The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
College of the Liberal Arts
THE VALUE OF INVENTION: ON THE UNGENDERING OF BLACK
LIFE IN FRANTZ FANON, SYLVIA WYNTER, AND HORTENSE
SPILLERS
A Dissertation in
Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
by
William Michael Paris
© William Michael Paris
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
August 2018
The dissertation of William Michael Paris was reviewed and approved* by the following:
Nancy Tuana Dupont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy Co-Chair of Committee Dissertation Co-Advisor
Robert Bernasconi Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies Co-Chair of Committee Dissertation Co-Advisor
Leonard Lawlor Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
AnneMarie Mingo Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Amy Allen Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Head of the Department of Philosophy
*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.
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Abstract
My dissertation brings the works of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers together in order to argue that invention is the central motivation of their engagements with race, gender, and sexuality. Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers provide starting points from which it is possible to not only apprehend the historical experiences of the alienation of Black life under European colonialism and transatlantic slavery but also the contingencies and subsequent naturalizations of race, gender, and sexuality as ontological facts of what it means to be human. It is by revealing how race, gender, and sexuality are enmeshed in a violent system of exploitation and expropriation that the necessity of praxis and invention arises. Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers expose how the modalities of “the human” formed through the dominant economic, educational, and cultural institutions of Western powers have been premised on stolen life. The question of this dissertation is thus: what does one do with a form of humanity whose historical dynamic is the ongoing theft of value? What I argue in the following dissertation is that Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers take seriously the preceding question and, thus, develop an understanding of invention that is decidedly not focused on the creation of a new object or revealing what the human “really” is. They reflect on how the colonialisms and enslavements of European empire crafted a system of existence that could appropriate and make use of any new values that were created by the colonized or the enslaved. On my account, invention is no longer circumscribed by the creation of a new value that can be commodified and exchanged on the market; invention derives its value from the activity of its praxis. Thus, the value of invention for Black life is in being attentive to how it wrenches away from the terms of a system of domination and not in the proliferation of stable products. In this way the struggle against a system of stolen life can be comprehended as a constant activity rather than a teleological process. It is important not to flatten the historical experiences of Black life through colonialism and enslavement into a single, homogenous narrative. For this reason, each thinker will be read according to the space of their thought. Fanon’s oeuvre arises from the French Caribbean and extends into the anticolonial war between France and Algeria. I will show that in his reflections he came to question and reveal how the French state was invested in crafting a racialized system of gender that positions the colonized as outside the purview of humanity and, thus, vulnerable to violence and expropriation. Fanon’s status as a French colonial subject means that his archive will consist of the Négritude movement, Sartrean phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. By working through these discourses it will be possible to see how Fanon links his new humanism to an invention of gender. From this opening I move to Sylvia Wynter of English speaking British Caribbean and her specifically Jamaican sensibilities of colonialism. Wynter moves through the English speaking and Spanish speaking Caribbean to the United States. Thus, her articulation of the trajectory of Black life will be distinct from Fanon’s and explicitly call attention to how Western academic institutions impose a global genre of what it is to be human across the planet. Wynter reveals how a genre endeavors to reproduce itself through bourgeois notions of gender that must be rewritten. Finally, Spillers writes from the United States about the movement of the slave trade from West Africa to the Americas. Her thought takes place about a generation after Fanon and, thus, makes use of different theoretical tools such as semiotics. All three thinkers provide a constellation through which one can understand the necessarily multiple dynamics of invention.
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The centrality of gender to the thought of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers consists in their comprehension of how Black life has historically been mobilized to make possible the reproduction of systems of Western exploitation and expropriation. From Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers, I claim, we can derive a blackened humanism that would arrest this reproduction and open the space for new systems of meaning. By undoing dominant systems of meaning the historical experiences of Black life are revealed as sites of constant invention that we may engage today. The theme of invention allows us to read Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers differently and, therefore, begin to change our own archives of historical experience.
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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………...vii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….1
Chapter 1. THE SKIN OF THE WORLD: FRANTZ FANON’S EROTIC INVENTION OF HUMANISM…………………………………………………………....10 Fanon and the Skin of Praxis and “History”…………………………………….....10 Fanon, Sartre, and the Problem of the Racial Real and Humanism………………..18 Fanon and the Search for Humanism………………………………………………26 “Man” and the Circle of Invention………………………………………………....34 Dépouillement and the Skin of the World in L’an V and Les damnés de la terre…………………………………………………………45 The Veil and Fanon’s Phenomenology of the Skin………………………………...50 The Skin of the World and the Erotics of Violence in Les damnes de la terre: On the à fleur de peau of Fanonian Invention……………………………………...58 Remembering the Skin of the World……………………………………………….66
Chapter 2. THE GENRE OF INVENTION: SYLVIA WYNTER, SOCIOGENY, AND THE WRITING OF BLACKENED HUMANISM…………………………..……………………………………………………73 Wynter and the Perils of Imagination……………………………………………….78 The Writing of Alienation and Imaginative Context………………………………..83 “No Humans Involved”: Wynter’s Open Call for the Committed Intellectual…………………………………………………………..88 The Sociogenic Principle and the Problem of Historical Experience……………….94 Wynter and the Aesthetics of Existence…………………………………………….117 Literature, Invention, and New Forms of Freedom…………………………………123 From Genre to Gender: On the Symbolic Births of “Man,” “Woman,” and the Western Ratio……………………………………………………………….136
Chapter 3. THE PROBLEM OF VALUE: HORTENSE SPILLERS AND THE MYTHOLOGIES OF BLACKENED GENDER…………………………………………….145 Metaphor and the Mythologies of Gender…………………………………………...148 The “Flesh” of Historiography: On the Zero Degree and the Form of Writing………………………………………………………………………….....157 Between Slavery and “Slavery”: Hortense Spillers’s Double-Writing of Blackened Gender…………………………………………………………………165 Anna Julia Cooper and the Value of Black Womanhood……………………………174 Anna Julia Cooper and the Existential Search for Measure………………………....183 The Symbolic Economy of Slavery………………………………………………….192 The Transvaluation of “Black Motherhood”………………………………………...198 Hortense Spillers and the Counter-Mythology of Black Life………………………..203
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Chapter 4. CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF INVENTION: THE FLESH OF BLACKENED HUMANISM IN FANON, WYNTER, AND SPILLERS…………………..208 Hortense Spillers and the Theory of Mythology……………………………………...212 Sylvia Wynter and the Plot of Humanism…………………………………………….219 Frantz Fanon and the Blackened Spaces of the World……………………………...... 224
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...228
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Acknowledgments
The completion of this project would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of family, friends, and colleagues to find my own voice and, in so doing, find the voices of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers. The many inventions and transformations of myself and this project are due to you. To Ursula, my best friend: There is not an idea in the following chapters that has not been touched by our “dialectical” engagements, our exchange of ideas across continents and traditions. Your wisdom and confidence have sharpened my mind and shown me that philosophical generosity is not only possible but necessary for our vocation. To Desiree, my fellow traveler: Writing does not happen in a vacuum and our sensibilities have always been adjacent to one another. Our revisions and struggles have happened alongside one another and, thus, I am grateful for how much we have read each other’s work even if I have not said so. Throughout this process I have thought of you not only as friend but as a comrade. To Kris, my “Ancient” teacher: You have shown me what it means to be excited by the prospect of ideas unfamiliar to oneself, that we need not be trapped by the ideas others may have of us. Your spirit of experimentation and maturity has taught me the value of communal philosophy and that our thoughts need not be pure to be worthy of articulation and investigation. To Danny and Axelle: Your vigorous and precise minds have tested my ideas in our agreements and disagreements while keeping me honest. I look forward to our conversations in the future. To Cynthia: You have been more than a friend. This dissertation was composed within the spaces of our free-flowing conversations. The importance of the Caribbean and its languages presses on the very form of my work. Thus, it is from these “utopias” that I have discovered that writing does not have value unless it attempts to bring some relation into the world that was not there before.
To Nancy: You have always encouraged me to find my voice and trust that I have something to offer. Your constant reminders that what I write should always be in the service of others, of solidarity, were an indispensable guide throughout this dissertation. Finally, your intellectual honesty and depth of knowledge always pushed me to be more careful and precise with my arguments. To Robert: It is hard to imagine a single person more responsible for my intellectual and philosophical transformations throughout graduate school. Your, often bracing, candor taught me the importance of writing clearly and not taking my audience for granted. More importantly, you taught me how to take critique and, when necessary, to be willing to change. Finally, the historical sensitivity I attempt to show each figure is due to the passion and appreciation for the concrete that you have passed to me. The highest respect a philosopher can accord a thought is to ceaselessly attempt to understand its time and space. In doing so, invention and responsibility may be dynamically conjoined.
Finally, to my mother and father: It is from you that I have learned, and continue to learn, the value of Black life is in the struggle for others. I hope to continue to make you proud. Without you my work would have been impossible.
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“I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into [existence]” ~ Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs
“The incredible inventiveness of black culture is not to be understood outside the imperative task of transformation, of counterresistance to the resistance of the Real world[…]” ~ Sylvia Wynter, “Sambos and Minstrels”
“[I] must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings[…]and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” ~ Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
For all those whom have been blackened.
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Introduction
The following dissertation examines the works of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense
Spillers as they attempt to grapple with the enduring legacies of colonialism and chattel slavery.
These three thinkers reveal the complex mechanics through which the systems of colonialism and chattel slavery not only stole economic value, in the form of labor and commodities, but also the existential and political values of what it means to be human. This latter theft in no way means that Black subjects in the Diaspora lost all ability for self-determination and invention. But what it does mean is that “the West,” through force and accumulation, was able to impose its reading of “History” as the center against which the values of the colonized and enslaved were to be measured. Such an imposition effectively attempts to naturalize and obscure the violent processes of expropriation and exploitation that have allowed “History” to become a fact rather than an invention. Since “History” continues to inform and give sense to the present via institutions and traditions this means that colonialism and chattel slavery can survive their “abolition” simply by continuing to frame the very terms through which we apprehend our situation, ourselves, and how we have come to be.
Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers map the coordinates of the systemic violence of colonialism and slavery as it has stretched between the French Caribbean of Martinique and Northern Africa
(Fanon), the English/Spanish speaking Caribbean of Jamaica and Cuba (Wynter), and the United
States (Spillers). The European powers (and later, the United States) invented blackened spaces across the world that became sites of value extraction necessitated by economic rapaciousness and an ideological humanism whose referent was never universal, but implicitly and explicitly wedded to forms of life “the West” had naturalized. Fanon and Wynter, as colonized subjects of France and
Britain, respectively, describe phenomenologically the historical experience of being framed by a
1 narrative of “History” that positions Black life as continually not yet human. Thus, Blackness, or what I will call “Black life,” is not an ahistorical phenomenon, but the historically contingent outcome of systemic praxes that endeavor to reproduce an order of values (economic, political, and ontological) that are concentrated in what has named itself “the West.” For this reason, my understanding of Black life as blackened in these figures will not be a metaphysical substance that exists outside of economic, political, and epistemological structures, but will be shown to be an engagement with forces distributed across concrete space. The “map” that Fanon, Wynter, and
Spillers provide is a frame by which we can comprehend a global system that is predicated on stolen life.
To simply call this global system “Capitalism” risks flattening and reducing to analogy the historical experience of dispossession and forced migration to that of the European, male factory worker or the European peasantry. Much Marxist writing and theory has paved the way for this reflexive analogy wherein the “slave” is nothing but a hyperexploited worker (and certainly not the space from which revolutionary consciousness might proceed). But such writing reveals a dangerous conservative impulse through which the historical experiences of the blackened are only taken seriously insofar an analogical relation can be constructed between “the West” and its colonies. In writing such as this, specificity is lost or, more to the point, stolen. Freedom and liberation come to signify how “the West” values freedom rather than the specific value of freedom as openness, as invention.
This dissertation aims to restore the specificity of this struggle by attending to the entanglements of gender, sexuality, and “race” in the discourses of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers.
Life in the Black diaspora cannot avoid how gender and sexuality have been mobilized to circumscribe Black life as a deformed space of humanity. The oversexualization Black women
2 and colonized women along with the supposed hypervirility of Black men and colonized men are but one example of how racialized values of normativity continue to impact how the human is assumed. Gender, it will be shown, is less an identity which one has and more a system of relation that demands the reproduction of modes of kinship that will continue to make viable the sociopolitical orders of “the West.” The question of the blackened resides in comprehending how to resist and transform a system that has crafted and stolen from you while being forced to use its language and resources. For if Spillers will claim in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book” (2003b) that chattel slavery suspended the customary understandings of gender for slave women and men by denying the possibility of patriarchal kinship arrangements she does not thereby cease to speak of Black women and men. Her claim that Black life was ungendered through the Middle Passage does not lead her to some pure space of Blackness uncontaminated by
Western grammar. Something more complex is happening here. The same can be said of Fanon’s oft claimed “masculinism” or insensitivity to “gender.” Such scholarship distorts Fanon’s reflections on how sexuality and gender have been racialized and, thus, must be transformed in the revolutionary upheaval of the colonized. In no way does he take the teleology of the free subject to be in the values of the free (white) male. These readings remain trapped by what Wynter calls
“genre.” Genre is a fundamental arrangement of knowledge that forms what content or connections will make sense or be considered “true” in a given discourse. If “the West” is, in part, an invented discursive arrangement, Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers challenge how Black life has been discursively produced as if it only made sense by virtue of similitude to Western values.
How does one craft alternate readings of “History” and experience from within the very genre that seemingly disallows such possibilities? This dissertation threads this complicated needle by neither absolutely rejecting the European theorists Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers engage and use
3 nor absolutely subsuming their thought as simply another component of European discourses.
Within each chapter it will be demonstrated that the concrete praxis of invention refuses simplistic either/or choices. Rather, the projects of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers evince a mode of thought, a mode of writing, that works through the very discourses that have distorted Black life in order to show how those of the colonies and plantations of the world have never been comprehended in their full, dynamic complexity. Thus, the employment of “Sartrean” phenomenology (Fanon),
“Foucauldian” archaeology (Wynter), and “Barthesian” semiotics (Spillers), should not mislead the reader into thinking that I am constructing an easy reconciliation between “the West” (France,
Britain, and the U.S.) and the spaces they have colonized. What I am claiming is that these encounters happened and have irrevocably formed our sense of the world and “History” in ways that we are not always aware. The point is to reveal the forms that constrain our perceptions, our reading habits, our imagination of what is possible and, thereby, make space for inventions that will not predetermine who the blackened “really” are.
But form remains a tricky problem. To describe the colonial systems of “the West” as forms of life is to say that their violence is not only in the content of their discourses, but how knowledge and institutions are arranged so that resistances and inventions can be captured and mobilized for their reproduction. For instance, I will argue that Fanon’s mode of writing in Peau noire, masques blancs (2011) reveals that French colonialism depends upon the fabricated distinction between le
Noir (the Black) and le nègre (negro or, more importantly, nigger). The colonial discourse seems to posit that the former is “good” and “civilized” while the latter is “violent” and “subhuman.” If one were to simply to take French colonial discourse at the level of its manifest content, what it says about itself, one might think the way to transform its system is to show that le nègre is simply a stereotype that misses how Black people “really” are. Fanon constantly oscillates between the
4 two terms in his French and this oscillation is often covered over by his English translators which produce flat renderings of his thought. Fanon’s semantic economy reveals that both the strategy of affirming oneself as a “good” Noir or attempting to claim oneself as un nègre lead to dead ends since the colonial system can abide both figures. After all France could both attempt to “integrate” lighter-skinned Martinique as a part of French culture while also deploying the darker-skinned
Senegalese as their “savage” soldiers. The insight that Fanon provides is that these “skin” politics are invested in the formation of an array of subjects who can be appropriated to defend and support
French forms of life. Thus, assimilation or resistance become content that the French form can make use of, they become commodities that the market system can circulate. The point is not to provide “new” content, but to challenge the very forms through which our understanding of freedom and liberation plays out.
Sylvia Wynter’s 1979 essay “Sambos and Minstrels” echoes this point, but in the United
States context. She argues that the figure of the “[h]appy-go-lucky irresponsible Sambo” (Winter
1979, 149) did not negate the duplicitous and “[r]ebellious Nat [Turner],” but, instead, both were necessary for the construction of a “[m]aster-model” or “bourgeois universe of signification”
(Winter 1979, 150; emphasis mine). Wynter, I argue, is fundamentally concerned more with form than content. What is the use of new content if the system has not changed? The genre critique that
Wynter engages envisages how the “[b]ourgeois universe of signification[…]cod[es] value and non-value, bind[s] the structures of production under the hegemony of its imaginary social significations” (Wynter Winter 1979, 150). Thus, this has led, tragically, to those who have been blackened to exercise forms of dominance and mastery over others who have been blackened. The model of mastery has not been uprooted and transformed; it has only snuck in under the cover of a supposedly “new” content. Keeping this in mind, it is important to apprehend that the blackened
5 humanism of Wynter that I will describe in her chapter is not simply a European humanism covered with Black skin. It is the working towards a new form, a new model, a new universe of signification that takes seriously the specificity of Black life as it has related to the imposition of colonial languages (French and English) and colonial market systems. The eclipse of the problem of language for those who have been enslaved and, thus, were forced to learn a foreign language in order to understand the commands they were given for their labor has too easily been analogized to the general alienation any subject might experience when confronted with a language they did not choose. It is this flight towards abstraction that the chapters in this dissertation attempt to arrest.
It is no accident that the first two chapters of the dissertation concern figures from the
Caribbean. Recent works such as Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and
Primitive Accumulation (2004) and Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The
Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and
Caribbean (2018) have noted the fundamental importance of the Caribbean as the condition of possibility for “Western” racial capitalism. Tracing the historical experiences of Black life within capitalism, colonialism, and enslavement requires that we decenter U.S. significations of
Blackness towards the different, yet interconnected, spaces across the Black diaspora. The
Caribbean makes it possible to more carefully apprehend the complexity of invention that I claim binds Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers together. The Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia notes that “The speakers of standard European languages in the West Indies usually follow the usage of the metropolitan country; and speech and thought in terms of speech are so important that this has left a stamp of metropolitanism on the West Indies which still remains even though some of the territories are becoming wholly independent of their metropolitan governments” (1970, 7; emphasis mine). The conflict between dominant European languages of the metropolis and the
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“minority” Creole languages often spoken exclusively by the darker and poorer populations leads her to claim: “Language in the West Indies is a double-edged sword” (Goveia 1970, 8). This is so for two important reasons. First, she is questioning whether independence is truly achieved when the structure of one’s thinking remains beholden to the metropolitan government. Second, while the Creole languages seem to depart from the linguistic structure of the metropolitan language it can only do so by stealing words from the latter. She concludes that the situation in the Caribbean is untenable because there is “[a] complete dichotomy between the way in which many people speak and think in the West Indies, and the official language which is set by the attachment to metropolitan power” (Goveia 1970, 8).
Goveia is not really interested in competing linguistic structures and, to be clear, neither am I. In this essay she wants to show how a system of power, a system of existence, can live on even after it has been surpassed. The form can adapt to new contents. Even after the European powers cease formal colonization “[t]he belief that the blacker you are the more inferior you are and the whiter you are the more superior you are” (Goveia 1970, 10) continues and, thus, “[t]he dark skinned are generally the most numerous and the most poor” (Goveia 1970, 12). The
Caribbean allows us to see that being blackened is not so much about color, but a form of social positioning. The statistical majority of Black skinned people in Caribbean countries does not undo the forms of anti-Blackness that have been developed in “the West.” Yet her reference to Creole languages (her description of “a complete dichotomy” notwithstanding) seems to be an attempt to show how invention happens within a structure that excludes the blackened. She implores the
Caribbean to “[c]hange from the old form” (Goveia 1970, 14; emphasis mine) which remains invested in a system of inferiority/superiority. But this transformation is not about the denial of
7 making use of things that come from Europe, such as words. It is about rewriting the background system in which the terms are embedded.
It is from this vantage point that I argue we can understand the project of Hortense Spillers more clearly. The Black skinned population is not, and most likely will never be, a statistical majority in the United States. But the Caribbean, and the writing of Fanon and Wynter, shows that a statistical majority of people of who look alike is not a sufficient condition for transforming the formal structures of alienation and exploitation. What Spillers demonstrates is how vulnerable the blackened are to being appropriated by dominant systems of meaning, yet these dominant systems cannot simply be ignored or wished out of existence. The question of “gender” must be analyzed for the ways in which it is mobilized to reproduce a system of inferiority/superiority vis-à-vis
Black life. I argue that Spillers does this through what I call her double-writing. She develops a praxis of reading and writing “History” that is attentive to the silences, the gaps, and, more importantly, distortions that have been reproduced around Black life. Her double-writing takes what a discourse says about itself while also listening for its inconsistencies, the questions it does not allow to arise. Black womanhood allows her to ask, “What is the value of womanhood within a system of meaning conditioned by the reproduction of enslavement?” Rather than filling in the missing content of who Black women (and men) are for such a system she takes the terms of the system and writes against it. Spillers moves away from inventing new values, stable “truths,” towards rediscovering the value of invention itself. It is a value that is often eclipsed and appropriated by dominant structures of meaning, but it can be written again and again.
The concept of double-writing is meant to show that invention is a poiesis, a creative activity, that ceaselessly moves through abstraction to the concrete complexity of historical experience. It aims for an understanding of invention that is not about the creation of a new
8 concept, product, or commodity that can be sold. The invention I am arguing for takes place between the lines of texts, it is constantly distorted by dominant and reflexive reading habits. Thus, even though my formulation of double-writing is not completed until the third chapter on Spillers it should be noted that, retroactively, it is the method I have employed in my readings of Fanon and Wynter. I look for the openings that exist between the lines of their thought in order to challenge the reified interpretations of their ideas. My readings juxtapose their thoughts with theorists of “the West” in order to make clear how dominant systems of meaning and interpretation too easily substitute themselves for the voice of the blackened. This dissertation is not a search for some “pure,” untainted Blackness that would have nothing to do with imposed structures of exploitation, alienation, and domination. Instead, following Sylvia Wynter, it argues, “The incredible inventiveness is not to be understood outside the imperative task of transformation, of counterresistance to the Real world” (1979, 149). This dissertation is a reminder that invention is always a leap; but we must not confuse where one lands for the actual risk and contingency in leaping.
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Chapter One The Skin of the World: Frantz Fanon’s Erotic Invention of Humanism
Fanon and the Skin of Praxis and “History”
The role of praxis in Fanon’s oeuvre should not be underestimated. It is only through praxis that the current structures of the world can be surpassed and the invention of new modes of understanding and existing can be brought forth. Fanon exemplifies this core component of his thought throughout his life in one of the concluding declarations of Peau noire (2011): “I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life [l’existence]”
(Fanon 2011/2008, 250/204).1 In this allusion to Kierkegaard (via Sartre), Fanon presents invention in contradistinction to the inert abstraction of “History” (l’Histoire) which threatens to imprison him (2011/2008, 249/204). Thus, praxis functions as a continual interruption of colonial time and teleology so that someone and something new may step through the gap. Fanonian praxis is the work of reversing and derailing the violence of colonial abstraction which organizes the economic exploitation and epistemological disavowal of blackened existence via the creation of a
Manichean system divided between “the” Black and “the” White. The persistent work of
1 Philcox translates l’existence as “life” thus obscuring Fanon’s explicit reference not only to Sartre’s 1945 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism (2007), but, more importantly, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. One of Kierkegaard’s reproaches to Hegel and other Danish Hegelians was that the stillness of abstract logic could not capture the movement of becoming in existence. In an important footnote of his Search for a Method, Sartre notes this tension between Kierkegaard and Hegel: “What Kierkegaard opposes in Hegel is the fact that for Hegel the tragedy of a particular life is always surpassed. The life fades away into knowledge. Hegel talks to us about the slave and his fear of death. But the fear which was felt becomes the simple object of knowing, and the moment of a transformation which is itself surpassed…What Kierkegaard complains of in Hegelianism is that it neglects the unsurpassable opaqueness of the lived experience” (1968, 9). Without this tension the reader will miss Fanon’s battle against abstraction and reification and, furthermore, will misinterpret chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks as giving the Black man rather than dramatizing a dialectical experience which necessitates creativity and invention. 10 revolution in praxis, if forgotten, imposes a teleology upon a thought that tirelessly resists completion. For this reason, reading Fanon must always be a search for the repetition of praxis.
Claiming that Fanon intends to bring theory and action together allows us to understand his critical apprehension that Western humanism has too often violently imposed theory upon reality (cf. Bernasconi 1996, 115), but this claim tells us very little about what Fanon perceived to be the problem in Western theories of humanity and by what action this problem could be cast off.
Fanon claims that “The structure [L’architecture] of [Peau noire] is grounded in temporality” because “[e]very human problem cries out to be considered on the basis of time” (2011/2008,
67/xvi). The architecture—arche—from which this work is built up is the violence of temporality and time. The colonial system vis-à-vis Martinique2 imposes its abstract understanding of time onto the skin of the Black colonial subject. The condition of Blackness becomes, thus, a condition to be escaped, a condition that will be negated for the emancipation of humanity, or a condition sealed up in a mythical prehistory. Thus, when Fanon writes, “As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man [le Noir]. And it is white” (2011/2008, 66/xiv), he conjoins the object choice of desire (whiteness) with the futural temporality of destiny (to be
2 For Peau noire it is important to always bear in mind for interpretations of the work that Fanon understands himself as beginning and writing from a specific sensibility. “As those of an Antillean [Étant antillais d’origine], our observations and conclusions are valid only for the French Antilles—at least regarding the black man [le Noir] on his home territory. A study needs to be made to explain the differences between Antilleans and Africans. One day perhaps we shall conduct such a study. Perhaps it will no longer be necessary, in which case we can but have reason for applause” (2011/2008, 68/xvii). Too often hagiographical or critical reflections of Fanon in this work rush to impose a universality and certainty on his voice in order to make it seem as if he claimed to speak for all Black people. This elides the hesitations, incompleteness, and failures Fanon, himself, weaves into the work. I will argue throughout the chapter that understanding Fanon’s “erotic” invention entails an appreciation of how he consciously leaves the epistemology of his reflections incomplete and in suspension. These opacities in the Fanonian oeuvre are crucial for my claim that the “intellectual” simply serves as a reminder of the value of invention, that one must continually create, rather than the individual who invents values for the reader, the group, the colonized. 11 white). This provides a different way of understanding Fanon’s claim that “Blacks are men who are black [Le Noir est un homme noir]; in other words, owing to a series of affective disorders
[d’abberations affectives] they have settled into a universe from which we have to extricate them”
(2011/2008, 64/xii). Fanon actually understands le Noir as a subject who has been blackened by a system that affectively situates the condition of Blackness as an aberration to be resolved in
Whiteness. Fanonian praxis is responding to a theory of erotic time which has grounded the blackened subject as an aberration within “History.”
History, to paraphrase Frederic Jameson (1981), is what hurts. The Fanonian praxis of the blackened is initiated by the pain of realizing that to be Black is to be disconnected from temporality. Thus, when Fanon expresses how “painful” it is to admit that there is one destiny for the Black (and it is to disappear) (2011/2008, 66/xiv), he is attempting to make the reader feel that the mediation between the human and time is erotic. It is by making this connection between time
(as l’Histoire) and erotic sensibilities that Fanon reveals that the violent force of the colonial system buttresses the objective expropriation of land and space with the subjective introjection of white temporality into the very sensibilities of the blackened subject. Within the colonial system, the proper sensibility of time belongs to the white men and white women of the French metropole.
To be a white man or white woman one must embed themselves within the heterosexual kinship matrix of colonial desire. This is the concrete problem of the “psycho-existential complex” (Fanon
2011/2008, 67/xvi) Fanon means to address. The hurt of “History” embedded within the very skin, flesh, of the blackened colonized requires, I will argue, the praxis of an erotic humanism.
By reading for an erotic humanism, it will become clear that colonial gender and sexuality are abstractions that Fanon’s texts claim must be continually invented. Fanon’s praxis is not simply a seizing of the means of production, but it is the opening of historically blackened skin to the
12 world, to reality, to “History” and vice versa. If it is Fanon’s aim to convince the reader “to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension” (2011/2008,
67/xvi) we must understand how Fanon understands the mediation of the human to temporality through touch, through sense, and, most concretely, through skin. I will argue that Fanon’s critical engagements with the possibility of blackened gender and sexuality have been missed because not enough attention has been given to the role of blackened skin as the mediation between the human and “History.” The sensibilities of this blackened skin, what I have described as the hurt or pain that colonial “History” has impressed upon it, precipitates the abyssal leap of invention. The concrete experiences of oppression and alienation for the colonized makes necessary a new skin of the world. This can only be carried out through a new erotics that disputes the colonial impositions of gender and sexuality as the only lived expression of the human.
