Keeping you post-ed: Space-time regimes, metaphors, and post-apartheid

Abstract

Societies that have undergone systemic change are characterized as ‘post’—post-socialist, post-colonial, etc.—to encapsulate the impact the past still has on their structure and functioning. Research on these societies has therefore tended to adopt a mostly temporal approach, investigating the tension between continuity and change. Using the example of post-apartheid South Africa, I make a case for a more balanced approach to post situations by including space as equally valuable. I draw my theoretical inspiration from Hartog’s notion of regimes of historicity and Massey’s space-time to argue that we should investigate space-time regimes. I show that a space-time regime of entanglement, often passéist, with blurred temporal boundaries and messy, place-bound experiences of time, characterizes post situations. Finally, using South Africa as my empirical grounding, I offer a set of metaphors to describe and analyze the concrete places that this entangled, post space-time produces.

The ‘post’ as powerful specific vocabulary

“…We already have a rich scholarship focused on the deeply productive ‘messiness and entanglements of social dynamics’ in ‘post-ed’ places (Houssay-Holzschuch, 2021). For example, Stenning’s (2005: 124–125) research on Nowa Huta, in Poland, demonstrates the ‘the challenge of identifying, interrogating, and theorizing post-socialism as a conceptual rather than a descriptive category after the “end of transition”’.…”

“…Houssay-Holzschuch’s (2021) opening contention, that ‘societies that have undergone systemic change are characterized as “post”’, and her question, ‘what is a “post” situation?’, provided me with entry points to begin thinking with and through the ‘post’ as a specific vocabulary. The current closeness of a ‘post’ situation 1 – the (post)pandemic 2 – is perhaps more tangible for many of us in Western Anglophone academia than it has ever been.…”

Inhabiting the ‘posts’

“…In pulling together these layers, in substantiating them concretely, as well as visually, in the text and through her own work, she shows the powerful and durable ways this passéist regime persists, shaping our analysis of post-apartheid society. Notions of change, progress, and failure are articulated as ‘a promised horizon of expectation that never materialised’ (Koselleck, 2004, in Houssay-Holzschuch 2021: 8); ‘caught between an intractable present and an irrevocable past’ (Mbembe, 2011: viii, in Houssay-Holzschuch 2021: 9) ; ‘a space-time of ghosts’; a form of ‘frozen liminality’ (Szacokzai, 2009, ibid, p. 9). Yet, as she emphasizes, the passéist register which shapes our thinking ‘doesn’t mean nothing is happening, anything can’, what is happening just ‘doesn’t move towards the desired, more just future’.…”

“…Writing this commentary immersed in a post-apartheid context and many months into a lockdown space-time, Houssay-Holzschuch’s (2021) ‘Keeping You Post-ed: Space-Time Regimes, Metaphors, and Post-Apartheid’ resonated deeply. In her scrutiny of the all-so-common prefix ‘post’, Houssay-Holzschuch draws on the South African post-apartheid context – its rich literature, debate, entangled spaces, and the rhythms of her own work – as an optic, an empirical ground, to unpack and make visible the work of the ‘post’ in South Africa, as well as in post-colonial and post-socialist elsewheres.…”

Brecciation, post-geographies, and spaces in transition

“…Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch's (2021) article is a fascinating piece that puts space on an equal footing to time in the analysis of 'post' situations by using a series of metaphors to help illustrate the various types of changes taking place. Her work invites us to reassess the co-constitutive relation of space-time regimes, and, in doing so, my commentary will explore the metaphor of brecciation in more detail before discussing how spaces in transition may obscure hidden processes that are indicative of change.…”