INTRODUCTION

In ‘We Spend Our Years as a Tale That is Told’: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom, which examines the relationship between orality and literacy, Isabel Hofmeyr (1993) drew attention to the impact on oral accounts of their publication in early South African school readers. She pointed to the way in which written texts separated speakers from their speeches, were static and unaccommodating of responses, and lacked the flexibility of oral storytelling. Using an aqueous metaphor that prefigured the circulations of the Indian Ocean and the hydrocolonialism of her later work (Hofmeyr 2022), she commented that publication conferred a rigid casing on forms that ‘previously lived by fluidity’ (Hofmeyr 1993, 54).

The fluidity that Hofmeyr pointed to in 1993 was, for most historians of the time, the core ‘weakness’ of oral accounts as historical sources. It was – and is still today for many researchers – a problem to be obviated by recording (usually by writing down) an oral text and ‘fixing’ it so that it stays the same. However, Hofmeyr's formulation suggested a different possibility: that of grappling with the significance and dynamics of fluidity both at the time of the text's encasement in written form, and in its iterations in social and political life in earlier eras, when the local world was one of oral communication and circulation.

This possibility has been realised in a critique of the concept of oral traditions, and of the ways in which oral accounts thus conceptualised have been used by historians. The critique points to a new way of approaching both oral historical accounts and early written accounts based on previously oral-only repertoires and discursive practices. This approach entails paying attention to fluidity as a characteristic feature – rather than a deleterious effect of oral communication and the passage of time – that demands methodological, and historical, attention in its own right. The approach brings past responses, debates, assessments and revisions into view (Cohen 1989, 1994; Hamilton 1987, 2002, 2021; Hofmeyr 1993; Landau 2010). The key arguments here are that engagements of the past were part of processes of the navigation of change; that oral accounts, as much as written ones, bear the traces of that navigational work; and that such navigations continue to this day.

In the literature that deals with public intellectual activity in SouthAfrica there is a tacit understanding that one of its defining features issustained reading and writing. The literature shares this feature withEuropean understandings of public intellectual activity and has not, to myknowledge, actively considered the possibility of intellectual life insettings without writing. There is further implicit agreement that‘public’ in the phrase ‘public intellectual’refers to the public of the ‘public sphere’, one of the socialimaginaries of a modern democracy. It is the public called into being by thewide circulation of printed texts, the public that must read, consider anddebate its options and make political choices then realised through theballot box.

In South Africa these assumptions about public intellectualism combine withdeeply entrenched ideas about pre-colonial societies as practising timelesstribal culture and relaying oral traditions, the combination therebyprecluding any exploration of pre-colonial intellectual currents andactivities. These combined assumptions foreclose any investigation of howintellectual engagements in oral forms sought to persuade people and toshape political futures, both deep within the eras before colonialism andpersisting into the colonial era. They obscure how such modes of debate anddiscussion overlapped and intersected with early literate forms of publicintellectual activity.

This chapter challenges the assumptions that position thinkers of thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who expressed their ideas orallyand who did not write, as atavistic relayers of oral tradition, and theirliterate counterparts – often their very own kin – as modernthinkers engaged in public intellectual life. Members of both seeminglydistinct categories, I argue, were deeply cognisant of the immense changesof their times and both attempted to reconcile the past with the present.People in both categories were critically concerned with the navigation ofchange and the nature of the brokering of the past into the present thateach saw as necessary to navigate that change. This involved drawing onbanks of inherited knowledge, reconciling the old with the new, testingideas and deliberating in multiple settings.

The chapter shows that deliberative activity of this kind was also a featureof life before colonialism. Such activity shows up in thehistorical record wherever significant change had to be navigated.

Normative understandings of public debate mostly associate it with the written texts or the back-and-forth of debating interlocutors making rational arguments. However, visual forms also occasion and animate public engagements. This chapter lays out a methodology for tracking the circulation of visual forms involved in public deliberative activity and the various kinds of ‘take-up’ they engender.

The chapter offers a conceptual vocabulary for the description of what is involved and the methodology can readily be applied to written texts. It is particularly useful in relation to visual forms because, without such a methodology, it is difficult to grasp the impact of visual forms on processes of public engagement beyond how they are received by audiences.

The visual forms we deal with here are forms that have entered circuits of public engagement. Whether individual creative works or a collection of items, such as an exhibition or a book of images, they are forms that have some kind of ‘charge’ linked to their aesthetic or affective dimensions and that gain further force in the course of their public lives. In other words, we are concerned with those forms that garner what Litheko Modisane terms ‘public critical potency’. This refers to the capacity of visual forms to precipitate public critical engagements, through the interplay among their form, content, genre and the conditions of their circulation. Although Modisane's original use of the term was with reference to film, public critical potency can be seen in other public engagements.

The surfaces and form as well as the (sometimes changing) media propel their ideas into ever-widening arcs of public life. These aspects of visual forms are part of the agency located in the form, part of the ‘stickiness’ which certain cultural and art forms develop over time, attracting repeated engagement long after their initial distinction has dissolved.