Fanon’s value of invention is primary to any invention of particular values. His role as the
“intellectual” is not to say where an erotic humanism engaged with the blackened skin of the world will go. The opacity of the Fanonian text interrupts and frustrates any knowable teleology. The singularity of the subjective leap into the new objective universal must be preserved. In this regard,
Kierkegaard takes on a distinctive role in Fanon’s written texts. The constant ironies, masquerades, and hesitations frustrates the desires of the reader to apprehend the “real” Fanon, to capture the
Black experience. Fanon attempts to lead the reader to feel the skin of another reality and, thus, remind them to value invention again. Fanon participates in a long tradition of Black thinkers and writers who understand Blackness as in the world, but not of it, and, thus, this experience cannot simply be stated logically and analytically.3 Until the conditions of sense of the colonial world are
3 C. Riley Snorton in Black on Both Sides: A Racial “History” of Trans Identity examines the problematic “[a]ppetite for a racial real whetted by the collapse of black literature with black bodies” (2017, 112) wherein the writings of slave narratives to black philosophical contributions 13 altogether changed any description of the Black experience will be a violent abstraction. In a word, this is part of Fanon’s complex dispute with the négritude of Léopold Senghor and, to a lesser extent, Aimé Césaire: it failed on the objective level as a political program. It was a mere reversal of Western colonial values even though it succeeded on the subjective level in creating a new subject (2011/2008, 168-170/109-111).4 What was missed was the imperative to carry the value of invention into objective structures rather than reify particular “black” values while leaving
“History” and the world the same.
For this reason, Fanon does not argue for what the new human ought to feel; he constantly reminds the reader to shed their skin (dépouille). This word, dépouillement, appears in Fanon’s
“Introduction” (2011/2008, 63-64/xii) and “Conclusion” (2011/2008, 251/206) of Peau noire in connection to how freedom will be invented. Perhaps, most importantly, it appears in the Marx epigraph from The Eighteenth Brumaire: “The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself [s’être dépouillée] of all its superstitions concerning the past” (Fanon 2011/2008, 245/198). This is how
I understand the value of invention as distinct from the invention of particular values. Fanon holds focus on how the subjective experience of transformation can be carried into the objective world and back again. From within the tripartite structure of erotic humanism, the mediation of the skin,
are reduced to mere autobiographical fact rather than theoretical reflections on the impossibility (or undesirability) of presenting one’s authentic self to an antiblack culture. Thus, “[b]lack art is less about distinguishing the real from the unreal than it is about the precariousness of representing the real in and through representation” (Snorton 2017, 113). In a reading of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Snorton understands the use of a pseudonym and fabrication of a “real” identity as an attempt to reflect on the conditions of possibility for any “true” autobiography of a blackened subject. In other words, the violence of abstraction had yet to be dissolved in the face of the concrete. I will deal with this problem of the “racial real” in the next section. 4 Paget Henry has an excellent analysis of Fanon’s critique of négritude as failing the “ontological test” of transforming the “real,” the objective situation (1996, 238-239). 14 and value of invention the reader must constantly reorder how they understand the co-implications of “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality” for blackened subjects.
The connections between erotics, skin, and “History” in Peau noire are made manifest at the beginning of the chapter “The Man of Color and the White Woman.” Here Fanon describes a folkloric anecdote wherein “a black man [un Noir] of the darkest of hues” cries out “‘Long live
Schœlcher!’” while sleeping with a white woman (2011/2008, 111/45). Victor Schœlcher, a 19th century French abolitionist, represents how the “History” of slavery continues to interdict authentic and concrete erotic relations. Even when the blackened subject is at their most intimate, with their skin laid bare for the touch of the other, “History” intervenes. Skin, touch, and contact are historically meditated for Fanon. Thus, he is not really concerned with the actual act of sex, but how the supposedly private and intimate actions of the subject remain caught within the colonial system. Fanon demonstrates that the Black and male “ego” or subjectivity is already vitiated by colonial “History” and feels this “History” upon his very skin. Two subjects, or corps à corps as
Fanon will say in “Racism and Culture” (2011/1967, 726/43), are always accompanied by a third—
“History.”
Fanon is not interested in whether this anecdote is real (2011/2008, 111/45) because then the conversation would turn on the individual pathology of the subject rather than the flaw in the world. Focusing on the individual in the anecdote offers an abstract and incomplete picture of how subjectivity is formed. Fanon’s project attempts to touch the concrete source of this erotic problematic. So, he claims, “the fact that [the anecdote] has taken shape and survived through the years is an unmistakable indication that it addresses a tension, explicit or latent, but real. Its persistence underscores the fact that the black world subscribes to it. In other words, when a story survives in folklore, it expresses in some way a region of the ‘local soul’” (2011/2008, 111/45-46;
15 emphasis mine).5 Fanon sets out to show how blackened skin reveals the erotic formation of what is “real” by colonial “History.” No authentic dialectic of recognition is possible so long as it is mediated by the antiblackness of colonial “History.” If “real” enjoyment is only possible by passing through white (male) skin then that can only mean that the blackened subject is “unreal.”
Within an historical culture saturated by “negrophobia”6 the desire for recognition is premised on the desire “to be recognized not as Black, but as White” (Fanon 2011/2008, 111/45).
In other words, authentic recognition becomes impossible for blackened skin. Fanon acknowledges that Hegel never described this “racial” problematic of recognition, but to reduce Fanon’s critique to the issue of race misses what Fanon reveals about colonial “gender” and “sexuality” (Fanon
2011/2008, 111/45). If Fanon turns to the white woman [la Blanche] vis-à-vis the man of color it is not to argue that heterosexual love is the route to authentic recognition. Instead he subverts the idea that heterosexuality is “normal” and deracialized by noting that the blackened subject is
5 While this is not the place to address the question one must wonder how much of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1969) influenced Fanon’s reflections in Peau noire. It is in that text that Freud makes his well-known psychoanalytic distinction between manifest content (what the dreamer says happens in the dream) and latent content (the meaning that is distorted or covered over by the manifest content). Freud calls for listening for the parapraxis (l’acte manqué), the inconsistencies in the patient’s speech while recognizing that the analyst must understand the relation between the manifest content and the latent content. Thus, Fanon here is trying to get us to read between the lines rather than make the easy choice of cutting the tension of this folklore by choosing either its manifest content or latent content. This connection is further supported by Fanon’s earlier claim that if Peau noire “[c]annot be opened up on a philosophical level—i.e., the fundamental demands of human reality—I agree to place it on a psychoanalytical level: in other words, the ‘misfires [ratés],’ just as we talk about an engine misfiring” (2011/2008, 75/6-7). The emphasis on failure or what is missing is exactly what Freud argues is the key to interpret. I will deal more explicitly with this mode of writing/reading in the third chapter on Spillers. There we will see how Spillers (along with Barthes) mobilize this analysis of tension and failure in their critique and construction of mythology. 6 Almost all of chapter 6 of Peau noire (“The Black Man [nègre] and Psychopathology”) is about unveiling how the colonial system constructs a negrophobic reality. A close reading of the chapter would show how Fanon theorizes the erotic mediation between the human and temporality/“History”. 16
“loved like a white man” (Fanon 2011/2008, 111/45). The compulsory heterosexuality of the colonial system does not only attempt to determine the proper race and gender of the object of desire, but also the proper race and gender of the subject. Heterosexuality, far from being a
“natural” disposition of “man,” is historically constituted as (white) heterosexuality. Thus, antiblackness throws into crisis any humanism that takes “gender” and “sexuality” as an ahistorical substratum of the subject.
Fanon did not believe gender and sexuality were ahistorical. But the discovery of how colonial “History” supervenes upon the “real” and mystifies the concrete subject leaves open a difficult question: who, exactly, is this subject buried beneath blackened skin? If there is not a
“man” or “woman” since these are abstraction of (white) men and (white) women how are we to understand the “real” subject given our current modes of philosophical understanding? I argue this inflects the necessary connection between dépouillement and the value of invention that continually arises from the opacity of blackened skin. For this reason, we must read Fanon’s infamous “zone of nonbeing” which is “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare [dépouillée] of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge [un authentique surgissement peut prendre naissance]” (2011/2008, 64/xii) as intimately connected to the position of blackened skin rather than a simple transposition of Sartrean negation [néant]. The possibility of an authentic birth is, for the blackened subject, inventing a new human reality. Before detailing Fanon’s relationship to “gender” and “sexuality” we must address the subtle difference between Sartre’s humanism—from whom Fanon learned a great deal—and Fanon’s humanism.
The difference will turn on what I will call, following C. Riley Snorton, the “racial real” (cf.
Snorton 2017) and the failure of humanism. For Sartre, this failure has a teleology of a classless
17 society. For Fanon, it is only through this failure that the a-teleology of invention can take place.7
The value of invention sustains the praxis of erotic humanism and does not determine where praxis will go. It is simply the condition of possibility for praxis.
Fanon, Sartre, and the Problem of the Racial Real and Humanism
In what follows, I will demonstrate that Fanon’s value of invention must be situated at the level of the concrete. Rather than abstract description we must work to remind ourselves of the praxis of existence with the world. The risk of relation is at the forefront of Fanon’s concerns in
Peau noire. When this risk is elided the value of invention is lost and converted into discussions about Fanon’s individual character or whether his invented values are anything new. But the conclusion of Peau noire ties the value of invention to erotic relationality: “Why not simply try to touch the other, feel [sentir] the other, discover each other?...At the end of this book we would like
[aimerions] the reader to feel [sentir] with us the open dimension of every consciousness” (Fanon
2011/2008, 251/206).8 The repetition of the verb sentir is not an emphasis on feeling as intuition, but feeling as physical sensation. Reason, rather than being sealed up inside the individual subject, affects and is affected by the passions of feeling and loving. Reason and passion, for Fanon, are
7 “I need to lose myself in my negritude and see the ashes, the segregation, the repression, the rapes, the discrimination, and the boycotts. We need to touch with our finger all the wounds that score our black livery” (Fanon 2011/2008, 213/164). I will return to this important claim wherein Fanon links skin, “History,” and the erotics of violence in the section on Algeria, gender, and the veil. 8 Philcox’s translation misses the use of the verb aimer, to love, in the last sentence. It should be recalled that Fanon’s extension of love [aimer] to the reader is almost a word for word repetition of the climax in chapter five “The Lived Experience of the Black”: “But we have forgotten my constancy in love. I define myself as absolutely and sustainedly open-minded” (Fanon 2011/2008, 175/117; emphasis added). Again the translation of this second sentence eclipses the resonance. In French, Fanon writes, “Je me définis comme tension absolue d’ouverture” (Fanon 2011, 175; emphasis added). Without these reminders of how Fanon repeats himself throughout the text his method is lost and the concrete erotics will be left to the wayside.
18 entered into a complex relation at the level of the concrete. It is necessary to not forget the aim of these erotic relations: freedom. “It is through self-consciousness and renunciation [de dépouillement],” Fanon writes, “through a permanent tension of his [leur] freedom that man [les hommes] can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world” (2011/2008, 251/206).
This erotic freedom is the creation of a human world, a humanism. Fanon’s use of the plural subject emphasizes the relationality of his humanism. While de dépouillement is a reference to the
“Introduction” wherein Fanon responds to French humanism with the claim that, “I’m bombarded from all sides with hundreds of lines that try to foist themselves on me. A single line, however, would be enough. All it needs is one simple answer and the black question would lose all relevance
[se dépouille]” (Fanon 2011/2008, 63/xii). Dépouillement is closer to the removing of one’s skin rather than renunciation or loss of relevance. The value of invention, for Fanon, is in service of an erotic humanism. This would be a humanism that is equally liberatory and dangerous, excessive and controversial, but it is a risk, Fanon argues in this early text, that blackened subjects must assume in the face of abstraction.
The centrality of risk in Fanon’s account can be found near the end of Peau noire when he writes after an examination of Hegel, desire, and recognition, “Only conflict and the risk it implies can, therefore, make human reality, in-itself-for-itself [en-soi-pour-soi], come true. This risk implies that I go beyond life [je dépasse la vie] toward an ideal which is the transformation of subjective certainty of my own worth [ma propre valeur] into a universally valid objective truth”
(2011/2008, 239/193). The dialectical surpassing [dépassement] of life can only be accomplished when subjects are willing to shed the comfort of life in favor of bringing a new value into human
19 reality—existence.9 What lies beyond life when one has only known living? Fanon cannot answer this question. Indeed, this is the point he is trying to impress upon the reader. One’s “proper value” is not encased in one’s given or imposed life. The conflict between imposed life and the subjective certainty that one is not this imposition is the impetus to risk transforming reality. So when Fanon writes that this transformation proceeds from his “propre valeur” he is saying that his value is the movement of transformation and dépassement rather than a particular value such as, for example, the supposed hypervirility and hypermasculinity of Black males.
Fanon demands that the subject be recognized “on the basis of [her] desire [Désir]” which is a constant negating activity (2011/2008, 239/193). This activity is in the service of pursuing
“something other than life, insofar as [she is] fighting for the birth of a human world” (Fanon
2011/2008, 239/193). Humanism reappears in Fanon’s text at this critical juncture. But what, exactly, this humanism means in Peau noire is unclear. It seems as if Fanon simply adopts Hegel’s theory of recognition and Sartre’s abstract description of consciousness from Being and
Nothingness. The use of en-soi-pour-soi follows Sartre’s argument that human consciousness and reality is constituted by the dialectical movement between being what it is not and not being what it is. The subject is the constant failure [raté] to coincide with oneself, the restless movement of negation and insatiable desire. In other words, the subject is never absolutely trapped by what it happens to be at the moment. Thus, the “world of reciprocal recognitions” (Fanon 2011/2008,
9 This passage proposes a challenge to Matthieu Renault’s vitalist interpretation of Fanon in Frantz Fanon: De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (2011) where he argues that Fanon’s politics are based on the presupposition that life must continually expand and any frustrations of this expansion must be removed. This leads Renault to charge Fanon with sexism vis-à-vis women of color because he assumes Fanon reads femininity as passivity and, thus, antithetical to political projects and agency. But Fanon clearly does not value life in itself. This is why he reminds himself to introduce invention into l’exister and not la vie in the conclusion. The binary of activity/passivity must also be surpassed. 20
239/193) would seem to be a situation wherein everyone simply recognizes the free movement of everyone else’s desire.
This is an abstraction, albeit a necessary one. By calling for a universal human world wherein desire is simply recognized assumes that there can be human desire that is freed from the impositions of facticity and “History.” Fanon follows Sartre’s methodological principle that before one can comprehend the dynamism of the concrete, the philosopher must begin in an abstraction and then see how these abstractions breakdown.10 The abstract allows an apprehension of concrete existence since immediate access to reality, Fanon shows, is made impossible by the colonial situation. Fanon’s first discussion of Hegel and desire occurs much earlier in the text when he describes the man of color mediating his desire for a white woman through the historical figure of
Victor Schœlcher (2011/2008, 111/45). The full meaning of this passage only becomes clear in the final chapter of Peau noire. The abstract description of the movement of desire obscures how desire is mediated through “History,” culture, and power. Attempts to recognize what the blackened subject really wants—the racial real—forgets that reality has been imposed upon and within the very life of the racialized subject. There is no safeguarding the claim that desire is “real.”
Thus, Sartre is right to begin Anti-Semite and Jew with a critique of abstract humanism that
“fails to see the particular case” and defends “the Jew[…]as man and annihilates him as Jew”
(1960, 56), but errs when he presumes to know how to move to concrete liberation and recognition.
This is most evident in Sartre’s treatment of negritude in Black Orpheus wherein after critiquing
Western humanism and its attendant colonial violence he avers, “the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of negritude ‘passes’ [passe], as Hegel says, into the objective, positive and precise, notion
10 Each chapter of Peau noire actually begins with a seemingly universal and abstract declaration and then investigates how the colonial situation fails to measure up to presupposed abstraction. 21 of the proletariat[…]Negritude appears as the minor moment of a dialectical progression[…]it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization [réalisation] of the human in a classless society. [It] is for destroying itself” (2001, 137). The Black cultural production of Negritude passes—or, more precisely, is surpassed [dépasse]—into the universal realization of a classless humanity. For Sartre, réalisation is connected to the changing of reality according to an existential or political project.
Thus, the “human in a classless society” is not a preexisting fact, but a project to be achieved in the future by surpassing the current facticity of the situation. The problem is that Sartre’s humanism in Black Orpheus must assume that he knows Negritude is the expression of a “racial real” whose project has already been achieved. From this epistemic assumption, Sartre takes the further step of schematizing how “History” must necessarily progress. In his attempt to move from the abstract to a concrete humanism Sartre errs by positioning himself as the knower and the blackened as the objectified known. There remains one destiny: Sartre.
The felt pain of this knowledge for Fanon is not that he believes Sartre is wrong, but that even while being right Fanon “needed not to know” (2011/2008, 172/114).11 Sartre’s humanism converted the existential value of invention into the mere invention of values to be historically surpassed. All opacity is lost and praxis becomes the resolution of a prefabricated “History.”
“Black Orpheus marks a date,” Fanon writes, “in the intellectualization of black existence
[l’exister]” (2011/2008, 171/113). Fanon returns to the thematic of time and temporality when he notes that Sartre’s publication “marks a date.” The felt pain of Sartre’s writing is the feeling of
11 Sonia Kruks argues that the early Sartre and Fanon fall prey to a “schematic rationalism” (1996, 131) which prevents both thinkers from “analyz[ing] the dynamics that mediate between particular existential experiences and more general historical processes” (1996, 132). I will argue that this problem of mediation is being addressed, embryonically, through Fanon’s discourse on skin. Kruks reads the Conclusion to Peau noire as a series of abstract, universalist declarations. I intend to demonstrate below why this is not the case. 22 having “History” imposed from without and losing the opacity of the unforeseeable within. Fanon never meant to give a “racial real” because this would amount to nothing less than taking Sartre’s place as the knower who strips away the enthusiasm of the known. Thus, Fanon will say, “the black [nègre] experience is ambiguous, for there is not one Negro [nègre]—there are many black men [nègres]” (2011/2008, 173/115). A concrete humanism that would revolutionize the colonial system must be felt and existed in its own time rather than schematically and teleologically laid out. Fanon’s critique is not leveled at the content of humanism, but its temporality. In Peau noire,
Fanon understands the epistemological violence of European humanism to consist in continuing to be mediated by colonial (white) desire and colonial (white) time. The blackened are not able to feel themselves carrying their value of invention into the objective world.
Humanism is no stranger to critique. And we need not go to Frantz Fanon to find critiques of humanism as Janus-faced, provincial, and, when mobilized politically, violent.12 At a moment when (European) humanism may appear to be thoroughly discredited as a viable political philosophy to address the continuing racial stratification of the earth, one could reasonably ask whither the new “genre” of being human? What has prevented this transvaluaton from taking place? Fanon, as I have argued in this section, provides an answer. It is not that humanism has not engaged in transvaluation and invention in a constant dialectic from the abstract to the concrete.
As early as the Renaissance, the epistemological endeavor of humanitas was already a transvaluative pursuit of human knowledge supposedly freed from the presupposition of a divine,
12 As early as 1950 Carl Schmitt wrote of “humanism” in The Nomos of the Earth concerning the treatment of indigenous populations under colonialism: “By no means is it paradoxical that none other than humanists and humanitarians put forward such inhuman arguments, because the idea of humanity is two-sided and often lends itself to a surprising dialectic” (2003, 103). 23 transcendent God (Osamu 2006, 264).13 It is that only one side—Europe—was able to feel the value of invention, the freedom of the unforeseeable. This freedom was, belatedly, allowed to flow down to the blackened Martinicans who were “Historically[…]set free by the master [and] did not fight for [their] freedom” (Fanon 2011/2008, 240/194). Humanism did not transvalue the world; it was the blackened Martinicans who found themselves transvalued. Thus, to say that “humanism” is no stranger to critique is to remember humanism was a critique of enslavement. It was a discourse that, albeit nominally rather than structurally, transvalued chattel slavery in the West.
The challenge of Fanon’s humanism is not to make European humanism dynamic—it already has been. It is to introduce a new dynamism.
The sudden intrusion of “History” into Fanon’s abstract account of the relationship between conflict and risk and the creation of a human world makes clear how Fanon can agree with the abstract descriptions of Sartre and Hegel, but take issue with how they mediate the move to the concrete. Fanon’s reproaches to Sartre often take the form of reminders or accusations that
Sartre forgets.14 In other words, he worries about their schematic anthropology that positions
Europe as the knowers—humanitas—and the blackened as the objects who are known—
13 “Man” was no longer imago Dei—crafted in the image of God. The effect of this separation was to make the “humanism” of Man a search for his essence that did not presuppose what that essence would be. To critique humanism for presupposing that Man was white, European, male misunderstands its genealogy. Humanism endeavored to make Man free by freeing the knowing subject from the essentialism of theology and the determination of any stable substance. This thematic of “Man” will be addressed in the following chapter on Sylvia Wynter and her poetic phenomenology. 14 “For once this friend [Sartre], this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness” (Fanon 2011/2008, 171/112; emphasis mine) and “Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man [nègre] suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Fanon 2011/2008, 174-175/117). It is clear that this tension between what Sartre (and “the West,” generally) forgets and what Fanon must “constantly remind” (2011/2008, 250/204) is one of the central problems in Peau noire. This problematic of memory and forgetting reaches its most concrete manifestation in Fanon’s last work on revolution in Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth). 24 anthropos. Fanon provides a “critical fabulation”15 of the “History” of this mediation from anthropos to humanitas when he writes, “So the white masters grudgingly decided to raise the animal-machine man [hommes-machines-bêtes] to the supreme rank of man [d’hommes], although it wasn’t easy” (2011/2008, 240/194). The equation of the blackened slaves to the status of animality and objecthood maps onto an epistemological split between the subject with the freedom to know and impose value onto other objects in the world. Without reciprocity, the freedom of humanism becomes historically racialized as the freedom to become white which is impossible since “whiteness” qua freedom is a project to be achieved in the future and “blackness” is the racial real to be surpassed. The paradox is that those with blackened skin no longer engage in conflict with the world, but with their very body. If white skin has become the erotic mediation between humanity and “History,” how can the blackened ever succeed? What can a humanism premised on this “racial real” of blackness achieve? Fanon notes with despair, “[w]ithout a black [nègre] past, without a black [nègre] future, it was impossible for me to live [d’exister] my blackness [nègrerie].
Not yet white, no longer completely black [noir], I was damned” (2011/2008, 174/117).
It may be critiqued that the “critical fabulation” Fanon engages is simply not “factual.”
“History” did not actually play out in this way. Fanon eschews historical research or genealogical critique of the Nietzschean (or Foucauldian) vein because he wants the reader to feel how “History” is lived and existed. He has already claimed that an anecdote does not have to be actual for it to be real (Fanon 2011/2008, 111/45-46). Collecting facts does not change the force of reality when the situation is structured through economic and racial violence. This is the source of Fanon’s controversial critique of the project of unearthing a “pure” Bantu philosophy untainted by Western modes of thought: it does not change “the ontological relations of ‘force’” (2011/2008, 212/162-
15 Cf. Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). 25
163). In other words, “a genuine culture cannot be born under present conditions” (Fanon
2011/2008, 213/164). The immense task is not to abstractly know a different “History,” but to introduce a new “History” into existence. L’Histoire, for Fanon, is not the composition of authentic historical facts, but the Western project of knowledge production and memory fabrication. Thus,
Fanon worries about the constant struggle for “a white liberty and a white justice” from “[the] former slave, who has no memory of the struggle for freedom or that anguish of liberty of which
Kierkegaard speaks” (2011/2008, 241/195-196). The myth of a “racial real” must continually be exploded in the name of the value of invention. If Fanon did not give up on “humanism” it is because he continued searching for an erotic humanism. But, as we will see, this erotic humanism, even in this early text, already contained an embryonic engagement with violence as the possibility for changing the present conditions. In the following section, I will detail Fanon’s search for this erotic humanism rather than his critique of Western humanism. This will allow for a more concrete understanding of the relationship between the invention of “gender” and “sexuality” through violence.
Fanon and the Search for Humanism
Fanon is in search of a humanism, to quote Césaire, “made to the measure of the world”
(Césaire 1972, 56). Everything turns on whether Fanon’s humanism sustains or revolutionizes the present conditions of the colonial system. Or to put it in my terms we must investigate whether
Fanon’s humanism repeats the epistemological division between humanitas and anthropos or if he introduces “invention into life [l’existence]” (2011/2008, 250/204) with the aim of overcoming the division within the Manichean existence of the coloniality. How does one get from the abstract to the concrete? There are no readymade forms; the world of human subjectivity remains to be
26 constructed. Richard Pithouse argues persuasively that we must take Fanon’s humanism seriously.
Pithouse errs not in his conclusion, but his interpretation of how Fanon theorizes a new humanity.
By interpreting Fanon as unambivalently claiming to write a “new humanism” in the Introduction of Peau noire (2003, 108). Pithouse mistakes, I will demonstrate, Fanon’s ironic denial of this
French humanist discourse for unequivocal affirmation. Understanding Fanon’s search for a new humanism and the concomitant importance of “gender” requires, as I showed in the previous section, grasping the concreteness of his method rather than leaping to an abstract conclusion.
Fanon occupies multiple voices in the opening pages of Peau noire through the enunciations of the slogans: “Striving for a New Humanism…Understanding Mankind
[hommes]…Our Black Brothers [frères de couleur]…I believe in you, Man [Homme]…Racial
Prejudice…Understanding and Loving” (2011/2008, 63/xi). It is important not to be misled into thinking Fanon is speaking uncritically in his own voice here since he follows these humanist declarations with “I’m bombarded from all sides with hundreds of lines that try to foist themselves on me” (2011/2008, 63/xii). Much criticism of Fanon has too quickly translated his voice into the very paradigms he means to critique thus enclosing his thought back under a Manichean epistemology such as Sartre’s Black Orpheus. This would appear to be the case when Fanon responds to the slogans with the claim that a “single line” with a “simple answer” would allow the black problem to be shed. That line would be “What does man [l’homme] want?” but Fanon immediately diffracts this question by following it with “What does the black man [l’homme noir] want?” The cutting and splitting of Fanon’s voice does not stop until he proffers, “Running the risk of angering my black brothers [frères de couleur], I shall say that a Black [le Noir] is not a man [homme]” (2011/2008, 63/xii). Fanon, in the space of a few lines, reverses the identificatory terms of solidarity in order to claim that one cannot translate the Black problem into the preexisting
27 humanist paradigm. The Black man does not have access to the particularist starting point of
“gender” which would allow the movement into the universal genre of the human white world.
Fanon introduces gender into the question of humanism, not to disavow it, but to show that the construction of “man” has been racialized to exclude Black men and women. An invention of humanism that does not invent from the concrete lived experience of the racialized and gendered body would remain another abstraction and, thus, a repetition of Europe’s humanist errors. So, to read these lines as concerned with the nostalgia of speaking like a readymade model of a gendered man is to miss the reversal Fanon is performing on Freud and his discourse on feminine sexuality.
Freud wrote to Marie Bonaparte that, “The great question that has never been answered and which
I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is
‘What does a woman want’” (1953, 2: 421). Freud, elsewhere, describes feminine sexuality as the
“‘dark continent’ for psychology” (Freud 1959, 20: 212). Fanon installs “the Black problem” within the historically racialized/gendered discourse of sexuality which constructs black desire as outside the purview of humanity while also constructing it as the exemplary metaphor for anthropological questioning and discovery. The “dark continent” is a metaphor with dangerous effects. but the historical representation of European knowers (humanitas) and the indigenous/Black known (anthropos). This is how we can understand Fanon’s controversial claim that “there is but one destiny for the black man [le Noir]. And it is white [blanc]” (2011/2008,
66/xiv). According to European humanism, desire can only be known as white desire while black desire is either “abnormal” in its rejection of whiteness or “normal” in its striving to have whiteness. The question “what does the black man want?” (2011/2008, 63/xii) does not collapse gender and sexuality, but shows how one is connected to the other. Gender, in abstraction, is thought to articulate the subject’s “proper” objects of desire. The Black man’s only “proper” object
28 of desire is whiteness which will allow him to be a human “man” rather than a mere anthropic
“male.”
