I understand this. For the last generation or so, scholars trained in cultural critique have fought hard to destabilise old divisions like urban/rural and traditional/modern. Binaries like these, we say, mask the complexities of everyday life by stripping lifeworlds of their indelible nuance, thereby rendering persons and situations misleadingly flat, and ultimately contributing (however subtly) to a politics of impossibility. As a result, we’ve tried to shift the conversation towards the provisional, contingent qualities of the everyday by directing our attention towards more dynamic objects such as ‘processes of becoming’ and ‘states of emergence’ 4 —interactive spaces that highlight the fundamentally murky quality of life as lived, and which allow us to spot (and report) novel social forms as they arise in the manifest wiggle rooms produced by human societies. But because reductivism is so seductive and resilient, its critique remains one of our main preoccupations; so it comes as little surprise when some of my colleagues target Malawi 2010 for this kind of tried-and-true take down. Van de Merwe does himself few favours, however, by describing the piece as a series about modern and traditional culture; the fashionable models symbolise modern Malawian culture; they are placed in a traditional setting. This is lowest-common- denominator reductivism, a page taken from ‘the conventional script’ (as my friend put it) – lazy at best, but also misleading. The ‘traditional setting’ van de Merwe speaks of is actually Soche, a high-density area in Blantyre, perhaps the largest city in Malawi. And equating a complex, multivalent Malawian modernity with fashionable elites is not only inadequate, but opens up some worrying implications. The images work better on their own. In particular, I have been struck by their ability to tap into the radical ambivalence and insipid tensions that undergird the kind of rural urbanisms we find in places like Malawi. The fashionable models are both present and absent, at home yet afar, both actual and abstract. The places are neither strictly urban nor firmly rural. Everything is process, nothing is fixed. Things could get better but things could also get worse. There is the potential for action, but only under constraint. Skepticism, jealousy and resentment lie in wait. It seems like we know these people, but not what they’re after. Substituting less determinative dichotomies for rigid older ones does more to account for the depth of predicament evoked by Malawi 2010 . This was the approach taken by the social philosopher Georg Simmel, whose essay on fashion remains one of the more insightful meditations on the subject. 5 For Simmel, fashion represents both a flight from reality (‘ a triumph of the soul over the actual circumstances of existence’) and a sobering relation to it (‘a form of imitation and so of social equalisation, but, paradoxically, in changing incessantly, it differentiates one time from another and one social stratum from another. It unites those of a social class and segregates them from others ’). However vital, self- fashioning is always precarious. I would add that self-fashioning is particularly precarious in zones of radical inequality, like the emergent rural urbanisms we see in Malawi 2010 ; and it is that precariousness that van de Merwe’s series manages to evoke.
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arjen van de merwe
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