ARTICLES

 

A rattle: On the other frontier, and Chabani Manganyi's "Making strange"

 

 

Ross Truscott

Centre for Humanities Research University of the Western Cape Bellville

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on Chabani Manganyi's "Making strange: Race science and ethnopsychiatric discourse" on the occasion of its republication in PINS. "Making strange" is placed in relation to the critique of what Marxist revisionist historian, Martin Legassick called the liberal frontier tradition of South African historiography, a tradition that posited the eighteenth century frontier of the Cape colony as the origin of South African race prejudice. Thinking about the implications of this critique for critical psychology, specifically for psychoanalytically inclined scholarship, the paper pursues what Manganyi calls "another beginning" of what he names as a "chain of discourse which is sometimes described as colonial discourse". The paper poses the basic question of what constitutes the links in this "chain".

Keywords: apartheid, frontier, psychoanalysis, Enlightenment, Kant, Freud, Manganyi

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Introduction

"... to search elsewhere, for another beginning, for locutions which are much more general..." (Manganyi, 2018: 12)

Chabani Manganyi begins "Making strange: Race science and ethnopsychiatric discourse" - first presented at a Sociology of Literature conference at the University of Essex in 1984, and then at an African Studies seminar later that year at Wits University - by implicating two theoretical frameworks dominant at the time he was writing: "Discourse about Europe's Others, about 'primitive races', about 'Orientals', about Jews, Africans and so-called Negroes is omnipresent even in such momentous intellectual undertakings as psychoanalysis and Marxism" (Manganyi, 2018: 4). Commonly used to critique racial inequalities, psychoanalysis and Marxism are, Manganyi suggests, part of a problem "more general" (ibid: 6) than South African apartheid (cf Manganyi, 1973).

Indeed, one can, Manganyi (2018: 4) notes, find such "inscriptions of Otherness in the most unexpected places". Tracing these "inscriptions" back to their beginnings, Manganyi turns to Hegel, in whom, he argues, we hear an unselfconscious "echo" (ibid: 4) - Hegel's voice reverberates up until the present, but what reverberates or, rather, is transmitted, is itself a repetition - of the idea that Africans are mere children. Manganyi is interested in what ties these thinkers together, but also in the way Hegel, Marx, and Freud are taken up, the way they "contributed the status of their discourse to the chain of discourse which is sometimes described as colonial discourse" (ibid: 8, emphases in original).

Hegel is mentioned, quickly, but then dropped. While Manganyi critically weighs and judges both psychoanalysis and Marxism, he turns, restlessly, against psychoanalysis in particular. The energy of the text in concentrated here, in his critique of the way psychoanalysis has been appropriated and set to work towards explicitly or implicitly racist ends, but also against a potential within psychoanalysis that enabled this, a potential that persists even in the anti-racist work to which it is set.¹

Adherents of psychoanalysis will be tempted to moderate Manganyi's claim: if the various fields Manganyi places under the heading of "colonial discourse" took up certain Freudian ideas, their objects are "cursed", as Manganyi puts it, that is, "afflicted with a condition which cannot be alleviated" (ibid: 10), difference inscribed at the level of biology, a permanent limit placed on and in the body of the black subject or, rather target - whereas psychoanalysis, they might claim, posits a subject that is merely haunted by an otherness lodged at its core.

Manganyi concedes that Freud may remain useful, if only for the ways in which he actively re-inscribes the texts he draws on, signs his name, as it were. This is what Manganyi appropriates from Freud, Freud's appropriative mode of reading, which he uses against psychoanalytic discourse, betraying the letter of Freud but thereby remaining true to his restless spirit. Hegel, Marx, and Freud, then, but mostly Freud, and the dispersion of psychoanalysis into, and its kinship with, colonial discourse.

In commenting on this important paper on the occasion of its republication in PINS (Psychology in society), using it as an opportunity to think about future directions for critical psychology in South Africa in general, and for possible avenues of exploration for the journal in particular, I want to place "Making strange" in relation to a reorientation of scholarship on the nature of apartheid that took place in the 1970s and 80s when Marxist revisionist historians called into question what Martin Legassick (1972) called a liberal frontier tradition of South African historiography, a tradition that posited the eighteenth century frontier as the beginning of South African race prejudice. This turn consigned liberal histories of South African racism to the rubbish bin, and with it an under-read psychoanalytic text by social psychologist, I D MacCrone, Race attitudes in South Africa: Historical, experimental, and psychological studies, first published in 1937.

