflect on my own posi-
tioning as a white woman academic teacher in my commitments to “change”.
The learning-teaching process is asymmetrical by definition creating what
Derrida calls an “aporia” with inevitable political and ethical consequences.
“So there is an aporia – and let us recall that there is no political decision with-
out going through an aporia: I have to reaffirm my difference and to respect
the other’s difference” (Derrida, 2001, p. 183). Or in Appiah’s (2005, p. 189)
words, the dilemma is: “How can we reconcile a respect for people as they are
with a concern for people as they might be?” He, like Derrida, suggests that
this is a conundrum that cannot be avoided: “to ignore the first term, is tyr-
anny; to give up on the second is defeatism, or complacency”.

Empirical action, intervention and reflection

In the previous chapter, we explored how Vygotsky’s notion of potential
might provide resources for (un)learning the contents and form of univer-
sity knowledge in general, and psychology in particular. Here, I will sug-
gest that the theoretical resources of narrative psychology might be brought
to bear on the processes of learning that are woven into the university
experience and scholarly life: “The educational process in a university is
the site for certain ways of thinking about what matters in life, and certain
ways of thinking about one-self” (Parker, 2015c, p. 75). These processes of
identification (Hall, 1996) insert students into specialised fields of know-
ledge, preparing them for particular modes of work and positioning in the
socioeconomic hierarchies of society and, in the process, they learn to be
different kinds of people. The vast majority of the large numbers of stu-
dents who register for undergraduate psychology courses in South African
universities are planning to continue at the master’s level to become either
counselling or clinical psychologists. Despite the fact that only an extremely
small elite group of students are finally selected for these professional post-
graduate degrees, the motivations of both students and academics are primar-
ily driven in this direction and this has a pervasive retroactive influence on
research agendas and on curricula at all levels of study.
In this context, my pedagogical and political aims are to disrupt par-
ticular conceptions of the psychological as amenable to neat taxonomic
description, and the conventional formulation of diagnostic interventions
in terms of dichotomously defined healthy or unhealthy mental life.
 Educating (our)selves 135

Narrative theory offers one way to shift this dominant framework,

emphasising the temporal and fluid construction of identities and suggest-
ing continuities between ourselves as practitioners (teachers or psycholo-
gists) and those with whom we work, all of us always in the process of
becoming who we are, rather than thinking of ourselves and others as
instantiating the fixed dichotomous roles of teacher/learner or therapist/
client. By working with the theoretical concepts of narrative theory, stu-
dents encounter new tools for conceptualising themselves and others, and
for developing the reflexivity that enables critical practice. All people narrate
the events and experiences of their lives in a perpetual flow of life in which
action and meaning-making are intertwined rather than sequential pro-
cesses. However, the kinds of narratives that we term “life-histories” or
memoires suggest that narrative comes after experience and conversely,
we tend to think of the dominant narratives of psychological theory as
coming before practice. By the time students have reached postgraduate
studies in psychology these disconnections between life and meaning-
making, between theory and practice, are entrenched.

Decolonising knowing and being: contextual relevance

In an early response to the theoretical and practical demands of the post-
apartheid context, De la Rey (1997) argued that the links between psychology
and political activism are incontrovertible. She was sceptical about the rele-
vance and utility of discourse analysis where the immediate needs were (and
still are) for “houses, water and jobs” (De la Rey, 1997, p. 191). Instead, she
argued for a contextually relevant psychology informed by participatory action
research (Fine, 2018) and critical versions of “community psychology”1 (and
associated liberatory, emancipatory or African psychologies). I share De la
Rey’s gut response to theory from the North that can sometimes appear to be
discursive playfulness for its own sake with little relevance for our context.
When these analytic tools are severed from material realities they may, at best,
facilitate little more than self-referential tautologies and, at worst, feed an
extreme relativist scepticism about “truth”, providing for the fake news phe-
nomenon of our era that emboldens climate change denialism and can conjure
“weapons of mass destruction” from desert sands. However, discourse analysis
and deconstruction may be put to progressive political use and, although we
have yet to solve the ongoing crises of “jobs, houses and water”, they have
been productively utilised as research methodologies in critically reframing
psychology and other social sciences in South Africa.
A robust psychosocial engagement with the complex problems of our
times will entail more than “a kind of political immediatism that becomes
136 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

antipathetic to theoretical reflection” (Maldonado-Torres, 2011, p. 4).

Recently, Wahbie Long (2013) has argued that interpreting the decolonial
project as primarily about making knowledge contextually relevant and
applicable is problematic as it fails to acknowledge how the context itself is
always changing and how the boundaries of local contexts are extremely per-
meable, increasingly so in the digital era. Tying ourselves too closely to our
immediate contexts may lock us and those with whom we work into the
very patterns and practices that require resistance but, conversely, retreating
from the demands of life into abstract universals is untenable epistemologic-
ally and politically. In any case, it is erroneous to cast theory developed in
the past and in other places as “universal” rather than contextually relevant
as knowledge is always generated in relation to the historical lines of ideas
that precede it and individual thinkers are always working in relation
with others. Notions of academic freedom that resist societal pressures
conceal the rather narrow constraints within which such intellectual pro-
jects are framed and the interdependence of the academy and wider soci-
ety. Scheibe (1986) refers to intellectual work as a kind of “serious
adventure” in which scientists and artists are supported by society to do
work whose impact and value may not be immediately obvious. How-
ever, there is an anticipated “payback” for these societal costs through the
reproduction of knowledge and skills for work that will sustain collective
life, potentially enhancing the quality of this life in multiple ways, most
obviously through technologies for communication or travel or health. In
increasingly precarious times, the turn-around for this payback is acceler-
ated and the interest demanded is inflated. This may particularly affect
disciplines that do not appear to have immediate material utility such as
literature or philosophy. But if education is shaped solely by the supply-
and-demand model, we cede the framing and direction of human produc-
tion to the forces of the market and it is in this context that Long’s critique
of the demands for relevant education should be taken seriously. If the way
the world is structured now is not the form that we would like it to take in
the future, a reductionist notion of relevance will not have emancipatory
effects and will stunt the possibilities for meaningful humane forms of life.
We need to recognise that “we are always educating for a world that is or is
becoming out of joint” (Arendt, 1961, p. 192, emphasis added).
The task of decolonisation, then, will entail “redefining relevance”
(Ndebele, 1991) to stretch across temporal and spatial zones. Recognising
that contexts are multiple, fragmentary and fluid makes the question of
context and relevance more rather than less important. New forms of
theorising must emerge from these contextual demands created both by
history and by imagined futures. The unknown futures for which education
 Educating (our)selves 137

is preparing young people and the futures for which they are fighting need to
be informed by long and flexible narrative arcs of memory and imagination,
and by engaging the intergenerational present in both wider and more focused
ways. In this way, relevant education is reframed as encompassing life beyond
the here-and-now, prefiguring new ways of being as well as knowing:

The fact is that it is not by learning yet more facts, yet more infor-
mation about what already exists for us in our surroundings, that
we change the way we live our lives. Our task is to change the
ways in which we relate ourselves to our surroundings, and to do
that, we must learn new ontological skills, new ways of being a person.
(Shotter, 2000, p. 25, emphasis added)

Rewinding Fast Forward and articulating new forms of

practice
The Fast Forward programme run at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
(2004–2009) illustrates how a narrative approach may creatively articulate
theory and practice in educating (our)selves and working with questions of
youth identities. The design of the programme incorporated multiple modal-
ities of meaning-making across temporalities: engaging the inherited legacies of
apartheid and colonialism in memory and forgetting; confronting the present
problems and possibilities of young people in their daily lives; and imagining
individual and collective futures.2 University students worked as facilitators on
an intensive programme of activities with young people from two disadvan-
taged schools, one urban and one rural. The name of the programme entails a
metaphorical allusion to technologies that allow us to project forward in the
stories that we read, listen to and view, suggesting that we can make similar
imaginative leaps across time in the construction of our own life stories. This
moment in these young people’s lives offers particular fluidity and uncertainty,
a kind of hinge between childhood and adulthood, what is typically referred
to since Erikson (1968) as a time for resolving the “crisis” of identity.
The programme was multifaceted, challenging participants to think
beyond the confines of their worlds and to envisage a range of possible
alternative paths their lives could follow. The primary pedagogical approach
entailed using various representational cultural forms (music, dance, pho-
tography) to create alternative narratives or storylines for participants, ques-
tioning and extending their existing horizons. As McAdams (2001, p. 114)
notes, “It is painfully clear that life stories echo gender and class construc-
tions in society and reflect, in one way or another, prevailing patterns of
hegemony in the economic, political, and cultural contexts wherein human
138 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

lives are situated”. The programme attempted to engage these structural

underpinnings of narrative by presenting alternatives to enable young people
to interpret their worlds and themselves in new ways, questioning taken-for-
granted versions of who we are and who it is possible to become. In this
way, it engaged in the development of what Césaire termed “poetic know-
ledge” that enables us “to transcend the immediate everyday realities that
confine our capacity to dream, imagine and hope” (Ginwright, 2008, p. 20).
The approach was underpinned by two different theoretical threads to argue
for the interpretive task as an appropriate way to engage young people in
processes of learning and change, including the process of identity construc-
tion: first, Ricoeur’s (1981) notion of the text as a model for human action
and the potential for the “enlargement of the self” by appropriating new
meanings across the distance generated by textuality; and second, Freire’s
(1972, 1973) conceptualisation of literacy (or education more broadly) being
about “learning to read the world” or as a potential form of conscientisation.

Framing possibilities for new narrative lines

Although the programme eschewed didactic instruction in favour
of activities that provoked interpretation and reflection on the part of par-
ticipants, this does not mean that the process was content-less or learner-
driven in the conventional sense. On the contrary, we worked with
a very clear sense of the kinds of discourses in current circulation in our
context (racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism) and deliberately
attempted to create alternative narratives and representations from which
learners could draw in the making of their identities. For example, ideas
of cultural and national heritage that question the boundaries of inclusion
and exclusion; women’s narratives of work in traditionally male roles; dia-
logue about sexuality that recognises the multiplicities of desire. This
agenda is far from neutral and critics could argue that it simply substitutes
one “hidden curriculum” (Illich, 1971) for another, failing to respect and
validate the understandings of others. In particular, many of these ideas
may be rejected as not culturally appropriate. Indeed, they were often
resisted by articulate learners who assertively made such claims as “homo-
sexuality is not part of our culture” or “in our culture, women are
expected to …”. Appiah (2005, p. 177) recognises that education of this
kind entails far more than the simple transmission of new information:

The decision to hew to a traditional gender role does not lend itself
to such redescription. It is not affected by the correction of a few
flatly factual errors. … To get the woman to change her mind here,
 Educating (our)selves 139

you could either erase the social stigma (which would require erasing
other people’s presumably benighted, commitment to values it subsists
upon) or you could somehow produce in her a new brazenness, or
reflective disregard of that stigma. Either way you would be involved in
soul making, refashioning ethical projects and ethical identities.

Such “ethical projects” are complex and require disentangling the

multiple threads of historical oppression. The architecture of apartheid was
explicitly built on racist ideology and constructions of “race” classification,
but the maintenance of “race” boundaries was also always simultaneously
sexualised (Ratele, 2006) and gendered (Shefer, 2010). Lines of difference,
otherness and marginality served to reinforce and maintain one another. The
unravelling and reconstruction of identities will, therefore, likewise entail
engaging these multiplicities simultaneously rather than sequentially (Hassim,
2003), recognising the nuanced ways in which each might reframe the par-
ticular experiences of individual people; “race” complicated by gender and
sexuality, gender complicated by “race” and sexuality, sexuality complicated
by gender and “race”. While the notion of intersectionality (Crenshaw,
1991) is well established in critical theory (e.g. Josselson & Harway, 2012;
Weedon, 1997) “race” was the almost exclusive focus in the initial recon-
struction of South African society. More recent writing across a range of dis-
ciplines (e.g. Jones & Dlamini, 2013; Ndlovu, 2012; Ratele, 2006; Shefer,
2010) is beginning to adopt the wide-angle lens of intersectionalities of
power to focus both its visible field of critique and its visions of possibility.
The activist agenda of the Fast Forward programme was premised on this
notion of intersectionality, employing multiple foci of engagement, to find
ways in which one form of dominance might be undercut by another to
create fissures of possibility, developing “conscious awareness of the contra-
dictory nature of subjectivity” (Weedon, 1997, pp. 83–84).

Educating for nation-building or democratic citizenship

Perhaps some would argue that these kinds of interventionist programmes
go where angels fear to tread, into territory that is not the rightful or
proper domain of education and rather should be left to the “private”
spheres of the family and cultural institutions such as religion. Education
should “stick to the facts”; the teacher’s role is to impart knowledge and
skills that will enable students and learners to live competently and
autonomously in the world. There are at least two obvious problems
with this argument: first, education is never apolitical, always entails an
agenda of some kind, even where this agenda is explicitly stated as to
140 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

avoid “politics” or to embrace “multiculturalism”; second, the domains of

the family and religion are not “private” in the sense of being outside of pol-
itics and the kinds of socialisation that happen in these other spaces are as
value-laden or political as those which take place in classrooms. Appiah
(2005) argues that this is indeed the proper role of state education, educating
children to develop their identities and values, understanding the languages
(both “natural” and academic or political languages) that will enable them to
participate fully as part of the national polity and the wider global world.

