African Philosophy

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1996
Other Authors: Arnold Shepperson
Place: Vista University, Port Elizabeth

Published: in Van den Bergh, N.C.J. The Semiotics of Political Transition. Port Elizabeth: Vista University, 284-293.

Type of product: Conference paper presented at the Semiotics of Political Transition Conference, Vista University, Port Elizabeth, 17 – 21 August 1992. This is an early draft of two papers published later: a) “Semiotics in an African Context: `Science’ vs. `Priest-Craft’ – `Semiology’ vs. `Semiotics'” in Acta Semiotica Fennica II, 1993, 159-176. A revised and updated version of this article was published as “African Gnoses and Geometries of Difference: `Science as Priest-Craft'” in Haines, R. and Wood, G. (eds.) Africa After Modernity: Alternative Prespectives. Port Elizabeth: Institute for development Planning and Research, Universit of Port Elizabeth, 1998, 47-62

Copyright: Keyan Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson

When the victorious `scientific’ order of knowledge is faced with cultures predicated on other kinds of world-views, it responds through two mutually exclusive avenues:either it treats the world view of the Other as `priest-craft’ and consequently something to be vanquished; or it views it as an object of study and manipulation in its own right, which needs to be preserved (conserved) as such. If desctruction is chosen then conservation fails because of the Other’s being relegated into irrelevance. When science is chosen, conservation is impossible because the Other has validity as an object of study.

We focus on the way in which the idea of the Other, within its own physical and social surroundings, absorbs and implements these contradictions. Africans are quintessentially the Other to the historical Same of Europe. When Africans have absorbed and applied to themselves the categories and methodologies of the European tradition, dire consequences have sometimes resulted.

These negative results had partly to do with the problems realised when people forget the original agenda within which an area of study came about: the need to `subdue the earth’, central to the methodological dispute between Galileo and the Church, becomes transparent. Put differently, `man’ as an object of study becomes exempt from the act of study, and simultaneously subject to the dismemberments associated with analysis.

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Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1996
Other Authors: Arnold Shepperson
Place: Imatra, Finland.

Published: This is an early draft of two papers published later: a) “Semiotics in an African Context: `Science’ vs. `Priest-Craft’ – `Semiology’ vs. `Semiotics'” in Acta Semiotica Fennica II, 1993, 159-176.

Type of product: Paper presented at XII Annual Meeting and International Congresses of the International Semiotics Institute of IMATRA and the Semiotics Society of Finland, July 1992. A revised and updated version of this article was published as “African Gnoses and Geometries of Difference: `Science as Priest-Craft'” in Haines, R. and Wood, G. (eds.) Africa After Modernity: Alternative Prespectives. Port Elizabeth: Institute for development Planning and Research, Universit of Port Elizabeth, 1998, 47-62

Copyright: Keyan Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson

Many of the policy statements made by the metropolitan nations concerning relations with Africa make them dependent on a factor called `development’. This concept is an eminently reasonable one given the historically authoritative corollary concepts of `progress’ and `civilisation’. Consequently, the idea of development incorporates something of the notion of science; this in turn gives rise to the requirement that development agencies speak of their activity in some kind of scientific discourse.

A requirement for discourse on development requires a critique of semiosis. This derives from the double articulation of development, in that it proceeds from two kinds of premises. The first often finds justification in the popular-scientific conception of evolution. This position views development as a form of supplanting: of one unfit form by a more fit other, whether in social, economic or political (ideological) terms.

In contrast is the equally popular-scientific understanding that sees development as subject to certain laws – usually economic and ideological. When applied to development, these laws are understood universally to result in a specific kind of change. Thus the object of development changes from a given prior (pre-modern) to an expected (predictable) posterior (modern) condition. The latter is always understood to be more amenable to the economic and ideological conditions necessary for smooth relations with the metropolitan centres.

The two kinds of scientific understanding clash with each other by virtue of an internal ideological inconsistency in the Western intellectual heritage: our tradition cannot make up its mind as to where the experiencing subject fits into our self-proclaimed intellectual marker of Science. Richard Rorty has pointed out that there is in Western thought a very specific kind of dialogue within which valid knowledge-claims can be made, and that this debate draws its agenda from the judgement we today pass on those who, like the Inquisition’s Cardinal Bellarmine, sought to refute Galileo’s cosmological claims. For our modern culture, claims which fail to conform to a specifc mode of justification we tend to dismiss as the equivalent of Bellarmine’s “priest-craft”.