Crucially, Fanon never supplies the “authentic” desire of Black subjects in Peau noire. To do so would only be a reifying abstraction. Hasty readings of the second and third chapter concerning the woman of color and man of color vis-à-vis the white man and white woman, respectively, have read Fanon as offering a general type of Black woman and Black man.16 Instead he wants to show how abstractions of the sexual desire of Black women and men are constructed as the desire for “white flesh” (2011/2008, 124/62). At the end of chapter three, Fanon offers a retroactive assessment of what he has been doing with his exemplary irony: “Just as there was an attempt at mystification by inferring from[…]Mayotte Capécia’s behavior that there was a general law governing the behavior of the black woman toward the white male, so, we claim, there would be a lack objectivity in extending Veneuse’s attitude to the man of color in general” (2011/2008,
124/62). Why not tell the reader this at the beginning? Why give the impression that he was giving general laws of desire which adhere to the genders of Black women and men? Quite simply, because French culture does this while claiming to express a universal humanity. Fanon’s dialectic
16 The most cited example of this is Bergner (1995) wherein she makes the dual mistake of reading Fanon as a faithful adherent to the abstract discourse of European/Freudian psychoanalysis and assumes that Capécia is the Black woman for Fanon (85). This reading, in the reverse of Pithouse (2003), gets the method right and the conclusion wrong. She mistakes Fanon’s working through the coercive abstractions of Black gender and sexuality for his acceptance of these abstractions. Fanon is explicit about this, and Sharpley-Whiting comes to the same conclusion (1998), when he gives his reasoning for writing on Capécia: “The enthusiastic reception the book received in certain circles obliges [devoir] us to analyze it” (2011/2008, 92/25). The “certain circles” are the Grandprix littéraire des Antilles which was one of the highest awards for literature in France and whose committee was staffed solely by French white men. Fanon is concerned about how the desire of white men is translated as the desire all Black women ought to have. If not for this prestigious award Fanon would not have felt it was his duty to investigate the autobiography. One must always remember that Fanon’s thought attempts to work through abstraction in order to get to the concrete. 29 shadows French culture in order to work through its abstractions and open the way for the concrete:
“The sexual myth—the obsession with white flesh—conveyed by alienated minds must no longer be an obstacle to understanding the question” (2011/2008, 124/62). That question remains: what does the Black man want?
One of Fanon’s strategies in his search for humanism is to dramatize how colonialism and slavery have constructed an incomplete reality wherein the Black is always already standing in the shadow of the white world. Thus, in the concrete colonial situation, for the Black subject to be asked for his/her inner desire is to always risk speaking within the closure of European humanism which can only recognize desire as a movement towards whiteness and its “proper” gender. In this way we can understand Fanon’s reproach to Sartre in “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” that “the black man [nègre] suffers in his body quite differently from the white man [le Blanc]” which is followed by the stammering declaration: “I am a nigger [Je suis un nègre]” (2011/2008,
175/117). Fanon’s juxtaposition of nègre with le Blanc demonstrates how the concrete experience of being formed by this epithet subverts the abstract universality of the white man.17 Locked within, yet excluded from, white human reality, Fanon’s stammer works to bring “invention into
[l’exister]” (2011/2008, 250/204) by reminding himself that he is neither the abstraction of the white man nor the abstraction of the black man who desires what the white man desires, but must be something else. From the pain of the nègre a new search for the human is possible because the
17 His juxtaposition of nègre and le Blanc happens again in the “Conclusion” in Fanon’s enigmatic claim: “Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le Blanc” (2011, 251). This has been translated as “The black man is not. No more than the white man” (2008, 206). In the section entitled “‘Man’ and the Circle of Invention” we will ask two, as yet unanswered questions, about this line. First, why does Fanon write nègre instead of Noir? Second, concerning gender, is “black man” really equal to the epithet nègre? The importance of sexuality and erotics between bodies will be read through the abjecting epithet of nègre as the mediation which brings about a new dynamic of human reality. 30 pain of abjection as a “nigger” (which one should never be) reveals that the universal is a mask for white desire and its gendering of humanity.
Reality is unmasked by Fanon as the barrier preventing a true knowledge of Black desire and sexuality. An “in-depth study” of a psychoanalytic interpretation of “the black man’s lived experience [l’expérience vécue du Noir]” and of “the black myth [mythe nègre],” Fanon writes in the sixth chapter “The Black Man and Psychopathology,” are necessary because “We have gradually come to the conclusion that there is a dialectical substitution when we switch from the psychology of the white man to that of the black man…But reality [réel], which is our sole recourse, prevents us from doing so” (2011/2008, 186/129). If reality, what is real, can prevent an understanding of the movement of subjective blackened consciousness into a new objective world it is only because reality has been constructed around the myth of the nègre. The inhumanity of the nègre leaves the only human psychology and understanding of reality as the purview of the abstract white man. The insight, to repeat, is that reality is a generalized abstraction and, thus, cannot be the measure of the concrete dynamism of the world. This is the lesson we must draw from the explicitly phenomenological chapter five as we move into the psychoanalytic chapter six.
Reality is incomplete and must constructed anew. Our understanding of reality cannot simply accept the reified and culturally specific understanding of what it means to be a “man” and desire as a “man.”18
18 Greg Thomas homes in on this aspect of Fanon as it concerns his comments on homosexuality: “The standard, static opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality is once again a problem. Like heterosexuality, and all sexual neurosis in the West, homosexuality is a culturally specific rather than natural, universal phenomenon. And, like heterosexuality and neurosis, it can only be universalized through imperialism. It is important, then, not to erase the presence of same- sex Black eroticism and its insistent defense in Black Skin, White Masks” (2007, 87).
31
But does Fanon end up implicating himself in this gendered problematic of knowledge construction when he pronounces, in “The Black Man [nègre] and Psychopathology,” that, as it concerns Black women’s sexuality, “We know nothing about her” (2011/2008, 207/157). It is this infamous sentence (in English) which has led scholars to conclude that Fanon silences the “truth” of Black women and casts her into the dark continent of the masculinist “we.” For instance, Diana
Fuss, using Charles Lam Markmann’s translation of this line as “I know nothing about her,” claims,
“What is missing…is any serious discussion of black women’s subjectivity under colonial rule”
(1994, 32). In “Race and Psychoanalysis,” however, Hortense Spillers claims that this line mirrors too closely Freud’s own infamous pronouncement on female sexuality in a letter to Marie
Bonaparte that this can be nothing other than another example of Fanonian irony (2003, 390).
Fanon, a few pages prior to this statement, states, “Cataloguing reality [réel] is a colossal task. We accumulate facts; we comment on them; but with every line we write, with every proposal we set forth, we get the feeling of something unfinished [d’inachèvement]” (2011/2008, 202/149). Rather than reading Fanon’s gendered claim as “We know nothing about her” it would be more appropriate to interpret the line as “We know nothing of it.” The “it” would refer to the general abstraction of Black female sexuality instead of her concrete existence which cannot be captured in European psychoanalytic discourse.
What is left unfinished is nothing less than the “truth” of the Black man and woman. Fanon does not claim that Black women do not exist. Instead he is constantly reminding the reader how the reality of Black sexuality has been constructed as irreality. Fanon’s insertion of incompleteness into his text elaborates the notion of the Black man and woman as shadows according to a certain historical archive of humanity and desire. For this reason, Fanon writes near the beginning of the chapter that “Much has been said about psychoanalysis and the black man [nègre]. Wary of how
32 it can be applied [he is referencing the movie Je suis un nègre] we preferred to call this chapter
‘The Black Man [nègre] and Psychopathology,’ seeing that neither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the black man [aux Noirs] into consideration in the course of his research”
(2011/2008, 187/130). We are returned to the epistemological split between who has the power to know humanity and who will be absorbed by this knowledge. What is the reality of gender and sexuality for the Black man and woman? Already the question is ill-formed. And if one reads Peau noire as an attempt to answer this question they will miss that the entire text is a critique of the idea that there is the Black man or woman. This would mean that our abstraction of the genders of
“man” and “woman” and the sexuality which seems to go along with these genders must be worked through. They are epistemologically incomplete representations of reality.
Fanon’s search for humanism is the dialectical search for the value of invention of the concrete through abstraction. But this invention, itself, cannot be any mere abstraction. It must be worked through as concrete. This means that we cannot read Fanon without reading him as questioning the abstractions of gender and sexuality as they are impressed upon his body. Nègre is the point of articulation that allows Fanon to reach for invention because it is evidence of how reality is constructed around what is irrealized.19 The opacity of discovering, retroactively, that one is a nègre informs Fanon’s response that “[n]aturally I don’t know it, because I am one. At home my mother sings [to] me, in French, French love songs where there is never a mention of black people. Whenever I am naughty or when I make too much noise, I am told to ‘stop acting
19 David Marriott, in his exceptional essay “Whither Fanon?”, connects Fanon’s reflections on this shadowing of the Black to Sartre’s L’Être et le néant (2011, 46; footnote 16 on 66) and then continues: “Fanon identifies in the colonial subject a void-like nothingness-of-being which is also linked to the problem of self-deception [mauvaise foi] in Sartre (a link that will allow him to develop thoughts on how the black subject is always belated and dispersed; who is irrealized and yet forever haunted by its non-appearance, and who can only acquire a certain density of being by taking on the tragic neurotic role (of an imaginary whiteness)…” (2011, 46; emphasis in text).
33 like a nigger [faire le nègre]’” (2011/2008, 216/168). The nègre is a construction and fabrication of abjection which shadows the Black, it is quite literally unreal. Without this feeling of irreality it would not be possible to apprehend the constructed split in human reality and, thus, invent through it. Fanon’s inventive value is neither volitional not abstract; it must come about through the failures of abstract humanity and the leap (2011/2008, 250/204) these failures precipitate.
The previous two sections have demonstrated how Fanon critiques, yet searches for a humanism “made to the measure of the world” (Césaire 1972, 56). Failure on Fanon’s account cannot be an apprehension of failure that will be resolved in a known future. The failure in and of the world must open the chance to risk the unforeseeable. In this way, gender becomes germane to any account of Fanon’s project because he is challenging and revealing the insidious racial realities that have been woven into the most “natural” categories. Furthermore, by bringing the value of invention to gender rather than only to race, changes what we see Fanon struggling for.
On my account, it is no longer tenable to understand Fanon as attempting to become a “man” like any other (this is his critique of Jean Veneuse). The search for humanism requires the anguish of feeling that we may not even have the language to describe this human. A total revolution of the value of the world is not only possible, but necessary. The following section will focus on a certain aporia of invention within Peau noire: how can Fanon distinguish between the invention of the nègre by the colonial system and the value of invention that sustains revolutionary praxis? I will argue that the mediation of blackened skin and its historicity allows Fanon to avoid this deadlock.
“Man” and the Circle of Invention
In the previous section I argued that we must not dismiss Fanon’s humanism in Peau noire, but we also have to hold his humanism in tension with the value of invention. Disavowing Fanon’s
34 humanism or simply leaping to its conclusion misses the critical work on gender and sexuality that
Fanon inevitably works through. The preceding section still remained at a level of abstract description which only served to set the terms of debate. We must now fill in those terms with one guiding question: is all invention unequivocally an invention of freedom for Fanon? Analytically, there does not seem to be a substantive difference between this act of invention and the invention
Fanon reminds himself that he must introduce. Dialectically, as Fanon understands it, we will see in this section that his invention is an invention against a prior invention—this is what give praxis its concreteness. Praxis is sustained and nourished by the value of invention of the blackened. It is not simply the work of conjoining theory and practice which allows for a chosen project to be realized; the value of invention continues to interrupt any teleology as long as the conditions of colonial racism remain. Thus, the circle of invention Fanon aims to disrupt is a system that has invented Black men and women, along with their sexuality and desires, as myths and irreality.
Fanon’s discovery is that one cannot engage racism without engaging the sexual and erotic dynamics which sustain and give it reality.
“The Black Man [nègre] and Psychopathology” is the longest and most difficult chapter of
Peau noire. Consequently, it is the most misunderstood because Fanon’s retrospective reminders of invention can get lost in his ironic mimicries of European psychoanalysts. The importance of this chapter is Fanon’s insight that the social reality and the field of “Man” is saturated by the
European epistemological project of understanding gender and sexuality. Any understanding of
Fanon’s humanism in this text and beyond must be willing to engage this chapter and the effects his reading has on the discourse of Hegelian recognition. To understand why Fanon would engage in such a risky project as reading sexual desire it is important to recall how Fanon formulates the animating problematic in the “Introduction”: “The black man [Noir] wants to be white. The white
35 man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man [d’homme]. This essay will attempt to understand [compréhension] the Black-White relationship…Our sole concern was to put an end to a vicious cycle [cercle]” (2011/2008. 65/xii-xiv). We should note the imbalance of desire that
Fanon is charting. The black desires whiteness while the white, seemingly unconcerned with the black, desires the transcendence of being a “man.” Rather than disavow the gendered connotation of homme it would appear that universalization of French humanism is coextensive with a masculinist paradigm of self-invention. But this universalized masculinism is never quite achieved for the white man which allows him to remain free of essentialism, while continuing to remain the incomplete project that subjects ought to desire in the future. This freedom from essentialism,
Fanon wants to say, is only possible because it seals the blackened in objecthood. Objecthood can only be escaped, it would appear, by becoming white and no longer being black. Thus, the dialectical compréhension of the relationship is necessary because invention becomes merely the reinvention of a circle that presupposes the values of Europe as the foundational values. To be clear: the freedom which is continually invented here is the freedom to be white, male, European and, thus, human. It is the freedom to become the knower who determines the known as Sartre had in Black Orpheus and, thus, the opacity of the future and the chance for a new dynamic of reciprocity is lost. Here we have a focus on the invention of value within the Manichean colonial situation constructed between the Black and the White. The abstract value of freedom, of desire, becomes reified by the colonial situation. Only in this way can we understand Fanon’s project in
“The Black Man [nègre] and Psychopathology.” Desire must become concrete again.
To reach the concrete, for Fanon, the world must be restructured—economically and psychically (Fanon 2011/2008, 125/63). The bind is that a Manichean economic structure—the expropriation of raw materials and the segregation of the land between colonizer and colonized—
36 such as colonialism reinforces a Manichean psychic structure between the White and the blackened. The one invents the other. This is the importance of the “circle” in Peau noire: how do colonized subjects change the world before changing themselves, how do they change themselves before the world has been changed? Racism, as a cultural phenomenon, does not merely attack bodies; it crafts them.20 Fanon says as much early on in the text: “White civilization and European culture have imposed an existential deviation on the black man [au Noir]. We shall demonstrate furthermore that what is called the black soul is a construction by white folk [Blanc]” (2011/2008,
68/xviii). Thus, the blackened body is constructed according to an “historical-racial schema”
(Fanon 2011/2008, 154/91). Even what is “inside” the Black colonized subject is an invention of
European culture.21 What at first appears to be a generic European psychoanalytic description of
20 In “Racism and Culture,” his 1956 speech the First Congress of Negro Writers, Fanon explains, “It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization[…]The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology” (2011/1967, 723/40). This means that for the blackened to be “normal” is to not be what their bodies have been made to be. It is to strive for the economic power of the colonizers while internalizing the affects and desires of the colonized. 21 It is important to note that this “existential deviation” not only prevents the value of invention, but it also explain how Black colonial subjects choose to oppress other colonial subjects. Fanon in “West Indian and Africans” (1967) (an essay he gestures towards at the very end of his “Introduction” in Peau noire) argues that many Martinicans were convinced that they were not nègres, but French citizens before the Second World War. Thus, they were comfortable inflicting violence on the African colonized for France: “In every West Indian, before the war of 1939, there was not only the superiority over the African, but the certainty of a fundamental difference. The African was a Negro [nègre] and West Indian a European[…]Before 1939 the West Indian who volunteered in the Colonial Army[…]served in the European unit” (2011/1967, 706-707/20). This all changed when the Vichy government occupied Martinique and the colonized subjects realized they were nègres after all (2011/1967, 710/24). Again, “History” and historicity craft the bodies and affects of the colonized. There is not space to give a full reading of this illuminating essay, but it is useful to note that Fanon references Kierkegaard again in two untranslated sentences concerning the difference in the role of irony for the European (to avoid existential anguish) and the Martinican (to avoid the consciousness of Negritude “la prise de conscience de la nègritude”): “La mission consiste à déplacer le problème, à mettre le contingent à sa place et à laisser au Martiniquais le choix des valuers suprêmes. On voit tout ce qu’on pourrait dire en envisageant cette situation à partir des étapes kierkegaardiennes” (2011, 706). Fanon is emphasizing, as I have 37 the split subject between consciousness and the unconscious, in the sixth chapter, becomes Fanon’s first gesture towards the concrete. The chance for breaking the circle is drawn from the fact that this “existential deviation,” for the colonized subject is not unconscious, it is existed. The Black body in White civilization comes to feel [sentir] its irreality. Thus, Fanon claims, “The black man
[nègre] realizes that many of the assertions he had adopted regarding the subjective attitude of the white man are unreal [l’irréalité]. He then begins his real apprenticeship. And reality proves extremely tough[…]at the first white gaze, he feels [resent] the weight of his melanin” (Fanon
2011/2008, 185/128). This feeling of irreality for the nègre is a fundamental concrete experience for Fanon.
Fanon disputes that this is a universal situation. He disagrees with the psychoanalysts who would say that this encounter with reality is “the criterion for masculinity” and how “it adapts to society” (Fanon 2011/2008, 185/128). The invocation of “masculinity” is Fanon’s indication that he will not adopt the European psychoanalytic account of subject formation. Fanon will not accept that the proper psychic development of the colonized subject is to assume the symbolic position of a white man or white woman. Fanon’s desire to restructure the world means that “masculinity” and “femininity” as the colonial reproduction of the family in European society will have to be reinvented. It is important to hold onto this nonuniversal moment in Fanon’s dialectic because if
Fanon does come back to humanism it will not be a humanism which is grounded in an a priori universal. From the start we have an originary disequilibrium or, put another way, a diremption of values.
been arguing, the opacity of the blackened subject and the difficulty in determining whether she or her has actually ascended to the stage of choosing superior values. This problematic follows Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way on the difficulty of discerning one’s movement from the Ethical to the Religious. 38
The discussion of gender in Fanon’s oeuvre can be lost because of how often he does not speak in his own voice, so it is necessary to remind ourselves of the moments when he disavows a “normal” teleological progression of the subject. Fanon does not only argue that there is a too quick dialectical substitution of white male psychology for the black man. He attempts to recover the possibility of invention from this difference in values. “The basic values [valeurs premières],”
Fanon writes, “differ between the white man and the black man. The socializing actions do not refer to the same intentions. We are in completely different worlds” (Fanon 2011/2008, 186/129).
Now none of this necessitates becoming “actional” (Fanon 2011/2008, 243/197). The Black colonized subject may choose to desire whiteness and, thus, attempt to wear the mask of a “white man” or “white woman.” Fanon says so explicitly: “So what are we getting at? Quite simply that when Blacks [nègres] make contact with the white world a certain sensitizing action takes place.
If the psychic structure is fragile, we observe a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. His actions are destined for ‘the Other’ (in the guise of the white man), since only ‘the Other’ can enhance his status and give him self-esteem at the ethical level” (2011/2008,
132/189). The blackened body, affectively and psychically undergoing the racial imposition of the white world, not only destines his action for the white man, but attempts to do so as if he were a white man. This is so because under colonialism (and slavery) authentic recognition, despite what some may try to say following the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, is circulated amongst the colonizers and not the colonized.
Fanon expresses this problematic through his sardonic formulation of how slavery came to an end on French soil: “The black man [nègre] is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude[…]The white man is a master who allowed his slaves to eat at his table[…]One day, a good white master, said to his friends: ‘Let’s be kind to the niggers [les nègres]’” (2011/2008,
39
240/194; emphasis mine). To repeat, as with the anecdote of the man of color crying out to Vincent
Schœlcher while sleeping with a white woman, it is not important to Fanon that this is a reductive account of what actually happened. He is arguing that the colonial system imposes this “History”
(l’Histoire) onto the present via state violence, economic violence, circulation of cultural texts such as novels and movies, and psychoanalytic and educational institutions which promote the ideological truth that to be a “normal” subject is to be a white, heterosexual, gendered subject. “In the Antilles,” Fanon explains, “the black schoolboy who is constantly asked to recite ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ identifies himself with the explorer, the civilizing colonizer, the white man who brings truth to the savages, a lily-white truth. The identification process means that the black child subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude” (2011/2008, 184/127). Fanon’s claim here about recognition is actually different than what I have argued above in reference to how the blackened
Martinican has not risked their life for new values. Fanon is actually indicating that there is not
“the” Master (or “the” White), but masters. These masters recognize one another and decide what they will do with the world and their objects. A certain solidarity exists between the colonizers as they struggle amongst one another for recognition as a master or colonizer. Thus, the lesson that can be internalized by the blackened is that to be recognized one must become the colonizer.
Fanon attempts to present an alternate path which follows this feeling of alienation in one’s blackened body and comprehends what this feeling reveals about European society and gender construction. Fanon spends pages elaborating on how white desire circulates through the overdetermined Black body (2011/2008, 189/133). Fanon claims that “negrophobia” decisively leads towards all sorts of phantasmatic inventions of the blackened body. Within the colonial situation, the erotic engagements of French men and women often become configured through antiblack violence: both corporeal and psychic. It is important to understand the sixth chapter not
40 as a postulation of the psychic structure of all individual white men and women, but an attempt to comprehend the erotic structure of the colonial situation. Thus, invention takes place all the time, but it is the invention of the blackened body as an overdetermined phobic object of knowledge even though no one actually believes the sexual myths (Fanon 2011/2008, 192/137). The facts of truth are made nearly impossible under the erotics of colonialism. Colonial discourse and
“History” saturate the blackened body with degrading sexual myths that no amount of reasonable reflection seems capable of dislodging. The feeling of alienation does not lead to a “true” sexuality that will reconcile the blackened body to white desire. Instead this erotic alienation can reveal how colonial desire is premised on the continual invention of antiblack fantasies.
The Black man is reduced to the genital level by the erotic gaze of coloniality.22 Mapping his analyses onto Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Fanon writes, “Going to the extreme, we would say that the body of the black man hinders the closure of the white man’s postural schema at the moment when the black man emerges into the white man’s phenomenal world[…]What is important to us here is to show that the biological cycle begins with the black man” (2011/2008,
193/138-139). The blackened body is apprehended as being locked into biological life and nature.
There is always, as Matthieu Renault (2011) would say, a corps à corps in Fanon’s comprehension.
Bodies are never atomistic; they are in relation. The Black body interrupts the field of the white body by being configured as the object to his subject. For the white subject to go beyond the determinism of biological life, he or she must go beyond the blackened body qua genital object.
Rather than being a complete disavowal of the blackened body, the colonial situation demands that
22 I say, “Black Man” because Fanon says le Noir or le nègre. But the violence done to Sarah Baartman via her kidnapping from southwestern Africa and the violent gazes of white men and women staring at her naked body and genitals indicate how, historically, the black bodies of men and women were constantly eroticized. We need not, and ought not, confine this aspect of erotic invention to only Black men. 41 sexuality as carnality circulate through the blackened. The blackened exists as body and sex for the colonialists (Fanon 2011/2008, 193/138). The Black body, Fanon argues, allows for this comprehension of the erotic dynamics of a culture which are often hidden by dominant “reason.”
Fanon’s challenge of “reason” is explicitly a gendered challenge. If one elides Fanon’s persistent subversion of “masculinity” and “virility” there will be the risk of incompletely formulating Fanon’s invention beyond the circular invention of “man.” Reason and passion are so thoroughly enmeshed for Fanon that to “reason” that one should be un homme pareil aux autres,23 a man like any other, is to also evince a passionate and erotic attachment to the desires of “man.”
For instance, Fanon’s description of how the Black male body is abstracted contains one of the moments when he tells the reader that he will sometimes adopt the voice of the dominant culture in order to reveal the processes of invention:
Still on the genital level, isn’t the white man who hates Blacks prompted by a feeling of
impotence or sexual inferiority? Since virility is taken to be the absolute ideal, doesn’t he
have a feeling of inadequacy in relation [par rapport] to the black man, who is viewed as
a penis symbol? Isn’t lynching the black man a sexual revenge? We know how sexualized
torture, abuse, and ill-treatment can be. (2011/2008, 192/137; emphasis added)
23 This is the title of the semi-autobiographical novel of René Maran which Fanon analyzes in the third chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon concludes that Jean Veneuse, Maran’s subject, desires the love of a white woman because he is hoping that will gain him recognition as a “white man” by other “white men.” The most striking conclusion in the chapter is not Fanon’s psychoanalytic diagnosis of Veneuse (which is really about Fanon trying to show that Veneuse’s neuroses are not determined by the melanin in his skin, but the societal structure that has epidermalized him). Fanon reveals how masculine desire circulates and invents the Black body: “When he is approached, the white man accepts there to give [Veneuse] his sister on one condition: You have nothing in common with a real Negro [les véritables nègres]. You are not black; you are ‘very, very dark.’” (2011/2008, 115/50). This passage shows that the erotic dynamics of racism do not take color as the primary object; it is something within the body. There can be a difference between those who happen to be Black and the nègres. At least that is the lie of the colonial situation. 42
Fanon is arguing that when “virility” is given a seemingly a priori and absolute value in a culture and economic system, in order to retain coherence there will be an anxious search for those who exist that ideal more. The relationship is key for Fanon. One cannot simply desire to be a “man” as if that position is not formed by the cultural relations in which it is embedded. There is not an understanding of white masculinity and gender without its sexually violent underside towards
Black bodies. Thus, if we read Fanon as constantly attempting to overcome the wounds within one’s skin that come from the Manicheanism within European culture we must be attentive to how he refuses the invention of these wounds through becoming a “man” (virility, masculinity).
The aim, which is not the same as telos, is to break the circle of invention in “man” so that the value of invention may be grasped again. The racialized, alienated skin is called to “put an end to this neurotic situation where I am forced to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, nurtured with fantasies, that is antagonistic—inhuman” (2011/2008, 221/174). The blackened skin is invented as inhuman, thus, a humanism is called for. While there is much anxiety around
“humanism” as a word, I have argued that the mere use of the word does not tell us what Fanon is doing with it. For Fanon, continues, “….there is but one answer: skim over this absurd drama that others have staged around me; rule out these two elements [disavow blackness or attempt to value blackness as evil, degenerate, the shadow of European values] that are equally unacceptable; and through the particular, reach out for the universal. When the black man [nègre] plunges, in other words goes down, something extraordinary happens” (2011/2008, 221/174). Fanon, it must be emphasized, states that it is the nègre, in concreteness, who descends in order to reach out to the universal. The sixth chapter has been tracking how the nègre has been invented with erotic value in European culture. So, rather than claim that a generic humanism will overcome the black problem Fanon realizes that the nègre invention indexes that there is an erotic problem at play that
43 must be encountered. From this eroticized position Fanon calls for a new eroticism. Humanism, the universal that stands to be constructed again and again, has value insofar as it is erotic. Thus, the circle is broken by reaching for the skin of the world.
The references to dépouillement in the Introduction and Conclusion are shown to be the concrete mediation of praxis and the value of invention. Fanon is calling for blackened subjects to shed the affects and sensibilities that have been embedded in their skin so that they might touch the world anew. This is a painful and violent process that Fanon will deepen and complicate from within the Algerian anticolonial struggle. In this way, Fanon’s account of the mediation of the skin of the world in Peau noire is underdeveloped since he is more focused on the Martinican subject.
We can still see that Fanon keeps the movement from the abstract to the concrete open by focusing the necessary erotic affectivity between the subject and the world. Thus, dépouillement is, at one and the same time, a shedding of one’s skin and one’s world. “It is through self-consciousness and renunciation [de dépouillement], through a permanent tension of his [leur] freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world” (Fanon 2011/2008, 251/206). In the following section, I will examine two of Fanon’s later texts, L’an V de la revolution algérienne [A
Dying Colonialism] and Les damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth], in light of dépouillement. This will allow an apprehension of the phenomenological and revolutionary apparatus that runs through Fanon’s corpus. From the position of the blackened, gender and sexuality become modes of existing that allow for the introduction of invention and a new erotic humanism. The rest of the chapter is concerned with explicating this mediation of skin between an abstract erotic humanism and the dynamic concrete value of invention.