Governments do, for example, provide public education in many coun-

tries that help children who do not yet have any settled identity or pro-
jects, hopes, and dreams. This is more than negative liberty, more than
government’s getting out of the way. You may say that parents could do
this; in principle they could. But suppose they won’t or can’t? Shouldn’t
society step in, in the name of individuality, to insist that children be pre-
pared for life as free adults? And, in our society, won’t that require them
to be able to read? To know the language or languages of their commu-
nity? To be able to assess arguments, interpret traditions? And even if the
parents are trying to provide all these things, isn’t there a case to be made
that society, through the state, should offer them positive support?
(Appiah, 2005, p. 29)

This, however, raises the problem of who governs and therefore what (polit-
ical) language children learn in school. Authoritarian systems recognise all
too well the pivotal role of education in creating people who will quite liter-
ally govern themselves, internalising the surveillance of teachers and adopting
appropriate approved “truths” as self-evident. Schooling may be little more
than an elaborate mechanism for developing such “technologies of the self”
(Foucault, 1988). In South Africa, the central role of education in maintain-
ing and extending governmental control was elaborately expressed in the
not-too-distant history of the ideological configuration of apartheid educa-
tion or “Christian National Education”. This system explicitly aimed to pre-
pare children in both “national” and “moral” terms for a racially stratified
future. The current South African education department must, therefore,
address not only inequalities of service delivery in the provision of basic edu-
cational necessities such as infrastructure and skilled teachers but also the con-
tent and form of education in terms of “new” notions of the nation and,
hence, citizenship. Two key examples encapsulate the parameters of this
task: first, quite literally, rewriting history; and second, attending to issues of
language in relation to constitutional multilingual rights in a context where
11 languages have official status. South African history textbooks, like all
 Educating (our)selves 141

histories throughout history, tell the victor’s story. In our context, this vic-
torious story was of colonial conquest as a “righteous” campaign that culmin-
ated in the establishment of white supremacist rule. The displacement of the
apartheid state means that new victors have stories to tell, versions of the
world seen through the eyes of historical victims. However, this task of re-
interpretation entails more than the mere substitution of rights and wrongs
or the inversion of the roles of victims and victors, and presents an opportun-
ity for analysis that will enable progressive future histories to emerge in
which the intersectionalities of power are recognised and resisted. The con-
stitutional framework for language rights has enormous implications for edu-
cation, raising questions about the cognitive and political benefits of mother-
tongue instruction (Alexander, 2004, 2012; Freire, 1972, 1973). Decisions
about additional language learning, which languages should be learned by
whom and to what level of competence, are significant in relation to both
the possibilities for individual socioeconomic mobility and the development
of new forms of collective social coherence (Alexander, 2004). As discussed
in Chapters 4 and 5, there is a pressing imperative to extend and elaborate
the conceptual lexicons of indigenous languages (Alexander, 2012) not only
to increase access to existing knowledge domains but, further, to create and
support alternative epistemological trajectories in the production of know-
ledge (Garuba, 2001; Peterson, 2011).
Furthermore, a very explicit focus on issues of identity development is
evident in the compulsory course for all secondary school learners,
“life orientation”, in which the standard career counselling function of guid-
ance teachers that emphasises personal routes to further study and successful
working life is extended to offer instruction “for life” more broadly conceptu-
alised. In this way, the education of young people explicitly incorporates atten-
tion to the “project of the self” (Giddens, 1991) or personal identity
development and, further, includes considerations of the ethics and politics of
relations with others. The progressive implementation of this project is reliant
on the conscientisation of teachers3 and (re)formulations of national policy.
A contentious proposal by the then Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, was
to introduce a “School Pledge”4 as an attempt to recruit learners to national
and “moral” commitments by invoking the South African constitution that, as
Pandor (2008) asserted at the time, encapsulates those “universal values that
you would want any human being to attach themselves to”. The South African
Constitution is certainly internationally recognised as one of the most progres-
sive in the world and includes the explicit formulation of a “non-racist and
non-sexist society”.5 The contentiousness of the proposal was less to do with
the contents of the pledge than the troublesome didactic assumptions that
repetitive recitation could create new moral sensibilities and practices. Although
142 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

the pledge was never formally instituted, it is indicative of a general sentiment

about the inculcation of civic responsibilities entailed in educating and being
educated. South African higher education institutions, in their formulations of
their “vision and mission”, now typically include “community service” or
“community engagement” as a central task alongside the traditional roles of
teaching and research. Academics and students are (at least on paper) required
to demonstrate the links and value of their knowledge-making to the national
community through active application and practice.
It is thus evident that education is understood as a primary site for the con-
struction and development not only of individual young people’s knowledge
and skills but also for the (re)construction of a (new) sense of national iden-
tity or for redefining the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). The
exclusionary effects of any identity project of this kind but perhaps particu-
larly one which emphasises “national” identity are always immanent but in
the newly democratic South Africa, it may be possible to harness inclusionary
effects by cutting across other lines of division, particularly “race”, but also
entailing multiple intersectional dimensions of difference, including gender,
sexuality, class and (dis)ability (Bradbury & Ndlovu, 2011). The hopes of
older generations may always be vested in the young to “make the world
a better place” but these hopes are exaggerated in contexts of conflictual his-
tories, as epitomised in the case of South Africa (Bradbury, 2012). The
articulation of these hopes in the educational process entails ethical and polit-
ical commitments of care for both the world and young people, as beautifully
expressed in the words of Hannah Arendt (1961, p. 196):

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the

world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token
save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the
coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And educa-
tion, too, is where we decide whether we love our children
enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their
own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of under-
taking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare
them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Recognising “the other” or the task of re-cognising

the “universal”
This may all amount to little more than attempting to “make children in
our own image”, albeit substituting more democratic images for those of
 Educating (our)selves 143

the past and projecting a new national collective in which children (and stu-
dents) will, as adults, participate. However, this project of inventing the future
does not happen de novo and, in complicated ways, we must rework our past
in the dynamism of the present. This means that we work in the confluence
of the long history of colonialism, the shorter explicitly racist history of apart-
heid, and in the multilingual, multicultural contemporary South Africa. This
places exceptional demands on educators to recognise the ways in which edu-
cation, in the process of changing understandings, validates and transgresses
identities – both of ourselves and those we teach. This notion of “identity” is
constructed through what Taylor (1992) has called “webs of interlocution”
arguing that “[w]e define our identity in ways always in dialogue with, some-
times in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us”
(Taylor, 1994, p. 33). Individual “identity” is thus relationally (Fay, 1996) con-
structed, always inevitably partly narrated by others and the way they interpret
who we are. As Taylor (1994, p. 25) further elaborates:

our identity is partly shaped by recognition6 or its absence, often by

the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people
can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society
around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning picture
of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm,
can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted,
and reduced mode of being.

This demand for recognition is imperative in a context where those with

whom we work have been subjected to various oppressive forms of non-
and mis-recognition and I understand part of our task to be this: the valid-
ation and recognition of others for who they are, thereby increasing their
own agentic possibilities. To return to the empirical example of the Fast For-
ward programme, for many young participants, this sense of “recognition”
from the student facilitators and academics on the programme, in dialogue
across boundaries of race and class (and perhaps less obviously from our per-
spective, but critical for these learners, age), is remarkable, liberating.
However, equally important, for my pedagogic purposes, the experi-
ence of confronting “the other” in this intense up-close-and-personal
way also provokes the university student facilitators to rethink themselves
and their context. Although interventions aimed at developmental oppor-
tunities for marginalised youth are of critical importance, transformative
education must also address the lacunae in understanding particular to the
ignorance of the privileged (as discussed in Chapter 4, Steyn, 2012).
Michelle Fine alerts us to attend to this typical “blind spot”:
144 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

I worry that by keeping our eyes on those who gather disadvantage,

we have failed to notice the micropractices by which White youth,
varied by class and gender, stuff their academic and social pickup
trucks with goodies not otherwise available to people of
color. … Whiteness accrues privilege and status within schools;
how whiteness grows surrounded by protective pillows of resources
and second chances; how Whiteness – of the middle-class and elite
variety, in particular – provokes assumptions of and then insurance
for being seen as “smart”.
(Fine, 2004, p. 245)

While all learners on the Fast Forward programme were black, the majority
of the student facilitators in the cohort were white and all, by virtue of their
elite insider status as postgraduate psychology students, might be understood
to occupy class and cultural positions characterised by “whiteness” as defined
by scholars such as Fine (2004), Soudien (2007, 2012b) and Steyn (2012).
These students had grown up post-apartheid but in a society that remains
divided, spatially segregated by race and by increasingly unequal class stratifi-
cation. They had of course read and written about theories of inequality and
difference many times in the course of their university studies but, for many
psychology students, their participation in the programme was a critical
learning experience in which “Consciousness [was] put into question by
a face” (Levinas, 1963, p. 352).
As discussed earlier in Chapter 4, contact across lines of difference does
not inevitably transform relations of power and may even entrench them.
In order for these contact zones (Torre & Fine, 2008) to effectively trans-
form relationships and identities, multiple bidirectional zones of (un)learn-
ing need to be created in which all participants alternate in the roles of
teacher and learner. Reconceptualising Vygotsky’s ZPD along these lines
entails opening ourselves to others in ways that challenge our existing
(mis)understandings of them, the world and our-selves: “The relationship
with another puts me into question, empties me of myself, and does not
let off emptying me – uncovering for me ever new resources” (Levinas,
1963, p. 350). Taylor (1994) acknowledges that the “politics of recogni-
tion” are complex and fraught with tension: how can one truly recognise
the other; in what terms? If recognition is to be on the terms of the other
as other, this implies an appreciation of and understanding of the other’s
meanings and world, the language and cultural resources on which they
draw to be who they are. And of course, if this were fully the case, the
other would cease to be other!
 Educating (our)selves 145

It seems that the argument for recognition must in the end be premised
on some reference to what is usually treated with suspicion and scepticism
that is, “universals” of some kind. (See discussion in Chapter 5.) The
demand for equal dignity seems premised on a notion of “universal human
potential, a capacity that all humans share. This potential, rather than anything
a person may have made of it, is what ensures that each person deserves
respect” (Taylor, 1994, p. 41). This idea of individual personal potential
resonates with Vygotsky’s theory of potential human consciousness as devel-
oped through other-regulation, internalisation and self-regulatory agency
(Miller, 2011; Vygotsky, 1987). Probably all of us who work with young
people find it difficult not to indulge in the romantic expectation of possibil-
ity, of potential waiting to happen! However, Burman (2008) alerts us to the
ways in which psychological theories of children’s development towards
adulthood are appropriated in language used to describe the potential of
“developing” nations or “other” cultures, problematically asserting the
“developed” world or “Western” culture as the destination or end-point of
this process of development.
This opposition of the “West” and Africa (or “the rest”) is the taken-
for-granted framing of liberal colonising discourses that understand the task
of education (or “development”) as assimilation to “Western” knowledge
forms (religion, language and cultural practices). An anecdote exemplifies
my own ignorance of other long histories of meaning-making and forms of
knowledge. As a very young junior academic while working on the TTT
programme (see Chapter 5), I was engaged in animated conversation
(perhaps an argument!) about the power of science and technology with
a colleague in the Zulu department in his office. This was no ordinary col-
league, although his office was down the corridor from mine and his door
was always open. Prof. Mazisi Kunene, who had recently returned home
after more than three decades in exile, was the poet laureate of Africa
(1993) and later of South Africa (2005), and author of many volumes of
poetry and prose, including his masterpiece, Emperor Shaka the Great:
A Zulu Epic (1979). He was old and already quite ill, a great bear of
a man, he shuffled across to his bookshelves, declaring, “I have just the
book you need to read!” and then glancing over his shoulder as he reached
to get it, asked, “You do read Chinese, don’t you?” To this day, I am
uncertain whether he really was intending to offer me an insightful Chinese
text to disrupt my arrogant edifice of knowing, or was simply putting me
in my place by confronting me with the limits of my confident knowledge.
Either way, this memory makes me cringe and lambaste my young self but
I am also filled with gratitude and humility by the generosity of a great
146 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

scholar who willingly shared his time, took me more seriously than
I deserved, and provoked me to think differently.
The recollection of this encounter has been repeatedly triggered in the
context of the contemporary demands for decolonisation and makes me
aware of the multiple threads of human knowledge-making that have been
neglected and from which we can draw to enrich the academy. Mbembe
(2016) captures this process as the transformation of the university into
a “pluriversity”. However, articulations of the decolonial project are often
less multiple in formulation. The binary between the West and Africa (or
the rest) is not disrupted by a framing of the project as the substitution of
one tradition of knowledge by another in which the dominance of the
“West” (whiteness and the colonial language of English) is unintentionally
re-inscribed as the reference point for resistance. While oppositional
constructions may be politically appropriate and strategically harnessed
for change in the current moment, despite his fervent commitment to
multilingualism and the development of indigenous knowledges, Neville
Alexander’s (pers. comm., 2011) oft repeated critique is pertinent: “We
give too much away by ceding certain knowledges to the ‘west’ – all
knowledge is ours, all knowledge is human knowledge!”.
Recognising the potential of others to be like us is quintessentially
a misrecognition. Recognition must entail the anticipation of worth and
value to be found in the other, not in potential form, but actualised in its
own terms, different from that which is familiar.