I want to consider here the ways in which "Making strange", while potentially falling within the ambit of this revisionist critique, may also allow the apprehension what Manganyi (2018: 12) calls "another beginning". "Making strange" offers, I want to suggest, a synthesis of the liberal and Marxist positions, reworking aspects of both, accepting neither fully, making possible a critique of a frontier tradition of which critical psychology may remain a part. Indeed, the difficulty of writing oneself out of this tradition is precisely what Manganyi's paper underlines. "Making strange" can be placed in relation to "The frontier tradition" for several reasons, not least of which concerns Black Consciousness thought - to which Manganyi made a significant if often under-acknowledged contribution - sharing with the radical critique of a frontier tradition a problematization of liberal ideas.

The theme in "Making strange" on which I focus in the second section of this paper has been treated before. In a chapter of A critical psychology of the postcolonial, Derek Hook (2012) focuses on the ways in which Manganyi's work thinks through the racialized division between body and mind, whiteness associated with the latter, blackness with the former. While I take Hook's elaboration of Manganyi's analyses of embodiment - "neither a new nor a forgotten theme in psychoanalysis" (ibid: 205) - as important, specifically for the ways he situates Manganyi's work in relation to that of Frantz Fanon and more contemporary psychoanalytic writers like Slavoj Zizek, I want to suggest that it is worthwhile dwelling not only on "the phenomenological breadth of experience within very precise socio-historical configurations of embodiment" (ibid: 216), but also on the genealogy of "the inherently divided nature of subjectivity" (ibid: 222). I use the term genealogy in its broadly Foucauldian sense, as an approach that attends to what is generally taken to be "without history" - such as "sentiments, love, conscience, instinct" or, in this instance, a separation between sensibility and thought - seeking not a "timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have been fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms" (Foucault, 1977: 139-140, 142). This, simply, as a matter of knowing what one is up against. My comments stand as a partial and incomplete attempt to pursue this line.

 

The frontiers of apartheid

For liberal historians of the interwar period, the beginnings of race prejudice in South Africa lay beyond the frontier of an ostensibly forward thinking enlightened Cape. Beyond the frontier lay the still unhealed wounds that explained the peculiar irrational madness of racism in South Africa. MacCrone's Race attitudes is squarely within this tradition. Indeed, as Legassick (1972) notes, MacCrone was the first to offer an elaborate, detailed version of the frontier hypothesis in a South African context.

As MacCrone's subtitle makes clear, his text consists of three sections. In the historical Part I, MacCrone recounts the arrival of Europeans at the Cape in the seventeenth century, and events that led to the movement of settlers out onto the frontier in the eighteenth. In the experimental Part II, MacCrone surveys the race attitudes of white South Africans towards the "native" in the 1930s. While the archival work of Part I may appear to contemporary readers, in light of more recent historiography, flatfooted, inaccurate, ideologically suspect, and the statistical analysis of Part II, while painstakingly detailed, may seem, when one considers how obviously racist the attitudes of white South Africans were, somewhat redundant, the innovativeness of Race attitudes is the way MacCrone formulates the relationship between experimental and the historical: the race attitudes of the 1930s, MacCrone (1937) argues in the psychoanalytic Part III, were a neurotic, morbid regression to a "frontier mentality" (281).

MacCrone's account differs from that of other liberal historians in one crucial respect: it is not so much continuity with the eighteenth century frontier as its deferred arrival, the Nachträglichkeit, the afterwardsness, of the frontier, which he emphasizes. Not the slow festering of a wound as its infection spreads across the social body, but the return of the unresolved conflicts of the frontier as a fearful bodily state expressed in acts of racial hatred. For MacCrone, we might say - although MacCrone does not put it in these terms - the frontier is the primal scene of race attitudes in South Africa, what the racism of twentieth century South Africa had repressed, what it recalls, what it does not remember and, thus, acts out, repeats unconsciously.

In "The Frontier tradition in South African historiography", a seminar paper first presented in 1970, Legassick tears into MacCrone's Race attitudes, drawing attention to the limits of understanding what became apartheid as a form of madness. For Legassick, the definition of the frontier in MacCrone's book simply does not withstand scrutiny. As the hypothesis goes, isolation from the influences of the European mother country, and contact with people understood by frontiersman as utterly different, stand as the conditions under which racialized group consciousness hardened. This hardening, so the hypothesis goes, was attended by fearful, often violent apprehensions of those falling outside the group, and without the intervening forces of a liberal civil society, fear and group consciousness were left to mutually reinforce each other: group consciousness begot fear of others which led to a reinforcement of a laager mentality and, thus, more fear, more group consciousness, more violence. If such a formulation now stands permanently on its head - if the liberal ideas that underpinned imperialism are now under permanent suspicion - Legassick's critique of the frontier tradition leant a hand in tipping it over. As he notes, there were theories of difference at the Cape colony from the outset; such theories, and the practices of othering to which they gave rise, were neither formed on, nor even more prevalent at, the frontier, but were an integral part of Cape liberal civil society itself.

