Framing Essay: Performing Public Wisdom

Social Dynamics, Vol. 36, Issue 1, pgs. 179 - 186, 2010.

by Leon de Kock

"The conceit is often adopted in the strategic performance of public wisdom - oracular, figurative, enunciating visions and versions of self as well as community - that truth is looming, that it is there to be embraced in self-evidently resonant forms of availability. However, in reviewing these acts in which calls to sagacity, vision and veracity are figuratively and/or performatively made in the public domain, it is necessary to distinguish between the reason or art or self-declared wisdom so brought into mediated public existence, on the one hand, and the contested context of the performance, on the other.

In the nineteenth century, no less than in the twentieth and the twenty-first, the question of how and to whom the 'artistic', prophetic or intellectual voice speaks, and in what manner that audience is framed, constituted and convened, has involved - as Khwezi Mkhize suggests in his article in this section - a process of 'seaming and pairing' realms of experience which may be quite disjunct (and I would add disjunct in ontological, cosmological, aesthetic, moral and political terms), but which nevertheless converge in spaces of public contestation.

Writing about Isaac Wauchope, poet and preacher, a leading member of the Christian African intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century, Mkhize reminds us that 'between the African subject and the specific text he invokes, what one is meant to glean is the world of African subjectivity', despite the fact that a significant proportion of Wauchope's readers (both intended and real) might have been distinctly 'disjunct' from precisely this 'world of African subjectivity', given the mixed colonial context in which he was writing and publishing. Between langue and parole,¹ one might add, between the multivalent, rhizomatic tissue of semantics into which the performing subject delves for his symbolic ammunition, on the one hand, and the context into which he chooses to direct his message, on the other, the paradoxes of public sphere enunciation find their form. Because in so shaping that message and its pathway, the performer also negotiates the space to be heard among the public or publics to whom his act of effect or affect is addressed, effectively calling them into being as an audience, a group, in the particular timbre of his or her orchestration. At least, this is the performer's mission. Alternatively, a public, oracular figure can be called into being by various groups or publics 'consecrating' such a figure in distinct 'fields' (literary, media, politics), as Anthea Garman, following Pierre Bourdieu, argues about Antjie Krog in her article in this section (see also Garman 2009). It is precisely such complexities in the conception of speaking positions, audiences, authors and modes of address that have characterised the public 'performance of wisdom and affect' over the past two centuries in southern Africa..."

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