I would like to maintain that there is something valid in this pre-

sumption, [that there is something equally valuable in all cultures]
but that the presumption is by no means unproblematic, and
involves something like an act of faith. As a presumption, the claim
is that all human cultures that have animated whole societies over
some considerable stretch of time have something important to say
to all human beings.
(Taylor, 1994, p. 66)

But this act of recognition or taking this leap of faith does not dispense
with critique. Cultures are not homogenous nor hermetically sealed and
therefore to speak of “recognition” of others cannot mean the acceptance
of some statically encoded form of life to which individuals blindly and
uniformly adhere. This would imply, for example, that “Western” culture
and its knowledge systems are homogenously expressed and experienced
through time and across place. In binary terms, it would also assume the
inverse of a romantically projected future, a nostalgia that in postcolonial
 Educating (our)selves 147

language is often formulated as a pristine “African” past, untainted by

colonialism.
The politics of recognition is not simply an expression of solidarity with
the other, which Taylor (1994, p. 70) rightly dismisses as “breathtaking
condescension” on the part of the dominant, but must assume the possibil-
ity for genuine dialogue, for mutual exchange that opens up possibilities for
movement and change. Education, in our context (and although perhaps
less overtly and in more convoluted ways, in all other places in the
contemporary globalised world) is inextricably tied to our colonial heritage
and cannot possibly proceed on the basis that the traditions of Africa need
replacing. In the specific context of the Fast Forward programme, the
reconstruction of the identities of these young people does not entail
a kind of education by substitution. But neither can we approach the
educational task as an elaborate form of validation, accepting differences as
inevitable and immutable. Worthwhile educational encounters may disrupt
or challenge the definitions of self with which people live and may offer
alternative resources to enable young people to live lives that are ethical,
interesting and productive. Besides, there is no sense in which the Fast
Forward participants can be thought of as living in a world divorced from
the global, neoliberal “culture” that dominates the South African landscape:
designer clothing, American media of all forms including digital worlds;
language crossings and reworkings, are all part of young people’s “culture”.
Neither is it inevitably the case that different “cultures” are characterised
by “different” values. In the most hopeful sense, all cultures provide mem-
bers with ways to “live together” and systematised ways of recognising one
another. Sadly, the less hopeful correlate is that it is also the case that
sexism and homophobia have found, and continue to find, fertile ground
in multiple cultural worlds. It is thus this hybrid cultural world and the
mobile articulations of identity within it with which we must engage –
respectfully and critically. bell hooks (1994) argues for a version of “multicul-
turalism” that, unlike the metaphorical “rainbow nation” or the “melting
pot”, is inevitably conflictual and challenging. This must require of us
a willingness to shift positions as teachers and learners and a recognition not
only of difference but also paradoxically of sameness, a recognition not only
of the other, but also, an acknowledgement of who we ourselves are in the
light of this encounter: “Respect of the other is an essential component of
human rights, where the ‘other’ can also be ‘I’, and ‘I’ can also be the
‘other’” (Egéa-Kuehne, 2001, p. 189).
Education is, by definition, interventionist, at its best, transformatory.
If change is anathema to us or to those with whom we work, we cannot
act. Whereas to act is risky and inevitably takes both learners and teachers
148 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

onto dangerous and unstable ground, failing to act seems the most unethical
option of all or, at least, not an option legitimately available to educators:

We could argue that the only way to do justice to the other, the other
whom we dare to educate, is by leaving the other completely alone. It
is not difficult to see that this neglect (which would not even count as
a border-case of education) would make the other unidentifiable and
unrecognizable. This would definitely block the invention for the
other and would be therefore utterly unjust. For education not to be
unjust some form of recognition of the other as other is needed. But as
we have already seen, any form of recognition, although necessary, is
at the very same time a mis-recognition, and for that reason, violent.
This seems to be the aporia of any education that does not want to be
unjust. It is, however, the aporia with which education has to reckon.
Can this be done? How can this be done?
(Biesta, 2001, p. 51)

Educating (our)selves in a postmodern, postcolonial world?

I want to conclude by turning reflexively and specifically to my-self and
my positioning in this process of educating “selves”. Given my blind
spots, the ways in which I am implicated in historical forms of knowing
and patterns of power, and the incomplete processes of my own (un)
learning and change, can the projects in which I am engaged be
considered critical feminist practice? Can this educational praxis have eman-
cipatory effects? Or is it simply the expression of colonial expansiveness,
missionary proselytising or traditional mothering? These are serious not flip-
pant questions and are indeed very specifically pertinent to my own self,
my own context of practice: can a white middle-class, middle-aged, Eng-
lish-speaking woman still teach in Africa?7 However, I think that while
these issues of diversity, difference and otherness may be exaggerated in my
case, they are characteristic features of all educational relations. Perhaps
women educators, especially if we are committed to emancipatory agendas,
are particularly prone to anxieties in relation to the exercise of power in
the learning-teaching situation. Tamboukou’s (2000) article, “The paradox
of being a woman teacher”, explores these ambivalences with such remark-
able insight that reading it made me feel as if I were looking in a mirror!
However, bell hooks (1994, p. 33) argues that such prevarications may be
problematic and inadvertently retrogressive: “If we fear mistakes, doing
things wrongly, constantly evaluating ourselves, we will never make the
academy a culturally diverse place where scholars and the curricula address
 Educating (our)selves 149

every aspect of that difference”. While definitely littered with such “mis-
takes”, the educational practice that I have reflected on here is an attempt
to teach in a way that “enables transgressions – a movement against and
beyond boundaries” (bell hooks, 1994, p. 12).
It is imperative that as educators we attend to our own boundaries, our
own entrenched ideas and ways of being, and open ourselves up to the
possibilities for these to be challenged, unravelled and reconfigured in
dialogue with learners. However, it also remains incumbent upon us to
challenge learners’ boundaries, to create new frameworks of understanding.
As a feminist academic teacher who grew up white and was educated
under apartheid, perhaps I can do little more than offer new theoretical
concepts, new ways to talk about the world and ourselves. But then again
perhaps this little is enough. Mark Freeman is cautiously hopeful that
teachers can create possibilities for others through narratives or stories but
neither he nor I think that, “we, academic researchers and theorists, ought
to be in the business of telling others how to live. Our own lives are often
troubling enough” (Freeman, 1993, p. 229).
Angela Davis recently gave the 2016 annual Steve Biko Memorial Lec-
ture, which she entitled, “Unfinished Activisms”. She drew parallels
between the US civil rights movement of the 1960s (and to a lesser
extent, with the struggle against apartheid) and the contemporary “Black
Lives Matter” campaign in America and the Fallist Student Movement in
South Africa. She outlined how these movements may be understood
to represent the unfinished business of earlier battles against racism, and
economic and cultural inequalities. Despite the attainment of political
freedoms in both contexts, the younger generation view these as hollow
victories, and many of the older generation feel that “this is not the
future we were fighting for” (Davis, 2016). The older generation,
although living alongside the youth in the same time zone, do not live in
the same world as the youth, and their futures are foreshortened. How-
ever, while the young may critique the older generation for giving in or
up too soon, for failing to finish the fight, they did not live in the worlds
of overt racism and brutal state power in which their parents had to sur-
vive. It could be argued that contemporary youth’s interpretations of
these earlier times is as legitimate as the understandings of those who
lived through those events. In much the same way that the novelist’s
account of her narrative becomes simply another version alongside that of
other literary critics, past protagonists do not have sole purchase on the
meanings of historical events, particularly in terms of their later impact in
the future-of-now. But, conversely, it could also be suggested that the
perspective of the older generation is not irrelevant to current events in
150 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

which the youth are the main actors. Davis is insistent that the youth should
be “left to make their own mistakes” even when they seem to be repeating
the errors of previous historical moments. However, successive generations
do not operate from a blank slate; this is both the beauty and the terror of
human life. In this sense, the mistakes (and new victories) of the youth
are never entirely and solely their “own” but those of all living (and dead)
generations. The older generation needs to acknowledge this complicity and,
despite our making of messy history, dare to offer suggestions for tackling
the complexities of life in the present and imagining futures.

But surely it is not outside the bounds of possibility to suppose that

some of the work we do, even if its primary role is but an exemplary
one – i.e. “This is what a life can be like”, “This is how someone
can be defeated or rendered unconscious”, “This is how someone
can reclaim his or her history”, and so on – might be of value to
someone besides ourselves.
(Freeman, 1993, p. 229)

While the autobiographical past experiences of the older generation are

quite literally consigned to history by the young, and the older generation
will not live into their extended futures, the present is a shared, overlapping
space. This space is a multi-dimensional chronotope (Bakhtin, 2010) in
which elements of both the past and future exist in a complex interface.
Present actions are informed by vibrant threads of remembering and
imagining, even (or perhaps especially) when these are not conscious pro-
cesses. In this sense, the present is a space of shifting sands, processes of
activity and understandings that are always in motion. This sense of flux
and uncertainty cannot be contained in assertions of fixed standpoints or by
privileging the vantage point of either the past or the future. To draw on
Gadamer’s metaphor of the horizon:

as human beings we can never come to an overview of the whole

which would allow us to systematize it but instead find ourselves
under way within an entirety of speaking and thinking which always
exceeds the horizons of our perspective.
(Smith’s introduction to Gadamer, 1980, xiii, emphasis added)

In the 10th annual Helen Joseph Memorial lecture at the University of

Johannesburg, Njabulo Ndebele (2016) spoke of his sense of the deep fissures
in South African society, and an “intergenerational dissonance” in under-
standing both past and present events. The provocative title of his talk “They
 Educating (our)selves 151

are Burning Memory” points primarily to conceptions of decolonisation as

a project of erasing the past (as encapsulated in the cultural objects of oppres-
sive histories, such as statues, commemorative naming of spaces and build-
ings, artworks or even books). Ndebele is highly sceptical about the
possibility (and desirability) of this project of erasure and asks us to reflect on
the collateral damage of such actions. He argues that in the process what is
lost is not just past knowledge or opportunities to learn from history but,
more critically, attempts to erase the past may entail a loss of agentic visions
of the future, a burning of potential memories. He suggests that what is
occurring is a temporal inversion, looking back in the hopes of recuperating
a utopian future that never happened and, in the process, negating the possi-
bilities contained in present conditions.
Paradoxically, without the constraining parameters of past meanings
and actions, it would not be possible to develop new forms of action and
understanding. Intergenerational knowledge makes it possible for both the
past and the future to inform the present. The question is whether gener-
ations who do not speak one another’s languages can find common meanings
in translation and forge ways to participate in multilingual conversations.
The exigencies of this present moment mean that it is imperative to ensure
the inclusion of multiple traditions and contradictory voices, voices that
speak from the past and echoes from as yet unformed futures. The mythical
Ghanaian Sankofa bird represents an inspirational metaphor of the tensed
narrative subject who flies forward while looking backward to collect the
wisdoms of the past, creating new storied trajectories and lines of flight. The
famous aphorism from Kierkegaard (cited in Crites, 1986, p. 165) captures
a similar sense of the contra-flows of action and narrative understanding:
“Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards”. We
are compelled (or perhaps even condemned) to be propelled forward
in action on the understandings of others, acting in advance of our own
understanding which cannot but come after the fact. As parents and teachers,
we may build nests to nurture the young and prepare for the future and, as
intellectuals and researchers, we may pursue new lines of thinking in the hopes
of transforming the world, but we do so precariously perched in the messy pre-
sent, on the tensile high-wire, where the past remains electrically alive.