For Legassick, the frontier was not purely and simply the site of inter-racial violence and the hardening group consciousness, but one of racial ambiguity, an uneven, heterogeneous zone of mutual influence, cooperation, and conflict. Whatever conflict occurred on the frontier, and there can be no doubt that there was violent conflict, Legassick argues, should be understood as an effect of the extension of the Cape colony into the interior. For Legassick, the racism of the twentieth century has its roots in imperial expansion, which accelerated in the 1840s, and was exemplified by the industrialization of mining in the twentieth century rather than the frontier of the eighteenth. Apartheid inequality is not irrational, Legassick argues, its logic is that of racial capitalism, buttressed by the migrant labour system.

It should be noted that historians, including Legassick, have tended to under-read Part II and III of Race attitudes. At the risk of a defence of MacCrone, it is fair to say that the three parts of his text have not been read together. Legassick is nonetheless undoubtedly correct to point out the limits of Race attitudes. Histories of the frontier may well contribute to understandings of the formation of an unequal South African society, but if the frontier assumes the status of an originary scene it distracts attention from liberalism's undisclosed investments in the very racial inequalities, and in the hardening of racial categories, against which it rails.

Addressed to Historians of yesteryear, the critique of the frontier tradition was hardly noted by psychology. This becomes apparent when one reads the "three essays on the psychology of apartheid" in the edited collection, The psychology of apartheid by H I J van der Spuy.

White South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, van der Spuy (1978a: 4) argues, display an "obsessional national character" defined by inflexibility, a preoccupation with purity, and, most pronounced of all, intense race prejudice, a syndrome he renders an unsuccessful "defence against insecurity and anxiety" (ibid: 7). In the second of his essays, van der Spuy (1978b: 18) explores a slightly different formulation, that an "obsessional

What is particularly dubious about van der Spuy's formulation, despite his intentions, is the developmental itinerary to which it commits the critique of race prejudice, precisely the itinerary of civilizational progress apartheid used to rationalize itself. Rather than black people being positioned as "primitive" children, Afrikaners are designated as being as immature as those they dominate and subjugate; it is precisely domination and subjugation that are rendered immature and which risk becoming "more primitive" than they already are.

The critique of the frontier tradition of South African historiography can be extended here to the discipline of psychology. The formulation of the problem found in van der Spuy's diagnoses of racism is a part of this frontier tradition insofar as the etiology of South African race prejudice is sought not only in the long histories of colonial conflict in South Africa, in "the wild and often hostile interior" (van der Spuy 1978b: 22), but, more importantly, in a location that is distant from the influence of ideas of Enlightenment. Afrikaners, van der Spuy suggests, experienced something like what an individual undergoes in a deprived early childhood. For van der Spuy, being cut off from European ideas and institutions, and being mistreated at the hands of the British, were a kind of abuse that led the Afrikaner people to become abusers. Dutch administrative presence in the Cape prevented a total sense of isolation, allowing a connection with the mother country, but soon this changed: "After the British takeover this umbilical cord was cut and much greater deprivation resulted" (ibid: 22).

Van der Spuy is hardly to blame. He simply repeats a basic misreading of Freud that, as in the case of MacCrone, assumes that the irrational currents of the group are repressed by civilizing forces in the absence of which the current is released. For Freud, by contrast, group life bears within its characteristic psychological features the founding violence through which the social was attained. It is, as Theodor Adorno (1991: 137, emphases added) puts it, "not simply the reoccurrence of the archaic but its reproduction in and by civilization itself. Had MacCrone framed his study this way, his frontier hypothesis would have assumed an entirely different shape. Indeed, Legassick would have found far less in it to question.

There can be no doubt that Freud narrates this "reproduction" through anthropological fables. Anyone wanting to think psychoanalytically about colonial discourse has to reckon with certain unfortunate compromises on Freud's part. Writing within an early twentieth century context wherein psychoanalysis was in need of a scientific stamp, Freud used anthropological discourse to legitimate his project. He might have simply said that something of the subject's early life will have come to orient them in and to the world, he might have said that these early scenes, with all their conflicts, into which the subject is thrown are carried into adult life, and that, having lain dormant for a time, return, unexpectedly, suddenly, in various unsettling forms. Sometimes Freud puts it as plainly as that, noting that if the family home remains the primary scene that shapes the subject, social, political, and economic double binds always intrude upon that scene. But because the reconstruction of a story of obscure beginnings that operate retroactively - the past arrives, later, at those moments at which it is encountered for the first time in that which recalls what was never fully experienced but nonetheless will have indelibly marked the subject - is essentially a speculative project, Freud names such encounters with the representatives of these early scenes as a regression to a "primitive" state, and he does this on the basis of the ostensibly infantile nature of "primitive people," which was thought to be a scientific fact (see Spivak 1993).

