March 2007

A Generous Imaginary: Contingencies of Value in the South African Charity Run

Ivan Rabinowitz

Apart from being a joyous celebration of shared values, the Annual South African Toy Run captures and reflects the spirit of motorcycling, its restlessness, its adventurousness, its imaginative energy and creative power. At a time when the featurelessness of middle-class culture threatens to overwhelm all genuine innovation, speculation and inventiveness (particularly in post-apartheid South Africa, a newly enfranchised and fragile society), motorcycling fights back against the suffocating torpor of the arcade, the shopping mall, and the scripted, enforced gaiety of the infomercial. Although the numbing uniformity of desire—reflected in leisure centres done up in gilt, glitter, and colonnaded splendour—is here to stay as a consequence of the appetites of our global economy, the need for authentic activity and meaningful engagement remains. Motorcycling, while not immune to market forces, opposes the rule of surplus wealth, proving its creativity and diversity in its vibrant mixture of styles, values, attitudes and ideals.

During the South African toy run, the struggle between mediocrity and creativity is played out in context of a society ravaged by crime and still trying to recover from the long horror of apartheid. In the charity runs of 1999 and 2000, the vast acres of concrete paving surrounding the two largest shopping malls in two of the largest cities were chosen as assembly points. In both runs the procession ended at air force bases prominent during the apartheid years. This coincidence cannot be brushed aside. There is an obvious relationship between motorcycle culture and a wider culture marked by conspicuous consumption and aggression. Motorcycling, it could be argued, is destined to replicate the commodity-fetishism of the leisured classes, its once lean and renegade otherness now reduced to parody by legions of hacks, copywriters, and assorted ad-spend hucksters. What the South African toy run proves, however, is that the power and energy of motorcycling is greater than the sum of the cultural conditions brought to bear on it. The event signals the possibility that South African civil society, despite its legacy of legislated brutality and corruption, might yet have the capacity to develop into a mature democracy.

At least five desires were discernible during the toy runs: charitable generosity; to expel the past; to place the events in a wider context; to re-imagine the nature of civil society; and to reinforce a heightened awareness of individuality. Taken together, these disparate forces encourage an escape from the narrow concerns of the self and promote a revitalized sense of community.

The image of the social renegade is always in danger of being exploited by commercial interests. The motorcyclist’s first line of defense against this is to cultivate extravagant emblems and artifacts which mimic—and sometimes parody—items which have come to be revered in a militaristic, consumer society.

Thus the toy run brings together a vast and diverse repertoire of motorcycling paraphernalia, ranging from severely utilitarian artifacts to conspicuous monuments. Taking place is both a reversal and a denial, since goods are given away in a gesture which repudiates the desire to possess what others possess, the model of interaction which characterizes the ideology of a competitive society. Instead of the all-too-familiar monotony of competition—the grim ritual in which satisfaction is deferred and subject to future evaluations of success—moral and ethical energy is invested in the spectacle of deconsumption, a process of giving away. Although the event itself is short-lived and improvised, the spectacle of freely giving away stays in the mind as a moment of freedom from the cycle of getting and spending—consumption, purchase, competition and the repetitive drive to possess what others possess. The memory of the event is liberating, not only because it is a new experience—a field of endeavour beyond the activities of exchange and consumption—but because it establishes an environment which gives full value to the genuine morality of civil society.

During the toy run, the possibilities that appear to the participants are carnivalesque, a staging of multiple and divergent interests in which there is freedom to banter with social codes and conventions. Like the traditional carnival in which social power is mocked, pilloried and erased, there are no dominant elements, no criteria by which to rank and evaluate degrees of authority. The procession gives itself laws and rituals in order to control its potential to be rebellious.