Notes
1 An innovative example of a participatory action research project that crosses
the boundaries between political activism, higher education and the disciplinary
practices of psychology is the recent University of East London project in the
Calais camp for migrants (mostly but not only from the Syrian war), named
152 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

by residents themselves, “the Jungle”. The multi-pronged approach was to (1)

provide opportunities for migrants to study a foundational higher education
course; (2) press for improvements in the living conditions in the camp and for
resolution to their status as “illegal” migrants; (3) offer psychosocial support; and
(4) collaboratively research and document the experiences of people living in
the Jungle. The camp was subsequently demolished but a published collection of
narratives tells how people acted creatively to humanise themselves and their rela-
tionships in this dehumanising place (Godin, Moller Hansen, Lounasmaa, Squire
& Zaman, 2017).
2 The programme has been written about in more detail elsewhere (see Bradbury
& Clark, 2012; Bradbury & Miller, 2010). I would like to acknowledge the
intellectual, soul and embodied energies of my UKZN colleagues who worked
with me on this innovative programme, particularly Jude Clark, Tarryn Frankish,
Kerry Frizelle and the late Siyanda Ndlovu. In the decade since, I have been
involved in other similar participatory action projects focused on narrative iden-
tity. In the initial phase of The Africa Gender Institute project at the University
of the Witwatersrand, Witsies (Women Intellectuals Transforming Scholarship in
Education), Peace Kiguwa and I worked together with photographer, Iris Dawn
Parker, who coined the acronym that framed our action and thinking. Young
women students became co-researchers with us, documenting their ambivalent
experiences of articulating new versions of themselves as university students.
They captured their daily experiences of alienation, assimilation and aspiration in
images and text (Bradbury & Kiguwa, 2012b). Currently, NEST (Narrative
Enquiry for Social Transformation) at Wits is working in partnership with
YOTS (Youth of the South) in Soweto, under the leadership of Hayley Haynes-
Rolando and Phethile Zitha, to create dynamic, bidirectional flows of narrative
research and practice between young people in the community, and students
and researchers in the university.
3 An incident reported in the local press is indicative of the ways in which multiple
identity struggles are playing themselves out in the sites of schooling. A lesbian
learner was informed by a teacher that she could not bring her same-sex partner to
the matric dance (the South African equivalent of the American prom) because
“same-sex couples had behaved ‘inappropriately’ in the past by ‘holding hands’”
(Govender, 2013). The immorality act of apartheid that prohibited sex across the
“colour line” may be abolished and freedom from discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation may be enshrined in the constitution but “transgressive” sexual-
ities are still clearly the subject of censure and continue to be overtly policed.
However, the teacher’s position was successfully challenged by a supportive
mother, some indication of societal shifts and optimistic possibilities for change.
4 The proposed School Pledge:
“We the youth of South Africa, recognising the injustices of our past, honour
those who suffered and sacrificed for justice and freedom.
We will respect and protect the dignity of each person, and stand up for
justice.
We sincerely declare that we shall uphold the rights and values of our Consti-
tution and promise to act in accordance with the duties and responsibilities that
flow from these rights.”
5 The inclusion of the term “non-sexist” alongside “non-racist” was not a foregone
conclusion, pointing to the precarious nature of these commitments. One of the
participants in the drawing up of the constitution who was later to become one of
 Educating (our)selves 153

the first judges of the Constitutional Court, Albie Sachs (2011), provides us with
a (black!) humorous account of how his initial proposal of the phrase was met
with bemusement and even incomprehension by fellow team-members and was
dropped in various interim iterations before finally being accepted.
6 The standard greeting in isiZulu, Sawubona, translated as “hello” in English,
literally means “I see you” as in “I recognise you” in the full sense in which
Taylor uses the term of “recognition”.
7 From a different identity positioning as a young black middle-class student,
Chikane (2018) asks a similar question: “Can Coconuts be trusted with
the revolution?” For many in the Student Movement, the answer to both Chi-
kane’s question and mine (Can a middle-class, middle-aged white woman still
teach in Africa?) would be a resounding no. However, I think that different
answers might emerge by reframing these questions. What is it that “coconuts”
can (and cannot) contribute to the revolutionary moment? It is often angrily
observed that the democratic state neglected the student crisis and institutional
recalcitrance with regard to transformation for decades, only responding once
the protests hit the elite universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand.
This re-inscribes the lack of state accountability to the majority poor and
working class, and bolsters the “whiteness” of these institutions and those who
learn and teach within them. It is this that produces Chikane’s questioning of
himself in acknowledging that he deserves the derogatory label of “coconut”.
But instead of lamenting the fact that government were only provoked into
a response when student protests challenged the centres of historical privilege,
recognising this political leverage creates new demands for accountability and
integrity on the part of those with access to these spaces and the power of
these knowledge-making processes. Coconuts cannot be solely entrusted with
the revolution but that does not mean they have no role to play. Likewise,
the dominant narratives of colonial education must be challenged and white
academics decentred. However, side-lining the older generation and those with
disciplinary knowledge and power may provide license to renege on our com-
mitments and obligations to the world and the younger generation in ways
that may benefit no one except those intended to be penalised.
7
HISTORIES AND HOPE
Acting, thinking and being in
the present

Introduction
This final chapter will explore the possibilities for change towards hopeful
futures in relation to the ways in which the traumatic past infuses the
present.1 The temporal structure of human experience that spans past and
future enables a dialogical engagement with present tensions and creates
possibilities for intentional action and individual and social change. How-
ever, this temporal line is not inevitably progressive or developmental and
neither are the consequences of our actions predictably contained in our
intentions. A historical narrative that consigns trauma and conflict to the
past and hopeful imaginative possibilities to the future is hopelessly over-
simplified. The warp and weft of time-space bends the narrative lines of
personal memory and imagination, and creates oscillating movements in
the longer durations of human life. In the first few decades of the 21st
century, these shifts, twists and turns seem to occur at ever increasing
speeds, threatening both the retention of memory and past traditions, and
the possibilities for planning or intentional action. The question is how to
engage with, respond to and act thoughtfully in the flow of these acceler-
ated frames of experience by “reflect[ing] on the process we are going
through now: the process of becoming, of making sense of all the noises”
(Ndebele, 2007, p. 156). From the perspectives of both Vygotskian and
narrative psychology, intergenerational longitudinal trajectories coalesce in
this process of meaning-making which is at once personal and political.
As the Sankofa bird reminds us, flying forward without looking back is
both foolish and dangerous even though it may seem ostensibly the safest,
most efficient way to reach a future destination. However, the process
of constructing a meaningful life in the present cannot rely solely on the
 Histories and hope 155

traditions of the past, even when these traditions are recuperated from
outside of dominant knowledge systems, and demands a dialectic between
the recollected past and the imagined future. Arendt (1961, p. 193)
reminds us that generating these lines of vision requires open dialogue
across generational vantage points:

Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings;
but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy
everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate
how it will look.

Traumatic histories and present day violences

The post-apartheid generation has now come of age, both the young
people who were “born free” and the state and its institutions: the
imagined future of our past has arrived and it is now clear that the rain-
bow was a mirage. For the younger “hinge generation” (Hoffman, 2004),
the legacy of apartheid, the weight of history is substantial and systemic;
entrenched in the racialised economic hierarchy, inscribed in the spatial
architecture of “separate development” and in the transmission of the psychic
scarring of the older generation. At a global level, the hopes that unfurled in
an Obama campaign that declared “Yes, we can!”, the possibilities of an
Arab Spring or a socialist Venezuela are dashed, and violent conflicts con-
tinue around the globe. While some things are better for some people, most
things are not for most people and this is particularly true for the African
continent.
In 2016, eight staff members of the South African Broadcasting Cor-
poration (SABC) were summarily fired by the Director for resisting
instructions not to broadcast footage of violent service delivery protests
which were (and are) an everyday occurrence across South Africa. These
protests by ordinary people declare the failures of the democratic state to
deliver the basic facilities of life: housing, water, electricity, education and
health, and disrupt the ruling party’s election slogan, “We have a good
story to tell!”. After years of “waiting lists” and the recognition that
“change cannot happen overnight”, the dignity of political freedom has
been eroded by the material indignities of poverty in the face of continuing
and accelerating wealth by the white minority and the new black elite. It
has become widely accepted that such protests must employ an element of
“violence” (such as destruction of infrastructure, burning of tyres, blocking
roads) to have any hope of attracting the attention of those with the power
156 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

to do anything about the situation. People gathering on the streets is a way

of refusing invisibility and interrupting the silencing of policies that paper
over the cracks of lived experiences. The SABC policy directive was prem-
ised on concealing this activism from the wider public, to smooth the
national storyline of progress and development, consigning the poor to
a “normalised absence/pathologised presence” (Phoenix, 2002, p. 505).
One of the SABC Eight (as they became known) was Lukhanyo Calata,
son of the struggle hero, Fort Calata, who was murdered by apartheid
security police over 30 years earlier, on 27 June 1985. Fort Calata and his
comrades, the Cradock Four, were intercepted at a road block, tortured,
killed and, in the particularly gruesome violence of the apartheid era, their
bodies burnt. When Nomonde Calata (Fort’s widow and Lukhanyo’s
mother) testified at the TRC, her memories were unleashed in a scream of
psychic pain (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2018). Although the firing of the son is
not comparable to the murder of the father, the blow to his life is delivered
by the very democratic state for which his father fought and died, in
a futile attempt to conceal its own failure to create a just and equal society.
His mother’s scream seems to resonate silently in the intergenerational
family story as the traumatic past actively mutates in the present.
We are living through what is described by Berlant (2011, p. 200) as
a historical “impasse”, in the aftermath of catastrophe and in the tedious
repetitions of action and thought without “traction” for change. In
language that anticipates Christina Sharpe’s (2016) remarkable text In the
Wake, Berlant (2011, p. 10) describes how, in the crisis of the impasse,
“being treads water; mainly, it does not drown. Even those whom you
would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay
attached to life from within it”. Sharpe (2016) explores contemporary
articulations of racism and xenophobia both on the ground of America and
in the waves of migrants crossing seas and borders, demonstrating the ways
in which oppression is perpetuated “in the wake”. She works
the metaphor in its multiple meanings “as a means of understanding how
slavery’s violences emerge within contemporary conditions” (Sharpe, 2016,
p. 14). First, and most prominently, the wake refers to the dragging, churn-
ing agitated currents of water behind slave ships. But the word also evokes
other associations in the enactment of a wake at the bedside of her dying
brother, a simultaneous mourning and celebration of life, and, echoing
Fanon (1963), refers to the state of wakefulness or anxious insomnia that
makes sleep and rest impossible.
Through powerful visual and word images, Sharpe concentrates the
oppressive sweeps of history in individual narratives of loss. The text
opens with the piling up of her own family’s losses and how these reflect
 Histories and hope 157

the multiple lines of marginalisation of African Americans in the present.

The narrative form of the text moves the reader back and forth between
personal experience and political systems, maintaining a “critical bifocal”
approach (Fine, 2018) that ranges across temporal and spatial zones of racist
exploitation and oppression to undercut the simple version of historical pro-
gress. She juxtaposes the ships of slavery and of African migrants drowning in
waters within sight of European shores, forces us to look into the face of
a little girl rescued in the Haitian earthquake of 2010 with the label “ship”
above her vacantly staring eyes and, as we do so, to read the account of the
slave auctioning of Phyllis Wheatley as a little girl of similar age, both
children ripped from their families, isolated, alone and dehumanised.
Sharpe’s text creates the sense of the all-pervasive foul “weather” of
oppressive conditions within and against whose powerful currents life
must be navigated. The present patterns of systemic racism and material
inequalities throughout the world mean that traumatic histories are not
deeply buried but entangled in the living surfaces of experience, creating
“holding” patterns of repetitive trauma. #Black Lives Matter emerged not
through feats of historical imagination but because people “are already
experiencing trauma from their material, lived violence”, (Sharpe, 2016,
p. 88). In the South African context, the violence of apartheid is perpetuated
in current patterns of unequal distribution of the material and political
“goods” of democratic life, creating precarious forms of contemporary
citizenship.

Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage

populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity … regarding
whose life is grievable and worth protecting, and whose life is
ungrievable or marginally or episodically grievable.
(Butler, 2012, p. 170)

It is in this national and international context that the South African Student
Movement took shape in 2015, in its two primary (inter-related) articula-
tions: #Rhodes Must Fall (engaging symbolic violence and initiating
the urgent imperatives of the decolonisation project) and #Fees Must Fall
(focusing on the material exclusions of the majority of young South Africans
from a range of citizenship rights, including, specifically, participation in
higher education and the economy). These contemporary political move-
ments are responses to dehumanising histories that are actively animating
present conditions, producing what Manganyi (1973, p. 10) refers to as
conditions that are “unhygienic” for mental health, generating “existential
insecurity” resulting in “helplessness” and despairing “nauseous anxiety”.
158 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

Hope for change: an optimistic vision?

In a context where the majority are living precarious lives of survival, the
narrative of hope most often takes the shape of a story of possible escape.
We have already explored the ways in which the myth of meritocracy (see
Chapter 5) works to assimilate people to the expectations of a hierarchical
system that is sustained through increasing levels of exclusions. “Today’s
optimism in undergoing education seems exclusively driven by our present
need (and fear) to secure individual success above all else” (Di Paolantonio,
2016, p. 152). The provision of basic goods and services, including access
to education that is the promised route to attain these things and more, is
being implemented at an excruciatingly slow pace but in a context of con-
spicuous consumption by the rich and in a (digital) world without limits,
offering remarkable remakes of the “American dream” for all. Berlant
(2011, p. 2) describes these conditions of late capitalism as characterised by
“cruel optimism” in which people develop

a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables

you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or
a world to become different in just the right way. … such that
a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound
threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.