It is thus not simply the dispersion of psychoanalysis into colonial discourse, but the incorporation of colonial discourse into psychoanalysis, to which one needs to attend in following the "chain" - "chain" as repetition, "chain" as that which binds. These compromises cannot simply be excised from psychoanalysis. They were a part of its formation, and were weaved into psychoanalytic theory. Understanding racism in terms of "primitive" defences against "primitive" affective states is hardly foreign to post-apartheid psychoanalytic thought, wherein racism is rendered, often in Kleinian language, as a failure to have attained depressive position maturity. However much various breakaway schools mark their difference from Freud, such formulations are entirely consistent with Freud's compromised discourse, shaped as it was by a colonial scene of writing. To invoke the psychoanalytic today is to stir this ghost. Which is to say that van der Spuy cannot be treated simply as a foil, for his blind spots are shared by celebrated psychoanalytic texts on post-apartheid South Africa. What is troubling in Freud remains troubling in contemporary psychoanalytic thought.

Manganyi himself lapses into the very temporality he critiques. Of De Ridder's perverse form of psychoanalysis, Manganyi (2018: 12) writes: "Here too, as in some earlier examples, one is made to feel, perceive and not to know the African". Like what Edward Said calls "radical realism", Manganyi argues, this mode of knowing "carries with it the momentum of primary process activity in spite of the fact that it intends to be unequivocal" (ibid: 17, note 34). This is subtler than van der Spuy's analysis of Afrikaner racism, but, in Manganyi's frame, De Ridder's is a childish, if not infantile, discourse, and it displays the kind of "primary process" psychic activities that, as "residue of a phase of development" (Freud, 1911: 219), is associated with a racialized, anthropological figure who is supposed to stand at the origin of humanity.²

Manganyi (2018: 13) is unquestionably correct when he suggests that "this 'knowledge' of the African as childlike, as innately inferior, as dangerous sexually and as a violent being, and a neurotic to make matters worse must surely have had a role to play in the various strategies of white power". That much is self-evident. The problem is how to transcend this frame so that race science, and all it laid the ground for - "separate education, residential segregation, exclusion of blacks from the exercise of political power, exploitation of African labour and the absence of equal economic opportunities" (ibid: 13) - is not itself simply rendered "childlike", "dangerous", "violent", "neurotic". That is to say, "primitive".

Can we be satisfied with merely inverting a frame? The very question would suggest that we cannot. But if Manganyi writes within the limits of psychoanalytic discourse, he also, as I want to suggest in the next section, brushes against those same limits.

 

The other frontier

MacCrone's hypothesis is worth entertaining, even if Race attitudes is taken as symptomatic of a problem Legassick names as a frontier tradition and Manganyi describes as a "chain". Manganyi (2018: 5) writes: "The discourse on intelligence within the colonial and race supremacist cultures is a sign (a decisive one no doubt) in a larger separation of reason (western and white) and unreason (primitive and black)". I want to suggest that what Manganyi makes available here is a correction of the misreading of Freud in the frontier tradition, and a synthesis that recomposes an opposition between MacCrone and Legassick. But this synthesis removes neither psychoanalysis, nor, necessarily, Manganyi's paper itself, from the frontier tradition, even if it gestures towards the possibility of working through it and beyond it.

Hegel, Marx, and Freud may be representatives of the primal scenes of twentieth century racism, as Manganyi suggests, but the "inscriptions of Otherness" which plague the world did not originate with them, even if their writings cannot but be considered seriously, and critically, if anything is to change. Drawing attention to "other founders of discursivity", Manganyi draws attention, ostensibly with MacCrone, to the eighteenth century as "another beginning" of what came to be understood, yet is still not fully grasped, as apartheid - apartheid as an ordering of life that exceeds the policies instituted from 1948 within the geographical borders of South Africa. The terrain of this "larger separation" remains a frontier of sorts - this is where MacCrone is correct, but not in the way he intends. What hardens in the eighteenth century - what Freud, what the colonial discourse on intelligence but also critical psychology, among other fields of scholarship, inherit from the eighteenth century - is the frontier between the sensible and the intelligible. Which is to say, the object of Manganyi's critique - a "separation" - can be thought of as an iteration of a frontier tradition, the links that form the "chain" Manganyi places on the table as reiterations of the division between nature and an intellect that seeks to subjugate it. This does not entirely leave the grounds of "The frontier tradition", Legassick (1972: 3) anticipates this extension of the frontier when he writes of an "alternative tradition" that, in its critique of racism, calls into question the valorization of reason over the senses. I will be referring to it as the other frontier tradition.