44
Dépouillement and The Skin of the World in L’an V and Les damnés de la terre
The young Fanon of Peau noire had not yet extended his investigations of erotic problematics of the colonial situation into a more fully developed erotic humanism of skin. In Peau noire, the erotic system of knowledge which supports the colonial situation is presented as more of a problem while an erotic invention of gender and sexuality remains implicit and between the lines. Detailing what brings about an erotic invention that would allow for an erotic humanism of the skin is left unfinished in favor of tracing the imposed flaws of French humanism and colonial violence. In other words, Fanon leaves us with the question of what, exactly, dépouillement could be? This question need not remain abstract. If we constantly remind ourselves to put Fanon in touch with the concrete situation he encounters and describes in his later writings we will see how erotics, skin, and the invention of the world are intricately interwoven in Fanon. L’an V de la revolution algérienne (2011)24 represents a decisive turn in Fanon’s thought to explicate how revolutionary violence is intimately erotic and makes possible the invention of new skins. His phenomenological analyses of how Algerian women mobilized the veil in combat against the
French colonial regime and the upheaval of the patriarchal family in Algeria make concrete
Fanon’s belief that new human realities could be invented which would no longer find themselves beholden to the past construction of colonial humanity. New skins and new structures await the colonized subjects. In this section I will describe these phenomenological descriptions of Fanon as
“the skin of the world.”
Fanon is not the voice of the colonized. Understanding Fanon’s project requires that we keep in place the incompleteness of Fanon’s voice and resist totalizing the experience of all the colonized in his descriptions. Instead we must see how Fanon’s struggle with the nègre informs
24 Translated as A Dying Colonialism (1965). 45 his reflections even after leaving Martinique for Algeria. The nègre, as I have argued in the previous section, is the constructed split in reality. This position produces a myriad of violent effects for the lived body in relationship to gender, sexuality, and “History” which are impressed upon the skin. It is this fabricated and imposed split upon the skin that concerns Fanon more than pretending to speak for every individual’s personal experience. From within such a situation of violence, according to Fanon, it is not even clear that the tools are available to apprehend and speak the “truth” of the colonized. At the outset of L’an V Fanon exposes the problematic of colonial violence as a persistent grip on reality which even attempts to determine the conditions under which anticolonial revolutionary violence may be permitted to proceed: “In a war of liberation, the colonized people must win, but they must do so cleanly, without ‘barbarity.’ The European nation that practices torture is a blighted nation, unfaithful to its ‘History’ [son histoire]. The underdeveloped nation that practices torture thereby confirms its nature [nature], plays the role of an underdeveloped people” (2011/1965, 262/24; emphasis mine). The two sides are not evaluated equally. The colonizing people are barbarous insofar as they betray their human “History”; the colonized people are barbarous insofar as they reveal their animalistic nature. The colonizer can always turn back to their “History”; the colonized can only flee their nature. Under these conditions, for Fanon, it would not make sense to attempt to speak for who the colonized are, but he can attempt to speak to the coming invention of a new “History” and future of the colonized.
To be precise, the colonized, in Fanon’s language, are not first a “nation,” but people. It is people who take their place in “History” by their very skin and not the abstract idea of nations.
Thus, the work of L’an V is meant to show that “on the Algerian soil a new society has come to birth. The men and women of Algeria today resemble neither those of 1930 nor those of 1954, nor yet those of 1957. The old Algeria is dead. All the innocent blood that has flowed onto the national
46 soil has produced a new humanity and no one must fail to recognize this fact” (2011/1965, 265/27-
28). Fanon’s reflections on the “zone of nonbeing” (2011/2008, 64/xii) in Peau noire finds a wider resonance in his interpretation of the Algerian men and women who have birthed a new “History” and, thus, a new nature. The blackened skin of the colonized people can give birth to this nation that is “stripped bare of every essential” (2011/2008, 64/xii). Since “[t]his people […] was lost to
History” (2011/1959, 268/31) they are not constrained by the colonial paradigm of splitting human reality between “History” and nature. A nation does not precede a people and give them “History” while banishing those outside the nation into mere nature. The blackened change the world because they cannot accept the world. In this way the skin of the colonized differs fundamentally, in the revolutionary moment, from the skin of the colonizer. The world has not wounded and impressed itself upon the skin of the colonizer in the same manner as the skin of the colonized who the world has attempted to strip of “History” and culture. Thus, Fanon argues, “The Algerian nation is no longer in a future heaven[…]There is a new kind [nature] of Algerian man, a new dimension to his existence” (2011/1959, 267/30). “History” and nature come together in the revolutionary moment and from this dépouillement it becomes possible to introduce “invention into [l’existence]”
(2011/2008, 250/204).
The phenomenological and revolutionary apparatus of L’an V must be read as coextensive with the call for erotic invention from Peau noire. In this way it will be possible to avoid reading
Fanon as attempting to speak for a people rather than speak to how he envisions a transformation of reality must take place. The skin of the colonized have been violently touched and stripped by the historical system of colonialism and, thus, the skin of the colonized must learn to feel themselves differently. What Fanon really means to examine is how a system of violence constructs relationships between bodies and lived reality. By inventing through that system, one
47 strips themselves of the essential nature that had been imposed upon their skin. Erotics and violence come so close for Fanon that he writes near the end of the Introduction to L’an V, “la mort du colonialisme est à la fois mort du colonisé et mort du colonisateur” (2011, 269). The death of colonialism precipitates the death of the abstractions of colonized and colonizer. New relations, senses, and touch become possible through this violence. Fanon’s more mature understanding of skin, agency, and the dialectical transformation of reality can be found in his descriptions of revolutionary Algerian women and the veil.
This apparatus extends into Fanon’s final, and most explicitly revolutionary, work Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth). Reading Les damnés in insolation from L’an V enforces an analytic division upon Fanon’s thought that eclipses his consideration of revolutionary violence as the condition of possibility for a total transformation of subjectivity and culture, of gender and humanity. Furthermore, as I have been arguing throughout this chapter, Fanon’s erotic humanism is central for understanding the complex interrelation between invention and subjectivities. Thus, to disarticulate L’an V and Les damnés from Peau noire further distorts
Fanon’s theoretical apparatus. The infamous chapter on violence, I will show, is centrally concerned with the confrontation of the abstract and the concrete over existential value. Fanon is calling for a new mode of creating values that can be felt across the skin. For this reason, he writes,
“The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breathing and his heartbeats are the same as the colonist’s. He discovers that the skin of a colonist is not worth more than the ‘native’s.’ In other words, his world receives [introduit] a fundamental jolt” (2011/2004, 459/10; emphasis mine).
The skin is the site of discovery and invention for Fanon. The erotic and sensuous discovery that the skin of the colonizer is not the skin of the world does not become an abstract affirmation
48 of liberal humanism. It is not the “fact” that all living beings are the same underneath their skin that concerns Fanon. Rather it is the skin which can discover, unveil, and shed the colonial system which has embedded alienation into the very epidermis of the subject that can “introduit une secousse essentielle dans le monde [introduce a trembling into the world]” (2011, 459; emphasis mine). The English translation of Fanon’s texts obscures the intimacy and reverberations that exist between Fanon’s writings. The constant emphasis on the introduction of discovery and invention into the world echo the Fanon of Peau noire who must constantly remind himself “[t]hat the real leap consists of introducing invention into life [l’existence]” (2011/2008, 251/204) and, thus, asks,
“Why not simply try to touch the other, feel [sentir] the other, discover each other?” (2011/2008,
251/206). The movement from the abstract to the concrete is not by intellection, the demands of
Spirit, or the ruse of “History” [l’Histoire], but skin. For this reason, dépouillement is essential for understanding Fanon, gender, and the value of invention. Nothing is left the same on Fanon’s account. Interpretations of Fanon which begin from the a priori assumption that he was only concerned with becoming a man like any other miss that the blackened skin of the colonized discovers that there is no prefabricated destiny for the wretched.
In what follows I will focus on how Fanon develops a phenomenological and revolutionary apparatus around skin and dépouillement. The purpose of this section is twofold. First, I will show that Fanon does take seriously the necessity of challenging dominant constructions of gender and sexuality in the colonial system if there is to be an invention of existence. Second, from this account I will argue that we can see how Fanon’s erotic humanism elaborates an account of the world through skin. Thus, to understand the value of invention in Fanon it is necessary to understand the relationship between erotic humanism and the skin of the world. Fanon’s account will remain incomplete, but from this transformative account of the subject amidst violence
49
Wynter will be able to transform Fanon’s famous concept of “sociogeny” from Peau noire into an elaboration of world-systems theory and Spillers’s concept of the flesh and “ungendering” will be seen as a praxis and invention of how one writes the “History” of race, gender, and sexuality through chattel slavery. At every step the problem of how to transvaluate the abstract and the concrete will be the central concern.
The Veil and Fanon’s Phenomenology of the Skin
In this section, I will fill in the content of what I have called the phenomenological and revolutionary apparatus of L’an V by demonstrating, firstly, the centrality of gender and kinship to Fanon’s thought. Secondly, it will be shown that the colonial imposition of a gender and kinship system upon the colonized has preoccupied Fanon since Peau noire because it is through this erotic violence that opacity is introduced into the very skin of the colonized subject. Finally, it is from this opacity that the colonized subjects—female and male—can transvaluate the Western dichotomy between “History” and Nature. Fanon’s reflections on how Algerian women claimed agency and transformed themselves and the anticolonial revolution reveal the value of invention resides in touching and being touched by the world, through the constant movement of bodies engaging in dépouillement.
The first part of “L’algérie se dévoile”25 concerns the “natural attitude” of the colonizer which erotically fixates upon the seen and unseen veiled Algerian woman (2011/1965, 273-
284/35-48). Much of what Fanon does in these opening pages reiterates the phenomenological and
25 Though this essay is translated into English as “Algeria Unveiled” I will keep the French simply because the English elides the agency that Fanon argues the revolutionary Algerian women are claiming. A direct translation would most likely read “Algeria Unveils Herself.” This brings the text back to the Fanonian thematic of dépouillement. 50 dialectical structure of every chapter of Peau noire. Fanon opens with what appears to be the case and then proceeds to show how this “truth” fails, or, at the very least, how this “truth” is not adequate to the totality of existence. Thus, Fanon begins with the observation that “The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of a society’s uniqueness, that is to say the one that is most immediately perceptible[…]In the Arab world, for example, the veil worn by women is at once noticed by the tourist” (2011/1965, 273/35). What, at first, seems to be a mere sociological description takes on a different valence when read together with Fanon’s important use of “livery” in Peau noire.26
Black skin is repeatedly described as the “livery” that the white, colonial world has woven together. Skin, like clothing, is draped over the body and is made to stand for who the subject is for the colonial system. It is in this way that Black skin could be invested with all manner sexual fantasies about what the Black man is capable of. That these fantasies are not objectively true is beside the point. Fanon is indicating how the erotic fantasies and desires of the colonial system weave violence into the lived experience (l’expérience vécue). The veil becomes the surface site for these erotic investments which leads Fanon to conclude, “Taken as a whole, colonial society, with its values, its areas of strength, and its philosophy, reacts to the veil in a rather homogenous way[…]committed to destroying the people’s originality, and under instructions to bring about the
26 “My true wish is to get my brother, black or white, to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery [livrée]” (Fanon 2011/2008, 67/xvi), “Whether he likes it or not, the black man [nègre] has to wear the livery [livrée] the white man has fabricated for him” (2011/2008, 84/17), “How come I have barely opened my eyes they had blindfolded, and they already want to drown me in the universal? And what about the others? Those ‘who have no voice.’ I need to lose myself in negritude and see the ashes, the segregation, the repression, the rapes, the discrimination, and the boycotts. We need to touch with our finger all the wounds that score our black livery [livrée]” (2011/2008, 213/163), “These stories [of Brer Rabbit] belong to the oral tradition of the Blacks [les nègres] on the plantation. Therefore it is relatively easy to recognize the black man [le Noir] in his extraordinarily ironical and artful disguise [livrée] as the rabbit” (2011/2008, 203/151). 51 disintegration[…]of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly”
(2011/2008, 275/37).
The veil, for French colonial society, is not only fabric, but the social signification that the colonized Algerian population could be developing “forms of existence” which hide from the colonial system, evade its attempts at fixing the Algerian woman and man in place. Combatting this possibility demanded that the colonizer, foreigner, or tourist use the veil to “unif[y] their perception of Algerian feminine society” and imagine that there is no cultural dynamism within the practice of veiling (Fanon 2011/2008, 274/36). Even as the body of the Algerian woman is
“hidden” she is known and, thus, an entire “History” and nature of Algerian gender and kinship is constructed as reality. The colonizer construes the veil as evidence that Algerian men are oppressing Algerian women and it is only through western values that her sexual reality can unveiled. In a passage that would have been at home in chapter 5 of Peau noire (L’expérience vécue du noir) Fanon writes, “Around the family life of the Algerian, the occupier piled up a whole mass of judgments, appraisals, reasons, accumulated anecdotes and edifying examples, thus attempting to confine the Algerian within a circle of guilt” (2011/2008, 276/38).27 By trapping
Algerian women and men within a perception of reality, the colonial system could continually justify its presence in Algeria and argue that its violence was necessitated by the mission to bring the “backward” Arab population out of nature and into “History.”
27 “Beneath the body schema [schéma corporel] I had created a historical-racial schema. The data I used were provided[…]by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories[…]I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania” (Fanon 2011/2008, 154-155/91-92). 52
In these early pages of “L’algérie se dévoile” Fanon’s main critique is not how the French colonial system invalidates and destroys the prior “authentic” culture of Algerian Muslims. Indeed, we may be critical of how his descriptions make it nearly impossible to discern what Algerian women and men were like before colonization. But this is part of Fanon’s point: just as blackened skin in Peau noire veils, makes opaque, the Black subject and his/her “History” before the White gaze, the veil altogether makes opaque the “real” subject underneath while presenting an
“inauthentic” image of reality for the colonizer. If Fanon is not primarily concerned with the defense and retrieval of a prior “authentic” culture it is because he wants to highlight a more immediate problem. The colonial system approaches the veil as an erotic site of conquest. Fanon’s descriptions reveal that the colonial system is not a “civilizing” mission, but an erotic adventure:
“The dominant attitude [of the colonialist] appears to us to be a romantic exoticism, strongly tinged with sensuality[…]there is[…]in the European the crystallization of an aggressiveness, the strain of a kind of violence before the Algerian woman. Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for adventure” (2011/1965,
280-281/43).
In a stunning reversal, Fanon now seems to be claiming that clothing, like skin, is not merely draped atop her skin, but constitutes her facticity. Thus, skin and clothing represent for
Fanon not only the skin’s contact with the world, but the world’s ability to touch the skin. For
Fanon, as with Sartre and Beauvoir before him, there is an irreducible ambiguity between facticity and freedom (transcendence or dépassement). Before Fanon can discuss the veil as a site of invention for Algerian women in the revolution he must make clear how the erotics of the colonial situation make impossible the realization of objective truth. The touch of the colonial system between skin/veil to the world and the world to skin/veil is an alienating and objectifying
53 engagement. The colonial system reacts to the veil by objectifying it as an obstacle which must be removed; this engenders a reciprocal reaction from the colonized that the veil must be objectified as a fact of existence which must never change. Fanon analyzes this moment almost exactly along the lines of his critique of Negritude in Peau noire: “It is the white man who creates the Negro
[nègre]. But it is the Negro who creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil” (2011/1964, 284/47). In other words, the colonized introjects the values of the colonial system, but attempts to resist them by claiming that what is debased is actually a good. While this move overturns the hierarchy of the colonial system, the situation is not fundamentally changed. The veil becomes, for both colonizer and colonized, an excessive object rather than a dynamic mediation towards the value of invention.
This is a tricky moment in the essay since one may reasonably ask if Fanon is equating the reactions of the colonizer and the colonized. It would be troubling if this were the case because
Fanon’s phenomenology of the skin would lose any revolutionary potential and become an abstract and universal ontology that would make no distinction between the position of the colonizer vis-
à-vis the colonized in the colonial situation. Reading L’an V in conjunction with Peau noire avoids this problem while continuing to make clear the centrality of gender in Fanon’s revolutionary apparatus. Just as the opacity of learning that one is nègre allows for the apprehension that one need not identify with the imposed system of gender, the objectification of the veil by the colonizer allows for the apprehension of how the colonial system understands gender. In this way the veil is mobilized as a way to shield oneself from this objectifying violence and creates the possibility of
54 transcending it. Put another way, this moment of “reciprocal homogeneity” (2011/2004, 492/46), as Fanon will call it in Les damnés, is a necessary prelude to a transformative reaction.28
Neither skin nor clothing reveal the “truth” of the underlying subject. Instead they are surfaces of interpretation (for the colonizer) and the site of opacity (for the colonized). Thus, it is important to keep in mind the temporality of how the skin/clothing is constructed. They are first touched by the colonial world which imbues these surfaces with values. In the colonial system these are not just any values whatsoever, but erotic values. Values which are open to being looked at and touched. For this reason, exploitation of material resources cannot be disarticulated from the expropriation of colonized bodies. The material violence done to the land and economy of the
Algerian nation is felt in the very materiality of the Algerian women and men. The colonial system is not a mere exterior structure laid upon the “true” and “pure” subject.29 The colonial system attempts to invade and embed its values into the very skin of colonized. It endeavors to fabricate
“women” and “men” beneath the skin/veil so as to either assimilate them into the heteropatriarchal system of European Man or abject them from this system and thus strip these women and men of any semblance of protection from “human rights.” The colonized is presented with the forced choice: either come into (our) “History” or remain in exploitable “nature.” Without foregrounding the erotic violence which saturates the colonial system one will miss how the bodies of the
28 Robert Bernasconi aptly captures this in his understanding of the dialectical confrontation between the oppressor and the oppressed within an exploitative system in Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique: “It is a reaction, but not just any reaction. It is a transformative reaction, a transcendence whose intelligibility derives from the fact that the pursuit of the objective takes place within an inherited system of relations which it modifies” (2012, 351). 29 Fanon is explicit about this in Les damnés: “In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie. Behavior toward fellow nationalists is open and honest, but strained and indecipherable towards the colonists. Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation. Truth is what protects the ‘natives’ and undoes the foreigners. In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior” (2011/2004, 462/14; emphasis mine). 55 colonized are made into lies from which a pure truth becomes impossible. Dislocating the forced choice between two lies—“History” and Nature—requires grasping an opacity which can counter the lie of the colonial system.
The skin/veil does not bear truth, but it can undo the imposition of the lie of the colonial system. Fanon describes how the revolution initiates an “authentic birth” which is not commensurate with “that coefficient of play, of imitation, almost always present in this form of
[revolutionary] action when we are dealing with a Western woman” (2011/1965, 287/50). When the Algerian woman chooses to unveil herself in order to transport weapons or information within the colonial city she is not merely enacting a role, but inventing a new contact with the world.
Simply because the colonial system only apprehends a woman (finally entering into Western
“History”) does not mean that this is how the revolutionary Algerian woman feels her body in this moment of unveiling. Though, again, we ought to hesitate here since Fanon appears to come perilously close to offering up the “truth” of the Algerian woman’s lived body by substituting his voice for hers.30 At the very moment when Fanon appears to do this he includes a telling footnote that reframes the objective of the essay and L’an V as a whole: “We are mentioning here only realities known to the enemy. We therefore say nothing about the new forms of action adopted by women in the Revolution. Since 1958, in fact, the tortures inflicted on women militants have enabled the occupier to have an idea of the strategy used by women. Today new adaptions have developed [pris naissance]. It will therefore be understood if we are silent [taise] as to these”
(2011/1965, 287/50). From this footnote Fanon reminds the reader (colonizer or colonized) that
30 In other words, Fanon would commit the same error for which he reproached Sartre’s Black Orpheus by stripping the Algerian women in the Revolution of their chance to experience the value of invention for themselves, through their own skin. Fanon would have forgotten the necessity of “need[ing] not to know” (2011/2008, 172/114). 56 the “truth” of a revolution derives its potential for new births from the opacity the colonial system relentlessly endeavors to strip away. By placing this essay within the concrete situation of violent revolution we must remember how the colonized or the oppressed conceal their truth, refuse to be known, so as to keep open the possibility of an “authentic birth.”
Fanon’s constant movement from the abstract to the concrete produces a phenomenology of the skin whose “truth” never appears as such, but is kept hidden so long as the colonial system remains the authentication of what counts as truth. Revolutionary Algerian women unveil so as to hide in plain sight. Once the colonial system realizes Algerian women are mobilizing their new bodies in this way and respond accordingly, Algerian women take on the veil again to hide and carry weapons (Fanon 2011/1965, 296/61). Each of these mutations evince an “historic dynamism that is very concretely perceptible” (Fanon 2011/1965, 298/63) as the Algerian Revolution continues to enact transformative reactions to the colonial system. Who these women and men are, in themselves, no longer becomes a truth one can unveil through violence. In their very skin they have become the movement of invention. Fanon’s writing, I argue, intends to preserve the opacity and novelty of these inventions rather than capture them as a form of knowledge.
What is actually unveiled in “L’Algérie se dévoile” is not the truth of the Algerian people and nation, but an erotic experience of invention from within the erotic violence of the colonial system. Everything is up for interrogation in Fanon’s descriptions. The Algerian woman who unveils as part of “penetrat[ing][…]into the flesh of the Revolution” (Fanon 2011/1965, 290/54) must make a new body of herself in relation to other bodies. Fanon consistently emphasizes how the Algerian woman who has “the anxious feeling that something is unfinished” and must “invent new dimensions for her body” (2011/1965, 294/59) is not transformed solely in her individuality, but experiences her body as connected to the body of the Revolution. Shedding the alienating
57 livery of the colonial system allows for the experience of invention with others. It is for this reason that Fanon mentions how the Algerian family becomes reconstituted such that the father is no longer “the authority for all things, the founder of every value” (2011/1965, 295/60).
Dépouillement matures in Fanon’s thought from its initial introduction in Peau noire. The shedding of skin is not only the shedding of values, but the experience of becoming vulnerable to painful possibilities of transformation. Western, colonial gender and kinship can no longer serve as determinants for what the subject may become or her “truth.” If the skin/veil becomes a surface of opacity for the colonized rather than the colonizer it is because the possibility of an open future from the colonial system must continually be felt between bodies as possibilities for new forms of connection and solidarity. Historical and natural determinations of what a body ought to become no longer make sense from within “the flesh of the Revolution” (Fanon 2011/1965, 290/54).
Fanon’s erotic humanism, when constantly read into the concrete situation of the colonial system, reveals the contingency of race, gender, and kinship. No longer is “truth” the aim of revolution; rather the continual dislocation of imposed lies allows for the preservation of new forms of touch and contact amongst the colonized. What remains to be explained is how Fanon’s erotic humanism leads to the value of invention. I will argue that Les damnés de la terre provides the connective tissue between the abstract idea of an erotic humanism and the concrete dynamism of the value of invention. This what I have called “the skin of the world.”
The Skin of the World and the Erotics of Violence in Les damnes de la terre: On the à fleur de peau of Fanonian Invention
The problem which remains to be solved may be summed up in this way: if dépouillement is, as I have argued, the existential motor for moving from the abstract to the concrete (le vécu)
58 how does this aspect of Fanon’s thought avoid repeating an individualist ontology which would foreclose a total erotic invention of the human? While “L’Algérie se dévoile” centers “the”
Algerian revolutionary woman in Fanon’s investigations into the colonial system as an erotic and gendered system he does not furnish us with an explanation of how we ought to think of violence as the condition of possibility for world invention. In the above account Fanon certainly provides a phenomenological description of the contingency of “gender” and how colonialism invests in violently imposing a Western imaginary of gender difference as universal and natural. But an individual may live this experience without feeling impelled to risk oneself in “the flesh of the
Revolution” (Fanon 2011/1965, 290/54). How can Fanon preserve the opacity of the singular subject without giving up the movement of the universal?
If readers of Fanon have too quickly criticized his work for purporting to be the “universal” voice of the colonized and, thus, forgets the issue of gender in favor of “race,” my reading risks going so far in the direction of opacity, incompleteness, and hesitation that it does not seem conceivable that Fanon could justify any consideration of revolution and political invention. In other words, we are returned to the classical problem of mediation.31 How does the opacity of the colonized individual pass into the intelligibility of the universal? I will argue in this penultimate section that Fanon’s answer is that it is upon the skin of the colonized that the sensation of individual invention can touch and be touched by the collective struggle for invention. The skin allows Fanon to argue for a collective solidarity without completely liquidating the singular subject into the revolutionary movement. Fanon’s first chapter of Les damnés is a subtle articulation of
31 This is a similar problem which haunted Sartre’s Marxist existentialism of the 1940s-1960s in the formulation of the relationship between the Singular and the Universal. Raymond Aron criticized this by claiming “A follower of Kierkegaard cannot at the same time be a follower of Marx” (1969, 30). 59 how the violence of the colonial system creates new affects, sensations, and bodies that can feel a new form of life in solidarity with the oppressed of the earth.
In a sense, Fanon already had this answer since Peau noire, but he required being in the midst of a revolutionary anticolonial struggle to apprehend the skin as the concrete site of invention and solidarity. The revolutionary upheaval denudes the colonized skin of the oppressive sedimentation and knowledges produced by the colonial system and, thus, allows the subject to be vulnerable to others and their movements. A new erotic relation is made possible within the alienating erotics of colonialism. But though the surface of the skin is shed it still remains my skin which prevents the complete dissolution of my subjectivity. I feel my comrades and my comrades feel me. My skin is only mine through this feeling and discovery of those beyond myself. In this way the singular and the universal are always on the edge of one another and never collapsed into either pole. What Fanon is attempting to articulate is how it is possible to move from the abstract affirmation of solidarity to the leap of risking one’s life for the life of others whom I do not even know, whom I cannot even see. Mere intellection could not support such a movement. The skin must feel it has nothing left to lose, but the world to gain.
A discourse of skin populates the lines of Fanon’s famous chapter on violence because in this way he can communicate the concrete, erotic experience of decolonization as a total invention of “History” and Nature. Fanon argues that decolonization “introduit dans l’être un rythme propre, apporté par les nouveaux hommes, un nouveau langage, une nouvelle humanité” (2011, 452).32
This introduction unveils a new being and a new subject. In fact, the colonized “object” becomes
32 Richard Philcox translates this sentence as “[Decolonization] infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity” (Fanon 2004, 2). In the English Philcox does not quite capture that decolonization is carried [apporté] by the very bodies of individuals who then change being. Decolonization is not an independent force which simply acts upon the colonized. 60 human as the very movement of unveiling and not as a new object which can be defined. For
Fanon, much of the violence of the colonial system was an attempt to create a petrified situation wherein the colonized is trapped within an imposed identity. Decolonization combats this violence not by presenting another petrified identity, but by making it possible to feel movement and rhythm again. The necessity of this movement is engendered by the historicity of violence suffered by the wretched. Thus, “Présentée dans sa nudité,” Fanon reminds the reader, “la décolonisation laisse deviner à travers tous ses pores, des boulets rouges, des couteaux sanglants” (2011, 452; emphasis mine).33 Fanon’s references to the “nudity” of decolonization which feels violence through the
“pores” of the colonized is not mere rhetorical flourish. These descriptions furnish Fanon’s concrete apprehension of historical suffering and revolution that can be traced back to Peau noire:
“I need to lose myself in negritude and see the ashes, the segregation, the repression, the rapes, the discrimination, and the boycotts. We need to touch with our finger all the wounds that score our black livery” (2011/2008, 213/163).
Colonialism embeds its histories of violence into the skin of the colonized. This introjection is what gives colonial “History” its force while also affecting the how the colonized experiences her body. Disrupting this state of affairs requires extricating the colonized body from the colonial situation. Decolonization will mean nothing if the subject’s relationship to her body is changed, but the world situation remains the same. From this description of “History” and violence embedded in the skin of the colonized it is possible to see why Fanon was anxious about the incompleteness of Peau noire even after the abolition of slavery by the French. The situation did
33 “In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” (Fanon 2004, 3). 61 not change; the erotics of the colonial system remained in place insofar as the supreme value of humanity was represented by the desire for whiteness and its values for what it means to be human:
The upheaval reached the black man [le Noir] from the outside. The black man [le Noir]
was acted upon. Values that were not engendered [pris naissance] by his actions, values
not resulting from the systolic gush of his blood, whirled around him in a colorful dance.