She argues that the project of assimilation or incorporation into the narra-
tive of progress is an apocalyptic vision, a repetition in Marxist terms of
“farce after tragedy”. Although she wrote this work before recent troubling
global developments, the xenophobic exclusionary politics being played out
in Europe, in the endlessly deferred Brexit escape plan, and in the United
States in its un-united state under Trump, these events might be under-
stood as the consequences of a continually unravelling narrative of universal
progress. Hopeful aspirations are disfigured and “freedom is reduced to
a market strategy and citizenship either is narrowed to the demands of the
marketplace or becomes utterly privatised” (Giroux, 2008, p. 130). Berlant
(2011, p. 1) suggests that being co-opted into this narrative of individual
achievement creates a “cruel optimism” in that what “you desire is actually
an obstacle to your flourishing”. The forms of life that are supported and
demanded by late capitalism promise possibilities for this flourishing, “by
the incoherence with which alienation is lived as exhaustion plus saturating
intensity” (Berlant, 2011, p. 166).
Within the horizons of human and planetary finitude, hope mutates
into striving for individual access to privatised public goods that might
 Histories and hope 159

deliver future benefits for one’s children. In one sense, this hope for the next
generation is the most universal, most human, most ordinary sustaining force
of life, and those of us who already have ownership of these private goods,
including comfortable armchairs (mine, Berlant’s and Giroux’s!) from which
to offer this critique, should proceed with caution in asserting alternative
visions. In some places in the world (South Africa included) generational
mobility is a very real prospect for some (though of course not all). It is,
however, also very clear that our inherited structural frameworks both entice
and frustrate individual strivings for better futures, and the routes for mobility
are along narrow pathways across treacherous terrain rather than multi-lane
speedy highways. Personal success happens in a context of collective misery.
It is difficult to think creatively and productively about collective possibilities
for change in the mire of despair. But Eagleton (2016, p. 122) reminds us
that despair is not hopelessness:

As long as calamity can be given a voice, it ceases to be the final

word. Hope would stumble to a halt only when we could no
longer identify cruelty and injustice for what they were. To speak
of hopelessness must logically presuppose the idea of hope. It is
when meaning collapses that tragedy is no longer possible.

The future holds out the potential of not-yet-realised worlds and triggers our
imaginations for alternatives even when the meaning of the present seems
perpetually on the verge of collapsing and people are living “illegible lives”
(Phoenix, 1991), incomprehensible to others and themselves. “[B]eing able
to imagine an alternative future may distance and relativise the present,
loosening its grip upon us to the point where the future in question
becomes more feasible. … True hopelessness would be when such
imaginings were inconceivable” (Eagleton, 2016, p. 85). However, in
responding to and rethinking conditions of despair, hopeful resources
may counterintuitively be found not only in the imagined future but
also in the re-imagining of the past and in present activism.

Backward-looking hope: resources in the past

Sharpe (2016, p. 19) imagines the astonishment of slave ancestors who
were “thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage” to find
their descendants still here, still breathing, still living in the wake. The
components of hydrogen and oxygen that constitute the water that
drowns are also the stuff of the air that we breathe, that enlivens and
aspirates us. Aspirational desire for achievement is usually thought of as an
160 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

unequivocal good, motivating study and “hard work”, and driving purpose-
ful forms of life. But Sharpe (2016, p. 113) again alerts us to the ambiguous
and ambivalent implications of aspiration for black life in the wake as
a process of “imagining and for keeping and putting breath back in the Black
body in hostile weather”. Forcing breath into dying bodies, enabling them
to live on into futures that may not be of their choosing, is both “violent
and life-saving” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 113). As I have argued above, the possibil-
ities for these futures are constrained by the past of multiple near-drownings
that have been survived. But the paradox of human life is that even within
the most brutal passages of history, human resistance and creativity persists.
People not only survive but live, generating cultural resources for themselves
and for future generations (Mama, 1995).
Mourning and nostalgia for what is lost may, therefore, be intertwined
with a kind of backward-looking hope. As opposed to restorative nostalgia
that entails attempts to restore the “truth” in the recovery of the past,
reflective nostalgia has the capacity to remake memory in ways that are gen-
erative for the present (Boym, 2001, 2007). This form of nostalgic longing
is not so much for a particular time or place but for earlier identities (senses
of self) and cultural resources that recuperate human dignity and enable
new practices of ethics and aesthetics in the present. “[I]t is not nostalgia
for the ideal past, but for the present perfect and its lost potential” (Boym,
2001, p. 21), entailing a process of “inventing memory in the future tense”
(Sanders, 2010, p. 121). From this perspective, precolonial forms of life and
art are not lost remnants of past life; they provide imaginative frames for
present life and aspirational imagined possibilities of social coherence gener-
ated through bonds of obligation2 and care:

A time is posited when there will have been ubuntu. If this were
merely a time in the past, one could call this a remembering. But
strictly speaking the phrasing is in the future perfect: the time of
Ubuntu that is posited has never had an actual existence, rather it
exists at the level of possibility.
(Sanders, 2010, p. 120)

The continuities across the ostensible radical ruptures of history through

colonisation and in post-colonial social formations mean that the traumatic
and creative processes of the past simultaneously actively animate the pre-
sent. These creative possibilities are overshadowed but not eclipsed by the
obsession with the accumulation and spread of facts and figures in the ether
of the information age. Global connectivity offers resources for scientific
control of personal, embodied and planetary futures but, conversely, those
 Histories and hope 161

with financial and technological power are also able to monopolise and
manipulate knowledge systems in extenuated ways in the production of
fake news and the insinuation of homogenous frames of reference, language
and culture. In the face of these pervasive neo-colonial forces, the cultural
resources of long histories and the vibrancy of culture in everyday life are
essential for the generation of alternative futures. Appiah (1992) expresses
faith in the potential of African resilience and resistance beyond the walls
of the academy, in relational cultural life on the ground rather than in
the ether.

And what happens will happen not because we pronounce upon the
matter in theory, but out of the changing everyday practices of African
cultural life. For all the while, in Africa’s cultures, there are those who
will not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of
economic decline, despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnu-
trition, disease and political instability, African cultural productivity
grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance,
drama, music, and visual art all thrive.
(Appiah, 1992, p. 254)

Raging hope in the present

The challenges of the present cannot be met by avoiding, minimising or
silencing the catastrophic effects of the past. The terrain of potential
development or the imagined future horizons of life are anchored in or
tethered to the past. As Eagleton (2016, p. 24) notes:

If the past cannot be deleted … it is not least because it is a vital

constituent of the present. We can progress beyond it, to be sure,
but only by means of the capabilities with which it has bequeathed
us. The habits bred by generations of supremacy and subservience,
arrogance and inertia, are not to be unlearned overnight. Instead
they constitute [a] … legacy of guilt and debt which contaminates
the roots of human creativity, infiltrating the bones of and blood-
stream of contemporary history and entwining itself with our more
enlightened, emancipatory impulses.

In contemporary South Africa, working-class muscle is being newly

flexed, strengthened not only by recollection of past injustices that people
refuse to forget but in direct response to the repetitive actions of elites
that entrench conditions of structural violence and inequality in the
162 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

present. The decades of “waiting” post the first democratic elections of

1994 have betrayed people’s hope in yet another of the governing party’s
catchy slogans, promising “a better life for all”. In these circumstances, rage
is not an irrational response but rather “a productive force for freedom
from oppression” (Canham, 2018, p. 320), expressing “affective commit-
ments to self and community” (Canham, 2018, p. 325). Rage indicates that
people know the world does not need to be organised in this way, and they
understand that the elite has both the power and the financial resources
necessary to change things but not the political will to do so.
In this sense, rage may be read as an indicator of hope, a belief that
the future need not resemble either the past or the present. In Canham’s
analysis, the affect of rage is conjoined with a term that sounds antiquated
and anachronistic by comparison: indignation. However, this somewhat
mild-sounding term refers not to an impolite slight but to an assault on
human dignity. Although material poverty undermines the dignity3 of
personhood, the question of recognition is also critical. Questions of the
sociological, political and economic dimensions of human life cannot be
abstracted from the peculiarly dehumanising effects of racialisation that per-
meate South African society, nor from contestations about gendered and
sexual identities, or the dynamics of global conflicts around citizenship and
belonging. “From this perspective, the concept of reparation is not only an
economic project but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repair-
ing broken links, relaunching forms of reciprocity without which there can
be no progress for humanity” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 182).
Canham argues that the affective response of rage need not translate
into violent action; however, it most often does and it is in any case diffi-
cult to imagine its effectiveness as a political tool for change in conditions
of structural violence unless it is externally expressed in some way. In the
face of intransigent authorities who remain impassive to the legitimate,
pressing demands of citizens particular forms of disruptive protest (that
may include actions such as blockading roads or the destruction of public
property, often by burning) have become commonplace in South Africa.
While the machinery of the state may sometimes be moved to provide
partial responses to these demands (re-inscribing these forms of protest as
the only effective way to gain attention) these responses are also typically
accompanied by overt, sometimes violent, policing that may serve to
exacerbate rather than contain violence. Aggressive activism or violent
forms of protest may be analytically sensible and politically defensible
under conditions of structural violence but rendering these patterns
“normal” is also part of the problematics of change in a context characterised
by pervasive (hyper)masculine forms of interpersonal violence in everyday
 Histories and hope 163

life. Rage may be triggered by “commitments to self and community” but

4

violent expressions of rage may not always be effective in the face of repres-
sive institutional and state violence. Further, it may not provide the impetus
for sustaining selves or communities in constructing hopeful futures, some-
times acting back on the actor/s, inflicting self-harm and further fraying
already fragile community bonds, with the deepest and most critical wounds
being inflicted by and on black youth.
The Student Movement is the loud voice of young people challenging
the optimistic narrative of their parents’ generation and protesting the ways
in which their inheritance is mostly manifest as a burden of debt, some-
times adopting and adapting similar methods of raging protest from the
streets. In the “best” moments of the protests, the students (who are by
definition a relatively advantaged group) and the desperate needs of the
working poor were recognised as inextricably linked. For example, in sev-
eral confrontations with the police (called onto campuses by university
management5), students appealed to them to recognise that this fight for
access to higher education was in their interests as it would be impossible
for them to send their children to university on a police salary. The
campaign against the inhumane and exploitative system of outsourcing
workers at universities was integrated with the Student Movement’s
demands and won on many campuses (Motimele, 2019). In these processes
of protest, it is clear that “[f]reedoms calcify and have to be rejected and/or
adapted by the young” (Zadie Smith, 2018, p. 339) but the question of the
older generation’s accountability cannot be ducked and requires ongoing
intergenerational dialogue.

Nor can it be easy for children, heroically transformed into adults

overnight, to be their own redemptive metaphor because the
experience of compassion and the nurturing of conscience have not
been a consistently informing aspect of their growth in recent
times. Can they succeed in effecting a strategic distance from them-
selves for the purpose of moral reflection? That we need their
energy is beyond dispute. And so do we need their fearlessness and
questioning attitude, which, under the circumstances, are the
strange gifts of these terrible times. But where will the visionary
authority come from that will harness that energy and assign
a proper role to it in a new and infinitely challenging society?
(Ndebele, 2007, p. 43)

In the wake, in the aftermath, in the impasse, in a present haunted by

traumatic histories, we will need to grapple with the question of how
164 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

rage and righteous indignation might be harnessed for imaginative hopeful

futures. Psychoanalysis and other therapeutic practices might offer some
resources for surviving the chaos of “the ordinary as a zone of conver-
gence of many histories, where people manage the incoherence of lives
that proceed in the face of threats to the good life they imagine” (Berlant,
2011, p. 10). These practices of care are surely necessary in the face of
extraordinary psychosocial strains for individuals and communities and
part of the immediate demands on the discipline of psychology is to find
appropriate responses to the pervasive everyday crises of ordinary people.
On university campuses, the mental health impact on students active in
the Student Movement, and on those who are not, has been immense,
including alarmingly unusually high suicide rates. Beyond these immediate
imperatives, the task of a critical psychology is to “think ahead of the
burning fires” (Canham, 2018, p. 328) and the task of education is to
create zones of potential development that enable people to engage in
social and inner dialogues that animate agency and imagination, hoping
for a world of imaginative, productive joy rather than resilient survival
against the odds. We need to nurture a kind of hope that is “mobilising
rather than therapeutic” (Giroux, 2008, p. 139).

Articulations of meaningful hope

The context of higher education should provide an ideal environment
for generating this meaningful activating hope, crossing the domains of
past and future in a parenthetical present. Human agency in the present
is enabled by the temporal quality of subjectivity that incorporates
past and future. The haunting effects of the past in the present are
accompanied by whispers from the future so that present concrete realities
are always infused with these alternative temporalities. Although it is always
subject to contestation, the past may be rendered legible through public
records and archives, through the practices of tradition, science, art and
socialisation. Future storylines are similarly present to consciousness but are
less clearly articulated, requiring improvisation, flexibility and creativity.