Hegel (1886: 9) is undoubtedly a part of this tradition when he writes of a "schism", as he puts it, "between pure thought and what is external, sensuous". Or, as he puts it further on, commenting on the modern stamp upon this old division that destines "man" (Hegel's term) "to live in two contradictory worlds at once", one particular, the other universal: "For, on the one side, we see man a prisoner in common reality and earthly temporality, oppressed by want and poverty, hard driven by nature, entangled in matter, in sensuous aims and their enjoyments; on the other side, he exalts himself to eternal ideas, to a realm of thought and freedom, imposes on himself as a will universal laws and attributions, strips the world of its living and flourishing reality and dissolves it into abstractions" (ibid: 59-60).

It is not without significance that Hegel burdens art with reconciling this opposition, with presenting truth sensually, and philosophy with reflecting upon this reconciliation. But the "chain" neither begins with Hegel nor ends with the discourse on intelligence; it runs from at least Descartes - one should say from Greek antiquity, most notably, though not only, Plato - up until our present, passing through Freudian discourse. To grasp how this "separation" recurs as a "chain", it is worth beginning, not entirely arbitrarily, with one of the "other founders of discursivity", Immanuel Kant. Indeed, of all the links in this "chain" he is perhaps most relevant to a critique of psychological knowledge.

Kant's Critique of pure reason (1787) is concerned with the origins of knowledge. There are, for Kant, "two stems of human knowledge, namely sensibility and understanding" (ibid: 55, emphases in original). Kant separates them in the strictest, most obsessional terms - the transcendental aesthetic isolating that part of human knowledge that has its origins in sensibility, the transcendental logic that part in the understanding: "Objects are given to us through sensibility; and through understanding they are thought" (ibid: 55, emphases in original).

Both "stems" contribute to knowledge, neither are to be privileged: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind ... Only from their union can knowledge arise" (ibid: 86). But a sequence and a hierarchy are undoubtedly put in place when Kant (1787: 114) writes of knowledge "beginning with single perceptions, and rising to general concepts". Intuition is, thus, prior to thought, the "first origin of our knowledge" (ibid: 104), supplying the "raw material" (ibid: 37), the impressions intuition has arranged in a preliminary way, from which the understanding can produce, by subsuming these representations under its concepts, "knowledge properly so called" (ibid: 104).

Kant's first Critique marks a moment of self-conscious resignation to a relinquishment of, perhaps even an elegy to, unmediated knowledge of things-in-themselves. In this context, Kant aims to set limits on pure reason, which in its rationalist expression, though it follows rules and procedures strictly, loses all relation to the objects - and objects are not things, but things sensuously apprehended and represented - it aims to think, spiralling abstractly away from the world of experience, producing methodologically rigorous, often complicated, nonsense. This is one edge of the ridge the Critique traverses. On the other side is an empiricism that, in its strict adherence to the mere facts of what is given to sensory experience cannot reckon with the subjective conditions under which the objective world is produced. Thus the importance, for Kant, of working out the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, the passage that sensory intuitions undergo in being brought to, and under, the concepts of the understanding.

If the concepts of the understanding must, Kant insists, be free of any empirical matter, and, at the same time, not simply imposed upon sensory data, that is, if Kant insists on not only a separation but a correspondence between thought and sensibility, then it is the filtering of the world given to intuition through the pure forms of time and space - time in particular - that prepares sensory intuitions, at the surface of the subject - where it encounters things it will represent as objects, including itself - for the concepts of the understanding. This is the "union" Kant posits between sensibility and the understanding. Sensibility, absolutely separate from thought, contains or, rather, is contained in, pure a priori forms, meaning that what is given to intuition, the world as apprehended through the senses, is always already arranged, from the outset - at the very moment of perception, at which the thing-in-itself impresses itself, affects the subject - by the abstract thought machine that awaits its representations for processing.

Sensibility is, thus, where knowledge begins, its point of departure, a provenance the understanding produces for itself. As Adorno (2001: 225) reads Kant's first Critique, the passage runs the other way as well, "time and space are shaped by empirical experience", ontogenetically and phylogenetically. The Copernican revolution of Kant's subjective constitution of the objects of knowledge can and, read against the grain, does work in the other direction, too: the empirical world constitutes the subject that constitutes the world. An absolute dualism, then, but also, for Adorno, a reciprocal interdependence.