The upheaval did not differentiate the black man [nègre]. He went from one way of life to
another, but not from one life to another. (Fanon 2011/2008, 241/194-195)
A new birth, a shedding of “History,” was not taken from the opacity within the colonized. Instead the colonial system decided to assimilate Black men and women into whiteness.34 This made the colonized into passive subjects who could not risk their life for another life, but instead remained trapped within the colonial imposition of existence.
The nègre is Fanon’s reminder that the concrete task of liberation is to introduce invention into existence. This introduction must manifest itself as a differentiation from the imposed universality of the colonial values. Therefore, the subject must feel herself surpassing35 the violent
“History” that has been woven into the very livery of her skin. Liberation cannot be given. It most certainly cannot be the assimilation of values drenched in the violence of “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” (Fanon 2011/2004, 452/3). The erotic humanism that I have argued is central to
Peau noire is repeated in Les damnés, but with the crucial difference that Fanon now sees how the
Manichean violence which created the nègre can also become mobilized as the violence to enter into solidarity with others who have been dispossessed and alienated. Thus, the violence of the
34 The last chapter of this dissertation on Spillers will give a more complete account of how gender became the fulcrum by which Afro-descended people continue to be abjected and assimilated by the dominant gender system of chattel slavery. 35 The word both Fanon and Sartre use is the dialectical dépassant. 62 colonial system which attempted to destroy the systems of reference, lifestyles, and culture of the indigenous now allows for “Faire sauter le monde colonial” by each of the “individus constituant le peuple colonisé” (2011, 455; emphasis mine).36
The leap of the colonized people into a new life is coextensive with the constituting individuals who are feeling themselves invent their own skins.37 This is the journey of the colonized subject who “discovers that the skin of a colonist is not worth more than the ‘native’s’”
(Fanon 2011/2004, 459/10). This affective discovery allows the colonized to feel the contingency of the values of the colonial world. In a sense, for Fanon, this realization cannot be attained through simply reading critiques of colonialism and Western civilization, but must be motivated by a felt need. The felt need comes to the colonized as a constant being “on edge [à fleur de peau] like a running sore” (Fanon 2011/2004, 467/19). Fanon uses the idiom à fleur de peau38 in several places throughout the chapter on violence to designate the historicity of the tension of the colonized on the brink of surpassing the colonial system. In effect, Fanon appears to be attempting to resolve the problem of mediation between colonial universality and colonized singularity by positioning the skin as the primary site for all concrete mediations.
The ruptured skin that touches and is touched by the colonial system opens the space for invention. The paradox of how one can truly invent from within “History” is exploded by the memory of skin that has undergone “years of unreality [d’irréalisme]” (Fanon 2011/2008, 468/20).
36 “To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject” (2004, 6). 37 It seems clear that Fanon’s language of “individus constituant le peuple colonisé” is meant to mirror Sartre’s distinction of the “constituent dialectic” (individual praxis) which is the motor for the “constituted dialectic” (group praxis) (Sartre 1982, 340-341). In Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre is arguing that the invention of the individual makes possible the constitution of a group that will attempt to invent and make a new “History.” Thus, individual and group are in a reciprocal relationship of praxis. 38 Cf. Fanon 2011/2004, 467/19; 468/21; 478/31. 63
Living on the edge of the real [le réel], being in but not of colonial reality and “History”, is precisely the fulcrum by which the colonized may shed the livery of colonialism and feel herself as a discovering and sensing subject. What is remarkable about Fanon’s account is that this praxis, or invention, is not pure activity, but is only made possible by being driven to the edge of exhaustion by the colonial system of violence. “We have seen that this violence throughout the colonial period, although constantly on edge [à fleur de peau], runs on empty[…]The challenge now is to seize this violence as it realigns itself” (2011/2004, 468/21). Further on, Fanon describes this atmospheric violence as “rippling under the skin [à fleur de peau]” (2011/2004, 478/31) and, thus, is the experience which mediates the atmosphere of violence into motion. Activity and passivity, touching and being touched, occur all at once so as to invent through the imposed rhythms of the colonial situation. Rather than the constant give and take, the violent reactions to one another that we saw in L’an V between the colonizer’s apprehension of the veil and colonized’s cult of the veil, a different skin brings a different “History”/Nature into reality.
Fanon supports this hope for invention by describing the transforming colonized subject as feeling herself to be a part of a broader transformation of the world. The erotics of violence, on the colonizer’s side is primarily negative and repressive, but the erotics of violence, on the side of the colonized, becomes the possibility of a solidarity of feeling and invention. This why Fanon states that “Colonized peoples are not alone” (2011/2004, 477/30). While the violence of the colonial system petrified the colonized into abstraction (nègre, Arab, woman-to-be-unveiled) in order to justify exploiting or assimilating the group, this felt imposition produces in the colonized subject the understanding that the colonial system is not attacking her body as if she were a singular individual, but as if she were already a member of a group. Thus, Fanon notes, “Despite the efforts of colonialism, their frontiers remain permeable to news and rumors. [The colonized] discover that
64 violence is atmospheric, it breaks out sporadically, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime. The success of this violence plays not only an informative role but also an operative one”
(2011/2004, 477/30).39 The violence coursing through the world against the colonial system is not a mere fact of information. It effects the creation of a new subjects inventing a new world. The colonized subject does not know who she is—she remains opaque and incomplete—but she becomes engaged in what the world may become. The movement of tension, of freedom, and, most importantly, invention is Fanon’s skin of the world. His erotic humanism, as I have described, is an abstract description which can only attain the value of invention via the mediation of the skin
(of the world).
The world, for Fanon, must be skin. If we are to understand the evolution of his thought on praxis and invention it is necessary to conceptualize the dynamism of his thought and method through the mediation of the ruptured skin between the colonial system and the opacity of the singular individual. While we all have skin, our skins do not carry the same histories. The blackened skin of the colonized feel themselves as part of another world to come, populated by bodies of which they know nothing except that the (gendered) bodies they have been given are incomplete. What is peculiar in Fanon’s oeuvre is the constant attention to the felt tragedy of those on the edge of the world. From this edge the colonized take in the colonial world in order to reenter
39 In another surprising connection to Peau noire Fanon mentions the anticolonial struggle of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bein Phu in 1954 when he articulates the feeling of solidarity it engendered in the colonized who ask, “‘What must we do to achieve a Dien Bein Phu? How should we go about it?’” (Fanon 2011/2004, 477/31). This echoes Fanon’s conclusion in his Peau noire where he writes, “It is not because the Indo-Chinese discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply this was because it became impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word. When we recall how the old colonial hands in 1938 described Indochina as the land of piastres and rickshaws, of houseboys and cheap women, we understand only too well the fury of the Vietminh’s struggle” (Fanon 2011/2008, 247/201). Again, we are returned to the germ of solidarity in this text that concerned the nègre, but, also, we see as well how Fanon conceptualized the colonial system as an erotics of violence. 65 it through collective invention. The open sore, unveiling, and dépouillement are all Fanonian terms for understanding how the invention of the individual becomes an invention of the world,
“History,” and Nature. If the colonized must shed her skin, she can only do so by shedding the world. By baring the world in its nudity new sets of erotic relations may appear that do not subscribe to dichotomies of man/woman, “History”/Nature, active/passive, and so on. Without considering these erotic mediations which traverse the skin of the colonized in contact with the skin of the world we risk abstracting Fanon’s project and reifying the very dichotomies he meant to subvert and invent through. The solidarity of the skin reminds us that Fanon’s subject is always relational, a part of the universal, yet singular insofar as the skin also separates and differentiates.
This keeps open the risk of totalization and petrification. Thus, erotic humanism touches the value of invention by always passing through and returning to the skin of the world in, what Fanon hopes, will be a “permanent tension of […]freedom” (2011/2008, 251/206).
Remembering the Skin of the World
For Fanon, the preeminent task of thought and action was always to meet the present moment. This task was not an ontological a priori truth; Fanon struggled against abstraction of this kind. Rather this was a demand placed on the ones who have suffered, who currently suffer, and those who choose solidarity with the harmed. Anyone who has suffered harm, that violence which leaves its scar upon their skin, knows this problem of temporality: Shall they move towards reconciliation in the future or seek recompense for the past? At one end or the other it is either “too early…or too late” (Fanon 2011/2008, 63/xi) and, in the present, the scar remains. The trauma is repeated not only by continued blows to the skin, but by a culture, a system of existence, that continually demands that the harmed subject finally decide, put an end to the tension. But the
66 question itself, day after day impressed upon the skin of the harmed (Fanon’s les damnés), is false or, at the very least, misleading. The task is to act now. And the forced choice of the question only serves to steal the present by sealing it up into “History” or throwing it into the ever-distant future.
For this reason, Fanon will conclude in his first book that “I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life [l’existence]” (2011/2008, 250/204). The world often implores the suffering to forget that their skin demands the invention of a new existence.
The invention of this new existence is anchored in the transformative erotics of blackened skin. Erotics, as I have argued, are central to Fanon’s conceptualization of invention for two primary reasons. First, Fanon, as early as Peau noire, was coming to understand the system of colonial racism as lived through the imposition of Western gender norms, disciplining of Black sexuality, and the reification of Black desire for “white flesh” (2011/2008, 125/62). All of which flee the imposition of blackness. This lived aspect of the colonial system qua erotics highlights the violence of abstraction imposed upon concrete existence. Thus, for Fanon, there is a difference between saying that colonialism imposes class stratification and analyzing how this stratification becomes effective. To live according to bourgeois white norms is not only to attain a certain economic status, but to repeat the desires of white, bourgeois society through sexual object choice, marital arrangements, and kinship structures. Consequently, “The Black Man [nègre] and
Psychopathology” chapter of Peau noire is an elaboration on how the first three chapters— concerning language and interracial desire—attain systemic force via the creation of the nègre. To be blackened by the nègre is not merely to be made into a “phobogenic object” (Fanon 2011/2008,
67
189/133), but to undergo, in the language of Les damnés, déréalisation40 (Fanon 2011/2004,
675/237). In other words, to be denied a proper sense of reality. The problem of the colonial system is lived as the erotic exploitation of the land and body as well as the affective denial of open contact with reality. In this way reality and subjective existence are rendered incomplete and irrealized.
Without this apprehension of erotic problematics it will possible to miss the central object of
Fanon’s critiques from Peau noire to Les damnés.
The second reason that erotics is central to Fanon’s conceptualization of invention is that it is at this level that the colonized can feel themselves liberated from the colonial system of reality.
The skin of the colonized remembers the violent impositions of the colonial powers and, thus, mobilizes these memories as what must be shed on the way to new skins, new liveries, new dialectical engagements between the exterior world. In this way it is possible to apprehend that the transformative reaction of the colonized through new erotics cannot be disarticulated from the erotic modes of violence by which the colonial system imposes itself. Fanon’s erotic humanism responds to specific and concrete problems of relationality and violence. This is why Fanon claims it is the Third World “whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe was incapable of finding answers to[…]It is the very basic question [Il s’agit très concrètement] of not
40 This is a very precise concept from psychology that Fanon uses only in the Conclusion to Les damnés in the context of describing Europe’s culture as afflicted with “an increasingly obnoxious narcissism” (2011/2004, 675/237). Déréalisation denotes sensorial and perceptive denial of the exterior world. Thus, it is important that Fanon accuses European culture of undergoing déréalisation since he is critiquing its violent withdrawal from the concrete reality of the blackened. But rather than being an individual pathology it becomes a systemic violence when the European powers have the weight of economic and cultural force behind them. To repeat, this highlights the importance of Fanon’s erotics because the withdrawal from reality is also a withdrawal from the touch of the other. An obsession with one’s personal security can only be purchased through a closing off of reality and, thus, a loss of sensation. On the side of the colonizer there is déréalisation. On the side of the colonizer is the invention of new skin from which to feel reality. This thematic reverberates through all of Fanon’s corpus. 68 dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it” (2011/2004, 675/238). Fanon is attempting to effect a return to the concrete community in which the colonized can “walk in the company” (2011/2004, 676/238) of one another. Feeling and being felt by this community does not lead to stasis or reification, but a constant duty to remember to invent and discover the skin of the world.41
For Fanon, the skin is the site of thought, of action, of invention. This is lost in the English translation of his thought and, thus, the erotic problematic which his humanism is meant to surpass is lost.42 What I have shown in this chapter is that the value of invention, for Fanon, can best be understood as a total upheaval of colonialism as an imposed system of the human. This means that coloniality was not understood by Fanon as only a racialized apparatus of expropriation whose destruction could only be brought about by becoming “a man like any other.” The colonial situation renders incomplete and opaque any totalizing thought of human reality. The gendered body and the disciplining of sexuality and desire lose their reification as a natural substratum in Fanon’s explication of the blackened skin. Everything is up for question. Thus, Fanon takes the skin of the colonized as the mediation between his abstract erotic humanism towards the value of invention.
The opacity and incompleteness of the blackened skin is not dissolved, but preserved as a constant resource to continue inventing reality and the world.
41 Fanon is more precise about this in the French rather than the English translation: “Mais si nous voulons que l’humanité avance d’un cran, si nous voulons la porter à un niveau different de celui où l’Europe l’a manifestée, alors il faut inventer, il faut découvrir” (2011, 676). Richard Philcox’s version of the sentence reads: “But if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers” (2004, 239). 42 Following Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic,” we could understand Fanon’s response to the erotic violence of the colonial system as the pornographic and the transformative reaction as the powers of the erotic, the total comprehension of the singular individual in contact with a new universal. 69
The circularity of Fanon’s corpus reflects the a-teleological strain of his thought. This is captured by the final page of Peau noire, where he proffers, “It is through self-consciousness and renunciation [de dépouillement], through a permanent tension of his freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world” (Fanon 2011/2008, 251/206). As I have argued dépouillement refers more to the shedding of one’s skin. Freedom and the invention of a
“human” world can only come through the skin. This is why Fanon will ask “Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” (2011/2008, 251/206). Revolution is coded as an invention of constant affective and corporeal discovery. But there will always be new bodies in new situations, thus, there can be no prefabricated goal to be reached. In his last book, the most explicitly revolutionary, Fanon demands, “il faut faire peau neuve” (2011, 676).43 We must make new skin. From Peau noire to Les damnés we have complex journey of the skin in “History” and
“History” in the skin. The skin is shed and invented according to the needs of the present and for the world of others.
Fanon’s erotic humanism is no quaint love story, the romance of mass society, it is the risk of the wounded to meet the present world in its production of pain and suffering. Fanon’s phenomenological and revolutionary analyses surely continue to keep the world open and allow for an understanding of what makes concrete solidarity possible, but his reflections provoke a troubling question: is there any end to the violence? Insofar as violence is the inciting situation which makes necessary the shedding of one’s skin and one can only engage in dépouillement through violence, is it possible for there to be blackened skin which is not marked by the scars and
43 In “Casting the Slough” (1996), Robert Bernasconi notes that this is an idiom which refers to the process of a snake shedding its skin (113). I have preferred to keep the original French in order to make clearer the connection between the conclusions of Peau noire and Les damnés as it concerns skin and invention. 70 wounds of violence? The skin is the condition of possibility for there to be any world for me and for me to be there for the world (of others). At the very moment that Fanon offers the skin as the medium by which the colonized subject can bring about an erotic revolution of reality, the skin is presented as the condition of impossibility for this revolutionized reality to be rendered complete.
This is why there is never an end to the shedding and unveiling in Fanon’s writings since he seems to be aware of what happens when the skin finally settles: the violence sediments. David Marriott argues in “Whither Fanon?” (2013) that there is a constant desire in Fanon’s work for a tabula rasa, an impossible beginning. While this would solve the problem of circular violence this seems to be more of a consequence of Fanon’s thought rather than intent. Memory and the work of remembering constantly clings to the skin of the world and this is what provokes the constant need for shedding and making new skin.
The necessity of remembering to forget the dictates of gender, the disciplining of sexuality into heteropatriarchal epistemology presents a complex and, perhaps, irresolvable paradox. It is not possible to forgo either the remembering or forgetting because the tension between the two provides the concrete motor to work through the violent abstraction of European coloniality. The constant thematic of remembering and forgetting works through Fanon’s skin of the world:
“Europe’s well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians. This we are determined never to forget” (Fanon 2011/2004, 498/53).44 Fanon is clearly concerned about how deep the sedimentation of violence into the skin has gone and, thus, does not
44 In Peau noire, the problem of remembering and forgetting is played out in Fanon’s reproaches to Sartrean Negritude. “For once this friend [Sartre], this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self- consciousness” (Fanon 2011/2008, 171/112; emphasis mine) and “Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man [nègre] suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Fanon 2011/2008, 174-175/117). 71 want the colonized community to become complacent and assume that they have surpassed the colonial system.45 So when Fanon famously cries out, “O my body, always make me a man who questions [interroge]!” (2011/2008, 251/206) we ought not read the French verb interroger as self- reflective, individualistic questioning, but instead, as interrogation. Fanon’s erotic humanism calls for the body to feel this moment upon its skin and then interrogate the skin of the world. In an inhumane world that scars, wounds, exploits, and hardens the skins of others returning to the skin serves as the reminder, which always must be renewed, that “the real leap consists of introducing invention into [existence]” (2011/2008, 250/204).
In the following chapters on Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, I will continue developing the bind of invention and remembrance that Fanon left unresolved. By showing that the question of gender was central to Fanon’s considerations it is possible to see how fundamental the value of invention must be. While Wynter uses Fanon’s concept of sociogeny in order to articulate an invention of a new genre of humanity which would come from the outside, Spillers carries out a subtle dialogue with Fanon’s incompleteness in order discover whether a system can be undone from within. “Ungendering” will be Spillers guiding thread towards an invention that could interrupt the cycle Fanon found himself caught by. Taken together all three thinkers present a tradition of Black thought that uncovers and invents new forms of humanity and human reality.
45 Indeed, this makes sense of Fanon’s inclusion of case studies which detail that ongoing traumas of colonizers and colonized when confronted with the revolutionary violence of Algeria at the end of Les damnés (2011/2004, 625-672/181-235). Even in his most straightforward text Fanon’s hesitations remain a guiding thread for reading his work. Violence is presented as necessary by the colonial system, but this does not mean that Fanon thought it was a cure-all. Hence, the troubling first line of the chapter on “Colonial War and Mental Disorders: “But the war goes on.” (Fanon 2011/2008, 625/181) 72
Chapter 2 The Genre of Invention: Sylvia Wynter, Sociogeny, and the Writing of Blackened Humanism
If the last chapter seemed to end with the inescapability of how violence makes and unmakes the memory, subjectivity, and environment of the colonizer and colonized—the very skin of the world—this is neither the end of the story nor a call for pessimism. Instead it is a demand to rethink how invention and praxis are interwoven. Fanon, as I have shown, deployed a phenomenology of revolution that allowed for the comprehension of how the violence of the colonial situation comes to be embedded in the very skin of the colonized in such a way that colonial violence erotically crafts bodily subjectivity. In other words, Fanon’s famous claim from Peau noire that “Besides ontogeny and phylogeny stands sociogeny” (2011/2008, 66/xv) informs his theoretical orientation in all of his later writings. A concrete comprehension of how historical structures institute and inscribe the human and vice versa guides the objective activity of Fanon’s writing. How institutions and praxis invent one another is a key feature of Fanon’s diagnostic apparatus. But
Fanon’s writings are not only diagnostic; they are meant to have effects. Thus, while Fanon constantly uncovers inventions in the colonial situation he is also trying to bring about inventions that will go beyond the system of existence. A definite poiesis animates all of Fanon’s writings and practices.
The skin of the colonized is crafted so that an alienating History may be spatialized over it. History, as Fanon’s phenomenological analyses show, is not the mere succession of temporal events, but is produced and reproduced through affective force. For this reason, I positioned erotics as central to Fanon’s works in order to show how History scales up and down from the singular individual to universalizing institutions. Fanon allows us to see that History can be alienating because it has been fundamentally arranged so that certain populations can attain a fluid dynamic between the world and History while other skins become petrified and scarred. But how does it
73 come to be that History can be arranged in space rather than linear time? If we are to understand invention and “ungendering” then we must show how the two would produce a reorganization of knowledge practices and the writing of History. Thus, it is necessary to attain a clearer understanding of how Western History has spatialized its writing of itself. The act of poiesis must be grounded in a preexisting organization of knowledge. In order to elaborate the connection between poiesis and the arrangement of knowledge I will turn to Sylvia Wynter, a contemporary
Caribbean philosopher of Fanon, and her theory of how “epistemes” of Humanity are crafted.
Sylvia Wynter takes up this undertheorized aspect of Fanonian poiesis and attempts to explicate the conditions of possibility for the crafting of humanity. The fact that poiesis refers to the activity of bringing something into existence that did not exist before does not necessarily connect this invention to the work of poetics—the study of literary form, genre, and rules. Yet, I will argue in this chapter, Sylvia Wynter’s distinctive contribution is to make one unthinkable without the other. In this manner, Sylvia Wynter has developed a singular poetic phenomenology46 that orients her adaption of Fanon’s concept of sociogeny and her continued call for a new writing of humanity. Given recent debates over the utility of “humanism” or any reference to “humanity” as, perhaps, hopelessly inscribed within a Western ratio—relationship and standard of measure— that will presume humanity as commensurate with white, middle-class, kinship structures it is my aim to show that Wynter’s poetic phenomenology meets this challenge. What has concerned
Wynter (and Fanon) is that human reality has been instituted according to the rules and grammar
46 I take this description of Wynter’s method from Paget Henry’s “Wynter and the Transcendental Spaces of Caribbean Thought” (2006). “[W]ynter’s approach to the transcendental has been through effective suspensions of the conditions of producing poetic knowledge rather than those of producing scientific, logical, moral, or mathematics knowledge[…]It is the extensive and intensive development of this poetic phenomenology that has given Wynter the ability to overcome the discursive discontinuities and inaccessibilities that normally keep the transcendental realm hidden” (Henry 2006, 273). 74 of a Western genre of humanity that has overrepresented itself as universal. In an early 1972 essay,
Wynter claims that literature/poetry must “[s]how the confrontation between the official reality and the marginal man [emphasis mine], non-existent in the official definition[…]whose humanity survives, precisely because of their exclusion from the inhuman reality” (73). Reality can only become “official” because its representation is mediated by prereflective rules and grammars— what will later be theorized as “epistemes” by Wynter after she migrates to the U.S.—that make equivalent what is real and what is sensible. This is how “common sense” about how things really are is possible. But, Wynter posits, the making of reality is a poiesis that also crafts a poetics— rules of the genre—which must designate what is without sense in order to support itself. Wynter looks at how institutions craft disciplinary boundaries in order to name what is really a part of the discipline and what is not.47 Humanity, thus far for Wynter, has been an institution and discipline that has crafted borders around the content of its concept. What Wynter calls “marginal man” is the point of fracture and dissent of the excluded who can reflect back the presuppositions of who counts as human.
The poetic phenomenology of Sylvia Wynter grapples with the aporia of whether one can reflect upon the rules of sense while using the very discourses made possible by the rules. The position of “marginal man” is her phenomenological starting point for uncovering the rules which have crafted reality. Far from an abstract intellectual exercise, Wynter argues that her poetic phenomenology must be an inventive intervention that crafts (poiesis) new rules (poetics) for the genre of humanity. In other words, what it means to “be” human remains to be invented, to be written towards others. This explains her remarks on Jamaican and Caribbean literature as a
47 For instance, one may think of the endless debates around whether a particular text or writer is an example of a “real” philosopher or not. Where does the system of value to judge the validity of such a distinction come from? What prereflective appeals to judgment are being made? 75 psychic explosion of being into language: “History, the political and economic sciences, ethnology, and sociology played their part, but it was in poetry, in literature, that the self of the black, till then presumed to exist in the absence of self which made him non-existence, first ‘was’ in terms of the written word” (1972, 73; emphasis mine). She continues, in an explicit reference to
Heidegger, “Poetry was the literary clearing in the forest where he [marginal man] first had his fictional being” (Wynter 1972, 73).48 Writing, for Wynter, as the praxis of intellectuals and the marginalized is of such fundamental importance to her intellectual project that its neglect obscures what Wynter means by designating her thought as part of the “human project.”49
48 The importance of writing, literature, and consciousness can be found in Fanon’s essay “Antillais et Africains” (2011) [“West Indians and Africans” (1967)]. In this short essay Fanon gives a spatialized history of how Martinicans came to embrace the political doctrine of Négritude. The first event was the “return” of the poet and “lycée teacher” (Fanon 2011/1967, 708/21) Aimé Césaire who declared that it was beautiful to be nègre in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. This created a psychic explosion in the population. The second event was World War II and the confinement of French soldiers of the Vichy government on the island. This revealed that France’s humanism was nothing but a “mask” for anti-black racism (Fanon 2011/1967, 709/22). The final event came after the war ended and the new “political consciousness” of Martinicans attempted to concretely implement these blackened values: “Then it became real [réel] that not only the color black was invested with value, but fiction black, ideal black, black in the absolute, primitive black, the Negro [nègre]. This amounted to nothing less than requiring the West Indian totally to recast his world, to undergo a metamorphosis of his body. It meant demanding of him an axiological activity in reverse [une activité axiologique inverse], a valorization of what he had rejected” (Fanon 2011/1967, 710/24). We have already covered Fanon’s critique of Négritude providing a “racial real” that remains subjective, but does not pass into modifying the objective. What is important to see here is that Fanon is describing a spatial history of the 1940s tumult in the Caribbean that deeply affected Sylvia Wynter in Jamaica. This tumult initiated an axiological activity in which blackened values were experienced and experimented. “In Martinique, the first metaphysical, or if one prefers, ontological experiment [expérience] coincided with the first political experiment [expérience]. August Comte regarded the proletarian as a systematic philosopher. The proletarian of Martinique is a systematized Negro [une nègre systématisé]” (Fanon 2011/1967, 710/24). The engagement between writing, literature, and consciousness makes space for new systems of existence. 49 As in Sylvia Wynter’s (2006) “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in the Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project.” 76
There would appear to be a manifest tension between Wynter’s adherence to a “human project” and her methodological reliance on Foucault’s theory of “epistemes” in Les mots et choses. In that text Foucault famously uncovered that what modernity calls “Man” and the humanisms it bases on this epistemological object is a recent and incoherent invention that if its epistemological arrangements were to disappear “[t]hen one can certainly wager that [“Man”] would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (1966/1994, 398/387). But the language of “project” cannot help but recall the existential phenomenology of Sartre with whom Foucault took issue. Foucault reproached Sartre’s tendency towards totalization and teleogy which is implied in the work of a “project.” I will address this tension later in the chapter with a close reading of Foucault’s Les mots et choses and what Foucault understands “arrangements” to be. For now, I would like to pose the fundamental question of this chapter as such: is the “Man” of Western culture that Foucault critiques the same as the “human project” arising from the
Caribbean? Wynter’s poetic phenomenology calls for the invention of a blackened humanism that would have a distinctly different epistemological arrangement than the humanism of Western culture. Thus, her writing of humanity can engage Foucault (and his “epistemes”) and Sartre (with his dialectical theory and totalizing projects) without incoherence.
In the following section I will make clear Wynter’s theory of writing as poiesis and poetics.
The question of what the role of the intellectual is in the struggle for a new humanity will be made explicit and offer a different interpretive lens through which to make sense of Sylvia Wynter’s later philosophy. The roots of Sylvia Wynter’s poetic phenomenology can be found in her 1972 review essay “One Love—Rhetoric or Reality—Aspects of Afrojamaicanism.” I will argue here that Wynter’s understanding of invention must be grounded in the concrete experience of alienation and the paradox of whether one can go beyond a language that has been imposed. The
77 centrality of race, gender, and class will guide Wynter’s novel reflections on the importance of the imagination.
