ARI SITAS

The reviewer has to absent Stephanus Muller’s prior and enticing work^{[1]Stephanus Muller’s (2014) Nagmusiek, Johannesburg: Fourth Wall.}, the controversy over a certain thesis at Stellenbosch University^{[2]Mareli Stop’s (2012) Contemporary Performance Practice of Art Music in South Africa, PhD Thesis, University of Stellenbosch. A thesis that became the epicentre of a serious controversy.} and even the reviewer’s own work^{[3]Ari Sitas (2004) Voices that Reason: Theoretical Parables, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. My difference with Alain Badiou on aesthetics was amplified in our debate at the Paris Poetry Biennale,2013: Debate on Poetry, Politics and Aesthetics. Crudely put, I challenged his universal notion of beauty, he challenged my idea of a conversation about non-centric and proximate notions of the “aesthetic” always striving towards universal certitude- a work in progress.} to pay attention to this text

– a futile task because all the coded and uncoded messages, the pseudonyms and disguises point to the empirical reality of what preceded it, which is alas outside its covers. The footnotes reinforce the need not to read this book and concentrate rather on the trees that had to be cut to make its pages possible.

Yet I will try and resist and absent all the above to start with, pretending I had just been gifted this book. It has a title; it has an English text and images. Its title is unambiguous: it is not any journey, but the Journey to the South by Stephanus Muller. It is not a journey in the South, but a journey to it.

What will linger throughout is the question from where does a journey to the South start?

I could have done without the foreword or the justification of having Manfred Zylla^{[4]Zylla’s work I feel is compromised slightly by the size of the book’s pages – the works needed more breathing space and, I get a different hue of colour if I shine a torch on them which speaks to the nature of the paper. They do convey a sense of an authoritarian melange but I would like a look at the originals before formulating a comment. At the moment they work if the intention was to create an eerie emphasis.} to accompany the author in the secondary journey (of constructing a visual account of “the” journey). The former not only because it makes the reader want to run away to understand the forest, read the thesis in question and all the debates, but also because it is rather apologetic – why not a polemic against the Ethical Guardians of the New rather than a parable (and the parable’s critics?). 

Admittedly, Muller is a kind man and acknowledges that the birth of the parable was from a “place of shame”, from a sense of “responsibility and outrage”.  Still, why the revelation that it is a mash-up of Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East^{[5]From what I recall, Herman Hesse spends time in Steppenwolf and Sidhartha reflecting on music which at first confused me because of Muller’s ideas in his Nagmusiek, but unless I missed something important and I would welcome a correction, Muller does use the text of Hesse’s journey as a writing prop.}? Why the revelation up front that all 100 or so pages are constructions of the author (are indeed, so many sides of the author).

 Why doesn’t the author let us enjoy the parable and its five critical engagements before surprising us with revelations? There is finally no need to justify the choice of a visual co-traveller.

There is a deep need to justify in Muller’s text, to almost confess before the sin is committed, as if the guardians of the Gorge have burrowed deep inside his soul.

Back to the text: the parable describes the initial excitement of the sojourners at the moment of the Great Change of 1994 where the landscape was filled with “saviours, prophets and disciples” (p. 23), but also with turmoil mixed with hope. “This procession of believers and disciples had always and incessantly been moving towards the South; towards Home.” (ibid) As in Hesse’s narrative there comes a disturbance, a tumultuous event by the Gorge of Ēthikē. The very event-ness of the event, scuttles the journey, fractures its collective purpose, and the Muller who is crafting the parable is left to wonder whether it was all a hallucination or a dream (p.29) but as he claims, despite such uncertainty, he needed in a Beckettian way perhaps, to write – despair, he announces, or even suicide, beckoned.

Then we have Werner Ansbach’s, Professor Parvenu’s, Christian Grippenkerl’s, Professor Doctor Finkel Fenkel’s engagements with the parable, to culminate with a Colloquium. Each character, who is a construct of the author’s imagination anyway, takes issue with core aspects of what is described or what is assumed in the parable. The various voices tackle issues of ethics, methodology, aesthetics and transformation.