An ideological substratum of this apartness is disclosed in a text like Kant's (1798) Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, which speaks more plainly than the three Critiques, in less technical language. Against those who suggest that sensibility ought to be the mere "servant of the understanding" and those who, by contrast, "extol the merits of sensualizing the concepts of the understanding", Kant suggests that "the understanding should rule without weakening sensibility (which in itself is like a mob, because it does not think)" (ibid: 256, emphases in original).³ This, for Kant, is the proper relation between the understanding and sensibility. While Kant does not want despotism, any arrangement in which the senses rule, where "sensations count as judgment", approaches "sheer enthusiasm ... derangement" (ibid: 258).⁴

Reading Kant's critical philosophy through the Anthropology, there is a kind of indirect rule that comes to structure the conception of the subject, the understanding judging representations derived from intuition through its concepts which are governed by the principles of reason, this higher authority constituting the laws according to which the understanding brings the sensible to order. The homelands of the sensible are ruled, remotely, by reason. Philosophers will object that the division between the sensible and the intelligible forms the basis of a universal frame for humanity, a point repeated in the Critique of pure reason. What is certain, however, as several scholars have noted (for example, Spivak, 1999; Brown, 2012), is that when Kant marks the divisions between the faculties and between different modes of judgment - reflective and determinative judgments, say, as in the Critique of Judgment - exotic figures, curiously and with regularity, are marshalled, with certain people coming to represent, if not the opposite sides of a unity inextricably bound together, then the necessary passage between them that has already been undertaken by the select few.⁵

In the Critique of Judgment (1790: 11), it is across this "great gulf" that Kant throws the bridge of the faculty of presentation, the imagination.⁶ Here, the feeling of the sublime is, for Kant, reason's ultimate assertion of its "supremacy over sensibility" (ibid: 104). In brief, the imagination, unable to refer to the understanding any design in what has impressed itself upon the senses - the mathematical sublime is exemplified by apprehensions of infinity, the dynamic sublime by the tumultuous forces of nature - the case is submitted to the authority of practical reason, under whose jurisdiction displeasurable incomprehension is converted into one of pleasure, a hindrance of what Kant calls "the feeling of life" (ibid: 36) into its furtherance. Not all people are capable, in Kant's view, of sublimity, for without "moral ideas", Kant writes, the sublime "merely strikes the untutored individual as terrifying" (ibid: 95). The sublime, for Kant, is a civilizational accomplishment, the name of which is culture. Which is a more refined version of his earlier claim that black people are incapable of anything beyond "the ridiculous", let alone the feeling of the sublime (Kant, 1764: 59). Hence the importance, and not only for Kant, of art: in the midst of an actual shipwreck a feeling of the sublime is impossible, but the immensity of the sea represented in a poem may offer the subject the adequate distance for reflection on the matter of nature to which he - with the sublime it is always a he for Kant - is subject and powerless, but ultimately, by way of reasoned reflection on the feeling of impotence, triumphant, for he knows this, whereas nature does not know anything.

By drawing attention to this "larger separation", and the identification of whiteness with reason, blackness with unreason and, thus, with sensory nature, matter, Manganyi alludes to the "organon" (Kant, 1787, 55) - that is, an instrument, the "echo" of Francis Bacon is intentional, indeed, Kant's first Critique takes its epigraph from Bacon's Novum Organum - by which anthropological knowledge has functioned as a tribunal in which blackness has been tried.

Psychoanalysis, and every deployment of psychoanalytic theory to apprehend postcolonial predicaments, cannot simply disavow a kinship with this separation and its "union". The bridge between the sensible and the intelligible marks psychoanalysis at its emergence: the analysis of dreams traces the thoughts encrypted in the dream images, that is, transposed into images of corporeal gratification, following the passage from images back to thoughts that can never be fully recovered, following this in the reverse direction from which they were formed (see Freud, 1900, 295-296). Freud's "royal road" is nothing other than this passage. As if to disavow and acknowledge a Kantian debt, Freud notes that he took inspiration for his method of free association from Kant's infamous misreader, Friedrich Schiller.

Perhaps Freud's most explicit attempt to bridge this "separation" is the drive, "a concept on the frontier [Grenz] between the mental and the somatic ... the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind" (Freud, 1915: 118). There are certainly other figurations of frontiers in Freud's writings, and other bridges, none of which depart far from the association with a spatial and temporal threshold that brings the subject into an encounter with the "primitive."