Wynter and the Perils of Imagination
Imagination need not refer to an abstract and individualist philosophy of consciousness that deemphasizes praxis and the crafting of the world.50 One is born into a society already populated by historical images and interpretive schemas to make sense of these images. The imagination is cultivated through cultural practices, disciplinary apparatuses such as prisons and educational institutions, and, most insidiously, economic forces. How one comes to see herself, the images she appropriates for her self-identification, are never primarily her own. This is so because we come into the world in media res. Our language and the images that arise from its use were crafted before we arrived. Thus, we are always already mediated by invented images and grammars that are not of our choosing. In a word, we are never absolutely coincident with ourselves; there is always a rift between myself and my historical situation which has preceded me and goes beyond me.51 This rift does not imply that any subject is completely free of their situation. Instead the rift suggests
50 For instance, this can be found in the very early Sartre, but by the time he has written What is Literature? it is clear that Sartre connects the imagination of the writer to concrete praxis: “Our job is cut out for us [writers]. In so far as literature is negative it will challenge the alienation of work; in so far as it is a creation and an act of surpassing, it will present man as creative action” (1978, 174). 51 Sartre would call this “presence-to-self” in his ontology of the human subject. We are never absolute presence, but always at some distance from what others take us to be and what we take ourselves to be. Consciousness is already a rift attempting to ground itself, but always being interrupted. In Being and Nothingness as Sartre writes, “Ontology here comes up against a profound contradiction since it is through the for-itself that the possibility of a foundation comes to the world. In order to be a project of founding itself, the in-itself would of necessity have to be originally a presence to itself—i.e., it would have to already be consciousness” (1984, 789). Sartre develops a more nuanced formulation in What is Literature? (1978) where he claims the writer of literature must address this alienating rift by finding “[a]n orchestration of consciousnesses which may permit us to render the multi-dimensionality of the event” (229). 78 that one is never in sync with the situation in which they are enmeshed. These general descriptions should distort the specificity of the rift, the importance of power, between those who have been blackened in colonial societies. So how does this rift—which I would call alienation rather than oppression—occur and what might come from this rift?
These critical questions guide Sylvia Wynter’s argument in “One Love” (1972). This article presents itself as a review essay of a collection of essays and poems (titled One Love) by
“new wave” Jamaican writers52 who, ostensibly, intend to provide a formulation of Afro-Jamaican consciousness that is free of the alienation of earlier Jamaican writers. While Wynter is critical of this text it becomes clear that she is more interested in theorizing the relationship between alienation and imagination. She begins by noting that the collection was published by “a West
Indian publishing company, set up in London, run primarily by expatriate West Indians” that
“answered a need—the need of an outlet for the new wave of consciously experienced black feeling, which emanating from the black struggle in the United States, has touched upon deep responsive chords in the Caribbean islands; and especially the English-speaking Caribbean”
(Wynter 1972, 64; emphasis mine). Wynter’s explicitly Marxist analyses lead her to question how the needs and feelings of struggle can be appropriated by the value of Capital. She is suspicious of the revolutionary potential of a Jamaican writing that could be published in a country that only ten years prior had claimed them as a colony.53
Part of Wynter’s response to the first question—how does this rift of alienation occur?— is that the Caribbean has remained in an economic and literary relationship of dependence to their
52 Wynter defines this “new wave,” thusly: “All the contributors to One Love are born in the forties; except one, born even later, in the fifties” who are “distinct from the first ‘national’ wave of writers, who erupted out of the 1938 upheavals that provided the catalyst for the birth of national consciousness” (1972, 67). 53 Jamaica was a British colony up to 1962. 79 former colonizers (the British for Wynter and the French for Fanon). The instituting of a new imaginary is still circulated through officially sanctioned presses and, thus, the actual needs and historical experiences of the “marginalized” becomes transformed and irrealized into another commodity. Wynter locates the expression of these needs and historical experiences of the underclass in the Jamaican creole and religious practices of the black peasants (1972, 80). Given that One Love consists of authors who are arguing for an authentic Afro-Jamaicanism and, furthermore, write in Jamaican creole, it might be expected that Wynter would applaud the writers for their “authentic” representation of those who suffer the economic and psychic alienation of colonial capitalism.
Except they do not suffer it. At least not in the same manner. These writers of One Love are not writing to or for les damnés (even if they may psychologically believe they are) because their “middle class ignorance of the true significance of Jamaican cult religions” (Wynter 1972,
70) leads them to exploit stereotypical images of the black peasantry that serve the same function of the cultivated images from “the West” about Black life: to mystify the relations of exploitation to the denial of Black humanity. She questions this “literary ‘blackism’” (Wynter 1972, 70) and asks, “Yet what are the true images of ourselves?” (Wynter 1972, 79). To be clear, Wynter is arguing that it is not enough to write “like” how one imagines the alienated and exploited speak.
This would amount to nothing less than the attempt to crawl inside the fabricated skin—livery— of the blackened. Wynter’s evidence for this problematic dynamic is that One Love was written for an institutional press located within the British territory. Since the economic relationship of dependence still circumscribes the autonomy of Jamaica Wynter does not see how this piece of literature can become anything other than another instantiation of an alienating imaginary. Indeed, in 1972, Wynter has come to realize that even those with black skin will “attemp[t][…]to ‘cash in’
80 on blackness, to manipulate it, rather than to relate the black struggle to its firm political and economic basis in the context of world wide monopoly-capitalist domination” and, in doing so, will obscure “the basic relations of the denial of black humanity to the rise and extension of the capitalist system” (76). Wynter could scarcely sound more Fanonian.54
It is not the attempt to appropriate an historical experience that is not “theirs” that moves
Wynter to critique the work of One Love; it is that the appropriation is a reification, a lifeless abstraction that does not communicate the concrete relations of alienation. In fact, insofar as this collection of essays was published outside of Jamaica, Wynter charges that it lacks the imaginative context (1972, 73) to address the current situation of alienation.55 The crafting and description
(poiesis and poetics, respectively) of one’s imaginative context ought to be the political imperative of the writer-intellectual on Wynter’s account. One must discover the “grammar,” the rules of sense, of one’s situation and then craft a new manner of understanding. This is what she thinks the
“old wave” of Caribbean writers (C.L.R. James and Roger Mais, for example) when they
“[t]ouched on this endemic confrontation between the official reality allied to the super-structure of the plantation and the unofficial yet majority reality of the marginal and excluded classes”
(1972, 70). Human reality is founded upon a struggle over the “reality” of imagination insofar as structures and institutions never offer themselves as senseless, but craft themselves as if they were the natural image of humanity. Later in her career, Wynter will describe Western Capitalism as the reproduction of an image of humanity as “naturally” homo oeconomicus (2000a, 26). Writing that
54 In fact, this essay constitutes one of Wynter’s most sustained engagements with Fanon’s Peau noire and reflects how she builds on his Phenomenological Existentialism. 55 It has long been understood how difficult it is to acquire all of Sylvia Wynter’s works. This is because so many of her essays are published with presses whose focus is the Global South. I surmise that this has been intention in Wynter’s case. Much of her work is a reflexive critique of Western academia and its global institutions of knowledge. I will address this aspect of her poetics in the last section of this chapter: “From Genre to Gender.” 81 loses touch with this struggle to craft a new imaginative context, that does not endeavor to unmask the prereflective image that guides the practices of dominating institutions, risks simply justifying the status quo.
Turning to Fanon, Wynter describes this as “[t]he complexity of our problem[…]that we the New-World blacks, the first total colonials of capitalism, have internalized the ‘standards and needs’ of the external audience” (1972, 74). The rift of alienation comes about when a population comes to prereflexively accept an imaginary that does not have a place for them. Indeed, this is how we can make sense of Fanon declaration near the beginning of Peau noire that he will grasp his narcissism with both hands (2011/2008, 75/6). The first step towards disalienation must be the wresting of one’s image from the external audience. The poiesis/poetics of Wynter’s project is meant to bring about this genre change. Wynter references the necessity of a “committed writing”(1972, 76)56 draws its source from the conflictual alienation of the imagination. This writing cannot rest upon abstract denunciation which Wynter acknowledges European discourse has engaged: “Whilst there is still a quality of abstraction in European denunciations of the great
European betrayal of humanity, the black suffers in his person, in his psyche this betrayal; he is at once its symbol and its concrete victim. When the black, educated and alienated, takes up his pen to explore his condition, he is the sacrificial victim, who refusing his place on the altar, springs up and takes the knife, setting in motion the destruction of the entire apparatus and paraphernalia of
56 Again, one can only hear echoes of Sartre’s “committed literature” here: “[w]orld and man reveal themselves by undertakings. And all the undertakings we might speak of reduce themselves to a single one, that of making history. So here we are, led by the hand to the moment when the literature of exis [Greek for relatively stable arrangement or disposition—this issue of arrangement and disposition will take on a fundamental importance further down when I engage with Foucault] must be abandoned to inaugurate that of praxis[…]The fact is that only in a socialist collectivity would literature, having finally understood its essence and having made the synthesis of praxis and exis, of negativity and construction, of doing, having, and being, deserve the name of total literature” (1978, 176-177). 82 his domination” (1972, 75-76). For Wynter, it is the experience of the “marginal man” that can overcome the aporia of investigating the conditions of possibility for thought while also being mediated by what these conditions have made possible.
The perils of imagination consist in losing touch with the context of one’s writing and depending on the alienating imagination that has preceded one’s birth into the world. The beginnings of Wynter’s poetic phenomenology must be situated as an attempt to discover the rules of one’s context and then crafting a new genre. It is not an attempt at reaching a hidden and authentic subject. Wynter’s humanism is premised on invention and not a preexistent, natural substance. Wynter is attempting to reveal how much material violence and destruction can come from imaginary constructions while disavowing the possibility that one will eventually find the
“real” image of humanity. While we can see where Wynter thinks the rift of alienation comes from—the imposition of an image that negates one’s existence—it remains to be seen why Wynter puts such emphasis on writing and the very specific role she envisions for the intellectual in struggle.
The Writing of Alienation and Imaginative Context
In the above section I argued that the imagination for Wynter is the concrete site of struggle to develop the conditions of possibility for sense and meaning to appear. The imagination, to repeat, is neither a purely private and subjective affair nor is it absolutely alienating and objective.
For Wynter, the imagination is the constructed and constructive space through which “reality” is mediated and made sensible. Being constructed implies that past actions have formed the space of imagination; being constructive indicates that this constructed space can enable new actions and reactions. At a certain level of abstraction we could say that Wynter’s argument does not go so far
83 as to say that the imagination is inherently oppressive or liberatory. It would appear to be more of an ontological claim that the human creature is both created according to preexisting image and creates an image for itself in the future.57 Insofar as the human is dynamic and opaque the imagination allows for the comprehension of human activity and institutions in the past and the future.
But abstraction is not truth. Wynter is sensitive to the fact that the imagination is not something that simply happens and, thus, would be the site of free play and creativity. The space of the imagination has material effects because it was crafted alongside dynamics of power which overrepresent their truth value. If the Caribbean imagination can be other than the dominant imaginary the blackened can exploit the inherent dynamism of language. Thus, Wynter claims that the most important problem facing the Caribbean writer is language (1972, 77-78). This is so because there is a close implication between language and imagination. The latter allows language to appear as sensible. If there were no imagination, then words would be no more than mere sounds without connection to objective reality. The problem of language takes on a singular significance within the imaginative context of the Middle Passage: “The disruption across the Middle Passage, was a disruption, for each individual tribal man, from his tribal language; and therefore, to borrow
Heidegger’s definition, his disruption from that ‘clearing in the forest where man has his Being.’
The experience of exile was linguistic[…]” (1972, 78). Wynter’s hypothesis is that the economically exploitative relationship between the European countries who began to imagine themselves as “the West” and African men and women could only be made to make sense by pushing indigenous languages, practices, and imaginations to the margins of the Western
57 Cf. note 13 on page 24 in the previous chapter for a discussion of Renaissance humanism and the severing of the connection from imago dei (Man as crafted in the image of God). 84 imaginary. Black humanity cannot come to light, cannot appear, within the context of European languages that designate blackened skin as “the space of otherness” (Wynter 1989, 642).
To be uprooted from one’s land is to disrupt the imaginative context that allowed one’s language to have dynamism and meaning. Words do not have meaning in themselves. They depend upon the space of imagination to provide the connective tissue between signifier and signified. If one’s language has not only been disrupted via the tearing away of space and context, but also by the new imposed language’s designation of Africa and Blackness as the space from which humanity does not arise then alienation is no longer only that of stolen labor power; it is the attempt to steal what it means to “be.” What makes Wynter’s account of language and violence distinctive is her attentiveness to the poiesis of the plantation:
[O]n arrival at the plantations, the dominant language of the master, the language of
command imposed itself on the former patterns. Language became an area of the plantation
where [the slave] negated [her] Being. [Her] response was at once to assimilate this
language to [her] structure of thought; of imagination. To subvert this clearing, to reinvent
it; recreating its essence through the trauma of [her] new existence. The creation of dialect
and Creole forms of the European masters’ languages, was an original act of self
preservation and rebellion as important as the innumerable slave revolts. (1972, 78;
emphasis mine).
The loss of the former imaginative context necessitated the invention of a new form of writing and imagination: the writing and imagination of revolt and revolution.
If in the previous section we were concerned with the question of how the rift of alienation occurs we now see what Wynter claims can come from this rift. This rift is not an atemporal or universal “human” condition of all those creatures who must speak a language. Wynter, by
85 referencing Heidegger’s clearing multiple times throughout the essay, is implicitly subverting the rather easy claim that all beings are alienated insofar as they must take up language from which they cannot escape and of which they did not choose. Perhaps all human creatures are alienated by virtue of the fact that the conditions of their creation are other than their choosing, but this does not justify the assumption that all forms of alienation are drawn from the same violence. In her analysis of the Jamaican writer and their situation Wynter begins showing how the blackened subject must contend with the alienation of labor, the alienation of language, and the alienation of
Being. The violence of these compounding alienations have crafted a genre of Black being that the
Black writer must transform and go beyond. A new genre of invention had to come to pass that would not merely obscure these alienating conditions. In other words, for the blackened to simply reinvent themselves as “middle-class” would not be enough.
Readings of Wynter that do not place violence and alienation at the center of her theoretical project to craft a new studia humanitas—a new humanism—will misconstrue her understanding of humanism as another attempt at discovering a universal ontology rather than the struggle to grasp how imagination changes reality. The experience of writing, Wynter suggests, is qualitatively different for the racially enslaved, colonized, and their descendants. The Western ratio constructed a relationship where writing was the expression of civilization while language could only be the source of command for the blackened. Wynter argues that by taking up the pen and choosing to inscribe oneself differently the black writer “negate[d] the totality of the master’s language and his former African language, [and] created a new synthesis out of his new experience” and, thus, “for the black to write at all in the context of the Caribbean was a revolutionary act, since to write is to affirm existence out of non-existence” (1972, 79). The imaginative context was shifted and new rules of being could begin to appear.
86
It is not possible to read these lines outside of the racial context of chattel slavery and colonialism wherein language was closely monitored in order to constrain the imagination of the blackened population about what they “naturally” were and to stifle the possibility of revolutionary communication. If Wynter puts an inordinate amount of pressure on language, writing, and imagination it is because she has this concrete, historical context in mind. To finally grasp and rework the conditions of one’s appearance is to make possible the crafting of something new as well as engage a poetic understanding of one’s current historical situation. In this way, revolution might not appear in the form we are conditioned to imagine it: primarily through the taking up of arms. If violence is already embedded into the imaginative context before the appearance of “real” violence such as the chains and whips of chattel slavery or the police and military institutions of colonialism then the revolutionary reinvention of this context must also take the form of transforming the obscured, background structures of our existence.
Much of Wynter’s retrospective, historical work is what one would expect from a philosopher-historian in the 20th century. Whether it is the search for points of discontinuity à la
Foucault, the revolutionary breakthrough of humanity à la late Sartre, or, even, the sifting for
“chips of messianic time” à la Walter Benjamin (1968, 263), she is attempting to reanimate the present by making appear the possibilities that had been in the past. But there remains a difficulty in Wynter’s project. Thus far, we have seen Wynter write about the praxis and poiesis of those in the past whose context and class position she no longer shares. At this point her embryonic poetic phenomenology reveals how the work of imagination subtends institutions and economic relationships. But how can she avoid the critique she offered of the writers of One Love whereupon she simply appropriates the imaginative speech of others without regard for the present situation?
In 1972, Wynter had not fully fleshed out what the role of the intellectual should be in the new
87 writing of humanity. She was sure, as I have shown, that it was not the intellectuals place to simply copy the voice of the marginalized (“native,” “negro,” “woman,” etc.). This could only risk transforming the inventive poiesis into another commodity for the market where “The chic, the with-it, the boutique world of fashion, the ad-sphere [can] reduce black liberation to another fashion” (Wynter 1972, 81). To avoid reducing the products of the imagination to cliché will require that the intellectual assume a sort of commitment and responsibility. The responsibility of the intellectual, I will show in the next section, is to rework the imaginative context so that new genres of invention can have material effects rather than be recaptured by the dominant episteme.
“No Humans Involved”: Wynter’s Open Call for the Committed Intellectual
In the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, Sylvia Wynter pens an open letter to her
“colleagues” calling on them to take responsibility for their role as “the grammarians of our present epistemological order” (Wynter 1992, 14). She is not only responding to the racial violence committed against Rodney King’s body or the violence of the mostly poor population of color against the city; what impels Wynter to write this letter is the discovery that the Los Angeles police institution “[r]outinely used the acronym N.H.I [no humans involved] to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young, jobless, black males living in the inner city ghetto” (Wynter 1992,
13). For Wynter, this appellation—N.H.I—constitutes phenomenological evidence that institutions often attempt to conceal their imaginative contexts. Once one brackets what an institution says about itself—a police institution that claims to abide by equal enforcement of the law—it is possible to discover the prior orientation that grounds how the institution will operate in the concrete. Wynter thinks this issue of “orientation” along the lines of grammar in this letter, but her deployment of the concept is analogous to her 1972 description of “imaginative context.” What
88 is different is that at this point she is explicitly wondering who is responsible for the writing of our grammar or context.
What I have been describing as Wynter’s poetic phenomenology is a mode of dialectical critique that endeavors to discover an horizon of meaning that makes a shared world of recognition possible for some while inventing others as outside the universe of human obligation (Wynter
1992, 13).58 “N.H.I” reveals a grammar that allows certain subjects to appear in the world as worthy of human recognition while casting others to the margins. When Wynter describes this linguistic practice working a prioristically as a “classificatory schema” (Wynter 1992, 13) she is calling attention to how the imaginative context of the “human” reveals itself to be premised on scarcity. For the Los Angeles police institution, humanity could only be universal insofar as its horizon is not extended too far. To inquire into the human with rights worthy of respecting is also to inquire into the limits that would allow this concept to maintain intelligibility. If everyone and everything were “human” then “human” would cease to actually designate anything. Wynter’s focus on the poiesis of language recognizes that for a word to have descriptive and performative force it must name what it is and what it is not. Furthermore, no word exists atomistically, for
Wynter. It must be embedded within a prereflexive system of existence that governs the words relations to other words, practices, and institutions. The paradox that Wynter reads into the Los
Angeles police institution is that its proclamations of the abstract universality of the law can only make sense through concrete negations and classifications. Our current genre of liberal
58 While Wynter’s engagement with Heidegger was explicit in 1972 with her exploration of how the imaginative context provides a clearing by which things may appear or come to light, her deployment of Heidegger in this 1992 letter is more implicit. What Wynter is after is akin to Heidegger’s reflections on language as already oriented by a worldview. Institutions, for Wynter, conceal their dependence on a prior and implicit image of the world that never speaks as such, but orients the epistemological and political limits of what the institution can be thought to accomplish. 89 universalism fails to interrogate how institutions take universality to be contravened by scarcity, by the notion that there simply is not enough.
Wynter goes further than simply observing that language and meaning proceed through negation. In this letter, she argues that linguistic practices have a materiality that constructs the experience of consciousness. She references the numerous deaths of black males by illegal chokeholds from the police59 which were defended by the institution because “[b]lack males had something abnormal about their windpipes” (Wynter 1992, 13). She argues that these violent deaths had to be precipitated by being “first classified and thereby treated differently” (Wynter
1992, 13). As I argued in the previous section, Wynter’s understanding of the imaginary provides the connective tissue between consciousness and “reality.” The troubling force of this conclusion is that it does not matter that “empirically” there is no difference between the windpipes of white people and the windpipes of black and brown people. No amount of scientific study, dissection of black cadavers, can disrupt this experience of the black body because the orientation of “objective” reality has already been circumscribed by an image of N.H.I.60 In other words, a universal
59 Not unlike the chokehold that killed Eric Garner in 2014. 60 Wynter is fond of quoting from Aimé Césaire’s Poésie et connaissance (1945) [“Poetry and Knowledge”] where he argues that “To acquire the impersonality of scientific knowledge mankind depersonalized itself, deindividualized itself” (157). The natural sciences have overdetermined human perceptions of what is “real” and have made opaque their vulnerability to institutional arrangements of power. Césaire’s argument intends to reveal that even the natural sciences are not completely disentangled from reproducing an image of the world. Thus, “[i]n all valid judgment the field of transcendence is limited” but “It is by means of the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the image that overthrows [bouleverse] all the laws of thought that mankind breaks down the barrier” (1945, 166). Reliance on the natural sciences for “truth” will reproduce the conditions of violence and alienation as in the case of police officers feeling compelled to use chokeholds because Black bodies are “objectively” different. Wynter takes up Césaire’s call for “[t]he study of the word [that] will condition the study of nature” (1945, 164) because she agrees that an image of humanity already orients the type of knowledges the natural sciences will reproduce. One need only look at the interminable debates over whether “race” is biologically real. Thus, in a recent essay Wynter (2015) will propose a new science that takes the human as a hybrid of bios and mythos, organic life and narrative (210). Wynter is arguing, as can be seen in the above 90 scientism or liberalism must contend with the fact that the intervention of language creates
“reality” (poiesis) according to certain laws (poetics). The problem is not located in the stated belief that black men have abnormal windpipes—indeed, for Wynter, it matters very little if the speaker actually buys into the idea—it is in the imaginary context that makes such a statement possible.
It is for this reason that Wynter will ask her colleagues, “Where did this system of classification come from? Why should the classifying acronym N.H.I., with its reflex anti-black prescriptions, have been so actively held and deployed by the judicial officers of Los Angeles, graduates of both the professional and non-professional schools of the university system of the
United States, whom we ourselves educate” (Wynter 1992, 13). Wynter calls on her fellow intellectuals to interrogate how institutions of knowledge become co-implicated in the construction of racial classificatory schemas of humanity. It is important to emphasize that the construction of this imaginary context does not happen at the level of explicitly racist statements; indeed, these are mere epiphenomena of a broader structural problem. Thus, there is no conversation about police institutions and law without excavating educational institutions and the imaginary.
Wynter’s focus on institutions (economic, publishing, policing, and educational) indicates that she conceives of the “human” as constantly generated through multiple apparatuses of knowledge production and implementation. Without institutions any notion of the humanity would be merely abstract and hypothetical. The foregrounding of institutions does not negate her concern for responsibility. Drawing on Ralph Ellison 1952 novel Invisible Man, she argues, “[w]e see each other only through the ‘inner eyes’ with which we look with our physical eyes upon
open letter, that our institutions are already inserting mythoi into our lives. Poetic phenomenology is the first step towards uncovering that the mythos of “Man” as white and middle-class governs our knowledge and perceptual practices. 91 reality[…]What is our responsibility for the making of those inner eyes in which humanness and
North Americanness are always already defined, not only in optimally white terms, but also in optimally middle-class variants of these terms? What have we, as educators, had to do, and still have to do, with the creation and maintenance of the classifying logic[…]” (Wynter 1992, 13).61
The language of “inner eyes” is misleading because Wynter clearly does not see the classificatory schema as a matter of private, interior consciousness. Her focus on institutions is meant to highlight how the consciousness that makes it possible for the physical organism to make sense of its situation already comes from the outside. There is not a problematic separation between consciousness, others, and the world. The “inner eyes” are an envelopment like skin over institutional subjects. That this skin of consciousness is socially reproduced through institutions leads Wynter to ask: how is that we have forgotten that it is we who have crafted these institutions?
Intellectuals have this responsibility to recraft institutions because they are the ones who ensure their continued existence by refusing to interrogate the “reality” institutions impose upon les damnés, the condemned. If Wynter is correct, that the apprehension of “reality” is mediated by prereflexive orientations, then this understanding can allow for the political commitment of the intellectual to challenge the imaginary contexts within which we are embedded. The question still remains how one can “[b]reak out of one cultural specific model of reality, one variant of our inner
61 It is worth quoting the Ellison passage at length to see the phenomenological analysis she takes from Ellison: “I am an invisible man[…]When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination [emphasis mine]—indeed, everything and anything except me[…]my invisibility [is not] exactly a matter of biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (2001, 3). Remarkably, Ellison comes very close to producing the phenomenological analyses of the gaze in Fanon and Sartre. Much of Ellison’s work consists in the investigation of how tropes and idioms govern the apprehension of material reality. We will also return to Ellison in the concluding chapter of this dissertation in order to investigate how Hortense Spillers reads Ellison as providing a counter mythology. 92 eyes, and make the transition from one Foucauldian episteme, from one founding and behavior- regulating narrative, to another” (Wynter 1992, 15-16). But it is here that Wynter begins to provide a concrete answer: the imaginary context is neither random not arbitrary. It follows a more or less coherent narrative. N.H.I. did not designate just anyone who happened to cross the Los Angeles police institution, but specifically the poor, Black and Brown population. Wynter takes this as the
“grammar” of the situation that came into being. It is not necessarily the case that the Black and
Brown jobless were always going to be conceived as belonging to the negative space of humanity.
This reality was produced via a concatenation of institutionally produced discourses and economic power. In other words, it was written.
Wynter’s open letter is an invitation to her colleagues that a new genre of writing must be brought forth. In fact, her open letter may indeed be an example of how this new genre of writing might begin. Her descriptions of the imaginary that provides the apprehension of “reality” does not lead her to say that “truth” is impossible or inaccessible. The fact that the “grammar” of an institution had to designate a population as not human indicates to Wynter that a certain disavowal is at work in the maintenance of the institution. The disavowal is of what institutions say about themselves and not a hidden “true” humanity. Wynter criticizes her colleagues for withdrawing from this “truth,” for refusing to marry their writing to the violence and alienation of those whose created lack of humanity supports the current image of humanity. Thus, in the conclusion of the open letter Wynter returns to Fanon and writes, “The starving ‘fellah,’ (or jobless inner city N.H.I, the global new poor, les damnés) Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. They are the truth. It is we who institute this ‘truth.’ We must now undo their narratively condemned status” (Wynter 1992, 16). The truth Wynter is describing is the truth of the inhumanity of the current human image. A new genre of invention would have to come from the dominant episteme’s
93 imagined “outside.” The N.H.I. or les damnés are the breakthrough of material alienation. Their construction is the key to the historical experience of one’s moment and the sociogenic principle that must be rewritten.
The Sociogenic Principle and the Problem of Historical Experience
The problem of humanism, historical experience, and modernity is a guiding thread that runs through the works of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. It is striking that much of the scholarship that connects these three figures does not highlight that Wynter and Fanon, far from being completely alien to Foucault’s historical context, were, in fact, his contemporaries.62
This is not to say that these three figures occupy the same position vis-à-vis the Western archive’s
(or “Western culture” as Foucault (1966/1994, 13/xxii) repeatedly calls it in Les mots et les choses63) philosophical anthropology and political humanism. Wynter and Fanon, of the English and French speaking Caribbean respectively, occupy and write from a liminal space at the borders of Western modernity and its historical experience. For what the archaeological Foucault of Les mots et choses has done is show that the sense of things is not to be found, primarily, in the linearity of time, but in the “fundamental arrangement [la disposition fondamentale]” (1966/1994, 314/303) of space. In other words, “historical experience” cannot be reduced to the simple fact that Wynter,
Fanon, and Foucault happened to be alive at the same time, but instead our analysis of their philosophical connections must proceed by delineating the relationships between ideas, structures, and institutions that made their thought possible. If the humanism of modernity constitutes an untenable paradox for Foucault in being an “empirico-transcendental doublet” (1966/1994,
62 A mere three years separate Wynter, Fanon, and Foucault. Wynter was born in 1928, Fanon 1925, and Foucault 1926. 63 Translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 94
329/318) it is because his thought is mediated by a very precise position and relationship within the border of “Western culture.” But is this fundamental disposition—this foundational attunement—shared by Wynter and Fanon? When they speak of “humanism” does it occupy the same position in historical experience as Foucault? Furthermore, insofar as Wynter and Fanon retain a fidelity to the word “humanism” might we ask if they are articulating a blackened humanism whose grid of intelligibility, or fundamental arrangement, we have yet to lay out? In what follows, I will put Wynter, Foucault, and, to a lesser extent Fanon, in conversation with one another in order to ask whether the humanism of which they speak is of the same genre.
