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Psychology in Society
On-line version ISSN 2309-8708
Print version ISSN 1015-6046
Psychol. Soc. n.46 Durban Nov. 2014
Antagonism, social critique and the "violent reverie"
Derek Hook
Department of Psychology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria
This paper opens up a series of windows on racialised life in past and present South Africa as a way arguing for the value of antagonism as a mode ofcritical enquiry. Sampling a cross-section of recent writing on South African race politics, the paper calls attention both to strident critiques of white privilege, and to concerns over allegedly anti-white populism. Chabani Manganyi's notion of the violent reverie is used to argue that such oppositional critique affords a crucial expressive modality, which perhaps unexpectedly, lessens the subjective (self-directed) violence of the historically oppressed and decreases rather than increases the possibility of objective violence between oppressor and oppressed. The paper also draws on a series of philosophical, psychoanalytic and political motifs - the ideas of "no hope", the Lacanian concept of the imaginary, and Mngxitama's notion of the failure of interracial dialogue - as a means of drawing attention to the readiness with which we often succumb to comforting social myths.
Keywords: antagonism, anti-white populism, Manganyi, racialization, violent reverie, white privilege
For a journal that begun publication ten years before the official demise of apartheid in 1994, and that has continued two decades beyond that landmark date, it is unsurprising that PINS has often returned to the themes of racism and racialization. This broad topic has been the focus of several special issues of the journal (see PINS issues 31 and 40, special issues on contemporary racism and the Apartheid Archive, respectively), and a variety of different analyses and perspectives. As such it is appropriate, in reflecting on 30 years of PINS, to consider how the thread constituted by such discussions might connect to current debates and political perspectives on race and racism in the post-Mandela South African context. In what follows, I open up a series of windows on the topic of racialised life in (past and present) South Africa, before drawing a conclusion about the value of antagonism as a mode of enquiry that is of particular interest to readers and future contributors to PINS.
"No hope"
In May 2014 I attended a lecture by sociologist Werner Bonefeld, a specialist on the Frankfurt School. Following the arguments developed in his (2014) book Critical theory and the critique of political economy, Bonefeld unsmilingly recounted the basic elements of Theodor Adorno's analysis of the effects of capitalism on modern culture and consciousness. In a sober and unvarying tone, he stressed how the logic of capital has saturated society and consciousness to such an extent that even our most elementary experiences of temporality are today effectively over-determined by the agendas of economic profitability.
The audience, taken aback by the bleak diagnosis of the current socio-economic conjuncture offered by Bonefeld, was discomforted, dissatisfied with this vision in which no future prosperity or recovery could be imagined. The most memorable point of the lecture came when Bonefeld responded to a contribution from the floor, to the complaint that Bonefeld's analysis made it sound as if there was no conceivable hope for the future. Avoiding the implicit request in the question, in other words, to outline one or two germs of optimism in the months and years to come, Bonefeld responded bluntly: "There is no hope".
The sociologist went on to say that investing critical theory with hope would come dangerously close to treating it - critical theory - as a form of religiosity. Doing so would be tantamount to believing that Walter Benjamin's figure of the Angel of History was coming to save us. Much incredulity and discussion followed on from Bonefeld's summary dismissal of hope. It was a wonderful moment, one which made it clear the degree to which social critical commentary is typically conditioned by an implicit proviso: be as critical as you want, so long as your critique entails a note ofhope for the future.
Two useful ideas could be extrapolated from Bonefeld's standpoint. Firstly, the very gesture of hoping for an improved world can undercut the agency of the subject invested in such a hopeful belief. That is, hope all too easily assumes the form of an imagined rescuer (such as, in Bonefeld's comments, Walter Benjamin's Angel of History) who is relied upon to deliver us. Such a figure thus relieves us of own agency, our own duty to assume responsibility for the dire social and historical circumstances within which we find ourselves. Secondly, by believing that "things aren't as bad as all that", that "a better future is on the horizon", we delude ourselves as the extent of the current crises, and go on to develop inaccurate diagnoses and analyses of our social, economic and historical conjuncture, once again believing that things will change for the better simply because they must.
There was as such an ethical dimension to Bonefeld's (2014) insistence that the correct (early Frankfurt School) critical theory posture is one in which there is no hope. Bonefeld was, in the first instance, refusing to allow his audience to delegate the responsibility for change to an Other, to some or other rescuing figure who would swoop down at the last moment and save us. Hence his comment on religiosity: a form of hope that implies salvation must be rejected insofar as it relies on someone else (God, History, etc.) to change, or indeed, to save, society, us. Bonefeld was likewise - our second point - refusing to participate in an imaginary game, in the construction of a comforting myth with which we might console ourselves and mask the extent of our current social and political predicament. Put in more psychoanalytic terms: Bonefeld's unsentimental rejection of hope can be read as a principled denial of the illusions of (social) fantasy. That is to say: what is truly difficult is not talking about the dire conditions of our current socio-economic predicament. Such circumstances can easily be anesthetized with beatific - or indeed fetishistic - constructions that allow us to picture a social reality in which our own particular forms of enjoyment or privilege are still, nonetheless, gratified, protected. Far more difficult by far is to confront changing social circumstances in a way that does away with those two omnipresent narrative elements of everyday politics: the figure of the scapegoat and the promise of an improved future.
Screening the social
What is the pertinence of the above anecdote in a paper commemorating 30 years of the publication of PINS? Is it to endorse Bonefeld's message of "no hope" in respect of the post-apartheid context? Might we posit it as a vanishing-point of critique that has guided the best of the particular brand of social critique and commentary advanced within PINS for the past three decades? Perhaps so, although this message should, as I will go on to argue, be read in a qualified sense.
It is a good few years ago now that Stuart Hall (1992) remarked on the fantasies that come to the forefront in popular culture. He stressed in particular how certain instances of social fantasy work essentially to conceal underlying forms of social antagonism. Hall had in mind certain constantly reiterated motifs - such as that of the "multi-racial" coupling of one white and one black cop in many US crime dramas - that in effect proved that the opposite was still the norm (that is, the fact of ongoing tensions between races). In subsequent years the same theme has been given a Lacanian gloss, as in Zizzek's (1997) insistence on how ideology often functions as a fantasy, that is, as a screen shielding a type of social incommensurability, obscuring the "real" of an underlying deadlock or antagonism that cannot easily be processed or explained away.
This screening function is as much an ideological as a psychical process. In Lacanian terms it would be considered an imaginary function. Lacan's (2006) notion of the mirror-stage maintains that in facing certain disconcerting or fractured scenes - the paradigmatic case being that of one's own uncoordinated body-in-pieces in infancy - the subject "imaginarizes" the scene in question. That is to say, the subject projects a greater degree of coherence and harmony than in fact exists, much in the same way that they tend to prefer a narrative to one which is fragmented or cut. This, for Lacan, is one of the primary functions of the ego, which is why he repeatedly emphasizes that it functions via types of meconnaissance (mis-recognition, or mis-knowing). As Pfaller (2005) notes, in his impressive summary of Zizzek's theorizations of ideology, it is precisely this facet of Lacan's teaching that Althusser was drawn to in seeking to supplement his theory of ideology. This conceptualization works well in explaining how entire societies have been content to misrecognize themselves and to be comforted by ideological illusions which, in historical hindsight, seem barely credible. There is an affective - in fact a loving - relationship to such willing states of misrecognition. In this respect, Zizzek often cites Mannoni's (1968) adage of ideology derived from Freud's notion of disavowal, "I know that it is not the case, but I am still believing it", stressing thus the tender relationship that is maintained by subjects of ideology to the illusions they have adopted.