In South Africa, local conditions of culture and society make the notion of banter particularly significant, since there is little hope of natural recourse to a universal system of rights and justice, despite the democratic vocabulary of a new constitution. Daily accounts of rape, infant rape, child abuse, corruption, ritual murder, and other atrocities have done much to obliterate a viable sense of an ideal at which society should aim: there is simply too much danger in the streets, and too little faith in the presence of a minimum standard of morality. In short, there is too little faith in the notion of an ideal standard, a shared aspiration, something to be pursued though never perfectly attained. In this context, the mere fact of staging a public event on the scale of the toy run acquires a special significance, a self-consciousness which contributes towards the phenomenon of the event itself.

In a society founded on respect for reason, where there is an expectation that natural law underwrites the rules and conventions of state power, an event such as the toy run might become the subject of popular reportage, but would be unlikely to warrant the attentions of the cultural analyst. In South Africa, however, such an event is not taken for granted and the spectacle can be viewed as transgressive, a representation of an alternative reality, one in which considerations of individuality and respect for difference become the channels for human community. It is in this sense that the well-known image of the renegade biker has the potential to become both an object of veneration and an emblem of harmony in diversity. 

I was one of a mass of people who crowded into the parking apron of the Menlyn Park Shopping Mall in Pretoria in November 1999. I witnessed a glorious celebration of Whitmanesque diversity, a cultural polyphony far in excess of any event I had ever attended: cryptic decals, snatches of house, rap, and ZZ Top, Eminem thumping unthinkable lyrics from deep within the alcoves of Gold Wings and Ducatis. Eccentricities embossed in metal and enamel, heroic styles of the machine, ancient and modern, each one different, unclassifiable, from the 1971 Triumph Daytona ridden by my son, to the precisely engineered BMW tourers and resplendently customized Harley-Davidsons. It was a collective homage to ideas in the making, transient manifestations in the dreamwork of pluralism. At stake here was the capacity of a society to get rid of the lingering presence of a vengeful, blind idiocy, the abject, the curse of centuries. I had not realized as forcefully as I was forced to, then, just how volatile and vulnerable the original human contract is, the notion that there are grounds for our rights and obligations. This gathering was the very embodiment of the “imaginary,” the site of possibilities, the kaleidoscopic otherness which makes it possible to think, to dream, and to create.

During the procession, on the highway from suburban Pretoria, I passed, and was passed by, all manner of riders, flamboyantly wind-tunneled, intertextual masterpieces, ancient Enfields, venerable Velocettes, bedsit scooters, junior-sized minicycles, leathered folk, smart casuals, Harley clubs, Wing riders, the old, the new, chapters of all the legions. Exhaust notes of every tone and timbre, a simultaneous projection of all the unfinished business of late capitalism, verging, perhaps, in its emphasis on surfaces, on a raw version of post modernity. Cars stopped. Throngs of spectators cheered us on. Traffic police on point duty, newly benign, waved and grinned. No rocks were pitched from bridges spanning the freeway. Overhead, as we neared the collection point, a banner proclaimed the universal brotherhood of bikers. Clearly, this was a value system sui generis, not simply a procession going places, but a lesson in values. There were too many strange and provisional sights to assimilate, too few boundaries to apply. Even the notion of a cross-section of society would not do justice to the proliferation of styles: metropolitan, countrified, gentrified, working-class, outlaw chic, outlaw crude, young, middle-aged, elderly. (Only in three respects could the multitude be said to be stereotypical in its replication of past ideologies and the patriarchal, hegemonic structure of the wider culture: there were too few “blacks,” there were far more “biker chicks” than women motorcyclists, and the event did not make any concessions to the feminization of popular culture.) What was most striking about this aggregate of meaning and being and seeming was its sheer unselfconsciousness. Motorcyclists do not wish to be the subjects of their own acts of “looking,” of spectatorship. The biker, it seems, has no wish to memorialize the instant, instead, s/he wishes to actuate the moment, to keep it restless. In this, the procession was emphatically opposed to modernity. It had nothing to do with the desire to pierce the fugitive pleasure of circumstance in an effort to freeze the meaning of the moment. Instead, its values were contingent and provisional, closely allied to the present and to an eagerness to invent the present.

