Articulating Our-selves: the (extra)ordinary art of life

Abstract

This paper offers a dialogical engagement with Bhekizizwe Peterson’s oeuvre of work through the framing of narrative subjectivity as constituted by three intertwined threads: 1) relationality; 2) temporality; and 3) embodiment (Bradbury, 2020). Peterson offers critical and creative resources for reconfiguring psychosocial praxis, persisting with the question of what it might mean to be human in dehumanising conditions. In his analytically rigorous formulation, ubuntu becomes a tool for dismantling atomised notions of individuality, rethinking subjectivity as inherently relational. The narration of these relational bonds is not restricted to the plane of the present. Narrative time disrupts linearity and Peterson theorises intergenerational life by attending to memory, particularly the traumatic repetitions of black spectrality, and imagination in the projection of alternative futures. The activation of memory and imagination in works of art offers resources for thinking and living, for the construction of culture in the flows of historical life. However, it is not only the life of the arts that Peterson theorises but the art of life, the (extra)ordinary everyday embodied practices of (extra)ordinary people. This approach to rethinking personhood is refracted through the ambiguous notion of articulation as, on the one hand, the expression of private thought and felt meaning in public discourse, and on the other, connection, conjoining or hinging together. Narrative captures both senses of this term and offers us a way of thinking, with Peterson, not only about the arts but also about psychosocial life.