We might add to Hall's above cited example with one drawn from the post-apartheid context. I have in mind here the advertising images that have come to be endlessly regurgitated in the context of sports spectatorship: a multi-racial group of (typically male) supporters celebrating a hard-won sporting victory with a few beers. The multiple variations of this theme - largely unchanged for the last 20 years - could be read as constituting a matrix such as that Livi-Strauss (1963) devised for recording the proliferating instantiations of the Oedipus complex. In both cases the myth in question will be deployed again and again in an ever-widening set of variations until the underlying "real" (be it sexual/familial or socio-political) is itself dissipated. That is to say: there is no end to this advertising imagery in a divided South Africa; the more such scenes are deployed in national advertising strategies, the more we can be sure that they are not as yet a spontaneous or widespread phenomenon. We have thus another opportunity to reconsider the critical import of Bonefeld's declaration of "no hope". This is a gesture which refuses to conform to, indeed, which aims to puncture, a given social myth.
"Born unfrees"
There is an interesting echo of the "no hope" message in Simphiwe Dana's Foreword to Malaika wa Azania's compelling (2014) autobiography, Memoirs of a born free. Wa Azania's memoir, at once a coming of age story and an account of her own dawning political consciousness, provides a vital perspective with which to consider the future of radical and/or decolonisation politics in South Africa. The narrative adopts the form of a disillusioned letter to the ANC, and it plots the author's involvement with a variety of political organizations, from the Black Consciousness group Blackwash, to Andile Mngxitama's September National Imbizo, to Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters. The book outlines the necessity of "rewriting the narrative of native identity" (2014: 150), and describes how the jubilant mood of the Mandela era that wa Azania experienced in childhood gradually gave way to a realization of the many ways in which the dream of national liberation had failed. Simphiwe Dana's (2014) introduction includes the following: "I find no hope in [wa Azania's] ... words - only a lonely young woman who knows what needs to be done but whose ideas she can find no space for in the world she occupies" (wa Azania, 2014: x).
Let us turn to a few representative extracts from wa Azania's text. Doing so will allow us to extend our survey of a mode of critical intervention that succumbs neither to prevailing social myths nor to the lures of sentimentality or false optimism.
"[I]n South Africa ... the same system that had given oxygen to the apartheid government continues to be in existence, to define the face of the republic. That system is capitalism, a brutal system that can only survive through the exploitation of the majority by the elite minority who owns the means of production, primarily, land. It is a system that necessitates that a labour reserve be created to sell to the elite, who, to maximise profit, must necessarily exploit the workers. It is a system that creates a welfare state so that the poor can remain indebted to the state that feeds them. It is a system that is both anti-poor and anti-majoritarian. In South Africa, it is also a system that is anti-black, because while the political breakthrough of 1994 deracialised governance, privilege and poverty continue to have a race: the former is white while the latter is black" (wa Azania, 2014: 5).
Wa Azania's insistence on deracialization as an unfinished project brings to mind one of the most notable essays on race politics published in recent years by PINS, namely the late Siyanda Ndlovu's (2010) aptly titled "Deracialisation! What deracialisation? There's no end to race". The above passage is crucial also inasmuch as it brings to the forefront a longstanding mode of critique that many in the neo-liberal South African academy would prefer not to hear. That is to say, wa Azania keeps the critique of racist social structures firmly tied to that of capitalism itself. These comments on racialised capitalism chime with the call made by Hayes (2013) to consider again the importance of the critique of capitalism in PINS and thus act as a prompt to further critical enquiry of this sort. Wa Azania continues:
"The South Africa that we see today is but a different version of yesterday's South Africa. It is a South Africa where racialism and racism are no longer imposed through violence . nor are they constitutionalised as was the case during the apartheid dispensation. Racism and racialization are now institutionalised; they are the threads that hold together the fibre of South African society" (wa Azania, 2014: 5).
This sobering indictment steers well clear of the impulse encapsulated in the ANC's recent election slogan, "We have a good story to tell", that is, that of offering an affirming - even mythical - narrative of progress. It is powerful also because it is has been penned by a so-called "born free", a member of a younger generation of South Africans, who, it is often assumed, will necessarily have a more positive outlook on the country's political future. Wa Azania does not conform to this expectation, and writes:
"Democracy is impossible without political freedom but political freedom is not the ultimate objective of the revolutionary struggle. The ultimate objective is economic freedom, the liberation of the masses of our people from the clutches of economic bondage. But our people remain in chains. So, what about this generation, which has the mission of freeing the people from these chains, is 'free'? What about us is reflective of a 'born-free' generation when our generation is born during a time of the struggle for economic freedom ...?" (wa Azania, 2014: 7).
Wa Azania offers a strident critique of forms of white supremacy and the various social and educational institutions that still shield and nurture white privilege. She is not alone in making such comments, as readers of Andile Mngxitama's regular missives to the Mail & Guardian and The Sowetan will know. What is refreshing about these types of commentary is that they fly in the face of what we might call, with a tip of the hat to Sarah Ahmed (2004), the "everyday performativity of nonracialism" that so many of us are complicit in, and that the post-apartheid public sphere is, in a very significant sense, built upon. Mashele (2010: 58) hits the nail on the head when he notes that "most whites and blacks in South Africa . lead daily lives of pretence towards each other". In a choice of words that resonates with the comments I have offered above, he continues: "The truth is that racial integration in South Africa remains a myth" (ibid: 60). Suffice it to say that the performativity of non-racialism contrasts dramatically with the material and economic realities of racialized difference as they manifest in South African society today.
Against dialogue
If wa Azania provides a corrective to the sense of hope projected onto South Africa's "born frees", then From a place of Blackness, a text collecting the correspondences between Andile Mngxitama and Aryan Kaganof (2012), gives the lie to a series of imaginary themes related to the idea of inter-racial communication. In a subsequent commentary on the text, Mngxitama (2013) elucidates both the approach and the conclusion of the book:
"The correspondence between Kaganof and myself is caught in the impossibility of reconciliation. A kind of impossibility that is light-hearted and honest, a travel sketch of our ever-present discomfort, he sealed in his whiteness, me in my blackness. What appears sometimes to be a convergence of ideas leaves each on either side of a split society, fraught with exhaustion, never quite being able to speak to each other."
Whether intentional or not, Mngxitama's analysis - a refutation of notions of inter-racial dialogue, brotherhood and reconciliation - replicates a style of Lacanian theorization. A Lacanian approach eschews notions of mutual understanding, communicative efficacy and joint recognition, considering each such idealization to be the result of an imaginary conceptualization of human inter-subjectivity. Echoing many of Mngxitama's key terms, a Lacanian framework prioritizes instead an attention to failures of communication and the ultimate impossibility of dialogue, to the impasse posed by ideals of empathy and joint recognition (Fink, 1995). It prefers, as a mode of analysis and theorization, attention to the "real" of what cannot be harmonized, reconciled or papered over with the warming platitudes of humanism. Unwilling to countenance any pretence of interracial friendship or solidarity, Mngxitama (2013) argues:
"[T]here can be no true friendship between black and white. In all the instances where such friendships have been struck, it's a case of one-way traffic to the benefit of the white ... [Following] Steve Biko ... we are forced to make an uncomfortable admission: any honest discussion of racism must necessarily lead to the end of dialogue . There is a sense in which any interracial dialogue on race must be framed as a failure. Yet, in a country built on the lofty idea of 'dialogue', which forms false brotherhoods between black and white, we engage in an endless and meaningless discussion of racism."