Before examining how Wynter’s blackened humanism is a fundamentally different arrangement and disposition than the humanism derived from “Western culture” it is necessary to make clear exactly what and who Foucault is critiquing in Les mots et choses. Doing so will forestall overextending Foucault’s critiques of “Man” (l’homme), exporting the space of his thought beyond the borders of “Western culture” without due diligence. In the famous chapter
“Man and his Doubles,” Foucault begins to imply which of his contemporaries he sees as most symptomatic of reproducing the incoherent structure of modern “Man” as both the object of investigation and the condition of possibility for apprehending this experience: “It is easy enough to understand how the analysis of actual experience [du vécu] has established itself, in modern reflection, as a radical contestation of positivism and eschatology; how it has tried to restore the forgotten dimension of the transcendental; how it has attempted to exorcise the naïve discourse of a truth reduced wholly to the empirical, and the prophetic discourse which with similar naïveté promises at last the eventual attainment by man of experience” (1966/1994, 332/321). Neither
Sartre nor his 1960 Critique de la raison dialectique [Critique of Dialectical Reason] are mentioned by name, but Foucault’s constant references to le vécu, the phenomenological
95 examination of “lived experience,” leaves little doubt that Foucault expected his readers to understand about whom he was speaking. In his Critique, Sartre attempts a dialectical synthesis of existentialism into Marxism that would allow an understanding of how History (l’Histoire) makes
Man and how Man makes History without reducing man to simply an empirical fact (positivism) or projecting History as inexorably drawn towards the overcoming of capitalism and alienation.
Sartre wishes to understand the historical experience64 of human freedom. Foucault is dubious about whether this project actually brings something new into the current arrangement of knowledge.
For Foucault will suppose that there is far more that links Sartrean experience (le vécu) with positivism (of August Comte) and eschatological Marxism. The linkage is that all three take as a presupposition that “Man” exists as an epistemological object. “Despite appearances to the contrary, it is evident how closely knit is the network that links thought of the positivist or eschatological type (Marxism being in the first rank of these) and reflections inspired by phenomenology. Their recent rapprochement is not of the order of a tardy reconciliation: at the level of archaeological configurations they were both necessary—and necessary to one another— from the moment the anthropological postulate was constituted, that is, from the moment when man appeared as an empirico-transcendental doublet” (1966/1994, 332/321-322). Foucauldian
64 It is important to note that in French l’expérience has a rich ambivalence between “experience” as something one has and “experiment” as the attempt to inaugurate something new. We should recall Fanon’s description of Négritude in Martinique after World War II: “In Martinique, the first metaphysical, or if one prefers, ontological experiment [expérience] coincided with the first political experiment [expérience]. August Comte regarded the proletarian as a systematic philosopher. The proletarian of Martinique is a systematized Negro [une nègre systématisé]” (Fanon 2011/1967, 710/24) This is not the place to adjudicate whether Foucault is completely fair in his rendering of the Sartrean project or whether there are striking similarities in their thoughts History and freedom, but Thomas Flynn’s two volume study Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason (1997 and 2005) offers an excellent exegesis of this issue. 96 archaeology reveals the fundamental arrangements that make certain thoughts possible and others unthinkable. This means that even contestations of dominant ideas do not necessarily leave the epistemological space. That all of these positions and dispositions are brought into relationship with one another is made possible by “[t]he pure experience of order” (Foucault 1966/1994,
13/xxi) or the “Western ratio” (Foucault 1966/1994, 388/377). The systemic linkages and relations that made possible the space of “Man” as that which exists and that for which History exists is a recent invention in Western culture that allows us to forget “[a] time—and it is not so long ago— when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not” (Foucault 1966/1994,
333/322).
The problem of how “Man” can altogether be a finite epistemological object—as he or she is preceded by a biological life which overflows her, economic institutions that produce her, and a language that makes it possible for her to speak—and that which is the condition of possibility for there to be epistemology in the first place is a highly specific one. In concluding the problem of
“Man” to be a recent invention Foucault notes that he has taken “a relatively short chronological sample with a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century”
(1966/1994, 398/386). If Les mots et choses is really a work of how historical experience mediates humanism in modernity then we are able to draw two interrelated conclusions: first, historical experience is the foundational arrangement or fundamental disposition that makes certain thoughts possible and others impossible and, second, this historical experience is rooted in more or less definite spaces, thus, Foucault’s archaeology of historical experience is an historical experience for “us.” Taken together we can say that the humanism Foucault’s attacks occupies a definite space in the arrangement of European ideas.
97
When Foucault reflects on History (l’Histoire) as the “[b]ackground [arrière-fond], which establishes [the human sciences] and provides it with a fixed ground” (1966/1994, 382/371) he makes a striking reference to the homeland (la patrie). History mediates the human sciences, or humanism, by determining “[t]he cultural area—the chronological and geographical boundaries— in which that branch of knowledge can be recognized as having validity” (Foucault 1966/1994,
382/371).65 La patrie is both necessary and dangerous as an epistemological space because it allows the coherence of a system’s discursive practices, but it also circumscribes these practices and blunts their claims towards universal truth. It is already possible to see how Wynter’s critique of the West’s “over-representation” of “Man” is coextensive with Foucault’s Les mots et choses.
Western histoire66 spills over its borders in the dual attempt to found “Man” and also find him.
Foucault’s issue with this practice follows his critique of “Man” as an empirico-transcendental doublet since the modern arrangement of knowledge would be attempting to universally ground
65 Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (2003b) takes this insight seriously, but asks, in the context of gender and Transatlantic slavery, what happens to the form of the human being who is abducted by a homeland? How do they “belong” to a history in which they were not rooted? Furthermore, if “gender” like “Man” is made possible by a circumscribed fundamental arrangement then can it be universal? In this way it becomes possible to understand what Spillers means when she describes the slave ships as the site of “ungendering”: “These scaled in equalities complement the commanding terms of the dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project of Africans that Azura might have recognized. It has been pointed out to me that these measurements [of the Black body receiving a certain amount of space aboard the slave vessel according to their sex] do reveal the application of the gender rule to the material conditions of passage, but I would suggest that ‘gendering’ takes place within the confines of the domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and female subjects over a wider ground of human and social purposes” (2003b, 214). Furthermore, the argument that a science has validity because it occupies a certain determinate field governed by an image (or “metaphor” to use Spillers’s language) had been suggested by Aimé Césaire in Poésie et connaissance (1945). See supra note 60. It is in making these diasporic connections of Black thinkers that it will possible to discover the “fundamental arrangement” or “historical experience” of invention. 66 We must constantly bear in mind that in the French this is not only the empirical events of the past, but also the narration of a tale or story. Thus, histoire is not simply objective; it is also a writing, thus, it is a disposition within a certain framework or episteme. 98 the conditions of possibility of dynamic, empirical beings who are constantly changing and shifting. If History is rooted in la patrie then the borders which circumscribe this determinate space represent a region wherein History may exist otherwise, where an altogether different historical experience of order may be possible. The question becomes whether the humanism of modernity can abet a relation with that which is not itself. Foucault, and the historical facts of colonialism, testify in the negative.
There is only one other mention of la patrie and it coincides with the only explicit reference to colonialism in Les mots et choses. This is important because it will make possible a rather different reading of Wynter’s humanism as it relates to Foucault’s archaeological project. The reference comes in the context of the three “counter-sciences” (Foucault 1966/1994, 393/381) that
Foucault argues militates against the existence of “Man” as that which grounds itself and discovers itself. These three sciences are psychoanalysis, linguistics, and ethnology. He argues that the unconscious in psychoanalysis, the existence of structures in language that have nothing to do with the choices of the human speaker, and ethnology’s search for the norms of culture that operate independently of the representations individuals give themselves of their situation expose the historicity of “Man.” In doing so, “Man” is “[l]ed back, by those strange bobbins, to the forms of its birth, to the homeland [à la patrie] that made it possible” (Foucault 1966/1994, 393/381). Thus,
“Man” is revealed not to have his origin in himself, but from an elsewhere he can never completely dominate. Foucault explicitly states that these “counter-sciences” produce “[a] perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established” (1966/1994, 385/373). This may be true so long as it is kept in mind that the three counter-sciences of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and ethnology only serve this
99 disruptive function within a concrete homeland and historical experience. It is in no way clear that psychoanalysis or ethnology have served this universal function.
In reference to ethnology Foucault observes, “There is a certain position of the Western ratio that was constituted in its history and provides a foundation for the relation [qui fonde le rapport] it can have with all other societies, even with the society in which it historically appeared.
Obviously, this does not mean that the colonizing situation is indispensable to ethnology”
(1966/1994, 388/377; emphasis mine). But where was this counter-science founded? In what space? Foucault explicitly claims that the roots of ethnology are founded “[i]n a possibility that properly belongs to the history of our [Western] culture, even more to its fundamental relation [son rapport fundamental] with the whole of history” (1966/1994, 388/377). Foucault claims, it seems, that the violent and colonizing practices of psychoanalysis or ethnology are contingent phenomena that cover over their essential work of disruption.67 But Foucault seems to draw back from this argument when he claims that “[e]thnology can assume its proper dimensions only within the historical sovereignty—always restrained, but always present—of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as itself” (1966/1994, 388/377).
This constitutes a profound misapprehension of the centuries of expropriation of land, resources, and bodies practiced by the homelands of Europe who extended their sovereignty into the African continent, Asian continent, the Americas, and the Caribbean. It is exceedingly unlikely that Foucault is unaware of all this. Thus, it is not my claim that Foucault evinces an ignorance of history here. What I do claim is that Foucault is looking for a ratio—a fundamental relationship—
67 “Obviously, this does not mean that the colonizing situation is indispensable to ethnology: neither hypnosis, nor the patient’s alienation within the fantasmatic character of the doctor, is constitutive of psychoanalysis; but[…]can be deployed only in the calm violence of a particular relationship and the transference it produces[…]” (Foucault 1966/1994, 388/377; emphasis mine). 100 that is not grounded in any sort of centralizing principle like Western “Man,” but in doing so he can only articulate this relationship of and to difference from within the circumscribed borders of his homeland—Western culture. In this way, the ratio remains a Western ratio that has its roots in the historical sovereignty of the very culture Foucault wishes to challenge. By turning to Wynter
I want to ask whether “humanism” has the same sense from within the grid of a homeland that is not one’s homeland. For it is not an accident that the French claimed Martinique as part of its territory or homeland (in the case of Fanon) or that the British did the same in the context of
Jamaica (in the case of Wynter). The space of thought for the colonized is nowhere to be found.
Thus, in what follows, I will argue that we must not overextend or over-represent Foucault’s critiques of humanism, anthropology, and modernity. His critiques were of a very specific genre.
Blackened humanism, on my account of Wynter, might more fruitfully be seen as part of the genre of utopia, a radical writing of humanity and a praxis that comes from “nowhere” vis-à-vis Western culture’s homeland of thought. Utopia, in Wynter’s sense, is not transcendent, but a constructed immanent site from which one may engage in critique.
It is true that much of Wynter’s methodological work in uncovering the epistemes of
“Man” owes a great deal to Foucault’s archeological period, but this focus has obscured a quite different philosophical orientation to her “Human Project”: the conjoining of writing and praxis.
Wynter remains a writer of humanism68 in “[her] demand for, [her] hope for, [her] search for, a new universalism” (Wynter 2000b, 196). The resistance to fragmentation and dispersion at the heart of Wynter’s intellectual project directly contradicts the battle Foucault was waging in his time. It ought to be emphasized that Foucault was fighting a very particular and local struggle
68 As with the previous chapter’s engagement with Fanon’s humanism it will be shown that simply the repetition of a word does not determine its content. Everything will hinge on the context, methodology, deployment, and form. In short, whether invention is at work. 101 against an institution of philosophical history upon French territory while Sylvia Wynter began her writing in the colonial territory of the Caribbean, generally, and Jamaica, specifically.69 She came to consciousness and began writing during a period of extraordinary economic and political upheaval across the whole Caribbean. This is something she shares with Fanon who noted the same upheaval in post-war 1940s Martinique (2011/1967). If the writings of Fanon and Sartre are read through the prism of being marked by violence, war, and upheaval it is remarkable that
Wynter’s texts are not understood as a part of this context. This historical experience of breaking through the History of the “West” undergirds her philosophical totalizations since violence and alienation runs through every piece of her writing.
David Scott presses Wynter on the unabashedly un-Foucauldian aspect of her project where on the one hand she aims to radically rehistoricize “the place of Man in Europe’s autobiography” but, on the other hand, she attempts “to provide the ground for a different imagining of the human.
But that reimaging has in some way to rest on an unhistoricizable a priori” (Wynter 2000b, 197).
Wynter’s response turns towards an elucidation of the debate on history between Lévi-Strauss and
Sartre’s Critique. She notes that, for Lévi-Strauss, history is “always already an ethnohistory”
(Wynter 2000, 197), it is a history for an ethnos, a culture, a people, a race. Thus, any “study” of history is already mediated by a “governing sociogenic principle” that, in order to produce
69 As I will show, Wynter is unequivocally a writer of historical experience even when she seems to be emphasizing individual experience. Much like Sartre and his “biographies” of Flaubert and Genet, Wynter sees herself as compelled towards totalization: “[f]or my generation the personal was never taken[…]very seriously. You knew you had this battle, but I think there was always recognition that what was happening to you was totally linked to what was happening to others. People ask me, ‘Why don’t you write an autobiography?’ But I have never been able to think that way[…]My generation, I think, would find it impossible to emphasize the personal at the expense of the political[…]The idea of what happens to you would always remain a secondary subject, because that’s how you lived and experienced it. The circumstances have changed, and one would experience it quite differently now” (2000b, 137). 102 sensible, self-referential discourses on the “nature” of humanity, must appear unhistoricizable.
Wynter argues in a Foucauldian vein, that from “[t]his ethnoculturally coded narrated history that is taught now in global academia as well as in our schools[…]we are all led to imagine [emphasis added] ourselves as Man, as purely biological and economic beings. The history for Man, therefore, narrated and existentially lived as if it were the history-for the human itself[…]up until now, there has been no history of the human” (Wynter 2000b, 198). It is this particular sociogenic imaginary of the “West” that imposes itself through knowledge institutions and global capital that
Wynter wishes to invent beyond.
It is striking is that at the very moment when she seems to take Lévi-Strauss’ side in his debate with Sartre she makes multiple references to “imagination.” Sartre, arguably, is a philosopher of the imaginary and from this he attempts to develop a poetics of History through the
Critique and his “biographies.”70 For Wynter, sociogeny (which she adapts from Fanon’s Peau
Noire71) is not a mere social construction of ideas, but the culturally specific ways an image of
“humanity” is crafted onto the skins of a population.72 For les damnés this is a necessarily
70 Cf. Thomas Flynn’s Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason vol. 1 (1997): “If Sartre is known as a philosopher of freedom and a moralist, he may with equal justification be called a philosopher of the imagination” (213) and, thus, “[i]f history, like every human undertaking, is a praxis, a doing, it is also for Sartre a poiesis, a making” (216). Flynn goes on to argue that “[i]ntegral to Sartre’s dialectic is the ideal of a socialism of abundance where nonalienating reciprocities would prevail[…]This practical als ob [Kantian “as if”] is an imaginative extrapolation from our experience in closely knot groups. Imagination obviously plays a major role in the dialectic through the projective totalization of the past” (1997, 219). On Flynn’s reading of Sartre the imagination of the philosopher-historian provides “[t]he mythos [which] connect[s] individual and collective praxes [while] respect[ing] their freecom and existential contingency” (1997, 219). 71 “Reacting against the constitutionalizing trend at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud demanded that the individual factor be taken into account in psychoanalysis. He replaced the phylogenetic theory by an ontogenetic approach. We shall see that the alienation of the black man [du Noir] is not an individual question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny…it is a question of sociodiagnostics” (Fanon 2011/2008, 66/xv). 72 An idea I have argued for in the previous chapter on erotics. 103 alienating historical experience since a History (l’Histoire) is narrated through a semiotic dichotomy of either Christian/non-Christian, Reason/non-Reason, or, as in our current state of affairs, economically selected/economically dyselected. Wynter writes for les damnés who must historialize themselves (Sartre’s terminology) through an image of humanity that analytically excludes them.
Wynter’s reflections on the intellectual and how the homeland of the “West” began to overrepresent itself can be found in her analysis of Christopher Columbus and the poetics of propter nos (created for our sake). She sees in his “discoveries” the overextension of a Western imaginary that crafts the world as if [als ob] all of its land was there for the sake of themselves.
Humanity becomes centralized within the territory of Europe and since humanity must be universal it pushes out beyond its borders to found itself and discover itself. The whole world will be “the
West.” Wynter is not only interested in the empirical violence that followed many of these
“discoveries” which led to the trafficking of African flesh, the dispossession of Indigenous land, and the genocide of many populations. She wants to reveal the transcendental conditions of possibility for this violence and “discovery.” What must the institutions of Europe imagined the world to be like that would make “discovery” possible and violence conceivable? Christopher
Columbus represented a form of “counter-reasoning” against the dominant institution of the Papal
Church that instituted a perception of the world as only habitable within its own borders (Wynter
1991, 253). Columbus was a proponent of a “utopian” apocalyptic millenarian vision that viewed the Earth as for the cultivation of life and the creation of souls. Rather than the church being bound within the territory of Europe, Columbus was the product of a new fundamental arrangement of knowledge which imagined that the whole world must be larger if the whole of humanity is to be saved. This new “universalism” was nothing short of a disaster for those who would be
104
“discovered,” and, then, subsequently “saved.” Thus, Wynter describes this transformation as
“Janus-faced” since it testifies to the possibility that a foundational order of knowledge and perception could be challenged and overturned, yet, “The same path opened up to a scientific geography would also open onto the phenomenon of what was to be the increasingly global colonization of the peoples of the earth by the modern post-feudal European state” (Wynter 1991,
257).
The historical experience/experiment of “Columbus” and the “discovery” of the New
World was not as radical as it may have seemed to those within the homeland of Europe. The writing of this new arrangement of knowledge merely shifted the dichotomous relationship of habitable/uninhabitable land to saved/not-converted peoples. The poetics remained firmly entrenched in an arrangement of knowledge that attempts to constantly overcome its borders. The above reference to “utopia” demands some consideration since Wynter is getting her understanding of utopia from Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1984). In those lectures,
Ricoeur redefines Ideology away from merely being a problem of “false consciousness” or distortion of reality and towards its integrative function as a legitimating symbolic structure:
“[e]veryone lives on the basis of an ideology[…]Unless social life has a symbolic structure, there is no way to understand how we live, do things, and project these activities in ideas, no way to understand how reality can become an idea or how real life can produce illusions; these would all be simply mystical and incomprehensible events” (1984, 8). Wynter is deeply informed by this proposal and, thus, reads “Columbus” as a reproduction of Europe’s symbolic structure that interprets the world as propter nos (for the sake of “us”).73
73 The interrelation between praxis and interpretation is addressed by Ricoeur further into the lecture when he moves to the topic of class conflict: “How can people live these conflicts-about work, property, money, and so on—if they do not already possess some symbolic systems to help 105
The expansion of “Ideology” from something merely distortive of “reality” to a constitutive function that makes it possible for there to be sense in the first place helps explain why Sylvia
Wynter does not simply jettison the word “humanism” as ideological. She simply does not see that there is an escape from ideology into some “pure” reality free from the mediation historical experience and symbolic structure. But there are always two sides to Wynter’s project. If she does not argue that there is an escape from ideology this does not mean that there is no way out. Wynter mobilizes Ricoeur’s understanding of utopia whose role is to “[c]hallenge the dominant Ideology from a place outside its order-specific mode of rationality—from u-topia, nowhere[…]at specific conjectural times of change” in which “they are enabled to emerge from obscurity, to ‘shatter a given order’ by the proposal of an alternative order, and to give the ‘force of discourse to this possibility’” (1991, 253). It is here, I propose, that we must remember that Wynter writes from that “nowhere” that “Columbus” is imagined to have “discovered.” She has lived this historical experience through her body. When Ricoeur states that “Utopia in particular distinguishes itself be being a declared genre” from which “[t]he field of the possible is now open beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternative ways of living” (1984, 15-16) it is possible to understand Wynter’s blackened humanism, as coming from those for whom the world is not imagined to be for, is of a different genre of invention. “Columbus” did not sail from utopia, though the metaphor was mobilized to shift the fundamental arrangement of Western culture, but towards
them interpret the conflicts? Is not the process of interpretation so primitive that in fact it is constitutive of the dimension of praxis? If social reality did not already have a social dimension, and therefore, if ideology, in a less polemical or less negatively evaluative sense, were not constitutive of social existence but merely distorting and dissimulating, then the process of distortion could not start. The process of distortion is grafted onto the symbolic function. Only because the structure of human social life is already symbolic can it be distorted” (1984, 10). 106 discovering it. Wynter writes back from that “nowhere” and, thus, a fair account of her poetics and praxis requires that we excavate the territory upon which her thought proceeds.
If Foucault’s archaeological insight consists in showing how the foundations of historical experience have shifted rather than unfolded in the linearity of time Wynter accepts this insight, but then asks why we cannot construct a foundation that would finally make humanism possible.
It must be remembered that Wynter’s humanism has, as of yet, been “nowhere” to be found though we may have a sense of it. Wynter recounts coming to consciousness in 1940s Jamaica: “[w]hat is beginning to happen is the anticolonial struggle, a wave of social protests movements with marches of the jobless on the streets, strikes on the sugar plantation, in the city, the asylum catching fire, inmates dying[…]But the point to note, one I wish I could properly convey, is that up to then we had been a totally governed and administered people. You cannot imagine [emphasis mine] today how total a system colonialism was!” (2000b, 124-125). It is this historical experience that Wynter formulates as an abrupt rupture in the imaginary of Jamaica and the Caribbean more broadly that animates her work. She, like Foucault, spatializes this history, “[i]n the different islands we had been totally cut off from each other. We weren’t even taught Caribbean geography in the schools.
The geography that was taught was that of England, the history that was taught was English history” (2000b, 129). It is as if a notion of West Indianness, West Indian writing, came from nowhere once a consciousness arose that they, of the Caribbean, were not even on the map of
Reason and History.
Wynter references the historian Elsa Goveia who noted that it was through the historical experience of the anticolonial movement that writers began writing and painters began painting
(2000b, 128). It is these writings and aesthetic practices that began carving out a new territory of thought and comprehension of Western Reason and History. Foucault’s archive does not make
107 apparent how what would become conceptualized as “Man” or what it is to be human worked through the semiotic negation of the blackened of the Earth. The justification for this negation shifts, as Wynter shows, from being religious (a la “Columbus”) to a notion of those who have secular Reason and “civilization,” to the present bio-economic order wherein there are those who deserve to be economically selected and those who will be condemned. “So all your education was intended to constitute you as a British subject, but I don’t think it was a deliberate plot,” Wynter claims. “This was simply how the English saw themselves. And this is how they would make the colonial subjects see themselves—derivatively. As long as there is not a counter-voice, we too are trapped in that conception. What happens now, after this great erupting moment, is that suddenly
[you] begin to constitute yourself as another subject” (2000b, 131). What Wynter provides, that
Foucault’s project in Les mots et choses does not focus on, is why the shifts in epistemes happen in Western culture.74 At least part of the story would have to be an attempt to secure and protect a sociogenic principle that divides Humanity and its non-Human others. While the surface justifications may change and shift, the dominant logic remains. In other words, the image of the human embedded in Western culture’s historical experience has always included its own projected negation, its own ethnos. Thus, the Caribbean contains an historical experience of rupture and
74 “It is not always easy to determine what has caused a specific change in a science. What made such a discovery possible? Why did this new concept appear? Where did this or that theory come from? Questions like these are often highly embarrassing because there is no definite methodological principles on which to base such an analysis” (Foucault 1994, xiii; foreword to the English edition). It is worth reiterating that this is not a general or universal claim regarding all of Foucault’s work. Instead I am focusing on the text of Foucault that Wynter goes to in order to develop the insight of specificity regarding her work. I want to ask whether Wynter begins to give us the methodological principles by which to understand the shifts in Western culture and sciences. She challenges whether we can assume the centuries long practices of colonialism and slavery (that is coextensive with Foucault’s different epistemes) as simply an epiphenomena rather than a constructive and dynamic praxis. 108
“utopia,” but this is not natural. It must be inscribed and internalized. Wynter’s blackened humanism is a part of this project.
In the preceding section, I argued that there has been a heretofore underexplored discussion of Wynter’s understanding of the committed intellectual and the writing of invention and freedom.
Wynter demands that the intellectual go beyond the historical “facts” of institutions and discover their grammar or imaginative contexts. Wynter’s poetic phenomenology proposes that the intellectual ought to bring their writing in line with the narratively constructed position of les damnés. Though this remains an abstract and hypothetical activity insofar as the intellectual writes from within an episteme whose image of truth is precisely not the outcast, the subhuman, the dysselected. This is a problem of historical experience. How does one feel what is beyond the limits of intelligibility? How does the intellectual imagine something for which there is no existing image?
Perhaps the response will be that it is not the place of the intellectual to create a new imaginary, that this should be left to “the people.” But such a response risks evading how economic, political, social, and educational institutions impose an image of freedom by crafting the prereflective, a priori conditions of possibility for what freedom “is.” Thus, Wynter will ask,
“How then shall we reimagine [emphasis mine] freedom as emancipation from our present ethno- class or Western bourgeois conception of freedom?[…]One in which the ‘rights’ of the
Poor/Jobless and increasingly criminalized category to escape the dealt cards of their systemic condemnation will no longer have to be excluded?” (Wynter 2000a, 41-42). In other words, a totalization75 makes possible the revelation of the contingency of the present order of knowledge
75 The dialectical verbs for this praxis are the German verstehen and French compréhension which emphasize the movement of the understanding that makes possible the moving beyond of the present. These verbs are important in the works of Marx and Sartre. 109 on which our institutions depend. From this, for however briefly, a new image of freedom can be crafted by others from an “explosive psychic emancipation” (Wynter 2006, 115). The complicated procedure of the Wynterian intellectual is to write for the liminal others (the N.H.I, the jobless, the starving fellah) as if they will be the truth of freedom from within institutions that position them as improper subjects of knowledge. In order to produce truth, one must engage falsity; becoming right entails being wrong.
The Wynterian intellectual is both catalyzed by the objective and material struggles of those cast to the margins of a dominant order and they are the catalyst to continue the rupture. In this way, the Wynterian intellectual does not assume a god’s eye point of view over the alienated, but enters into a dynamic that constantly responds to the needs and desires of those whose lives have been distorted. On this paradigm imagination is set loose from the individual responsibility of the intellectual and becomes a space towards which the transformation of invention can be apprehended again.
The question of how to write the imagination of what it is like to “be” a liminal other can only be addressed via Wynter’s understanding of the “sociogenic principle” and her engagement with Fanon. Neil Roberts states, “The sociogenic principle argues that the social order or episteme of an era conditions the normative beliefs of those living in that era. The concept of freedom that individuals and collective groups hold in an order arises from the normative beliefs shaped by the actualities of social life” (2006, 162). Wynter is attempting to unmask how alienation occurs when the conception of freedom promulgated by an episteme and its attendant institutions make it impossible to imagine what it is be like a subject of freedom. How Wynter characterizes “the sociogenic principle” requires careful articulation. Thus, the remainder of this section will deal
110 with her essay: “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious
Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’”
Wynter’s essay begins by claiming that when Fanon named sociogeny as a theoretical object of knowledge he “enabled the calling in question of our present culture’s purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human” (2001, 31). The fact that
Wynter locates the impetus for the production of this critical activity in naming connects with that argument of the previous section that the classification of an idea can have material effects on
“reality.” For Wynter, Fanon did not make something new possible because he was “free.” Instead
Fanon instituted a new vantage point from which freedom could be theorized. The condition of possibility for this invention is that it was “[g]enerated from the ground of his own, as well as that of his fellow French Caribbean subjects’ lived experience of what it is like to be black” (Wynter
2001, 31). Fanon, on Wynter’s account, could not have intellectualized this discovery through a purely third person, thus abstract, desire for knowledge. Sociogeny could only be made into a theoretical object of knowledge because of the painful conflict between the third-person white,
“Western” imaginary of what it is like to be a “man” and the first-person experience of “being concretely [emphasis mine], that Nigger Other” (Wynter 2001, 34).76
The felt conflict between the abstract and the concrete reveals an episteme founded on analogy, or an already invented reference for value. Wynter is arguing that historical experience is
76 Wynter connects this experience in Fanon’s text between the “Look, a nigger!” statement of chapter five and the statement from Fanon’s mother to him as a child to “stop acting like a nigger” in chapter six. Wynter shows that Fanon’s actual point is not that being seen by the white child is the original trauma, but that the French colonial imaginary had already occupied the Martinican subjectivity before even arriving in France. Peau noire, on this account, becomes a study in retroactivity that reveals the disrupted temporality of what it is like to be “Black.” Fanon can “invent” sociogeny because of his corporealized discovery that his skin had already been invented. Thus, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man [Noir]” must be read in the retroactive light of “The Negro [nègre] and Psychopathology.” 111 never immediately or directly apprehended, but is always mediated by the culture and institutions in which one becomes a subject. At this point there is not much to differentiate Wynter’s analyses from Foucault’s Les mots et choses. Wynter’s critique of the “sociogenic principle” as follows
Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology through the problem of “Man” being an “empirico- transcendental doublet.” Wynter is asking how one can study empirically the very historical transcendental conditions of possibility for experience in the first place. This would appear to either be a contradiction in methodology or it places into question the very possibility of reaching an Archimedian point.