Such an ethos implies a Foucauldian refusal of the authoritarian alternative, including a rejection of all projects which seem to be hierarchical and stable. The event I have described is both archaeological and transformational—archaeological because it is a reminder of the possibilities of freedom; transformational because, in its diverse particularity, within the confines of a dangerous and damaged cultural milieu, it gestures towards a liberated sense of the self.

At this point, surely the Toy Run speaks for itself. Should it not simply be, rather than mean something? But this is to beg the question: events create conditions from which we may take meaning. As a biker on the Run, I was obliged to recognize my own specificity; I was obliged to pay attention to the characteristics of the event, not because I intended to make it the subject of cultural critique, but because my participation in the event made me a fitting subject for cultural critique. After all, what was I doing there: middle-class, professorial, and, above all, a citizen of a country still recovering from pathologies of every persuasion. In such a place, reality might dictate, there is no place for mass frivolity, and still less time for displays of non-utilitarian artifacts, the surplus goods of a privileged group, the stubbornly unrepentant beneficiaries of apartheid.

What I was doing there, it seemed to me, could be explained only by recourse to a larger field of cultural politics. The philanthropic nature of the event could obviously be invoked, but the most authentic explanation was motorcycling as an idea in the realm of the imagination. Motorcycling has unique attributes and characteristics that intersect with, or are symptomatic of, important structures of value and belief. It seems that motorcycling is a complex structure of implication and suggestion, a perfect unity of purpose between being and becoming, towards harmony between subject and object, being and machine. The metaphor of the “generous imaginary” unites these dreams, and the Toy Run—with its dominant image of the rough rider bearing toys for children—seems to fulfill both conditions. Motorcycling is associated with an autonomy of understanding which is based on the kind of self-knowledge and self-sufficiency. In other words, the figure of the biker is easily transposed into the figure of the outlaw with a heart of gold, reminiscent of medieval archetypes of sainthood and transgression. In a sense, the biker is a last vestige of this complex unit, the powerful symbol in the discourse of the imaginary. The figure of the biker is caught up in a system of multiple deflections, twists of meaning, surprise turns in metonymic chain, so that it splits off into multiple, mercurial versions of itself: renegade, outlaw, solitary, other, self-sufficient partner, omniscient loner, sage, damaged survivor. The biker, therefore, operates as a potential mutation, constantly transformative, improvisatory, even contradictory, pointing towards the future, and available for transposition into multiple forms of cultural significance. Written in the future tense, it is a nomadic story of flux and potentiality, ready to be rewritten at will in response to new cultural practices.

But perhaps the most important point to make is that there is a tension between individual experience and the figure of the biker. Is it only at the point of assembly, for example, that the biker is constructed in relation to a particular cultural milieu? Before the event, on the way to the assembly point, is the motorcyclist simply someone riding a motorcycle? Is it only during an event that the motorcyclist acquires an identity and the status of a cultural icon, transformed by prior speech events, agglomerations of language, and the idioms arising from the popular imagination? The issue of identity is at the heart of motorcycling. It is a truism that the biker is a social construction, a consequence of linguistic and cultural experience; but that trite observation has no explanatory power. Parallel to this truism, however, there is another level of analysis, that which would try to establish the defining features of the human subject in its uniqueness and individuality. Such an analysis would need to ground itself in individual histories, and would have to abandon the bland generalizations of cultural anthropology. In other words, only the narrative story would be an appropriate vehicle for this kind of analysis.

My point of origination has been the generous imaginary, a metaphor for the unforced, improvisational, conversational idiom of the gathering, and for the spirit of generosity which marked the event. It is a metaphor which seeks to capture both the self-perception of the biker—the motorcyclist imagining the transformative energy of motorcycling—and the act of sharing this imaginative energy with others. In creating the conditions for the realization of such a metaphor, the South African toy run attests to the achievement of motorcycling as a unique form of community, proof of the possibility of discovering, and recovering, a strong sense of purpose.

Images and text copyright © International Journal of Motorcycle Studies