What is true of a Lacanian insistence on the failure of communication, the impossibility of truly inter-subjective rapport and understanding (Hook, 2013), seems true also of Mngxitama's political analysis of interracial dialogue. That is to say, just because failure, impossibility and discomfort await us - be it in the context of psychoanalysis or in attempts at interracial dialogue - this by no means implies that we should throw our hands up at the futility of it all or adopt a posture of fatalistic resignation. The spectre of hope again makes an appearance here, although the type of hope posited by Mngxitama is one blended with pessimism and the imperative of self-interrogation:
"The reader [of From a place of Blackness] enters a self-reflective confrontation, encouraged to be frustrated and enthralled by an Afro-pessimistic position not widely held. More importantly, the reader is encouraged to question his or her own position of solidarity with the reproduction of racism. From a place of Blackness speaks about the failure of good race relations in a racist society. The hope is that this apparent book will subvert the perpetual insistence on empty dialogue in which speech is celebrated because it is all we have left."
The politics of antagonism
Mngxitama's rejection of notions of interracial brotherliness contains lessons about the positive value of a politics of antagonism. A recent blow up between Mngxitama and the white political activist Jared Sacks helps makes the point. A 2013 Mail & Guardian article penned by Sacks, "Why Biko wouldn't vote for Ramphele", elicited angry threats of violence from Mngxitama. What is of concern here is less the intellectual content of the conflict than what was demonstrated by the form of the disagreement itself. Indeed, the irony pointed to by many was that Sack's criticism of Ramphele seemed to differ little from attacks on Ramphele contained within the journal Mngxitama edited, New Frank Talk . In other words, the conflict had much to do with the speaking position of each of the men, and the issue of who had the right to publically critique Mamphela Ramphele.
A published attack on Sacks accusing him of insulting the legacy of Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement - Sacks was alleged to have arrogantly included himself in this tradition, and to have spoken on behalf of blacks (Mngxitama & Joja, 2013) - was followed by a threat posted on Twitter by Mngxitama. The threat, thoroughly dissected in the letter pages of the Mail & Guardian on the 29 March 2013 read: "Real biko-ists out there, whenever we see that white little bastard called Jared Sacks, we must beat the shit out of him". What, if anything, is to be learnt from this unnecessarily fractious and seemingly regrettable promise of violence?
Predictably, Mngxitama's comments drew a chorus of disapproval from a variety of Mail & Guardian readers outraged by the aggressive and bullying nature of his attack on Sacks. One potential shortcoming of such knee-jerk reactions is that they could be said to have missed the point, or, to have made precisely Mngxitama's point. That is to say, the thrust of much of Mngxitama's work has been precisely to explode the liberal pieties governing post-apartheid norms of interaction when it comes to discussions of race and racism. One might argue that his choice of words was far from unintentional, but like the confrontational tone of much of his journalism, deliberately provocative, designed in this sense to elicit the outrage of liberal readers.
Mngxitama's style of engagement, as much as it raises the hackles, is notable inasmuch as it overturns the discourse of liberal tolerance, pronouncing instead the existence of an ongoing form of social (indeed, racial) antagonism. This runs against the platitudes, banalities and fantasies of a united South Africa that one feels so often compelled to endorse. Such an antagonistic position is a corrective to the liberal impetus to pronounce racial harmony, to uphold an imaginary view of an integrated rainbow nation that doesn't really exist, and it shows claims of a singular South African identity to be built, all too typically, on false solidarities. Exemplary in this respect is an anonymous letter of 28 June 2013 to the Mail & Guardian that takes issue with claims by readers that the death of Mandela will "bring the country together":
"Can [we] honestly say that the country is truly united? Can someone who enjoys a middle-class lifestyle truly admit that they are united with a woman who lives in an informal settlement? ... The country is not united, and those who say that they are brought together are doing so because they benefit from this unequal system ... I feel that when one makes statements such as "we are all in this together" one should be more honest about what that really means, and how one benefits from existing inequality."
One further remark should be made in respect of the Mngxitama/Sacks debacle. One sentence in Mngxitama's attack on Sacks was typically overlooked in comments on the affair. Mngxitama followed his threat to Sacks with a further comment: "when I see Jared, he must beat me up. That's the deal". This is curious. A threat followed by a comment inviting a reciprocal reaction goes some way to undoing the initial threat, or so it would seem. It introduces a balance of sorts, a degree of parity to what had been a threatening and thereby fundamentally symmetrical relationship. Are we going too far to suggest that there is a paradoxical type of solidarity to be found here? The solidarity, perhaps - at least in my reading - of antagonists bound by the same socio-political context yet separated by ideological, "race" and class interests that cannot and should not be ignored or wished away?
We might put it this way: antagonism does not indicate a state of war. Rather it connotes a critical position of non-rapport, a non-collaborative attitude that points out rather than denies current circumstances of oppression. Such a non-collaborative attitude does not deny the participation of one's ideological opponents in a given over-arching struggle, although - as in Biko's (1978) Black Consciousness position regards the role of white liberals - it refuses direct collaboration with them. Such a non-collaborationist position is crucial to prevent such would-be allies from diluting the cause, and, furthermore, so as to keep the lines of existing social division clearly in mind.
Anti-white populism
Two of the books discussed above, wa Azania's autobiography and From a place of Blackness, can be interestingly juxtaposed with another recent reflective political text, namely Max Du Preez's (2013) A rumour of spring. A connection immediately comes to the fore: the anger expressed by wa Azania and Mngxitama against enduring structures of white privilege will no doubt be read by some as "antiwhite". This is a topic that has inflamed Du Preez, who complains about what he sees as the spreading influence of anti-white populism.
Du Preez (2013) laments how it has become acceptable for black South Africans to scorn and abuse whites as a racial group. He speaks of "a wave of unbridled populist politics" that has "created an atmosphere in which it is almost required of 'good blacks' to vilify and curse white people" (2013: 231). And, "[I]nsults and threats to whites have become . commonplace in some sections of the black community" (232). A similar note of anxiety is evident in Boraine's (2014) reflections on South Africa after twenty years of democracy. In What's gone wrong? Boraine deplores what he takes to be the ugly and menacing demonstrations by the Economic Freedom Fighters, expressing particular concern over "the large posters which read 'Honeymoon is over for white people in South Africa', clearly racist in tone" (2014: 137). Back to Du Preez:
"crude racial stereotyping and name-calling, has suddenly become very common and acceptable in decent company, and it is becoming progressively more aggressive and hate-filled. Every imaginable ill in society is now directly blamed on whites. I know how this disturbs, angers and scares the average white citizen - and how it undermines the potential for dialogue." (2013: 236-237)
Du Preez (2013) is quick to note that the apparent racism of anti-white populism is matched blow by blow by whites, although whereas white racism towards blacks is quickly penalised in public culture, black racism towards whites remains, in Du Preez's view, largely unchallenged. Du Preez then changes tack by conceding that it would have been surprising if black South Africans' feelings of resentment towards whites after the accumulated humiliations and dispossession of centuries had simply evaporated after 1994. The Truth and Reconciliation process, he admits, could never have been adequate to the task of undoing the anger built over many generations. Du Preez then moves to telling the story of participating in a Kigali workshop where survivors of the Rwandan genocide were given the opportunity to confront perpetrators responsible for killing members of their families. A woman told how living next door to a man who had killed her parents and brothers was made manageable: from time to time she would tell him to stand against a wall and hurl insults at him. Du Preez is impressed by the advice offered him - as a white South African - by this survivor of the Rwandan genocide, whom he quotes: "'I think you white people should sometimes stand against a wall and allow black people to scream at you and insult you to get all their bad thoughts out into the open when they feel better, you can go on living together". (Du Preez, 2013: 234)
Although this may at first seem a simplistic and necessarily inadequate mode of redress, it does contain a measure of symbolic value. That is to say, it entails not only the cathartic potential of the (partial) venting of traumatic affect. It allows also for the symbolization and thus externalization of what might otherwise remain inwardly bound - and no doubt toxic - "bad thoughts". Reflecting on these words, Du Preez concludes: "There is some wisdom in her advice . The wound is not yet clean. There's still some stuff that needs to come out into the open . we should face the anger on behalf of what our fathers and grandfathers did. It is hard, I know" (2013: 234).