The author’s preference for French philosophy takes us through Badiou’s “ethics of truths”, Rancière’s ideas on methodology and aesthetics, and Derrida’ s idea of the end of the University. It will be a tortuous game to take each one and critique their partial take on the same parable. It would make the author giggle.

I would have had issues with Werner Asbach: Badiou’s “ethic of truths” after all is a critique of the false universalism of bourgeois right and of sacred accounts of the good. But the French iconoclast would not have opposed a “proper” universalism that could have provided the arsenal for another, more “appropriate” Gorge of Ēthikē.

Also, with Parvenu and Grippenkerl’s, and to a lesser extent Frenkel’s, accounts there are issues to be raised – why only Rancière as a source of inspiration?  For example, Badiou again, could have elicited insight and argument on aesthetics or transformation: despite his notion of the “inaesthetic”, it is an inescapable point that Badiou, as a modern-day Platonist, believes in the idea of beauty and its universal sway. Wagner and Schoenberg among others feature in his philosophical and rather West-centric pantheon.

Why not allow for Derrida against all, his oeuvre would have touched the ethical, the methodological and the aesthetic anyway. Focusing on his simple idea (oh my, the word mochlos could receive a nod from any Greek taxi driver, but has been elevated into a philosophical concept, to describe exactly what mochlos means anyway, a lever!). What Derrida could have contributed though is the futility of Badiou’s and Rancière’s elaborate sophistications. Ah, but each one is a different character and a different kind of theorist with their own biases and scholarly voice, therefore, to demand philosophical consistency across their arguments would be silly.

I get it.

It is obvious that the Great Change of 1994 has the significance of an event’s event-ness unleashing many journeys in and to the South. Most academics who disturbed the canonical would have faced a Gorge of Ēthikē or helped construct one because the nature of the edifice of knowledge and know-how demanded and demands one. Many of us have spent endless hours comparing bruises.

What Muller notes but does not invoke in detail was that a man of faultless training in and through Apartheid’s Western musical tropes dares to lead, or co-lead or join a journey (there are hints at actual empirical musical and/or aesthetic examples with a number of recognisable pseudonyms) which challenges the fidelity of the canon, its ethics of practice and his colleagues. The bruising is serious and the tone borders on defeatism. It shouldn’t have, Muller’s text should have tried for a space to discuss our bruises and our BRUISERS.

Furthermore, as someone who has been journeying with quite a noisy ensemble of brigands and mercenaries, I would have liked a more embedded reflection on two of Muller’s fascinating claims following Rancière – the idea of the need to move beyond the dialectic which “accentuates the heterogeneity of elements in order to provoke a shock that reveals a reality riven by contradictions”, with “mystery” which “emphasises the connection between heterogeneous elements” (p. 54) and the metaphor of the “knot” as the ravelling of aesthetic, technical and normative strands of coir, wire or silk.  A discussion of these in the context of what the parable alludes to, the “excursions” initiated by the Great Change has been overdue and is sadly absent from the text.

To (almost) conclude: one has to engage finally with the very concept of the Parable. Parables are particular constructions of a generalisable moral notion or a titbit of wisdom. They are not just stories, they pre-tend towards a theorisation, whether in Plato’s Cave, in Christianity, or in Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. Do we take it then that every Great Change is to meet its nadir after an inevitable encounter with a Gorge of Ēthikē?

I do not think so.

What I have been saving for the end is this:

Muller is a wicked “tactician”. Of course, the whole point of these well-crafted 100 pages or so is to subvert the Gorge’s Guardians by making sure that a reader has to visit the trees from which these pages have been cut, to fathom the landscapes, so injustices committed are never hidden. There was hope, there was scholarship and performance, there was a thesis, there was epistemic violence. Ergo.