Freud (1923: 398) goes as far as to call the ego a "frontier creature", one with three lines, or surfaces, along which it must defend itself, producing three corresponding forms of anxiety. First, the ego is set against the external world given to sensory perception, its threats, and the tensions they produce for the ego. But within Freud's thinking, the division between an outside world and a psychic interiority is never given. Thus, secondly, the ego defends itself against "the instigations of the murderous id", which is, to the ego, a "second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself" (ibid: 397). In this respect it is instructive that Freud should state: "Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id" (ibid: 397). And thirdly, the ego defends against the super-ego, "against the reproaches of the punishing conscience" (ibid: 395). The ego is thus, in Freud's rendering, "a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego" (ibid: 397).⁷

It is worth citing what Manganyi (2018: 7) takes to be one of the enduring effects of Freud's work, a highly unstable effect: "The black man is constituted individually as though he was part of a permanent mob". In other words, because Freud formulates group psychology as entailing a regression the analogue for which is supplied by the "primitive", the black man permanently or, rather, primarily, regressed. It is only a short step from Kant's analogy between sensibility and an unthinking "mob", and a certain Kantianism in Freud, to the view that it would be "derangement" for those who are delegated the task of representing bodily existence in its "natural" state - and Manganyi gets at precisely this in "Making strange" - ruling over those who have taken it as their task to represent the cognitive faculty.

The differences between each iteration of what Manganyi names as a "separation of reason ... and unreason" - a "schism" (Hegel), a "great gulf" (Kant), a "frontier" (Freud), but also those not dealt with here, most notably, Marx - should not go unremarked.⁸Despite variations, in each link noted here the relations between the sensible, the intelligible, and their "union" are going concerns. It should go without saying that all contemporary valorizations of the bridging of body and mind - they are too numerous to cite, and not always sufficiently aware of their immediate or distant predecessors - should be thought through with care: the most cursory genealogy of this bridge reveals it as a means to address a question that has animated Enlightenment thought from Bacon onwards: how to bring nature into a relation of progressive subjection, and the proper, that is to say, "civilized", form of that subjection. And along with nature, those thought to be in a more or less "natural" state.

 

Conclusion

Manganyi foregrounds race in relation to this other frontier, but class interests, too, are quite central to his critique of psychometrics. Here, Manganyi finds himself in sympathy with Adorno (2001: 28) who, in his reading of Kant, renders the separation of the sensible and the intelligible as "primordially bourgeois". As Adorno continues, underlining a division of labour not absent from Manganyi's concerns: "The assumption of the inferiority of experience ... is ultimately connected with the separation of manual and mental labour and the making absolute of mind in fixed logical forms" (ibid: 28). And the division of labour is indeed very strict: "These two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding cannot intuit anything, the senses cannot think anything" (Kant, 1787: 86). One could hardly consider such a division of labour without reflecting on the gendered elements it entails. At least in Kant's iteration of the frontier, of which, I am suggesting with Manganyi, we find an "echo" in the present, women fare little better than black people, limited as they are to a morality grounded not on the principles of reason but on affect, sensation, sentiment (Kant, 1764). The other frontier tradition marks an intersection, where race, class, gender, and sexuality - as Manganyi notes, the black body is made to bear a voracious, "primitive" sexuality, a point he elaborates, with Fanon, in much of his writing - are co-constituted.

To state the synthesis Manganyi makes available, insofar as he pays attention to the psychometric measures developed in South Africa for the purpose of rationalizing the banishment of large numbers of black men to the menial labour of the mines, he writes from the perspective of Legassick: the "chain of discourse" has its origins not on the frontier of the eighteenth century, away from the supposedly enlightened Cape, but in the industrialization of mining. Yet by drawing attention, as well, to the "larger separation" at play, larger but also smaller, for it is also a topographical itinerary that runs from affect to thought, in the rationalization of such an oppressive project, Manganyi underlines, with MacCrone, the importance of a "chain" that stretches back to at least the eighteenth century. To set to work upon this frontier, this apartness according to which white bourgeois masculinity became a striving to rise above the muck of certain kinds of physical labour, delegating to its others a perpetual bodily being in service of mind, is to attend to a formation, as Manganyi (2018: 12) puts it, "much more general" than South African apartheid. One might call it "global apartheid" (see van Bever Donker, Truscott, Minkley & Lalu, 2017: 14-21).

The other frontier tradition, which persists today, does not yield, easily, to critique. Our notions of critique have been formed upon its very grounds. As in the case of Manganyi's critique of race science: to say that a mode of knowledge production has a tendency towards "primary process activity" is to say that it bears a little too much in the way of sensation, and not enough understanding. The other frontier tradition not only underwrote, and continues to underwrite, objectifications of life, but also modes of resistance to it. "Making strange" is, thus, both within and against a tradition of thought the defining feature of which is a frontier between the sensible and the intelligible, a tradition that seeks to bridge this divide but for all that presumes it. Manganyi's provocation concerns the difficulty of orienting oneself within such a tradition.