A further anecdote follows, in which a senior, black "thought leader" expresses little sympathy to Du Preez for whites who felt unloved and attacked. Du Preez takes up the thread:
"My friend [asked:] Do you have any idea how black people felt over many generations being called non-persons, non-citizens or sub-humans? She . had no sympathy with whites playing victim, feeling sorry for themselves . We should spend our energies and resources on other crises . rather than on white insecurities. White South Africans should realise they simply have to carry the burden of the past and the continuing inequalities and insecurities" (2013: 238).
Oddly Du Preez seems not to pick up on the obvious contradiction in his own text. He has the intuition that such expressions of anger may prove somehow ameliorative of past sufferings and abuse. He likewise intimates that whites should be thick-skinned, willing to absorb attacks stemming from past and ongoing inequalities. Yet he does not cease complaining about how black abuse of white South Africans is, in his mind, relatively permissible in post-apartheid society. White South Africa - to risk an unavoidable generalization - has a rather poor track record when it comes to listening to, even permitting, ostensibly "anti-white" critique. Du Preez's own posture seems to exemplify such a defensiveness, an unwillingness to permit any narcissistic wounding to the subjectivity of whiteness.
A humorous interjection helps (re)conextualize the issue at hand. In a wonderful piece of satirical writing, Ndumiso Ngcobo (2009) makes fun of unreflexive white sensitivities toward threats of ostensibly anti-white violence:
"Remember Peter Mokaba and his 'Kill the boer, kill the farmer' chant? Does anybody really believe that Peter Mokaba fancied crawling over sheep droppings . to kill Jannie van Tonder on the outskirts of Phalaborwa? If you believe this, may I suggest that you . have of late been taking hits from the bong. And may I also suggest that if you . think Julius Malema's over-the-top agitating-for-votes statement [in 2008, that he would 'Kill for Zuma] was 'deplorable' and worthy of the attention of the Human Rights Commission ... you also need to lay off the weed. No? Okay, let's perform a little experiment. You know that panic button you keep on [you] . as you go around the house supervising Mavis's chores? Press it right at this moment. Now, how many seconds do you think it will be before those willing-to-kill . guys arrive . and splatter any would-be-burglar's brains . So let's talk about . the orgy of violence that is part of our everyday lives, shall we?" (Ngcobo, 2009: 47).
In fairness to Du Preez, it is worth noting an important qualification in his argument. Whites should be able to hear and withstand deserved anger for generations of racism, he says - an assertion one can only agree with - however: "there is the danger that this anger is not always righteous . Sometimes it is simply racist abuse. Also, black anger for the sake of black anger is not very productive - black anger will remain forever if we don't remove what is keeping it alive. We need this anger to take us somewhere, or it will never end and it will become destructive" (Du Preez, 2013: 234-35).
This would seem at first glance a reasonable objection, and yet it proves difficult to sustain. It pivots on the difference between perceptions of gratuitous (or hate-filled) instances of anti-whiteism, and apparently legitimate criticism and anger directed toward white supremacy in its past and current forms. There are of course legal precedents to the making of such distinctions, as in the South African High Court's decision that the singing of "Kill the boer" should be considered an instance of hate-speech. That being said, the attempt to delimit such instances of angry speech to polite or acceptable public utterances surely cannot work if the speech in question is precisely meant to give vent to longstanding historical suffering and anger.
My own view is that Du Preez's (2013) lamentations about what he considers unreasonable antiwhite populism itself shows up his intolerance toward the type of venting he seemingly advocates. This contradiction likewise evinces a failure to appreciate the disconnect that a psychoanalytic theorist like Chabani Manganyi (2011) sees between the symbolic expression of such vengeful ideas and the violent acting out of such (often unconscious) impulses.
Drawing out the "violent reverie"
The work of Chabani Manganyi (1973, 1977, 2011; Couve, 1986), is not new to readers of PINS. His conceptualization of the "violent reverie", recently re-published in the journal (Manganyi, 2011), enables us to extend several of the themes we have raised thus far. In Mashangu's reverie and other essays (1977) Manganyi describes the travails of the eponymous protagonist, a black South African intellectual, who undergoes analysis while teaching Comparative Literature in an East Coast (of the USA) university. Mashangu is surprised by the extent to which a certain fantasy comes to predominate in his treatment, namely a scenario - a "violent reverie" - in which he murders a white man, a figure emblematic of the racialised oppression of apartheid. The autobiographical dimension of Mashangu's reverie (1974), which represents a partly fictionalised account of Manganyi's own experiences, is important to note inasmuch as it is crucial in understanding the motivation and ultimate purpose of the text. As Manganyi writes in his introduction to the book: "So overwhelming were the fantasies of revenge, so terrifying in their stark clarity, that it became important for me to arrive at some internal resolution of the diverse impulses which were constantly invading my consciousness" (1977: i).
I will focus here more on Manganyi's scholarly and psychoanalytic reflections on the phenomenon with which he is concerned, namely that of the (un)conscious fantasies of violent revenge experienced by the oppressed as outlined in Manganyi's essay "The violent reverie" (2011). Couve (1986: 107) describes Manganyi's over-arching objective in this paper: a Kleinian concept of ambivalence is deployed so as to explain the collusion of the oppressed in their own oppression and, furthermore, to "extoll the valency of the murderous reverie in undoing this collusion". This collusion, importantly,
"is primarily unconscious and is predicated upon the co-existence of both loving and hostile impulses towards the master. At the unconscious fantasy level the slave's destructive impulses towards the master lead to . anxiety . As a consequence the destructive fantasies and impulses are turned against the self, so that the structure of ambivalence is maintained" (Couve, 1986: 107-8).
Two contextualizing comments should be made here, drawing attention both to the necessarily psychical and historical dimensions of Manganyi's theorization. Manganyi (2011: 9-10) prefaces his analysis by noting that a historically extreme situation, such as that of apartheid "forces the floodgates of the unconscious open" allowing primitive fears to achieve mass circulation. We would be foolhardy thus to foreclose an examination of unconscious relations of ambivalence and violence from any analysis of subjugation. "There is . no comparable relationship which is as riddled with ambivalence . and a potential for violence as that between a master and a slave" (2011: 10), insists Manganyi. Moreover, while his conceptualization is obviously anchored in the time of apartheid, I follow Hayes (2011: 3) in insisting that Manganyi's psychoanalytically informed critique still offers us an "unravelling of the psychological and unconscious sedimentations that are consequent upon the dynamics of identity in a racialised society".
In Manganyi's reading then, the psychology of subordination is founded on an ambivalent libidinal economy in which impulses to objective violence are continually held in check and counter-balanced by subjective (self-directed) forms of violence. The problem of course is that subjective forms of violence oscillate continually with wishes to destroy the oppressor, a situation, which, in a spiralling fashion, gives rise to ever greater levels of subjective violence. The agonised and conflicted stasis of this situation is aptly rendered by Manganyi:
"The violent impulse of the unconscious . is bound up with the most tender concern and affection for the object of hate. The ambivalent character of adaptation under conditions of subordination is maximised by . anxiety about . retaliation . and the lingering possibility that subjective violence may, without sufficient warning, be transformed into violence as a social act" (2011: 12).
