Rethinking "relevance": South African psychology in context

This article examines the phenomenon known as the "relevance debate" in South African psychology. It begins with a historical overview of the contours of the discipline in that country before describing the controversy's international dimensions, namely, the revolutionary politics of 1960s higher education and the subsequent emergence of cognate versions of the debate in American, European, and "Third World" psychology. The article then details how South Africa's "relevance" project enjoyed a special affinity with an assortment of ethnic-cultural, national, and continental myths and metaphors, all of which served the interests of the political formations of the day. It discusses how, in present-day South Africa, the intelligentsia has become an important catalyst for the so-called African Renaissance, which seeks to provide "relevant" solutions for the regeneration of African society. However, the global hegemony of what began in the 1970s as a "second academic revolution," aided by the lifting of the academic boycott of South Africa, has blunted the once critical edge of "relevance" discourse. A new mode of knowledge production now holds sway, the outcome of a dramatic reformulation of the capitalist manifesto in which the values of the "May 68" generation have been hijacked by a managerialist rationality. In light of the capitalization of the knowledge-production enterprise, it is concluded that the idiom of "relevance" has outlived its usefulness.