Visual forms are of particular interest for a number of reasons: they are able to engage with matters that are repressed or not easily articulated in a society, revealing things that may not otherwise be readily apparent. Often visual forms raise issues that may be unsayable in words. They have a capacity to dwell in the contradictions that many other kinds of public interventions are under pressure to eliminate. They can entertain ambiguity and many potential meanings and interpretations and set aside relentless searching for fact and reason.

In 2002 Charles Taylor identified the public sphere as one of three social imaginaries that constitute modernity. The idea of the public sphere, he argued, knits together discussions in a range of locations – a newspaper report, a discussion in a coffee shop, a radio debate – through the understanding of the participants that they are involved in a greater, collective discussion. Discussion in a notional public sphere is seen as a key process through which a society can mediate collective life.

Such public engagement is the focus of this book. However, we approach the public sphere not as a theory about how public deliberation takes place, but as an established, normative concept and ideal in society, a value-laden organising principle: how people imagine public debate works, thus shaping ‘actual’ discussion. The notion of the public sphere is closely tied to ideas of democratic practice – in particular, the conception of deliberative democracy, which ‘revolves around the idea that … problems concerning the organization of life in common can be resolved through the force of the better argument: through people coming together and deliberating upon the best way to resolve particular disputes’. Seen in that way, public engagement is more than the cut and thrust of myriad interactions in society; it is crucial to the operations of democracy.

This leads us to ask, in the first section of this chapter, what work the idea of the public sphere and related notions (public, public opinion and counterpublic) do in the world. Approaching the public sphere as an idea that animates social processes and institutions allows us to flag some of the forums that, taken together, present as if they are a unitary public space for discussion. They perform a sort of front-of-stage set of public engagements that appear to fulfil the ideal of the public sphere and, indeed, important debates happen in these forums with consequences for society. However, how these debates happen is subject to all sorts of constraints. We set out the ways in which this assemblage of public engagements – what we have called the ‘convened public sphere’ – is shaped in particular ways by the operations of power.

In public discussions, archives and records – concerning everything from past genocides to the bases of claims to citizenship or the tracking of disease regimes – play a significant role in establishing what is understood as the truth about a matter. Relied on to expose fictions and misuses of power, archives are also criticised for biases, omissions and inaccessibility, and for underwriting the views of those with power. Indeed, archives are currently a topic of increasingly heated public exchanges and sites of purposeful political intervention – being actively inaugurated, burnt down and much more between those poles. They are an important site of contestation in public life.

Focusing on the operations of power in and around archives, and tracking the role of archives in public discussion in three very different case studies, this chapter examines the dynamics of how archives come in and out of public view, gaining and losing things in the process. While preservation is at the heart of any archival project, this chapter argues that archives are not inert. They are forged and changed in political and public conditions, as well as through academic engagement. In turn, archives shape and change political, public and academic discourses and practices. Going beyond questions of the bias or otherwise of archives, and theorising archives and public discourse as mutually constitutive over time, the chapter offers a fresh perspective on heated contemporary debates about the role of archives in public life.

ARCHIVE(S)

It is useful to establish how the term ‘archive’ is being used, since, depending on usage, different things come into view.

Sometimes it is invoked as an epistemological term, as in the pompous phrase the ‘archive of Western civilisation’ or, more critically, as used by Michel Foucault in his notion of the archive as ‘the law of what can be said, the system of statements or rules of practice that give shape to what can and cannot be said’. Both of these instances, from almost opposite points of view, raise the issue of the way in which ‘archive’ is shot through with questions of power.

It has been an article of faith in modern societies that in order to live together, we need to talk to one another. The premise is that, through dialogue, communities can mediate different needs, solve pressing problems, decide on leaders and come to some consensus on issues that confront collective life. Public life is rich with activity: arguments expertly laid out in formal arenas, spectacles that unsettle our taken-for-granted convictions, and nuanced cultural engagements designed to provoke reflection. But this imagined foundation for how we live collectively seems to have suffered a dramatic collapse. All over the world, dialogue seems impossible across partisan politics and religious divides. Many societies appear to have lost the capacity to solve problems through talk – whether deciding on responses to international crises, such as climate change, human rights abuses and nuclear proliferation, or resolving local issues closer to home. This situation has evoked global confusion and alarm, with analysts unable to fully explain the multiple disruptions to public life. The future of public discussion as a mediating force in society cannot be taken for granted. And the stakes are high. Arguably, the greatest challenge of our times is how we address the global climate emergency in this context, a problem that requires collective engagement and decision-making on a global level.

Political philosopher Achille Mbembe delineates the end of a world in which the articles of faith of modern democracies have held sway. For Mbembe, politics is increasingly a street fight in which reason and facts matter less and less: ‘Whether civilisation can give rise to any form of political life is the problem of the 21st century.’ Such concerns are becoming the substance of public conversations about a crisis that prevails across much of the world. Information, evidence and facts needed to inform decisions and choices cannot be relied upon.

Indeed, the recognised spaces of political life seem largely to have been ceded to global capitalism: states, their sovereignty eroded, are everywhere ‘captured’ by economic interests. ‘Capture’ refers to the reach of power into democratic institutions in order to make them vehicles to advantage political cronies and elites, rather than the broad ‘people’.