The central dilemma in the psychology of subordination is the fear of losing ambivalence, or, more directly put, by subjective violence being effectively eclipsed by the impulse to participate in violence as a social act. That is to say, the ongoing condition of ambivalence (the concurrence of affectionate and aggressive affective ties) is "predicated and sustained by violence against the self to placate, once and for all, the alternative . of objective violence against the representations of authority" (Manganyi, 2011: 12). The paradoxical logic of psychoanalysis comes to the fore here. Oppressors are shielded from the violent reprisals of those they oppress largely because this rage is internalised in the alienating form of self-directed violence that the oppressed exercise against themselves. In short, the prospect of violent revolt can be short-circuited by ensuring that the oppressed become ever more adept at self-hating.
While the vicious circle thus described (between impulses to objective violence and acts of subjective violence) is clearly of a self-perpetuating sort, Manganyi (2011) does outline two routes of de-alienation for the ambivalent subject of oppression. For the rank-and-file, he notes, the path from subjective violence against the self to violence against others, the oppressor and their various symbolic instantiations, may be a short one. Such forms of violence typically constitute an "acting out". What is in question here is the unconscious's preference for action, a violent type of direct expression which bypasses the potentiality of language, symbolization and conscious thought.
A second means of facilitating fantasies of revenge takes a more overtly symbolic - one might add, sublimated - form whereby the unconscious is "directed toward a more 'creative' course" which "allows language to mediate between itself and possible acting out in the social sphere" (ibid: 17). We should not slip over this point as for Manganyi a tremendous political and psychical value resides precisely in the cultural expression of such "violent reveries", that is, imagined ritual murders, fantasies of killing or subordinating figures of oppression. To Manganyi's list of violent reveries we may of course add the apparent instances of anti-white populism invoked by Du Preez. We might similarly include a spectrum of examples of political agitation and symbolic aggression - it is hard here not to invoke the figure of Julius Malema and the aspirations of the Economic Freedom Fighters - directed against white structures of power. The irony of the situation is that it is precisely these ostensibly "anti-white" expressions, those that white South Africa finds the most threatening and unacceptable, and that it labours so strenuously to prohibit, that might facilitate something of the creative course that Manganyi describes. It is for this reason that he asserts: "the violet reveries may be put to constructive social use by blacks" (2011: 18).
The symbolic assassination of the oppressor - murder in the realm of reverie - enables the oppressed, in Manganyi's analysis, to come to live in an authentic manner in the social sphere. Such violent imaginings, "blossoming into metaphysical murder . create unity in the psychic economy of subordinate individuals by dispelling a debilitating ambivalence" (ibid: 18). Not only is ambivalence thus undermined, along with the intra-subjective forms of violence associated with it, the false consciousness of the oppressed is likewise thus eroded.
This seems a soundly psychoanalytic - even if controversial - proposition, namely that by making the unconscious violent reverie conscious, by symbolizing it in disseminated cultural forms, one avoids the "acting out" of objective forms of violence. In other words - and counter-intuitive as it may appear - frustrating and prohibiting symbolic instances of the violent reverie may decrease rather than increase the prospect of the anti-white violence so feared by whites. Hence the importance psychoanalysis affords the concept of abreaction, that is, the symbolic expression and/ or discharge of unconscious material, in the presence of a significant figure, so as to lessen the build-up of intra-psychic conflicts.
Importantly, the violent reverie once symbolized in culture has its potential effect also on the oppressor, simply by virtue of a heightened awareness of the oppressed as potential rebel, as possessed of power. Hence:
"[T]he constructive use of the violent reverie prepares the way for the superordinate . to recognize and appreciate the subordinate . at a more profound level than was possible before . Such an achievement could sustain painfully won victories in the sphere of tolerance, mutual respect and understanding . From the violent reverie must be allowed to . to touch us - in spite of some initial shock, disbelief or anxiety - where it matters most: the innermost core which informs our relations in public (Manganyi, 2011: 18-19).
For Manganyi then the violent reverie is capable not only of restoring identity to the oppressed, it is also a vehicle for moving the oppressor and oppressed toward a more equitable relation. In what sounds very much like a Freudian argument, the prospect of any type of social stability is built on the basis of fantasies of violence.
The relevance of Manganyi's argument in respect of the radical forms of critique I have mentioned above is by now, I hope, clear. Manganyi's theorization enables us to appreciate that if we indulge in illusions of inter-racial harmony and dialogue that repress or "imaginarize" ongoing realities of inequality, we will fail to move beyond them. Rather, by proving unwilling to confront such conditions and the fantasies that they give rise to, by prohibiting expressions of social antagonism and associated violent reveries, we insulate and thus preserve prevailing conditions of social pathology.
In what has gone above I have attempted to draw attention to a trajectory of critique that much of the best of PINS has exemplified, namely the use of antagonism as a strategy of critique. I have tried to show how critiques that are antagonistic, that run against a prevailing social consensus -even against prevailing moral platitudes - most certainly have their place. The same is true of those modes of critique willing to picture and explore lines of antagonism even where we would most prefer not to imagine them. This last assertion is particularly germane to the post-Mandela context. Confronting antagonism is often precisely what we are not willing to do in South Africa, for fear that stating lines of division and - why not - of race/class antagonism, will resuscitate past (or not so past) forms of racism.
All too often we would rather engender a veneer of social harmony, participating thus in the odd post-apartheid dramaturgy of non-racialism and non-racism, rather than scratching away at the social and historical wounds of racism that are not yet healed. As understandable as such a reticent might be, it often seems tantamount to closing our eyes to the abounding social contradictions that characterize the post-apartheid context, and believing, hoping, that things may one day be different. In such conditions, it is perhaps better to confront a position of no hope, than to embrace comforting social myths - such as the notions of interracial dialogue, brotherhood, reconciliation critiqued by Mnxgitama (2013) - that repress inequality rather than interrogate it.
Following Manganyi's arguments as outlined above, we might take precisely the opposite position. Rather than shutting our eyes against what is unpalatable about South Africa's structural and racialised inequalities both past and present, we should intensify our attentions to those imagined and symbolic forms of anger, violent retribution and antagonism. Here lies a paradox. To facilitate the symbolic working through of such imagined scenes and expressions of antagonism, to pursue precisely those exploratory routes that seem to signify no hope, is very possibly the best real hope that we have.
