❉cogent-arts & humanitiesSmit, Cogent Arts & Humanities (2015), 2: 1064246
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2015.1064246
distinctly anti-mainstream. Ninja's desire to keep Die Antwoord "a secret mind-fuck" is to keep the sense of ambiguity that the band has established for themselves. So it is not that Die Antwoord are not sell-outs, but that they are quite specific about what they would like to "sell out" to. For instance, the band later agreed to be the opening act for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in 2013, a band which is commercial, but less superficial according to Die Antwoord?
Haupt observes how the reception to Die Antwoord in the media is a form of cultural imperialism (2012a, p. 2). He argues that it is Die Antwoord's media savvy approach and access to high-quality production tools together with their "self-referential parody of white and/or coloured working-class subjects" which have underlined their success (2012a, p. 115). Haupt goes on to note that, "it was the work of socially conscious hip hop activists in Cape Town that ensured that hip hop found an audience in South Africa" (2012a, p. 2), but who did not garner the kind of mainstream success that Die Antwoord has. This pertains to the representational power of Whiteness which seems to remain intact. Yet, Die Antwoord's treatment of culture as a found object, as "debris", also reveals the impossibility of a representation that could do justice to the complexity of South African life. This is the ironic aspect of Die Antwoord whose subversion of "keeping it real" is simultaneously soaked up by international audiences, revealing the West's inability to recognise (or to take responsibility for) their prejudiced perceptions of the (South) African "other".
5. Conclusion: the inadequacy of essentialist ideas surrounding cultural authenticity
Trinh Minh-Ha argues that "authenticity as a need to rely on an 'undisputed origin' is prey to an obsessive fear: that of losing a connection" (1989, p. 94). Deleuze and Guattari agree when they argue that flights towards free and autonomous positions away from the connections of representation, interpretation or symbolisation are full of dangers such as, for example, fear: "We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organisation that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that" (1987, p. 227). Through the desire to connect, to "represent, interpret or symbolize", one easily ends up categorising people, nations and ideas in order to make sense out of life. As one categorises, one might end up reifying concepts, forgetting one's own involvement in their creation. Perhaps this is more harmful than the fear of losing a sense of security which is based on ill-defined premises. Homi Bhabha speaks of a "creation of cultural diversity and a containment of cultural difference" (1990, pp. 208–209). Bhabha recognises the limit of Western liberal and universalist perspectives to accommodate difference and argues that no culture is complete in itself "because its own symbol forming activity, its own interpellation in the process of representation, language, significance and meaning-making, always underscores the claim to an originary, holisitic, organic identity" (1990, p. 210). Desires for authenticity constructed around visions of an objective and well-defined world result in the reification of authenticity which ultimately hampers the emergence of new forms and modes of experience. With the realisation of difference, as Braidotti points out, "comes also the quest for alternative figurations to express the kind of internally contradictory multi-faceted subjects that we have become" (2002, p. 6).
By positioning themselves as quirky oddities, who blur the distinctions between themselves and the personas they create, Die Antwoord reveal their simulation of Zef. Die Antwoord cultural appropriation is on a surface level, a "pasted on" performance of authenticity which may empty the various tropes of their significance. In doing this, they provide an illustration of the impossibility of supplying an adequate representation of a multi-cultural society: the limits of representation.
Die Antwoord present us not with a representation of politics, but with a politics of perception. They are disinvested in an objective or rational world, rather they work within a simulated world, they are attached to the world of appearances. Die Antwoord's strategy is not subtle and they push this simulated world of Zef appearances to its nth degree. This rap outfit gives you more, but more than more, by supplanting signs of the "real" as their real. They abuse the rules of simulation and do not attempt to simulate an objective reality, but to create their very own. So, in their own unsubtle and unstable manner, they cross into opacity—into a form which seems to lack coherence or