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1995
Other Authors: Arnold Shepperson
Published: Caiet de Cinema, 11, 1995, 1-20.
Place: Timisoara, Romania
Copyright: Tomaselli and Shepperson

Though scholars in South Africa have been studying semiotics since the late 1960s, the method was only recently contextualized in African terms (Shepperson 1992a; Shepperson and Tomaselli 1993; Sekoni 1992). The reconstitution of semiotics in terms of African gnoses has followed two basic trajectories in South Africa: the first and most recent relates to specifically African ways of making sense, deriving from the oral consciousness. The second is a more conventional appropriation which has been applied to the study of academic disciplines such as literature, theatre, media and so on. Both are criss-crossed by political considerations.

The bulk of critical social semiotic work has been done by media and cinema studies scholars (Van Zyl 1977, Tomaselli 1985; Tomaselli et al 1986; Tomaselli R.E et al 1989). The semiotics of popular theatre flared in considerable depth during the 1980s (Steadman 1985, 1989; Dalrymple 1987; Tomaselli 1981a, 1981b). Literary criticism has a longer tradition of semiological application, but has tended to concentrate on internationally known writers.

In problematizing semiotics and semiotic discussion in South Africa during the 1980s, we discuss the following areas:

a) the politicising of semiotics – left-wing struggles over representation;

b) Reception theory – de-politicizing semiotics;

c) Locating semiotics in the concrete concerns of African social and political developments.

Each of the three areas will be examined in terms of domestic political dynamics. We concentrate on that specifically semiotic work — which on the whole is rather little — which is closest to our own concerns and knowledge and which applies the method within the African and South African contexts.

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Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1994
Other Authors: Arnold Shepperson
Type of Product: Conference paper, International Association for Semiotic Studies, Berkeley 1994.
Published: No
Copyright: Tomaselli and Shepperson
Our discussion covers a) the problematizing of semiotics and semiotic discussion in South Africa; b) politicising semiotics _ left-wing struggles over representation; c) reception theory and the de-politicizing of semiotics; and d) locating semiotics in the concrete concerns of African social and political developments.

The community as a Semiotic Subject is a problematic of peculiar relevance in the South African context. Apartheid assumed that the idea that a subject’s culture was somehow inherent as a genetic function of a subject’s tribal or national origins. The defence of apartheid was that the ethnically defined “cultural community” (or “sign-community”) of one’s birth defined the life one officially lived and where, the language one officially spoke, and the practices that one officially appropriated in order to live (see Tomaselli and Shepperson 1991). That this “community” was but “race” writ large in the language of science rather than of Divinity, imparted a special aspect to the idea of communication. Since practice generally subsumes action, and since action has to be justified in terms of one or more values that are held by the agent to be relevant in the context of activity, the exchange of signs across the racially defined South African “communities” inherently could not be communication.

The application of different strands of semiology/semiotics by South African academics thus indicated their ideological positions within the social formation. The use of European semiology within an interpretive theological framework was preferred by conservatives who sought to escape confrontation with apartheid. An extreme formalism drawing on French structuralism found its way into literary studies, while a more open-ended approach was found in Afrikaans University communication studies. Derived from the Dutch formalist J.M. Peters (1977), it offered analysis within assumptions of high culture and the media providing a “model” for reality and social behaviour (Fourie 1982).

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Author: Shepperson, Arnold
Date: 1997
Published: In Communicatio, 23(1), 79-85.
Copyright: Communicatio, University of South Africa
At the beginning of my undergraduate career at University of Natal in 1986, I became aware of something called the Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit. As an engineering undergrad, I heard this news invariably negatively. They were a bunch of union-loving communists who were Hell-bent on destroying in the name of The Revolution everything the goverenment had achieved. Needless to say, I eventually settled in the Humanities, and in 1991 enrolled at the Unit, by then named the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies (CCMS), precisely because its syllabus offered some means of confronting ehtical issues which had arisen in my pre-university career in technology. As its original name suggested, the Centre initially based its teaching and research on work which had been going on for some 20 years at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England.

On seeing Christo van Staden’s article in Communicatio (volume 22/2), therefore, I first wondered whether at last I and my colleagues at CCMS had gained some new `culturally compatible’ company. However, on reading Van Staden I was rather dismayed to find that he wasn’t talking about South African or African cultural studies at all. His bibliography demonstrates that peculiarly South African quality: the intellectual inferiority complex which drives South Africans always to define themselves in terms of what others say.

This, curiously, is the direct opposite of the intellectual arrogance that characterises the bulk of Van Staden’s sources, the Americans: where the latter’s world ends at the North American continental shelf, Van Staden’s begins at the pelagic side of Africa’s continental shelf. In short, it seems hard to believe that after all the time that scholars have spent developing situationally-adequate cultural studies rooted in South Africa’s concrete conditions, the only African writers cited in his article are Nigerians like Appiah or Zaireans like Mudimbe (both of whom, incidentally, are expatriate scholars in the West, anyway).

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