We cannot know the future directly, but … we can feel its ghostly
pull all the same, like a force that warps spaces out of true. It is to
be found in the unfinished nature of the actual, discernible as
a hollow at its heart. Potentiality is what articulates the present with
the future, and thus lays down the material infrastructure of hope.
(Eagleton, 2016, p. 52)
 Histories and hope 165

Realising these potent possibilities (potentiality) for the future requires an

articulation of what Eagleton (2016), in a book by this title, calls “hope
without optimism”. Meaningful hope for alternatives is to be differentiated
from optimism which demands nothing of us in the present in the passive
assumption that “things will get better” and progress is inevitable. In this
way, optimism offers no more resources than its ostensible opposite, pes-
simism, which similarly implies that there is nothing to be done as things
can only get worse, and they will! Optimism for a perfect utopian future
cannot redeem the grievous effects of the past and articulations of hope
must confront, rather than deferring to the future, the challenges of the
present. The antithesis of hope is thus not rage or despair but cynicism.
“One has faith in the future precisely because one seeks to confront the
present at its most rebarbative” (Eagleton, 2016, p. 7).
Hope creates “a crack in the present through which the future can be
glimpsed” (Eagleton, 2016, p. 44). Critical psychological praxis, whether in
the domain of therapeutic interventions or in the world of teaching and
learning, entails the creation or widening of such cracks in edifices of
certainty. This is of course a risky business, whether the edifice in question
is the carefully constructed coherent self, or the structural foundations of
collective culture life and meaning-making, and the traditions of know-
ledge that have served (some of) us well up to this point. It is not only
those who currently benefit from these structural formations or identity
categories that resist their unsettling but also those whose precarious grip
on the world is under constant threat who desire this certainty for their
future selves. Working with young people whose futures have longer
trajectories than our own requires simultaneous strategies of affirmation
and unsettling. As explored in Chapters 5 and 6, university education
functions at a unique nexus between the past and future.
A key role of public educational institutions is to prepare graduates for
the world of work and the requirements of professional life are quite
firmly framed, sometimes in the “hidden curriculum” of conformity to
the “culture” of corporate life, and sometimes in the explicit codes of
professional regulatory bodies such as the HPCSA (Health Professions
Council of South Africa) that governs the training of psychologists. The
goal of the vast majority of students is to gain a qualification that will offer
them a “degree of distinction” in the workplace that they will inhabit in
the very near future where they will be expected to demonstrate mastery
of particular skills, including appropriate modes of conceptual thinking and
problem solving. University mission and vision statements throughout the
world increasingly use a language of recruiting staff in the service of
166 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

students as “paying” customers towards these purposes. In this frame, uni-

versity education is reduced to “maintaining a society of quiet ones, of
mere ‘job-holders and consumers’” (Greene, 1982, p. 5). The focus is on
the transmission of information or, at best, providing guidelines for the
gathering of volumes of information via the internet that, like fast-food
outlets, serves up “precooked” material for quick and filling consumption.
The nutritional value of such information is questionable, leave aside the
more time-consuming processes of learning to cook things up oneself.
Maxine Greene (1982, p. 5) cautions that to “rear a generation of specta-
tors is not to educate at all”. In the context of these global trends, the
disruptive protest politics of the South African Student Movement can be
understood as a refusal to remain on the sidelines of the practices of know-
ledge production and as resistance to the regimentation of the academic
calendar and the established institutional conventions of that work to
“render black subjects quiet” (Motimele, 2019, p. 205). The anxieties of
academic staff and particularly of university management in response to the
disruption of the Student Movement centred around the completion of the
academic year to produce the “output” of students progressing through
their degrees and graduating on time.6 The aim (shared by many students)
was to get things to “quieten down” and return to “normal”.
Individual aspirations that assimilate to the status quo, and the routine
cycles of teaching and learning that are repetitive for teachers but fresh
for each new cohort of students, are the target of the decolonising
project. However, this abstract position of critique is not fully adequate
to frame our response in the face of the young people on the cusp of
adulthood in our classrooms, and it is unethical to negate the often remark-
able sacrifices that their families have made to facilitate their studies. “For
hope to be more than an empty abstraction, it must be firmly anchored in
the realities and contradictions of everyday life and have some hold on the
present” (Giroux, 2008, p. 138). We have responsibilities for equipping
students with the languages and forms that have made for our success and
will make for theirs, not because they are paying customers nor because we
are beholden to the market but because we have relational commitments
to them as people, recognising the legitimacy of their choices even when
they do not coincide with our own. In the highly diversified global land-
scapes of work, we all of us need the benefits of skilled expertise that
can only be developed through extended high-level study across a range of
disciplines of which we ourselves remain largely or entirely ignorant. This
is perhaps most clearly evident in the application of the sciences in every-
day technologies such as cars and planes, laptops and cell phones that we so
take for granted that we forget they are the products of human thought
 Histories and hope 167

and labour. However, it is also a feature of the arts where audiences need
not have the knowledge or skills that musicians, visual artists, writers and
choreographers inscribe in their works. In all domains of knowledge and
work, our present practices are articulated in the tension between past
and future in the contesting dialectics of change and continuity. In relation
to the discipline of psychology, it is incumbent upon us to equip graduates
to thoughtfully practise the work of psychological support or healing.
However, our existing repertoires of specialist knowledge are strained to
their limits in response to the pervasive psychic stresses of our times. It is
imperative that we develop new concepts for analysis and potential modes
of practice and this will entail contestations about the canon. As I have
argued throughout this book, Vygotskian theory and narrative psychology
provide some such conceptual resources for rethinking personhood as
mutable, temporal and relational. These frameworks might be fruitfully
combined with other critical psychology and interdisciplinary insights and,
in particular, largely untapped reservoirs of meaning in African languages
and the art of life beyond the academy.
Beyond mastering the content of disciplinary knowledge, university
study is an apprenticeship in the traditions, forms and practices of enquiry
and knowledge-making. These forms of engagement are most often what
we mean when we claim that what we teach and what graduates develop
is “critical thinking”. This thinking is valuable beyond the domain of spe-
cialist applications and the best education should enable students to deploy
these new languages of description, theoretical concepts and the rigorous
processes of gathering supportive evidence or developing rich idiosyncratic
detail, in work and life. Contemporary life requires the capacity to read
between the lines to differentiate truth from fake news, the ability to range
across disciplines to think through large-scale “wicked” problems such as
climate change and poverty, and full democratic citizenship cannot be
articulated without learning the languages of others and learning to read
the structures of power within which we live. If democracy is to have any
future life, it needs to find new vital expressions beyond traditional ballot
boxes or parliamentary spaces that, in many places in the world, increas-
ingly feel like circus arenas. New ligaments of strength for democratic
practice may be developed through new textual horizons that challenge
established world views and through the exchange of ideas that happens
in conversation. Conversations with provocative potential to change
subjects and worlds are not necessarily characterised by politeness and
tolerance, and the most productive exchanges often entail conflict and
contestation, challenging participants in their claims to truth and commit-
ments to ethical judgements. Others may provoke us
168 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

to see and listen (to reflectively think) from positions (both temporally
and spatially) other than our own … the world calls me out to attend
to not only those others who are present, but also those who are no
longer here or not yet here, leading me to sense the world as more
than me.
(Di Paolantonio, 2016, pp. 154–155)

The skill of talking across difference with heat but not hostility is in
short supply in the world and the academic context should provide scope
for practising this art.
However, the importance of face-to-face learning and teaching is being
increasingly challenged by digital platforms that have transformed the old
modes of correspondence or distance learning into immediate real-time
exchanges with human or avatar others across remote ether worlds. The
explosion of information and the acceleration of communication across
geographical, cultural, linguistic and other boundaries has empowering
effects and, regardless, it is impossible for those of us in it to reimagine an
existence without this dimension of the world. However, perhaps because
I am not a digital native, I would argue that this virtual world can supple-
ment but not supplant embodied face-to-face interaction in the space of
the therapeutic room, in the classroom, in political gatherings or live
performances, across family dining room tables and over coffee or wine
with friends. In his insightful interpretation of Berlant’s “cruel optimism”,
Di Paolantonio (2016) sketches the possibilities for a hopeful praxis that
counters the precarious effects of loneliness and alienation that characterise
contemporary life. Reading, thinking and talking in zones of potential
development “implies the ‘beautiful risk’ of human interaction, the relational
encounter where human beings come together to influence each other with
words and interpretations that work to forge and sustain a common world”
(Di Paolantonio, 2016, p. 149).
While the massification of higher education, in South Africa and
around the world, is critical on grounds of both human rights and
economic imperatives, it has most often been implemented through
increasing corporatisation of higher education in which the market place
determines the worth of qualifications. This produces a divide between
the purposes of “training” and “education” that cuts at the heart of the
idea of the university, distinguishing between the traditions of research and
developing scholarship, and the preparation of students for the workplace.
The vast majority of students, and courses that command high registration
rates, are treated as “cash cows” (a term used without approbation in South
African university management discourse), suggesting that students and
 Histories and hope 169

lecturers have a limited commercial contract with one another. Relations

defined in this way erode the hope that graduates may leave their studies
equipped for meaningful work and social life, contracting their future hori-
zons to work that entails performing repetitive practices on known ground.
The tension between the demands of the marketplace and the imaginative
domain of scholarship and enquiry requires that educators creatively conjoin
the ostensibly contradictory aims of education and training. Flexible respon-
sive curricula and pedagogies should inculcate disciplinary knowledge and
practices while simultaneously provoking creative leaps that will enable us to
invent new languages and forms, and encourage students to participate in
these intellectual adventures with us. University life should provide spaces
for experimentation and innovation, reflection and imagination, time
for living inside our heads in positive quietness. In the solitary practices of
reading and writing and in the collective dialogues of seminars or tutorials,
the cultivation of scholarship entails giving “time to what is not here – to the
past and to the future” (Di Paolantonio, 2016, p. 150) in ways that will
enable us to cultivate a “less anxious creativity” (Appiah, 1992, p. 254). Our
world is in dire need of rigorous critical analysis of political and economic
systems but it is also essential that we cultivate practices of “improvisation
and playfulness, pleasure and independence … humour [that] recognises
ironies, impossibilities, and disproportions … driven by imaginations as
supple as art rather than as stiff as dogma” (Solnit, 2016, p. 44, emphasis
added). Hope without critique is reduced to optimism and critique without
hope is reduced to pessimism and neither eviscerated forms have the potency
to effect change.

Combining the discourse of critique and hope is crucial to affirming

that critical activity offers the possibility for social change and to
viewing democracy as a project and a task, as an ideal type that is
never finalised and has a powerful adversary in the social realities it
is meant to change.
(Giroux, 2008, p. 141)

Productive work to change subjects and worlds will require the relinquish-
ment of ourselves and a willingness to question established certainties in
traditions of knowledge. Hopeful futures take the “shape of water” rather
than following the contours of solid ground and are not amenable to
design by fixed blueprints or plans. “Hopefulness lies in its unfinishedness,
its openness to improvisation and participation. … [When] hope is no
longer fixed on the future: it becomes an electrifying force in the present”
(Solnit, 2016, p. 95).
170 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

Concluding thoughts
Particularly in periods of sociopolitical change, narratives of the past
cannot provide clear storylines for the future, and the usually incremental,
silent and invisible formation of human subjectivity becomes accelerated,
articulated and visible, although no less easy to grasp. We may resist the
imposition of the monolingual formulation of the past and the ways in
which this makes us feel “out of place” but speaking the language of the
future entails moments in which of all of us will feel “lost in translation”.
We live tensed and tense lives, in which the present is a moment of ten-
sion between past and future. This tension entails precarious balance,
poised at the moment in which we navigate the lifting of the one foot
still in the past before the other can yet be placed in the future. We may
never have both feet on present ground but nevertheless, we cannot have
both in the air simultaneously either. Navigating the demands of the
present transformational moment to create more equitable futures is
a process steered by those with whom we converse, by the narrative his-
tories, both silenced and voiced, which we are willing to hear, sometimes
in fraught translation, and through which we must weave new versions of
ourselves and the world.

Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories. … Hope
is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk
involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding
than despair and, in a way, more frightening. And immeasurably more
rewarding.
(Solnit, 2016, p. 7)

To realise these potential narrative subjectivities, it is imperative to open

ourselves to voices not only from the past but from the future too, so as
to become what Xolela Mangcu (2011) terms “worthy ancestors”. In as
much as successive generations need to learn from history, the future
horizons of the young are beyond our reach and their vantage point is
therefore critical in informing the present. The argument of the book has
been that the same psychosocial processes and forms of intergenerational
life that make it impossible to escape the past simultaneously orientate us
towards imagined not-yet-present futures. The question of change entails
the challenge of how to live ethically in the present, in relationship with
others, creating collective future histories that will be conceptually and
politically transformative. We are impelled to live innovatively rather than
 Histories and hope 171

repetitively, with an aesthetics and humour, entailing relational care not

only towards those with whom we live but also those beyond our spatial
borders; to the memories of those in the past whom we have lost, often
through our own violence and ethical failure; and towards the imagined
futures of those who will inherit the earth, the consequences of our
actions, and our fragments of meaning and cultural threads from which to
weave new more humane forms of life.