Manganyi is not simply against the Enlightenment, here, but caught in it, and it is out of this bind that he attempts to write himself, describing it, critically, in the very language of critique by which he and others are held. Taking inspiration from Manganyi, perhaps the best critical psychology can hope for is, as Gayatri Spivak (1999: 4) puts it in her reading of Kant's Critique of judgment, "a constructive rather than disabling complicity". Indeed, this is the strength of "Making strange", an "enabling complicity." Manganyi repeats a certain psychoanalytic logic that extends the other frontier tradition. But what he is, arguably, doing in his reprisal of psychoanalysis is not only using it when it suits him, rejecting it when it doesn't, but writing psychoanalysis, and himself, reflexively, into his critique: Manganyi casts a psychoanalytic glance over psychoanalysis as a part of "the chain of discourse", he counts psychoanalysis into what he uses it to read. That "Making strange" is coextensive with what it diagnoses - that Manganyi is, here, turning against his own previous recourse to psychoanalysis, even against the paper he is writing - does little to reduce the force of this psychoanalytic critique of psychoanalytic discourse.

Manganyi's key insight is that, like the psychoanalytic subject, psychoanalytic discourse itself is haunted by an otherness lodged at its core, that what is most proper to it is not its own, has been inherited, taken in, introjected, as it were. This differentiates "Making strange" from all dogmatic applications of psychoanalysis. That some might call this an enlightened, self-conscious psychoanalysis will not allay the sense of uneasiness Manganyi's paper so sublimely stages as a problem for thought.

Beyond the theoretical minutiae of a psychoanalytic inheritance, beyond encouraging critical psychologists to read outside the limits of their field, the question "Making strange" leaves us with is what it means, today, to invoke, in research and especially in teaching, aesthetics and the aesthetic, the body and embodiment, sense, imagination, affect, and intuition - so often accompanied by recourse to art, invoking its ostensibly disruptive force - as a means of bridging an oppressive and old duality. It is a question worth posing rigorously, if not to resolve it then at least so as not to be surprised if this repetitious undertaking is accompanied by the unnerving and echoic sound of a "chain" being rattled.

I end on the relation between art and scientific knowledge not only because the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics is currently a burning issue in university curriculum transformation, in various university centres and departments, including psychology, but also because it was to art that Manganyi's own work subsequently turned, and, retrospectively read, was always turning (see, for example, Manganyi, 1977; see Truscott & Hook, 2016). If art can offer anything to the current quandaries of higher education, it may be, as in the punchy, poetic style in which "Making strange" is written, through the disclosure of irresolvable difficulties rather than through any easy solutions triumphantly declared.

 

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1 Manganyi spills less ink on Marx than Freud. As with his treatment of Freud, though, he sees a potential in Marxist theory, which can be set to work to understand apartheid's workings. The Althusserian reading of Marx to which Manganyi is sympathetic, however, would not be able to erase the Eurocentrism of Marxist theory.
2 Some will, of course, object that "primary process" as a psychic phenomenon is not the same as the "primitive" as an anthropological one. Yet they are related.
3 The senses, Kant (1798: 258) asserts further on, are "like the common people who, if they are not a mob (ignobile vulgus), gladly submit to their superior, understanding, but still want to be heard".
4 Melancholia, for instance, is, for Kant (1798), a malady whereby the subject's understanding has not attained sufficient mastery over the sensible, the passage from which entails restoring the proper relation between the understanding and the senses, the former master over the latter, even if intuition is granted its due.
5 When it comes to the contemporary use made of Kantian ideas to combat racism, the tendency, as Robert Bernasconi (2003: 18) puts it, is to say that, "although Kant is logically committed to the idea that the entire species progresses in perfection, he is not personally committed".
6 Strictly speaking, this "gulf" refers to the division between theoretical and practical cognition, between the understanding and the sensible, on the one hand, and reason and the sensible, on the other. It is beyond the scope of, and perhaps unnecessary for, this paper to flesh this out.
7 The kinship between Freud and Kant is usually dealt with, if it is at all, by referring to Freud's own comments. "Kant's Categorical Imperative", Freud (1924: 422) writes in "The economic problem of masochism", "is the direct heir of the Oedipus Complex". This entails the third of three frontiers, only the first of which entails the sensible and the intelligible in a straightforward sense, and Kant's second Critique. Warding off the gratifications of the id, the super-ego, carrying out the mandate of the categorical imperative, itself becomes an instrument of violence against the ego. Inverting a debt, Freud suggests that Kant in fact owes him, for the Oedipus complex is older.
8 If for Kant the subject produces what is given to sensory experience, Hegel is perhaps the first to reverse this, suggesting that subjectivity is constituted by the external world of social relations. Marx pushes this to think consciousness as an effect of relations of production. And Freud actively reinscribes what in Kant he inherits, discloses its violence, even if he also repeats some of it.