Ahmed, S (2004) Declarations of Whiteness: The non-performativity of antiracism. Borderlands Ejournal, 3(2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no22004/ahmed declarations.htm Accessed 14 September, 2011. [ Links ]
Biko, S (1978) I write what I like. London: Bowerdean. [ Links ]
Bonefeld, W (2014) Critical theory and the critique of political economy: On subversion and negative reason. London & New York: Bloomsbury. [ Links ]
Boraine, A (2014) What's gone wrong? On the brink of a failed state. Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. [ Links ]
Couve, C (1986) Psychology and politics in Manganyi's work: A materialist critique. Psychology in Society, 5, 90-130. [ Links ]
Dana, S (2014) Forward, in wa Azania, M (2014) Memoirs of a born free: Reflections on the rainbow nation. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana. [ Links ]
Du Preez, M (2013) A rumour of spring: South Africa after 20 years of democracy. Cape Town: Zebra Press. [ Links ]
Fink, B (1995) The Lacanian subject between language and jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [ Links ]
Hall, S (1992) Race, culture, and communications: Looking backward and forward at cultural studies. Rethinking Marxism, 5(1), 10-18. [ Links ]
Hayes, G (2011) (Re-)introducing Chabani Manganyi. PINS (Psychology in society), 41, 1-6. [ Links ]
Hook, D (2013) Nixon's "full speech": Imaginary and symbolic registers of communication. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33(1), 32-50. [ Links ]
Lacan, J (2006) The mirror-stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, in Icrits. Trans. B Fink. New York & London: W.W Norton. [ Links ]
Livi-Strauss, C (1963) Structural anthropology. London & New York: Basic Books. [ Links ]
Manganyi, N C (1977) Mashangu's reverie and other essays. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. [ Links ]
Manganyi, N C (2011) The violent reverie: The unconscious in literature and society. PINS (Psychology in society), 41, 7-19. [ Links ]
Mannoni, O (1968) Clefs pour l'Imaginaire. Paris: Iditions du Seuil. [ Links ]
Mashele, P (2011) The death of our society. Pretoria: CPR Press. [ Links ]
Mngxitama, A (2013) From a place of blackness: Throwing the book at empty interracial dialogue. Mail & Guardian, 15 November 2013. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-14-from-a-place-of-blackness-throwing-the-book-at-empty-interracial-dialogue Accessed 27 June 2014. [ Links ]
Mngxitama, A, Joja, A & editorial collective of New Frank Talk (2013) Untitled letter. Mail & Guardian, 22 March 2013. [ Links ]
Mngxitama, A & Kaganof, A (2013) From a place of blackness. Melville, Johannesburg: Sankara Publishers. [ Links ]
Ndlovu, S (2010) Deracialisation! What deracialisation? There's no end to race. PINS (Psychology in society), 39, 56-62. [ Links ]
Ngcobo, N (2008) Is it coz I'm black? Cape Town: Two Dogs. [ Links ]
Pfaller, R (2005) Where is your hamster? The concept of ideology in Slavoj Zizek's cultural theory, in Boucher, G, Glynos, J & Sharpe, M (eds) (2005) Traversing the fantasy: Critical responses to Slavoj Zizek. London & New York: Ashgate Press. [ Links ]
Sacks, J (2013) Biko would not vote for Ramphele. Mail & Guardian, 15 March 2013. [ Links ]
Wa Azania, M (2014) Memoirs of a born free: Reflections on the rainbow nation. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana. [ Links ]
Zizzek, S (1997) The plague of fantasies. London & New York: Routledge. [ Links ]


text:
October 4th, 2010
Sleep more, lose weight, says study
Are you trying your best to eat right and exercise, but still not losing weight? One study suggests that lack of sleep could throw off a diet.
Research from the University of Chicago showed that dieters who slept for 8.5 hours lost 55 percent more body fat than dieters who slept 5.5 hours.
"Lack of sufficient sleep may compromise the efficacy of typical dietary interventions for weight loss and related metabolic risk reduction," the study authors concluded in an article released Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a journal of the American College of Physicians.
Not having enough sleep could affect a hormone called ghrelin, known to affect appetite and weight. An increase in this hormone level has been shown to make people hungrier and cause higher fat retention.
The dieters who slept less reported feeling hungrier throughout the course of the study.
The study had a small sample size – 10 sedentary nonsmokers, between the ages of 35 to 49 years with a body mass index considered overweight to obese (BMI 25-32), who stayed in what's considered a closed study environment for two weeks.
They ate the same diet, consumed multivitamins and performed the same type of work or leisure activities. Six of them were assigned to 8.5 hours of sleep, and four slept 5.5 hours. Those who slept more lost more fat and maintained fat-free body mass.
"Together, these results suggest that the loss of sleep at times of limited food intake amplifies the pattern of ghrelin-associated changes in human hunger, glucose and fat utilization, and energy metabolism," the study authors wrote.
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Get a behind-the-scenes look at the latest stories from CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and the CNN Medical Unit producers. They'll share news and views on health and medical trends - info that will help you take better care of yourself and the people you love.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Some hospital bills vastly higher for similar care
Staff Writer
Journal Star
The government is shedding light on the mystery of just how high a hospital bill might go — and whether it's cheaper to get that care across town.
The Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday listed thousands of hospitals' charges for 100 common Medicare services.
There are vast disparities. Joint replacement prices range from about $5,000 at an Ada, Okla., hospital to about $220,000 in Monterey Park, Calif. It's not just geography — hospitals within the same cities also vary widely.
Medicare and insurance companies negotiate lower rates than these "list prices." These prices can affect the co-pays that hit insured patients.
Releasing the information may put pressure on hospitals to lower charges that are out of line.


text:
Rihanna. Serena. Maria. Stella. Iman. Padma. Emme. Estelle. Gabby Sidibe. These were just a few of the boldfaces who bib-and-tuckered it at Carnegie Hall last night to honor Glamour's Women of the Year. And, yes, dude looked like a lady.
There is one word I think everyone can apply to Rihanna's exercise in arts and crafts: bold.
Rory Tahari's gown evokes Poiret.
Apple MacBook Air Laptop
Powerful performance
The M1 chip delivers 3.5x faster performance than the previous generation all while using way less power. Get up to 18 hours of battery life.
Digging designer Lucilla Beccaria's boho lady. Et vous?
Liya Kedebe is a fan of the trench dress. I'm a fan of anything when she wears it. Slavish.
See, does Emme know what she's doing, or is this line unflattering? Inquiring minds.
Our collective gaze is torn between Gayle King's shoes and necklace. Collective gaze, people.
When it comes to EIC Cindi Leive: I get it. I think we all get it. Is that the same as liking though?
Maria Shriver's Spanish widow is kind of majestic. Am I wrong to crave a mantilla? How can something so right be wrong?
Some would say, the further we move from necessity and utility, the more closely we approach decadence. How does this apply to Lisa Ling's single sleeve?
Shocker, that: Padma Lakshmi looks glorious in maternity.
I kind of like it when people do unashamed Mount Olympus. Serena Williams is doing this.
Having read The Game, I now understand that Steven Tyler basically invented "peacocking."
I like that Estelle's doing a total 180 and being completely conservative, and it still makes all kinds of sense.
Zoe Kravitz: cool, simple, beyond reproach.
Katharine McPhee rocks the Disney interpretation of Grecian. Not that I saw Hercules.
Whereas Kerry Washinton seems to say, "no, this is how you do it - with a dash of Out of the Past!"
Amy Poehler was a Woman of the Year, angelic.
Stella McCartney showed that part of being a WotY is making everyone else look like they're trying too hard.
Andie MacDowell does unabashed mother of the bride, and I respect this.
Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe always looks completely amazing. No rookie mistakes, no missteps. She is either working with a stylist who should be famous immediately, or is a total prodigy.
Luckily, Iman can wear a feathered sack - and probably break into "Cheek to Cheek" as needed.
[Images via Getty]


text:
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- The following pages are good resources for funding news and opportunities.
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Peer Review at NIH
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text:
In 1788, twenty years after sailing into the Pacific with Captain Cook, Joseph Banks turned his attention to the next riddle of geographical science: the exploration of Africa. In St. Albans Tavern in London, Banks and the other members of the elite Saturday Club drafted a proposal of action:
Resolved: That as no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography; and as the vast Continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the Antients, and the wishes of the Moderns, is still in a great measure unexplored, the Members of this Club do form themselves into an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inland Parts of that Quarter of the World.
The Saturday Club acted quickly. It endorsed the resolution, established an Association, put together an expeditionary fund, and commissioned John Ledyard (also a veteran of Cook's voyages) to cross the African continent from east to west. Ledyard arrived in Egypt ready to complete the "efforts of the Ancients" but was struck down by illness in Cairo. He died before his boots got sandy.
Ledyard's death was a disappointment to the Association, but it couldn't have come as much of a surprise. Africa had proved itself resistant to European efforts for over three centuries. The first forays into Africa began badly. In 1446 Portuguese mariner Nuno Tristão took twelve men up the Gambia River in pursuit of Africans and riches. Tristão was attacked by Gambian tribesmen and killed along with half of his party.
The Portuguese learned from Tristão's mistake. When they returned to West Africa, they abandoned their plans to explore and conquer the interior, preferring to set up outposts or "feitorias" on the coast from which they could trade with African kingdoms of the interior.
