60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

248 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
stood as reality. Also the knowing subject, and the body, are a product
of a historically specifi c regime of truth. ‘Power seeps into the very
grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their
gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work
with other people’ (Foucault cited in Sheridan 1980: 217). Thus, power
is not a property of the politicians but politics consists of networks of
power where the activists are an integral part of the South African political
fi eld, whether this is to the president’s liking or not.
The Foucauldian view on power implies also a refusal to accept essentialised
moral high ground, as everything, all knowledge, is situated and
inherently political. This can be seen both as the theory’s strength and
weakness when applied in political activism. There can be no references
to right and wrong in a factual sense, only struggles over legitimacy of
arguments. Even more: if the understanding of reality is a shared enterprise
of networks of actors, it indeed needs to be asked if a person
in particular, in a democracy, can be blamed for the AIDS catastrophe.
Partly, through its literacy campaigns and mass mobilisation, the TAC
teaches a Foucauldian lesson in politics. But it also withholds the possibility
of demanding accountability, resorting instead to moral high
ground argumentation. It teaches shared responsibility, but returns to
tactics of shame and blame when seen as necessary. Later we will argue
that this may become a problem in terms of consistency of arguments
and credibility, but there are also ways out. First, however, it is necessary
to show the positive, encouraging aspects of deconstructive body politics
in the landscape of the epidemic.
Education in democracy and body politics
A practice of civic education and political engagement to ensure true
SA democracy is an aspect of TAC work that is repeatedly celebrated
by activists in their testimonies of what it means to be an activist.
What we have observed is that, to some extent, TAC events also work
as a learning practice in a Foucauldian perspective on body politics:
TAC meetings are sites for deconstructive speech acts. In training sessions
one ‘unlearns’ stigma and personal guilt for the HIV infection,
and rehearses what a politicised embodiment means: situatedness in
a context, the socio-sexual landscape of a certain historical moment
in South Africa. When pointing at the lack of treatment, the activists
do not address the absence of pills only, but critique a political system
that denies hope to poor people, as in the following quote:
We are not going to change people’s perceptions; we are not going
to change behavior because the value of life is not signifi cant in