The ‘post’ as powerful specific vocabulary

Abstract

On several occasions through her article, ‘Keeping You Post-ed: Space-Time Regimes, Metaphors, and Post-Apartheid’, Houssay-Holzschuch (2021) prompts us to consider suitable vocabulary for analysing ‘post’ situations. In this commentary, I pursue the notion that the ‘post’ discourse already has a specific vocabulary. Taking Houssay-Holzschuch’s lead and drawing from Massey’s conception of space-time regimes, I argue that ‘post’ is used powerfully to fasten the past to a place’s present, bounding certain geopolitical discourses to people and places and overshadowing experiential memories of place. This powerful lexicographic move is shrouded by cruelly optimistic rhetoric that otherwise links ‘post’ with newly opened spaces of possibility, positive change, and hope.

Of waters and bridges

“…If the name sticks, what does it do? Danielle Drozdzewski (2021) explains that post ‘locks the present-day identity/ies of a nation to its past’, thereby agreeing with Elder (2003). Drozdzewski’s conclusion is especially true of post terms, such as ‘postsocialism’ and ‘post-apartheid’, which are rather descriptive and contemporaneous, and point to quite precise, although increasingly remote, spatial and historical ‘containers’ (Müller, 2019; Tuvikene, 2016).…”

“…Post tends to erase the future, and subsume the now into the then. According to Drozdzewski (2021), post 'produces a norm'. How do we then escape that norm and open up new, conjoined possibilities of understanding the past and enriching our individual and collective 'space of experience', of analyzing the city, of envisioning futures, and enlarging our 'horizons of expectations' (Koselleck, 1979(Koselleck, [2004)?…”

“…Sophie Oldfield (2021) reminds us that all of these constitute a theoretical vocabulary ‘immersed in practice’, ‘rooted and located’, epistemological, and political. In this regard, our collective conversation allows Drozdzewski’s (2021) ‘potentialities of thinking-with-bodies’ to encounter and resonate with Oldfield’s beautiful work in ‘Step, Step, Breathe’, comprising autoethnography, poetry, emotions, literary writing, drawing, animation, and the running body, constructing critical pedagogies to understand and feel the city and ‘see it anew’ (Oldfield, 2020). Transitions often have vocabulary issues, but opening up possibilities and lines of flight also allow for such encounters, for becomings, for worlding.…”

“…The post is a rather generational idiom, born from the political and economic turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as from high hopes. Indeed, my interest in the post is part of my temporal and generational positionality on first encountering South Africa as a Nadia Bartolini (2021) and Danielle Drozdzewski (2021) remind us that there are other, less spectacular posts, such as the postindustrial with its slower temporalities and more diffuse spatialities. Their commentaries reveal that the post should not be tethered to better futures, although powerful narratives-the replacement, however incomplete, of authoritarian regimes by formal democracies-have infused our thinking of the post with (cruel) optimism.…”

“…As the commentaries highlight, the post labels periods of time, informs us about their supposed nature, offers what Danielle Drozdzewski (2021) calls a ‘specific vocabulary’, and describes situations that I believe have specific space-time regimes. However, French historian Dominique Kalifa exhorts us to engage critically with period names, reminding us that while Lord Acton famously told historians to ‘study problems, not periods’, ‘the period is sometimes precisely the problem’ (2020: 8, my translation).…”