Other factors inhibited exploration as well. The inhospitable conditions of the Sahara made overland expeditions difficult. The great rivers of Central Africa seemed more promising, but they were filled with cataracts that made it impossible to travel far by boat. Malaria felled Europeans who traveled inland, and sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) not only attacked humans but horses. The horse, so effective as a weapon of war for Europeans battling the Incas in the New World, proved useless in European efforts to dominate Central Africa.
Despite Africa's importance in the Atlantic economy as a source of slaves and gold, then, it remained poorly understood in Europe. As a result, it remained a place of mythical and geographical speculation: on the source of the Nile, the riches of Timbucktoo, the Gold Mines of Ophir, the trans-continental mountains of Kong, and the mysterious Mountains of the Moon.
This explains the power of Africa in the Western imagination even late into the nineteenth century. For writers and artists, Africa became a canvas upon which almost anything could be painted. In Anglo-American literature, Africa found a home in the work of dozens of writers including H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines, She), Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan). Interestingly, the Africa of these works was background rather than foreground, a region made dark (morally, racially, and geographically) so as to better illuminate its protagonists — Allan Quartermain, Charles Marlow, Lord Greystoke — as they found adventure and enlightenment.
How such ideas were projected upon the surface of maps is the focus of Princeton's excellent online exhibition, To the Mountains of the Moon: Mapping African Exploration, 1541-1880. Created by curator John Delaney, To the Mountains of the Moon offers a history of Africa as seen through European eyes.
As one might expect, early Renaissance maps of Africa were colorful, fantastical documents. What they lacked in credible information they compensated for with a rich palate of speculation. On Sebastian Münster's 1554 map of Africa one finds the home of the mythic Christian hero, Prester John, as well as a tribe of one-eyed giants, the dough-faced Monoculi, who sit above the bight of Africa.
Nineteenth century maps added precision and sophistication. Gone are the mythic tribes and gold mines of early maps along with the chatty notes in Africa's margins about river currents, astronomical observations, Biblical figures, and anything tangentially related to the continent.
Yet the later maps leave out Africans too. If Prester John and African cyclops are not representative of Africa's peoples, at least they show it to be a place of human action and habitation. While some nineteenth century maps — by John Tallis and Victor Levasseur — present ethnographic scenes in the margins, others — such as William Winwood Reed's Map of African Literature — shows the continent as a white text, tabula rasa, for the names of European explorers. "LIVINGSTONE" stretches across Central Africa from Mozambique to the mouth of the Congo River. Which of these maps – Munster's or Reed's – shows the greater distortion?
Despite the excellent maps and essays, the menus of the exhibition are not very clear. It's easy to get lost and miss a map or two on the way out. This didn't stop Stanley. It shouldn't stop you.


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MapServer CGI Controls¶
Variable names are not case sensitive.
- BUFFER [distance]
A distance, in the same coordinate system as the map file, used in conjunction with MAPXY to create an new map extent.
- CLASSGROUP [name]
The name of a LAYER CLASSGROUP. Set the LAYER CLASSGROUP to name for all layers that have at least one CLASS that is using the given CLASSGROUP name.
- CONTEXT [filename]
Path to a context file. Path is relative to the map file to be used, or can also be a URL path (See the section "Map Context Support Through CGI" below for more details).
- ICON [layername],[classindex]
Used in MODE=legendicon to generate a legend icon for a layer. The class index value is optional and defaults to 0.
- ID [id-string]
By default MapServer generates a unique session id based on system time and process id. This parameter overwrites the default.
The name associated with the inline map image used to record user clicks. What actually is passed are two variables, img.x and img.y.
For the CGI Applications this is an essential variable, see the examples for sample usage.
- IMGBOX [x1] [y1] [x2] [y2]
Coordinates (in pixels) of a box drag in the image. Most often used in conjunction with Java based front ends to the MapServer.
- IMGEXT [minx] [miny] [maxx] [maxy]
The spatial extent of the existing inline image, that is, the image the users can see in their browser.
- IMGSHAPE [x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 …] | [WKT]
An arbitrary polygon shape (specified using image coordinates) to be used for query purposes.
The polygon is specified by listing its coordinates (multiple instances simply add parts to the shape so it is possible to construct a shape with holes) or by specifying the WKT (Well Known Text) representation.
Used with the NQUERY mode.
- IMGSIZE [cols] [rows]
The size (in pixels) of the exiting inline image.
- IMGXY [x] [y]
Coordinates (in pixels) of a single mouse click. Used most often in conjunction with Java based front ends to the MapServer.
- LAYER [name]
The name of a layer as it appears in the map file. Sending mapserv a layer name sets that layer's STATUS to ON.
- LAYERS [name name …]
The names of the layers to be turned on. Layer names must be separated by spaces.
Version 4.4 and above: passing 'LAYERS=all' will automatically turn on all layers.
- MAP [filename]
Path, relative to the CGI directory, of the map file to be used.
- MAPEXT [minx] [miny] [maxx] [maxy] , MAPEXT (shape)
The spatial extent of the map to be created.
Can be set to shape as an alternative option. In this case mapextent is set to the extent of a selected shape. Used with queries.
- MAPSHAPE [x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 …] | [WKT]
An arbitrary polygon shape (specified using map coordinates) to be used for query purposes.
The polygon is specified by listing its coordinates (multiple instances simply add parts to the shape so it is possible to construct a shape with holes) or by specifying a WKT (Well Known Text) representation of the polygon.
Used with the NQUERY mode.
- MAPSIZE [cols] [rows]
The size (in pixels) of the image to be created. Useful for allowing users to change the resolution of the output map dynamically.
- MAPXY [x] [y] , MAPXY (shape)
A point, in the same coordinate system as the shapefiles, to be used in conjunction with a buffer or a scale to construct a map extent.
Can be set to shape as an alternative option. In this case mapextent is set to the extent of a selected shape. Used with queries.
- MINX | MINY | MAXX | MAXY [number]
Minimum/Maximum x/y coordinate of the spatial extent for a new map/query. This set of parameters are the pieces of MAPEXT.
- MODE [value]
Mode of operation. The following options are supported:
Fully interactive interface where maps (and interactive pages) are created. This is the default mode.
Returns a string of map coordinates based on a user click on an image.
mapserv.exe?map=/ms4w/apps/local-demo/local.map&MODE=coordinate&IMGEXT=0 0 100 100&IMGXY=10 10
A spatial search that uses multiple features from SLAYER to query other layers.
A spatial search that uses one feature from SLAYER to query other layers.
Looks up a feature based on the values of SHAPEINDEX and TILEINDEX parameters. SHAPEINDEX is required, TILEINDEX is optional and is only used with tiled shapefile layers.
A text search of attribute data is triggered using a QSTRING. Returns all matches. Layer to be searched is defined using slayer parameter. The results of this search are applied to other searchable layers (which can be limited using the QLAYER parameter).
A text search of attribute data is triggered using a QSTRING. Returns first match. Layer to be searched is defined using slayer parameter. The results of this search are applied to other searchable layers (which can be limited using the QLAYER parameter).
A text search of attribute data is triggered using a QSTRING. Returns all matches.
A text search of attribute data is triggered using a layer QSTRING. Returns 1st match.
The created legend is returned. Used within an <img … > tag.
A legend icon is returned. The ICON parameter must also be used to specify the layername and a class index. Class index value is optional and defaults to 0. For example:
The created map is returned. Used within an <img … > tag.
A spatial search (finds all) is triggered by a click in a map or by user-define selection box.
A spatial search (finds closest) is triggered by a click in a map.
The created reference map is returned. Used within an <img … > tag.
The created scalebar is returned. Used within an <img … > tag.
Generate a map tile. See Tile Mode for details.