Notes
1 Some of the ideas in this final chapter were first explored in a previous article,
Narrative Possibilities of the Past for the Future (Bradbury, 2012) and then further
developed in a paper presented at the first NEST (Narrative Enquiry for Social
Transformation) international conference, Narrative Subjects: Tense (in)tension and
(im)possibilities for change.
2 The term “obligation” in English implies negative bonds of duty to be fulfilled
on the basis of social respectability rather than motivated by desire. However,
we sometimes express our thanks by saying “much obliged” acknowledging the
reciprocal “debt” created by someone’s kindness towards us and revealing
a more positive etymology, as evident in the Spanish term for “thank you”, obli-
gado. From the worldview of ubuntu, (see Chapter 3), relations of obligation and
duty serve to consolidate filial affection and community cohesion.
3 This focus on the dignity of personhood is central in the analyses of a wide
range of contemporary authors from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and
varying political perspectives, for example, Appiah (2018); Fukuyama (2018);
Peterson (2012). (In a particularly interesting twist, Fukuyama utilises the
notion of dignity and its expression in identity politics to account for the rise
of the (working-class) right in the United States that propelled Trump into
the presidency, catching many political analysts and left intellectuals by surprise.)
4 South African society is characterised by pervasive violence: gender-based vio-
lence, rape and femicide, xenophobic and homophobic violence, gang- and
drug-related murders, the excessive use of physical violence in petty crimes such
as theft or mugging, cyber- and physical bullying in schools. While (white)
middle-class fear of crime is most visible, the victims of violence are mostly black
and poor. I do not mean to conflate violent tactics in protest action with these
more generalised forms of interpersonal violence but this wider context indicates
a milieu of violence shaped by the dehumanising effects of colonial oppression
and apartheid brutality, rather than aberrant or exceptional acts.
5 For those of us who were students in the 1980s when apartheid police often
forcibly occupied campuses, the notion that police would be invited onto cam-
puses by university management in a democratic state was unthinkable until it
happened. Although the situation was complex, tense and difficult to manage,
the argument that this was unavoidable reflects an alarming bankruptcy of intel-
lectual and political resources at the heart of the very institutions charged with
developing these resources in the next generation. The SERI (Socio-economic
Rights Institute of South Africa) report (Rayner, Baldwin-Ragaven & Naidoo,
2017) provides a detailed account of how the strategies of securitisation and
172 Intergenerational subjects in changing worlds

policing were deployed by the University of Witwatersrand. While vast sums of

money were expended on these strategies, no provisions were made for medical
or psychological support for students or staff in the midst of violent clashes with
private security forces and police.
6 The irony is that we are not very good at even this routine process. Throughput
rates at South African universities are notoriously low, with the “average”
student taking five years to complete a three-year degree.
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INDEX

access 92, 101n7, 107, 109–113, Anderson, B. 64, 70

122–125, 129, 129n1, 131n8, Andrews, M. 26, 71, 93, 100
132n11, 141, 153n7, 158; apartheid 17, 18, 35, 54n13, 60–63, 69,
epistemological 113, 119 70, 78n3, 79n8, 87–89, 96, 101n8,
action; ethical 66–68, 71, 154; 105–107, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116,
narrative 13, 19, 20, 23–25, 28, 108, 118, 123, 125, 139, 140, 141, 143,
135, 138, 150, 151; Piagetian 5, 156, 157, 177n5; spatial segregation
29n3, 48, 100n3; Vygotskian 9–11, of 16, 87, 123, 155; legacy of 22, 88,
48–50, 55n16, 73, 74, 85, 93 137, 155; education 89, 90, 94, 96,
action research see participatory action 97; post 16, 63, 88–90, 95, 100n1,
research 101n5, 101n9, 122, 123, 130n1,
activism 29n5, 32, 52, 62, 71, 90, 99, 131n7, 133, 144, 150, 155
129, 129n1, 135, 139, 149, 151n1, Apartheid Archives project 79n8
156, 159, 161, 162 Appiah, K.A. 44, 52n1, 52n3, 53n5, 70,
African; community/kinship 44, 68, 70, 71, 88, 92, 123, 134, 138–140, 161,
79n5; histories 66, 118, 143, 147; 169, 171n3
humanism 43–45, 54n14, 60, 64, 66, aporia 134, 148
68–70, 78, 79n5; knowledge and Archer, M. 28, 40, 48, 54, 76
cultural production 7, 17, 29n4, 64, Arendt, H. 119, 136, 143, 155
79n6, 79n7, 79n12, 118, 120, 125,
132n14, 161; psychology 59, 63, 69, Bakhtin, M. 150
77, 79n12, 112, 135, 145–147, 155 Baldwin, J. 89, 97, 98
agency 6, 18, 25, 38, 49, 52, 54n11, 70, Bauman, Z. 19, 21
75, 76, 96, 128, 143, 145, 151, 164 being 4, 5, 9, 12, 18, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32,
Alexander, N. 90, 91, 110, 126, 130n1, 34, 39, 44–50, 55n16, 65, 78, 79n11,
141, 146 87, 98, 99, 106, 133, 135–137, 143,
alienation 17, 109, 118, 152n2, 149, 154, 156; black 32, 43, 44,
158, 168 62, 122
ancestors 7, 17, 71, 159, 170 belonging 66, 68, 70, 83, 142, 162
192 Index

Berlant, L. 156, 158, 159, 164, 168 98, 100n2, 122; Double 23, 75, 77;
Benjamin, W. 108 dual 23, 74, 75; meaningful 82–84
bifocal/bifocality see critical bifocality conversation 21, 49, 50, 86, 88, 90, 92,
Biko, S. B. 61, 149 93, 97–99, 119, 132n12, 145, 151,
black consciousness 32, 63, 122, 127, 167; internal/inner 3, 21, 22, 23, 27,
144, 145, 164 28, 48, 76
Black Lives Matter 149, 157 corporatisation 124, 166, 168
Bourdieu, P. 27, 32, 91, 111, 124 Crenshaw, K. see intersectionality
Brockmeier, J. 15, 25, 29n6 critical bifocality 6, 36, 157
Bruner, J. 25, 93, 101n10 culture 4, 5, 7, 9–12, 17, 21–24, 27, 28,
Burman, E. 28n2, 30, 145 31, 32, 37, 40–42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51,
Burr, V. 31, 38 52, 68, 72–77, 79n7, 88, 91, 105,
Butler, J. 9, 157 109, 112, 125, 138, 145–147,
161, 165
Canham, H. 162, 164 cultural capital 32, 35, 91, 92, 101n6, 124
capital/capitalism 10, 32, 41, 53n5, 66, cultural historical activity theory see
68, 78n4, 108, 158 CHAT
change 4–6, 129, 167; individual/ cultural historical, Vygotsky see
personal 25, 49, 52, 75, 76, 78, 105, sociohistorical
115, 138, 154; political/social 25, 38, curriculum 28n2, 53n6, 60, 80, 81, 107,
52, 53n8, 75, 76, 78, 80, 105, 154, 113, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 125,
170; possibilities for 24, 25, 31, 147, 132n11; hidden 116, 138, 165
169; resistance to 21, 81, 84, 98, 162
CHAT (Cultural historical activity Danziger, K. 34–36
theory) 31, 47 decolonial/decolonisation/decoloniality
Chomsky, N. 47, 120, 127, 128 17, 59, 90, 92, 100n4, 118, 119, 125,
Chronotope see Bakhtin 132n15, 132n15, 135, 136, 146, 148,
class 32, 33, 51, 83, 90, 96, 97, 100n2, 151, 157
101n5, 110, 118, 122–125, 128, 129, deconstruction 36, 47, 99, 121, 135
137, 142–144, 148, 153n7, 161, dehumanisation 35, 38, 45, 71, 152n1,
171n3, 171n4 157, 162
classification; cognitive 6, 7; De la Rey, C. 135
diagnostic 60; race 139 dignity 68, 111, 145, 152n4, 155, 160,
colonial/colonialism/coloniality 17, 20, 162, 171n3
37, 43, 44, 45, 53n5, 63, 64, 66, democracy 105, 109, 128, 130n1,
68–70, 79n12, 91, 100n1, 118–120, 167, 169
125, 129, 130n3, 132n15, 137, 141, development 4–6, 9–11, 14, 15, 27,
143, 147, 153n7; post 16, 33, 43, 44, 28n1, 28n2, 29n3, 30, 46–49, 54n12
52n1, 147, 160, 161; pre 68, 160 73–76, 82, 85, 93, 100n3, 145
community 21, 66, 68, 70, 79n5, 121, Derrida, J. 91, 126, 134
140, 162, 171n2; engagement 114, dialogue/dialogical 28, 43, 60, 81, 138,
142; imagined 64, 70; psychology 143, 147, 149, 155, 163, 169; internal
101n9, 114, 135 3, 9, 22–24, 74, 77, 99, 164
confession 64, 66, 78n4 dialectic/s 72, 77, 78, 155, 167
conflict 16, 19, 21, 61, 71, 75, 82, 87, 94, difference 21, 33, 34, 37, 38, 47, 64, 81,
100n1, 142, 147, 154, 155, 162, 167 87, 92–94, 98, 99, 133, 139, 142,
conscientisation 138, 141, 83 144, 147–149, 168
consciencism 66 discourse 29, 30, 33, 35–42, 45, 50–52,
consciousness 5, 12, 21, 22, 24, 27, 61, 112, 118, 122, 123, 131n5, 134,
44,46, 47, 72, 74, 77, 82, 83, 84, 97, 138, 145, 168, 169; analysis 39, 135
 Index 193

discursive psychology 30, 31, 33, 36, 136, 137, 155, 164, 170, 171; in the
39, 40, 45, 135 present 10, 25, 45, 111, 143,
Di Paolantonio, M. 158, 168, 169 149–151, 159, 163–165, 169–171;
discipline, academic 32, 46, 50, 51, selves 23–25, 45, 78, 114, 119, 170
52n2, 86, 106, 115, 116, 118, Freire, P. 90, 126, 128, 138, 141
120–122, 131n11, 136, 153n7, 166, Feuerstein, R. 116, 118, 131n6
167, 169; languages of 125–127; Foucault, M. 34, 40, 46, 75, 78n4, 87,
inter/trans-disciplinary 42, 63, 72, 108, 122, 128, 140
119, 120, 79n12, 131n9, 139, 167; of
psychology 28n2, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, Gadamer 9, 84, 121, 126, 150
41, 43, 48, 52n1, 53n6, 59, 60–63, gender 32, 33, 43, 51, 54n8, 64, 75,
72, 76, 77, 78n3, 80, 106, 112, 134, 79, 96, 97, 110, 111, 137–39, 142,
135, 164, 167 144, 162
double consciousness see consciousness gender-based violence see violence
dual consciousness see consciousness Giroux, H. 158, 159, 164, 166, 169
Du Bois, W.E.B. 23, 75 Gobodo-Madikizela, P. 64, 68–71, 88,
89, 98, 156
Eagleton, T. 10, 11, 40, 159, 161, Griesel, H. 114, 115, 131n7, 131n9
164, 165
education see schooling; higher see Hacking, I. 39–41
higher education Hall, S. 33, 53n3, 134
embodiment 3, 10, 13, 27, 30, 39, 40, Harré, R. 30, 41, 42, 54n15
42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54n13, 68, 93, haunting see history, in the present
160, 168 Hayes, G. see OASSSA
empathy 17, 66, 68–71, 77, 89, 98, 99 Hermans, H. 60, 94
emplotment 13, 19, 24 hermeneutic/s 36, 67
enlightenment 40, 45, 48, 65, 120 higher education 81, 92, 95, 100n4,
epistemology 37, 39, 60, 90, 113, 119, 101n6, 105–109, 111, 112, 114–116,
120, 122, 129, 136, 141 122–127, 129, 129n1, 131n7, 132n16,
erasure 17, 23, 78, 151 142, 152n1, 157, 164, 168, 172n6
Erikson, E. 89, 137 higher mental processes, Vygotskian 46,
48, 73
face 68, 97, 144 hinge generation 19, 89, 106, 155
face-to-face 48, 65, 69, 168 history 4, 5, 10, 11, 26, 74, 86, 95, 105,
Fanon, F. 156 106, 108; collective/cultural 3, 5, 7,
Fay, B. 13, 22, 37, 53n3, 143 13–16, 21, 22, 24, 49, 50; in the
Fast Forward programme 137, 139, 143, present 15, 18, 19, 89, 98, 105, 124,
144, 147 157, 163, 164; life (narrative) 15, 19,
feminist 32, 33, 40, 45, 96, 148 24, 37, 94, 135, 170; long 37, 64, 66,
Fine, M. 6, 19, 36, 135, 144, 157 70, 118, 143, 160, 161; of psychology
forgiveness 64, 66, 71, 78n4, 98 4, 28n1, 30, 34, 37, 60, 78n3, 80,
Freeman, M. 18, 20, 22, 48, 67, 85, 88, 112, 116; political (colonial) 16–20,
127, 128, 149, 150 29n5, 45, 63, 68, 70, 87, 88, 97, 98,
Fees Must Fall see Student Movement, 125, 143, 156; teaching
South African of 140
future; collective/political 30, 45, 75, Hoffman, E. 19, 22, 25, 89, 106, 155
78, 96, 97, 106–108, 111, 124–126, hooks, b. 54n9, 147–149
129, 136, 137, 141, 143, 149–151, hope 21, 89, 97, 119, 133, 138, 140,
159–165, 170; imagined 4, 5, 11, 13, 142, 147, 149, 151, 154, 155,
16, 19, 27, 93, 99, 100, 119, 129, 157–170
194 Index