Switch to mode BROWSE with ZOOMDIR=1
Switch to mode BROWSE with ZOOMDIR=-1
The previously available map-only query modes, e.g. ITEMQUERYMAP, are no longer supported. The QFORMAT parameter is now used instead.
- QFORMAT [outputformat | mime/type] (optional)
The OUTPUTFORMAT name or mime/type to be used to process a set of query results (corresponds to the WEB object's QUERYFORMAT parameter). The parameter is optional and used in conjunction with query MODEs. The default is text/html.
Example (map output):
- QITEM [name] (optional)
The name of an attribute in a layer attribute table to query on. The parameter is optional and used in conjunction with the QSTRING for attribute queries.
- QLAYER [name]
Query layer. The name of the layer to be queried as it appears in the map file.
- QSTRING [expression]
Attribute queries: Query string passed to the query function. Since 5.0, qstring will have to be specified in the VALIDATION parameter of the LAYER for qstring queries to work (qstring_validation_pattern LAYER-level METADATA for MapServer versions prior to 5.4).
- QUERYFILE [filename]
Used with BROWSE or NQUERY mode. This option identifies a query file to load before any regular processing. In BROWSE mode this result in a query map being produced instead of a regular map. This is useful when you want to hilite a feature while still in a pan/zoom mode. In NQUERY mode you'd gain access to any of the templates used in normally presenting the query, so you have access to query maps AND attribute information. See the SAVEQUERY option.
The name associated with the inline reference map image used to record user clicks. What actually is passed are two variables, ref.x and ref.y.
For the CGI Applications this is an essential variable when reference maps are used, see the examples for sample usage.
- REFXY [x] [y]
Coordinates (in pixels) of a single mouse click in the reference image. Used in conjunction with Java based front ends to the MapServer.
When used with any of the query modes this tells the MapServer to save the query results to a temporary file for use in subsequent operations (see QUERYFILE). Useful for making queries persistent.
- SCALEDENOM [number]
Scale to create a new map at. Used with mapxy. Scale is given as the denominator of the actual scale fraction, for example for a map at a scale of 1:24,000 use 24000. Implemented in MapServer 5.0, to replace the deprecated SCALE parameter.
- SCALE [number] - deprecated
Since MapServer 5.0 the proper parameter to use is SCALEDENOM instead. The deprecated SCALE is the scale to create a new map at. Used with mapxy. Scale is given as the denominator of the actual scale fraction, for example for a map at a scale of 1:24,000 use 24000.
It is possible to do pan/zoom interfaces using querymaps. In these cases you will likey want information about the contents of the new map rather than the previous map which is the normal way queries work. When searchmap is specified the new map is created and it's extent is used to query layers. Useful with NQUERY mode only.
- SHAPEINDEX [index]
Used for index queries (in conjunction with INDEXQUERY).
- SLAYER [name]
Select layer. The name of the layer to be used for any of the feature (i.e. staged) query modes. The select layer must be a polygon layer. The selection feature(s) are available for presentation to the user.
- TILE [coord]
Used in MODE=TILE. Tile coordinates. See Tile Mode for details.
- TILEINDEX [index]
Used for index queries (in conjunction with INDEXQUERY), used with tiled shapefile layers.
- TILEMODE [mode]
Used in MODE=TILE. mode can be gmap (Google Maps) or ve (Bing Maps/Virtual Earth). See Tile Mode for details.
TILESIZE [width] [height]
Neu in Version 8.0.
Used in MODE=TILE. width and height are the tile dimension in in pixels. If not specified, defaults to 256x256. See Tile Mode for details.
- ZOOM [number]
Zoom scaling to apply to the creation of the new map. Values greater than 0 resulting in zooming in, 0 is a pan, and values less than zero are for zooming out. A value of 2 means "zoom in twice".
ZOOM can be used as a shortcut for the combination ZOOMDIR/ZOOMSIZE. The zoom is limited by the MINZOOM/MAXZOOM settings compiled into the MapServer (-25/25) by default.
Direction to zoom. See above.
- ZOOMSIZE [number]
Absolute magnitude of a zoom. Used with ZOOMDIR.
ZOOMDIR is limited to MAXZOOM compiled into the MapServer (25 by default).
Changing map file parameters via a form or a URL¶
Beginning with version 3.3 it is possible to change virtually any map file value from a form or a URL (see Run-time Substitution). The syntax for this is fairly straightforward, and depends on what version of MapServer you are using. One potentially very powerful use of this ability to change mapfile parameters through a URL involves changing class expressions on-the-fly. VALIDATION is used to control run-time substition. Try it out.
This functionality is only available via the mapserv CGI application. Within MapScript this is easy to do by yourself since the developer has complete control over how input is handled.
Using MapServer version <= 8¶
Previous versions of the MapServer CGI program allowed certain parameters to be changed via a URL using a cumbersome syntax such as map_layer_0_class_0_color=255+0+0 which changes the color in one classObj. So, in the past you had to change parameters one-at-a-time. Now you can pass chunks of mapfiles (with security restrictions) to the CGI interface. The map_object notation is still necessary to identify which object you want to modify but you can change multiple properties at one time. Note that you can use either a '_' or a '.' to separate identifiers.
Example 1, changing a scalebar object:
Example 2, changing a presentation style:
Example 3, creating a new feature:
Example 4, set multiple web object parameters:
Example 5, set the map size:
The variable identifies an object uniquely (by name or index in the case of layerObj's and classObj's). The value is a snippet of a mapfile. You cannot create new objects other than inline features at this point.
Using MapServer version < 5¶
For MapServer version < 5, any value can be expressed using the hierarchy used in a map file. A map contains a layer, which contains a class, which contains a label, which has a color. This hierarchy is expressed as a sequence of MapServer keywords separated by underscores. For example to change the color of a layer called "lakes" with only one class defined you would use a form variable named "map_lakes_class_color" and could assign it a color like "0 0 255". Layers can be referenced by index (i.e. map_layer_0…) or by name as shown above. Layer classes are referenced by index value (i.e. map_layer_0_class_2). If there is only 1 class for a layer then the index should be omitted. These variables must always begin with the sequence "map_". Values assigned must conform to the syntax of a map file.
It is also possible to define inline features using this mechanism. This is the only case where you can add on to the map file. You can edit/change layer parameters but you cannot create a new layer. With inline features you have to first create a feature and then build upon it, however, the layer the feature belongs to must exist. Here's a snippet from a GET request that adds a feature to a webuser layer:
The "map_webuser_feature=new" creates a new feature for the webuser layer. All subsequent calls to the feature object for that layer will modify the new feature. You can repeat the process to create additional features. This is really intended for very small (point, rectangle) amounts of data.
Specifying the location of mapfiles using an Apache variable¶
Apache variables can be used to specify the location of map files (instead of exposing full mapfile paths to the outside world).
Set the variable (in this example MY_MAPFILE) in Apache's httpd.conf:
SetEnv MY_MAPFILE "/opt/mapserver/map1/mymapfile.map"
Refer to the variable in the MapServer CGI URL:
ROSA-Applet Controls¶
note: Active development and maintenance of the ROSA Applet has stopped
The ROSA Applet parameters were added to the CGI MapServer in version 3.6. This Java Applet provides a more intuitive user interface to MapServer. The MapTools site provides detailed information on the ROSA Applet.
The parameters can also be used by other interfaces/tools, if set to the right values. Please note that the two parameters have to be handed over to te CGI application in the order identified below.
- INPUT_TYPE (auto_rect | auto_point)
The INPUT_TYPE parameter is needed to identify if the coordinates handed over to MapServer have to be interpreted as rectangular or point data.
- INPUT_COORD [minx,miny;maxx,maxy]
The ROSA-Applet always fills the pair of coordinates. In case of a point (input_type=auto_point) min and max coordinate are equal (MapServer uses the min value).


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