hopelessness see hope language 7, 9–11, 19, 21, 27, 31, 32,
horizon/s 25, 38, 60, 119, 129, 137, 47, 51, 74, 77, 91, 92, 127, 140, 151,
150, 158, 161, 167, 169, 170 167; and power 32, 33, 90–92, 110,
humanism 43–45, 65, 66 125–127, 140, 161; colonial 91, 125,
Hustvedt, S. 13, 41, 42, 84 126, 146; conceptual, Vygotskian 6,
7, 10, 13, 45; indigenous 65, 68, 69,
identification 33, 52n3, 134 78n1, 78n2, 90, 92, 112, 125, 126,
identity 12, 18, 19, 32, 44, 52n3, 122, 141, 167; learning in schools 141; of
137–139, 171n3; gender 32, 33, 64; instruction 90–92, 125, 141, 167,
intersectional 32, 33, 129, 162; 169; role in consciousness,
language 33, 64, 91; national 18, 133, Vygotskian of 3, 9, 11, 14, 21, 22,
142; narrative 18, 27, 49, 78, 98, 24, 27, 28, 29n8, 39, 46–48, 52, 74,
135; place 33, 44, 66, 68; queer 32, 75, 77, 127
33; race 32, 33, 64, 75, 153n7; learning 50, 81, 83–85, 91,92 101n10,
relational/collective 44, 69, 76, 105, 114–118, 124, 132n12 137, 168;
78, 143; sexual 33, 64, 152n3; youth histories 80, 84, 112; Un-learning 85,
133, 137, 140, 141, 147 89, 99, 101n10, 134, 144, 148
ignorance 80–82, 86–90, 92, 97–100, learning-teaching 13, 81, 85, 119,
143–145 134, 148
imagination 4, 13, 24, 25, 27, 28, 41, Levinas, E. see face
48, 69, 89, 92–94, 129, 137, 154, looping kinds see Hacking
159, 164 Long, W. 108, 124, 136
imagined community see community Loss 13, 17, 19, 23, 151, 156
immigration see migration
individuation 74, 76 Maldonado-Torres, N. 119,
inequality 22, 32, 51, 54n8, 57, 79, 132n15, 136
79n4, 81, 88, 89, 109–111, 116, 123, Mama, A. 33, 69, 112, 160
124, 130, 132n16, 140, 144, 155, Manganyi, N. C. 24, 43–45, 49, 54n13,
157, 161 62, 69, 75, 112, 122, 157
innocence 82, 87, 89 90, 99, 100 Marx/Marxism 6, 10, 40, 46, 51, 53n4,
intentionality 4, 24, 25, 28, 42, 44, 83, 100n2, 122, 158
127, 154 Mbembe, A. 146, 162
interaction 23, 28n3, 32, 44, 45, 48, 50, meaning; historical/shared 5, 9, 16, 21,
67, 73, 74, 76, 82, 112, 128, 168 28, 47, 73, 92, 126, 127, 154, 165; in
intergenerational 4, 14, 21, 30, 44, 49, the formation of consciousness,
50, 73, 75, 81, 88, 106, 127, 129, Vygotskian 82–84; making 3, 5, 7,
137, 150, 151, 154, 156, 163, 170 12–14, 40, 42, 43, 48, 93, 118, 127,
interlocution 13, 22, 24, 47, 75, 92, 135, 145, 154, 159; social
99, 143 construction of 36, 39; textual 50,
internalisation see language, role in 127; word 6, 7, 10, 12, 47
consciousness, Vygotskian mediation 4, 9, 30, 31, 44, 46, 48–52,
interpretation 23, 41, 128, 138, 141, 54n16, 799 b, 117; orders of 31,
149, 168 49–52
intersectionality 32, 33, 54n8, 122, 129, memory 10, 13–18, 22, 25, 28, 46, 49,
139, 142 66, 98, 108, 127, 129, 137, 151, 154,
160
kindness 67, 128, 171n2 memorials 16, 17, 29n6
metaphor 93, 94
land, dispossession and relationships to meritocracy, myth of 90, 106, 111, 123,
38, 64, 66, 68, 70, 107 128, 158
 Index 195

method/methodology 34–38, 41, 121, postcolonial/postcolonialism see

122, 135; discursive 39, 135; colonial/colonialism
experimental-developmental 14, 116; postmodern 31, 33, 36, 37, 40, 43, 46,
feminist 122; narrative 3, 4, 12; 48, 52n1, 148
queer 122; Vygotskian 3-5 14, 46 potential 9, 24, 33, 45, 46, 72, 93, 95,
migration 37, 81, 131n5 97, 106, 111, 114–116, 118, 121,
Miller, R. 31, 48, 49, 52, 54n16, 74, 128, 131n6, 132n11, 134, 138, 145,
77, 79n9, 79n10, 80–87, 89, 99, 111, 146, 159–161,164, 165, 167, 170
114, 117, 118, 121, 125, 132n11, power; agentic/resistant 33, 38, 97,
145, 152n2 128, 141, 161; and knowledge/
Mills, C. 81, 120 education 32, 35, 46, 54n9, 90, 120,
mistakes 148–150 128, 131n5, 148, 153n7, 161;
misunderstanding see understanding discursive 10, 32, 33, 36, 41, 51;
monolingualism 91, 92, 126 in subject formation 21, 30, 33, 38,
mourning 15, 17, 156, 160 129; of language, Vygotskian 10, 14,
Mphahlele, E. 63, 66 32, 45, 76, 93; structural/state 41, 51,
multilingualism 90, 125, 140, 143, 87, 89, 122, 149, 155, 167
146, 151 Praxis 63, 77, 105, 148, 165, 168
precarity 33, 96, 123, 124, 136, 157,
Ndebele, N. 63, 79n12, 136, 150, 151, 158, 165, 168
154, 163 precolonial see colonial; see history,
neuropsychology/neuroscience 13, 22, long
34, 35, 41, 42, 54 protest; action 17, 62, 123, 126, 162;
non-understanding see understanding art/literature 79n12; service delivery
nostalgia 107, 146, 160 155, 162; student 17, 123, 163, 166
psychoanalysis 18, 28n2, 29n8, 35, 40,
OASSSA 62, 63 42, 53n4, 53n6, 63, 71, 89, 98,
optimism 108, 128, 158, 165, 169; cruel 101n9, 122, 164
158, 168 psychosocial 3, 4, 31, 38, 39, 70, 78,
other, the 23, 29n8, 48, 54n13, 54n15, 79n8, 135, 152n1, 164, 170
65, 67, 71, 84, 89, 91, 97, 98, 126,
134, 143–148; internalised 74–77 race/raced/racism 16, 22, 32, 41, 43,
othering 33, 52n3, 108 51, 53n3, 54n13, 62, 64, 68, 75,
otherness 4, 21, 37, 92, 97, 139, 148 78n3, 87, 88, 90, 96, 97, 101n8, 109,
110, 118, 122–125, 129, 139,
participatory action research 132n11, 142–144, 162
132n15, 135,151n1, 151n2 rage 162–165
Parker, I. 35–39, 45, 46, 53n6, 127, 134 Ratele, K. 59, 63, 69, 75, 77, 79n7,
pedagogy 84, 85, 91, 100n4, 101n10, 112, 139
113, 117, 126, 128, 129, 131n11, realism 38, 39
134, 138, 143, 169 recognition 44, 69, 70, 143–148,
pessimism 108, 165, 169 153n6, 162; mis 29n7, 143, 146, 148
Peterson, B. 19, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71 reconciliation see TRC
Phillips, A. 67, 68, 71, 98 regulation, Vygotskian 48, 50; self/
Phoenix, A. 156, 159 internal 23, 28, 30, 48, 52, 74, 75,
Piaget, J. 5, 15, 28n3, 48, 49, 53n7, 72, 126, 145
82, 84, 100n3, 122, 132n12 relationality 3, 21, 42, 44, 45, 49,
Piketty, T. see meritocracy, myth of 54n14, 60, 66–68, 72, 78, 97, 143,
plot see emplotment 161, 166–168, 171
196 Index

relevance 13, 24, 59, 78n2, 112, 124, 54n14, 70, 74, 76, 78, 79n12, 86,
136, 136, 150 107, 122, 129, 139, 164, 170
relativism 37–39 Student Movement, South African 17,
retrospective, narrative 24, 28n2, 30, 29n5, 53n3, 60, 149, 157, 166
63, 86, 105, 107, 108, 114; analysis of symbolic, Vygotskian 7, 11, 13, 14, 16,
theory and practice 31, 47, 63 114 37, 47, 50, 105
Rhodes Must Fall see Student
Movement, South African Taylor, C. 47, 97, 143–147, 153n6
Ricoeur, P. 15, 20, 21, 23, 50, 74, 76, Tamboukou, M. 36, 133, 148
77, 93, 94, 127, 138 teaching 59, 81, 85, 97, 105, 113–116,
119, 128, 133, 148, 168
Sacks, O. 22, 42 Teach-Test-Teach (TTT) 101n7, 114,
Said, E. 99 115–117, 117, 128, 129, 131n8,
Sanders, M. 35, 67, 78n3, 92, 112, 160 131n10, 145
Sankofa 108, 151, 154 temporality 3, 4, 13, 19, 24, 25, 27, 40,
scaffolding 99, 101n10 44, 45, 49, 52, 54n11, 73, 95, 105,
Sharpe, C. 19, 156, 157, 159, 160 107, 115, 120, 135–137, 149, 154,
Shotter, J. 4, 30, 117, 118, 137 160, 164, 167, 168, 169
schooling 21, 86; apartheid 89, 90, 94, theory-method 3–5, 12
96, 97; bullying in 171n4; inequalities therapy/therapeutics 35, 45, 53n4, 53n6,
in 90, 101, 107, 109–113,116, 130n1, 62, 63, 78n4, 81, 101n9, 125, 164
130n4, 152n3; language in 91, 92, time see temporality
140, 141; knowledge/curriculum tradition 6, 9, 14, 20–22, 51, 60, 62, 66,
118, 125, 126, 130n1, 140, 141, 75, 76, 78n4, 84, 106, 108, 109, 111,
152n4 116, 119, 121, 126, 127, 140, 146,
selectedness 111 147, 151, 154, 155, 164, 165, 167, 169
self 11, 20–22, 27, 45, 48, 54n15, 67, transaction 5, 67, 132n12
69, 75–78, 79n11, 98, 121, 134, transformation; curriculum 107,
138, 141, 147, 160, 165; 132n11; higher education 100n4,
consciousness 77; dialogical 22, 23; 109, 116, 123, 124, 128, 130, 146,
narrative 3, 12, 19, 40; social 74, 77; 153n7; of nature/material conditions
technologies of 75 11, 46, 122; Piagetian 100n3;
signs, Vygotskian 3, 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, sociopolitical 106, 109, 170
27, 46, 127 translation 69, 78n2, 90, 121, 130n5,
slavery 19, 156, 157, 159 151, 170
social coherence 66, 141, 160 trauma 22, 63, 70, 154–157
social constructionism 30, 31–33, truth 15, 22, 24, 37, 38, 63, 66, 70,
36–39, 41, 47, 52n2 97, 135, 160, 167
sociohistorical, Vygotsky 4–6, 21, 22, Truth and Reconciliation Commission
27, 44, 46, 47, 76 (TRC) 63,64, 66, 68–70, 78n4,
Solnit, R. 169, 170 79n8, 88, 156
Soudien, C. 109, 121, 144 Tutu, D. 17, 64, 65, 69, 72
Stam, H. 31, 38, 47
Steyn, M. 80, 81, 87, 88, 97, 99, 144 Ubuntu 54n14, 60, 64–77, 78n1,
structure; cognitive/psychological 21, 78n4, 79n5, 160, 171n2
22, 29n8, 42, 44, 46, 47 76, 154; unconscious 29n8, 53n4, 122;
social 6, 9, 31, 32, 49, 50–52, 53n8, narrative 18, 22, 42, 127;
54n11, 107, 111, 136, 167 political 18
subject/subjectivity 12, 20–23, 28, 30, understanding 10, 32, 47, 48, 50,
32, 33, 36, 40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 52, 72, 73, 76, 82–87, 90, 94, 97,
 Index 197

118, 126, 127, 138, 140, 150, 151; violence 62, 70, 98, 156, 157,162, 163,
misunderstanding 80–84, 86–90, 92, 171, 171n4; epistemic 118, 120, 157;
98, 99, 100, 117, 144 gender-based 17, 54n8, 171n4;
universal 3, 5, 28n2, 34, 53n5, 53n7, 59, protest 155; structural 161, 162
69, 71, 113, 122, 136, 141, 142, 145,
158, 159 wa Thiong’o, N. 90, 107, 126
University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN)
62, 101n7, 114, 121, 131n9, youth 137, 143, 144, 147, 149,
137, 152n2 150, 163
University of the Witwatersrand (Wits)
124, 152n2
Žižek, S. 118
zone of proximal development 4, 72, 73,
Valsiner, J. 93, 115–117 84, 99, 101n10, 106, 114–117, 164,
Van der Veer, R. 115–117 168