Fanon was already asking this Foucauldian question avant la letter in Peau noire when he notes, “There is a drama [un drame] in what is commonly called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections or should we not rather relentlessly attempt a concrete and always new understanding [une compréhension concrète et toujours nouvelle] of man?” (Fanon 2011/2008,
75/6; translation modified). The breakdown of a prereflective belief in a “typical human reality” is precipitated by the painful knowledge of the invented drama lurking within any “objective” science of humanity. But Wynter’s reliance on Fanon for her “sociogenic principle” complicates any pure and simple reduction of her thought to Foucault. After all, Fanon was not only writing before Foucault, but he was responding to and building off of Sartrean thought. The concrete understanding Wynter invokes throughout her essay on Fanon is the apprehension of how the blackened subject is mediated and alienated by supervening cultural codes and mores: “His socialization as a subject, therefore, is at one and the same time both French and colonial ‘native,’ and/or Negro—in effect, both Man and Man’s Other” (Wynter 2001, 38). Wynter’s poetic phenomenology evades Foucault’s criticism of Continental phenomenology by being attentive to
112 the paradox of concrete historical experience for the blackened (“native,” “slave,” “woman,” etc.): the experience is the experience of the supposedly transcendental conditions of what one is not.
The doublet is split and the sociogenic principle is open to be felt. In the breach of this historical experience, whereupon the subject exists at the liminal border between “History” and non-History, nothing “real” is given since the sociogenic principle has not yet been crafted to support its sense.
But a consciousness of a different quality is born and at this juncture poiesis meets praxis. Wynter references the moment in chapter five when Fanon writes, “I lose my temper, demand an explanation…Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me”
(Fanon 2011/2008, 153/89). She analyzes this line as the poiesis of consciousness: “This ‘put together’ other self then analyzes his experience, seeing it as one common to all black men. The quality [emphasis mine] of this experience, he recognizes, was new in kind” (Wynter 2001, 39).
We might even say that Wynter is saying that the experience is a new genre.
The idea that the human as Western “Man” can be imposed through violence as a horizon of knowledge and being puts into question what knowledge we can have of any “natural” substrate of human being. Sylvia Wynter, drawing from Peau noire, argues that “Man” as the provinciality mostly constituted by the white, heterosexual, bourgeoisie has become the sociogenic principle of existence. Blackened humanism becomes the evanescent possibility of relativizing this ontology, of discovering a new genre of human being, and giving historical force to this “outside.” The movement from Fanon to Wynter situates blackened humanism as an interrogation of one’s historical experience.
What the sociogenic principle shows is that the human creature is both crafted and crafts itself within an ethnocentric image of what it is like to be human. It brings together what is imposed upon the agential subject and what this subject can create from this imposition. Experience comes
113 to appear as natural—acultural and ahistorical—when it aligns with the “[p]remise of the genetic pregiveness of ‘man’” (Wynter 1992b, 263). Wynter’s entire work is guided by the hypothesis that there is no ontological pregiven image of humanity; it only seems this way because our imaginations have been adapted to an hegemonic imaginary whose unquestioned telos is “[t]he well-being of the middle class mode of the subject” (Wynter 1992b, 239). Wynter proposes that the “middle class mode of the subject” (Wynter 1992b, 239) is a form of life that must go unquestioned if the language game is to function at all.77 This need not be a thought any single individual has or expresses. It cannot be a thought at all.78 If the institution or system within which the intellectual finds themselves ensconced could concretely make a theoretical object of the white middle class mode then that would mean it could be subjected to radical critique. To radically critique this mode of being like a human being would entail nothing less than a ruthless critique of one’s own position. It would entail asking oneself if they can abide by producing knowledge for an institution that requires the denial of humanity, the N.H.I, in order to participate in broader economic and symbolic system. Wynter is an unabashedly systemic theorist, thus, she would claim, that if the intellectual truly put the sociogenic principle of her imaginative context up for question she would be forced to act, to create, to invent. The genre of this invention would have to be total.
Thus, an article written and published behind a paywall that deploys a Marxist critique of
77 For instance, one could not speak to another being if there was not the already embedded assumption that the other person was a human being that could understand my language. Even when one is spoken to in a language they do not know there is an attempt to convey to the other person that they are not being understood. In other words, there is attempt to communicate that there is a lack of communication. If this were up for question, then it is difficult to see how any communication could actually begin. 78 Sartre analyzes colonial racism in this way as well in his Critique: “The essence of racism, in effect, is that it is not a system of thoughts which might be false or pernicious[…]It is not a thought at all. It cannot even be formulated[…][Racism] arose with the establishment of the colonial system and [has] never been anything more than this system reproducing itself as a determination of the language of the colonists in the milieu of alterity” (1982, 300n-301). 114 capitalism does more to legitimate and sustain an economic system of exploitation than reinvent beyond it. Wynter’s poetic phenomenology would discover that even in attempting to antagonistically push against a system one can, unwittingly, remain a faithful adherent to its laws and imagination. Thought that concerns one’s own historical situation would be the most demanding and exacting exercise for the intellectual. One may question Sylvia Wynter about whether the intellectual could ever be up to this historical task on their own.
Of course the point is that the intellectual is not on their own. A system that is predicated on stolen life can find itself undone from within. New forms of solidarity can be created from within a dynamic system premised on the exploitation and alienation of large populations on the earth. It seems Wynter’s intellectual must unlearn the dominant habits of their institution and engage alternate spaces of the imagination. These spaces do not preexist but must be continually forged and crafted. Critique helps pave the way for invention.
A true critique of a system of existence (to use Fanon’s language) would necessitate going beyond the historical situation and investigating its conditions of possibility. It would mean going beyond objective “reality” and moving into a different imaginative space that is interested in something different than the historical experience of “truth.” The writing of a new humanity would have to be willing to challenge the symbolic codes that make “normal” experience truer than the historical experience of the systematically excluded. It would have to be a commitment to the unmaking of the phenomenological world with the wager that a world, yet unseen, could be crafted with new laws and symbolic codes. At present, all writing of the “West” has been premised upon stratification, violence, and alienation. This is why Wynter can claim “[u]p until now, there has been no history of the human” (Wynter 2000, 198) and to call on her fellow colleagues to, for the first time, write this historical experience. The intelligibility of this poiesis/praxis would be one
115 that could only be confirmed retroactively. For the human does not pre-exist; it must be inscribed into being. If history has been history-for up until now, for whom shall the writing of this invented human history be for in the future? What will its aims be? It will be towards a “utopia” for those who have been inscribed as being “nowhere.” A blackened humanism awaits the fundamental arrangement of knowledge that would make it sensible. We forestall this poetic work by remaining adapted to a Western ratio. Bringing Wynter and Foucault together allows us, as intellectuals, to probe those spaces of thought that have been made unthinkable, to challenge the institutions of knowledge that govern our being, to finally go beyond the borders of “Man.”
A blackened humanism would be attuned to a rather different fundamental arrangement than that which is found on the territory of “Man.” I have brought Wynter (and Fanon) in conjunction with Foucault in order to show how the Caribbean might be imagined as a site of rupture, radical possibility, and “utopia” (in Ricoeur’s sense). The spaces of History and Reason in “Western Culture” and “the Caribbean” are not isomorphic and should not be read as such. For a “thought” to make sense we must understand the fundamental arrangement in which it is embedded. Wynter is committed to doing some of this imaginative work. The question becomes whether this imaginative work must remain caught in the Western ratio. What would it mean to delink from Western culture’s anxiety over “Man” and its production of anti-human spaces
(archipelagos of poverty, war zones, prisons, just to name a few). A humanism and history written for those who occupy those “nowhere” spaces might be a new genre of invention. Wynter’s task and wager is that a new historical experience may be enacted. It would be an historical experience of humanity that would no longer require borders as its condition of possibility.
116
Wynter and the Aesthetics of Existence
The aim of Wynter’s poetic phenomenology is not the mere intellectual comprehension of the sociogenic conditions that make possible one’s historical experience. Her wager is that once a situation is comprehended as being structured by an alienating poetics it will be possible to
“consciously and consensually” (Wynter 1992b, 240) alter our imaginative contexts. To repeat, what she means here is an engagement of solidarity that opens oneself up to the risk of invention with others. If the human is not anything pre-given for Wynter this does not mean that she does not hypothesize that the human creature is singularly capable in one manner: it is the only being that can turn its theories into flesh (Wynter 1992b, 252). Once ontogeny and phylogeny are set aside then it becomes impossible to view the human creature as a purely biological entity. It is through sociogeny—the manner by which social systems constitute a “form of life” for human creatures and these human creatures, reciprocally, enact social systems through their praxes—that the human creature exists as human. Far from atomistic, Sylvia Wynter reveals that the human does not become human by simply being biologically born into life, but by being symbolically inscribed into being-with-others. Language and the imagination do not come solely from me, but from the activity of others. Yet, at the same time, I make use of language and the imagination to continually bring myself into the world for others. Wynter calls this “symbolic birth” (Wynter
1997). If the symbols are “our” making then perhaps we can become socially conscious of this fact and work at crafting a new aesthetics of existence.
It is because Wynter hypothesizes that human existence is governed by poetic codes of meaning that she describes the current Western mode of aesthetics as endeavoring to produce a
“psycho-affective field” through which a coherent system of meaning will continually reproduce itself (Wynter 1992b, 244). Let us return to the example of Los Angeles police institution and their
117 deployment of N.H.I (No humans involved) in reference to the Black and Brown jobless population. What does it mean to “be” a police officer? Surely one is not a police officer by merely willing it within one’s private imagination since to be a police officer is to be in a position of authority as an agent and executer of the Law. This power can only have material effectivity insofar as it is bestowed by a pre-existing social institution (say, the police academy) which itself can only make sense via a broader social and political field of meaning that requires that there be something like “the police” in order for there to be a stable and coherent society. If property is to be secured, if crime is to be held in check, if the image of United States society is to remain a “form of life” there must be a police institution. From within the Western “image” of humanity, “property” signifies what is mine that must be secured against those who would take it, “crime” signifies what could befall me through actions of others who wish to possess what is mine, and “United States” signifies what belongs to me by birthright against those who wish to take it. It becomes impossible to not feel that property, crime, and U.S. society need the institution of policing in order to make sense and the police institution requires that property, crime, and U.S. society be imagined as real in order to justify its existence. Wynter goes beyond the reciprocal antagonism of those who wish to support the police and those who wish to reform the police in order to ask the founding question of why does the institution of the police make sense in the first place?79
79 Imagine asking U.S. citizens if the institution of the police was justifiable or not. Not only would this lead to an aporia by which the institution of law enforcement could be deemed illegal since then one would ask how there would be law in the first place, but, more corporeally, it would feel as if society would no longer make sense if the institution of law enforcement and the police were not taken for granted. This is why no matter how much evidence is amassed of how police institutions expropriate the wealth and bodily autonomy of citizens it is meant to protect all the offenses are reduced to the “bad” actions of individuals or a reflection of how the institution must be reformed to accord with it imagined purpose. Wynter would propose that the intellectual critically engage the prereflective conditions that allow the police to appear as natural and necessary in the first place. 118
The revelation of the appellation N.H.I as guiding the institution of the Los Angeles police makes apparent that the police are one strategy for crafting the perception of what it is to “be” human. The human is symbolically birthed as that which owns property which must be secured against the criminal element that would threaten and harm the property-holder and the idea of property. One can see how the United States continuing to be defined as the property of its citizens can have global ramifications for those who do not belong to the United States—inside and outside its borders. But in order to remain concrete it is necessary to remind ourselves of what Wynter is arguing this autopoiesis—self reproducing system of meaning—is doing: it is crafting a provincial image of humanity that we are induced to model. If to show oneself as human is to own property, then where does that leave those who are jobless? It is this work of definition through negation that pushes Wynter to argue against what she sees as the totalizing discourses of Marxism,
Feminism, and Afrocentrism since they miss that Capital, Heteropatriarchy, and White Supremacy are interlocking institutions that reproduce an image of humanity premised upon scarcity. To bypass the human question, to regard the human as passé, is to allow the imaginative context to recede into the background again. All of these discourses must be brought to bear if a new writing of humanity is to finally become possible.
It is important not to read Sylvia Wynter as only interested in the macro processes of institutions both local and global. For these institutions are only able to craft reality according to certain laws because they are reproduced by individuals who assume and reproduce these institutions as if they had unquestionable meaning. After all, one is not born a police officer but becomes one. The badge, the uniform, crime statistics, written exams all serve to craft the perception and image of what it is to be the good kind of police officer. In other words, it is a particular invention of a genre of being. Thus, one does not only become a police officer but must
119 continually reproduce themselves as becoming like a good kind of police officer. The police officer has meaning only in the context of other police officers. The execution of one’s duties affirms one’s kinship to others embedded within the networks of meanings that constitute the police institution. To paraphrase Sartre from his Critique, when the police officer wraps a black person up in a deadly chokehold he does not to do it because he hates all Black people, but because in this action he can experience himself narratively as a police officer.80 It is what one does. For this reason, Wynter demands that intellectual begin the hard of work of undoing the narratively condemned status of those bodies who supported a cultural system of human meaning via their negation as not human (Wynter 1992a, 16). New forms of experience and action could then arise.
These narratives which govern the aesthetics of our existence must be rewritten. The police institution is only a particular example of how an aesthetic makes possible an experience of oneself as part of a broader community. Wynter is attempting to show that there is nothing purely natural about our experiences of ourselves as being like a human. In fact, it is through the construction of a certain aesthetic that white middle-class experience comes to stand in for “[t]he experience of the generic human subject” (Wynter 1992b, 249). How one theorizes what it is like to be a good kind of human creature can be corporealized, made into flesh, through institutional and systemic praxes which ground themselves in these theories while also, circularly, justifying the rightness of these theories in the first place. Wynter describes the emergence of “narratives of origin” (Wynter
1992b, 251) that allows for the human creature to be symbolically born as part of a particular genre. For instance, she offers the intellectual mutation of Descartes as providing “[t]he ‘ground’ that would make the physical world mathematizable and, therefore, alterable in accordance with
80 “The employer may curse or beat his workers, for example. He does this because that is what one does; he is the Other, the fleeting, unrealisable character called the colonialist” (Sartre 1982, 731). 120 our human purposes” (Wynter 1992b, 239). Wynter’s hypothesis is that a new aesthetics will decipher the systems of meaning that alter humanity according to culture-specific purposes and, in doing so, make possible the creation of unforeseen forms of meaning. It is her search for the explosion of counter systems of meaning that make Wynter’s reflections on writing consistent with the revolutionary apparatus of Fanon in the previous chapter. She is not interested in critiquing this or that particular aspect of current form of existence; Wynter is demanding a total invention of the very conditions of possibility for human existence in the first place.
Wynter constantly turns to the popular aesthetics of the underclass for these explosions.
She notes that “Black popular musical forms, can be properly evaluated only in the context of the challenge they make to the cultural Imaginary instituting our present order” (Wynter 1992b, 258).
She reminds us again that we must be attentive to the imaginary context of aesthetic production without being seduced into thinking one can simply appropriate the works as the authors of One
Love, in her 1972 essay, had done with the Jamaican creole of the working class. But what the intellectual can do is not evaluate the aesthetic production according to the inherited standards of value from the dominant cultural imaginary. The intellectual and the police officer have already been inscribed into the skin of their institution and, thus, cannot trust their perceptions to judge the possibility of counter systems of meaning. The question becomes whether it is possible for them to shed this conditioning.81 The stratification of the world, for Wynter, is made possible not only
81 I quote Wynter at length on the conjunction of the discourse of aesthetics with the reproduction of normative sentiments: “[t]he taste of reflection is systemically conditioned, as such a taste, by the discourse of aesthetics itself and, even more directly, by the ‘ethico-aesthetic’ practices of literary and film criticism themselves, correlated with those of all our disciplinary discourses, then these practices are necessarily a central function of the conditioning of the psycho-affective field of normative sentiments by which we are collectively induced to behave in specific ways able to bring our present global order and its role allocated hierarchies into being[…]” (Wynter 1992b, 259). 121 by the theoretical discourses written by intellectuals in the academy, but the existential expression of narrative roles such as the police and the affective reproduction of what it is like to be a good kind of human being.
When newspapers blare about how the stock market has either risen or fallen, Wynter would argue, that the reader is meant to be induced into feeling that something good or bad as happened for society and the world. The fact that most the world’s population, or, at least, most of the jobless and communities of color throughout the global south, do not actually have much material stake in the stock market reveals that the stock market is not written for the les damnés of the earth. Yet we are induced to feel as if the institution of the stock market is a relatively coherent and reasonable paradigm for evaluating the health of the world. Indeed, institutions operate as if this paradigm were an inalterable “fact” of human existence. Systems such as global capitalism, anti-blackness, or heteropatriarchy depend on the repeated symbolic births of subjects who can be induced to feel as if reality makes sense. In this way a system can reliably reproduce its image of humanity and then have these human creatures reproduce that image upon their skins and through their actions. It is only from the aesthetics of the alienated and their feeling of the wrongness of being that a rupture in existence can be approached. The disalienation of the intellectual can only begin by finally writing towards a history of the total human. In the last two sections of this chapter
I will engage Wynter’s reading of the Black Aesthetics Movement of the 1960s as a missed opportunity for a new image of humanity and then draw from this her persistent questioning of whether the Western ratio will be the relationship that will always govern our symbolic births as human subjects.
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Literature, Invention, and New Forms of Freedom
In What is Literature? Sartre claims, “One does not write for slaves” (1978, 47). This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others (1978, 32). Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it (Sartre 1978, 30-31). It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function.
The force of committed literature is not propaganda that attempts control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, “The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to freedom as such by means of constraint, fascination, or entreaties. There is only one way of attaining it; first, by recognizing it, then, having confidence in it, and finally, requiring of it an act, an act in its own name[...]” (1978,
33). In a sense, literature does not liberate the reading subject, but reminds her of the freedom which she is, the freedom which she must take responsibility for. But if to “be” a slave is to be a being without freedom then Sartre would make two interrelated claims that would support his conclusion that “One does not write for slaves.” First, to engage in the act of reading is to already be a subject of freedom—no matter the facticity of one’s situation—and, thus, not be a slave.
Second, following from this, to write is to appeal to the other’s freedom, to engage it in concrete acts of invention, and, thus, one can never write for a slave as such. The former claim is ontological while the latter claim is a value judgment of what ought to be. Yet how can freedom both be an ontological given and something that ought to be brought into existence?
Sylvia Wynter shares with Sartre the understanding that the writer or the intellectual is responsible for historicizing the contemporary situation and making perceivable its alienating components. In this way the reader can be induced to act and surpass the situation towards a more
123 concrete realization of freedom. Throughout this chapter I have focused on the central importance of the image and imagination in Wynter’s oeuvre because, as in Sartre and Fanon, she envisions the role of the writer/artist as being engaged in the crafting of the social and global imaginary of the public.82 The imagination envelops and connects the perceiving subject to “reality”;83 it allows for the organization of the complex elements of reality into a synthesizable totality which can then be altered.84 For Sartre, the necessity that there be an imagination for the perceiving and acting subject means that the writer must negate the present imaginary in order to remind the public that they are freedom, that they did not choose this situation and thus must alter it. Sartre, sounding a great deal like Sylvia Wynter in the open letter N.H.I., writes, “It is therefore up to us to convert the city of ends into a concrete and open society—and this by the very content of our works[…]If the city of ends remains a feeble abstraction, it is because it is not realizable without an objective modification of the historical situation” (1978, 203). The “objective modification of the historical situation,” for Wynter, requires that the writer/artist discover the grammar of the institutions that govern our lives and, thereby, change the imaginative context that constantly embeds black skin as the site of alienation. Thus, Wynter claims in “Africa, the West, and the Analogy of Culture:
The Cinematic Text After Man” (2000): “[t]he challenge to be met by the black African, and indeed black diasporic, cinema for the twenty-first century will be that of deconstructing the
82 In fact, Wynter has written several novels early in her career including The Hills of Hebron and the unpublished manuscript Black Metamorphosis. 83 I have described this as Fanon’s erotics of the skin and touch in the previous chapter. 84 For instance, Sartre describes the invention of the airplane as an “organ of perception” (1978, 176) because it changed how one could perceive and conceptualize the space of the earth. It is now possible to be standing in the United States and imagine that one could be halfway around the world by the end of the day. The ocean no longer presents an alienating limit, but something to be surpassed. A certain global image of the world could be made more concrete. Of course, under conditions of global capitalism this imagination allows for the seemingly unending expropriation of wealth from every corner of the planet for the consumption of a relative few in the “West.” What Wynter is asking is: does this have to be our governing imaginary? 124 present conception of the human, Man, together with its corollary definition as homo oeconomicus” (26).85 Both Wynter and Sartre argue that poetics can be transformative insofar as they comprehend the historical situation and the incite the public towards creating something new.
Where Wynter and Sartre differ is on the question of the relationship between freedom and invention. For Sartre, freedom is negation, it is the freedom to invent in the name of more freedom.
Freedom assumes an ontological priority to invention throughout What is Literature? as both the value to be struggled for and brought into being and as what “we” all share and, thus, must be reminded of in order to invent. But what is this “freedom” that the writer must assume we share?
Is it abstract and denuded of any imaginative content? Sartre is not naïve on this point. “Freedom” is just as open to mystification as any other concept in language: “[i]t is clear that in the nineteenth century the word ‘freedom’ never designated anything but [bourgeois] political freedom[…]”
(1978, 207). Freedom has been converted into an analogy. Freedom is like being bourgeois. Sartre demands that the writer negate this form of freedom that is necessarily alienating for most of society since the concrete economic arrangements and institutions simply cannot abide by everyone becoming bourgeois (for where would the exploited labor come from to generate their wealth, their form of freedom?). But here the nub of Sartre’s conception of the writer cannot help but conflate
85 Wynter’s claim is worth quoting in full: “The central thrust of the ‘after Man’ of my title is therefore to propose, given the role of defective Otherness analogically imposed upon the peoples and countries of Africa and the black diaspora by the representational apparatus of our Western world system, central to which is that of its cinematic text, that the challenge to be met by the black African, and indeed black diasporic, cinema for the twenty-first century will be that of deconstructing the present conception of the human, Man, together with its corollary definition as homo oeconomicus; to deconstruct with both, the order of consciousness and mode of the aesthetic to which this conception leads and through which we normally think, feel and behave. This cinema will therefore be compelled, as it has already begun to do, if tentatively so, to reinscribe[…]and thereby redefine, the human on the basis of a new iconography” (2000, 26). We will return to this issue of underlying iconography in the following chapter on Hortense Spillers and “the hieroglyphics of the flesh.” 125 ontological freedom with what freedom ought to be since the writer must synthesize the historical situation in order for a new image of the future to become possible. For the writer to make sense she must confer a telos onto the public of what they are in order to reveal how the current situation alienates them from themselves. Thus Sartre writes, “[o]ur writings would have no meaning if we did not set up as our goal the eventual coming of freedom by means of socialism[…]” (1978, 211; emphasis mine).86 Freedom becomes another analogy; in Sartre’s hands freedom is like socialism.
Of course, socialism is no more denuded of its historical and imaginative context than “freedom,” but it does have one advantage for Sartre: it is a counter system of meaning from within his concrete situation of bourgeois democracy and economics.87 Wynter, attentive to how language for the colonized subject has been the most insidious site for alienating even the image of liberation, reverses this priority and turns to invention as preceding freedom.
Sylvia Wynter provides a concrete examination of how literature can aim to disrupt the dominant epistemological order of knowledge—episteme—without the assumption of a pregiven sameness. Put another way, Wynter’s phenomenology of the Black Arts/Aesthetics Movements of the 1960s reverses Sartre’s understanding of invention wherein invention arises from universally
86 A little later Sartre reiterates this claim in the context of a conversation on revolutionary violence: “It is incumbent upon the writer to judge the means [of violence] not from the point of view of an abstract morality, but in the perspective of a precise goal which is the realization of a socialist democracy” (1978, 214). 87 This is not the place to provide a complete description of Sartre’s historical circumstances, but suffice it to say that one must be careful in simply critiquing Sartre for insinuating a telos into the craft of the writer. Sartre, at least in What is Literature?, is careful not to overstate what he is doing. The longest section of the book from which these claims were excerpted is called “Situation of the Writer in 1947.” Thus, a generous reading of Sartre would note that he is doing exactly what he intended: describing what the writer must be committed to in post-war France. “Socialism” as a concrete imaginative tool would be unavoidable for his reading public. Our question becomes that of figuring out what our contemporary situation requires of us. Following from Wynter’s critique in 1972, the writer/artist cannot simply appropriate another’s historical and imaginative context, but each time the synthesis must be undertaken anew. 126 free subjects. But Wynter’s distrust of “Liberal universalism” (2006, 108) and the “Marxism-
Leninism” counter-universal (2006, 109) is predicated on the idea that what one understands as
“freedom” is pre-reflectively informed by the dominant episteme. According to “liberalism” freedom would be the freedom of each individual qua individual. For Marxist-Leninism, it would be the freedom of a society without class stratification. Thus, “freedom” is never an abstract essence stripped of any contingent predicates. It is always historically situated according to an order of knowledge’s designation of what it means to be free. If this is the case, then the invention which follows from freedom will remain epistemologically and aesthetically constrained by political and social institutions that will attempt to conserve their autopoetic notion of “universal” freedom.
Paget Henry describes the aim of Wynter’s poetic phenomenology as “an approach that demands of us a well developed poetics. In particular, an interventionist poetics that is capable of rewriting the governing codes and templates that inscribe the a priori conditions of epistemic and social orders” (2006, 270). Wynter proposes that there is a distinction between our everyday discursive activity and the transcendental conditions that make such activity possible and sensible in the first place. For everyday discursive activity to proceed “free” subjects must allow the transcendental conditions to fade into the background and autopoetically institute themselves as habit and forms of rationality. Following from this we would have to say that to interrogate transcendental conditions everyday discursive activity would have to be interrupted. This
“bracketing” allows Wynter to give readings of history where the value of invention broke through as opposed to what we might call “freedom” in our everyday discourse.88 It is important to
88 Sartre gives an explicit definition of value in What is Literature?: “[The book] presents itself as a task to be discharged; from the very beginning it places itself on the level of the categorical imperative. You are perfectly free to leave that book on the table. But if you open it, you assume 127 remember that Wynter is attempting to unsettle the conditions of possibility for colonial knowledge rather than assuming that an abstract and universal project of human knowledge already exists.89 Thus, the breaking through of invention is a psychic poiesis, a making of subjectivity, that will have a new form of decolonial freedom.
Even when Wynter is writing to her colleagues and fellow inhabitants of educational and economic institutions she is writing for the dispossessed, the populations narrated as N.H.I. She is attempting to disalienate her fellow intellectuals who can only perceive and conceptualize the blackened of the world as sources of pity who have not been allowed to become like “humanity”— what Wynter derisively calls Man. The problem of analogy, as for Sartre, asserts itself insofar as
“humanity” has been mystified as universal rather than as a “[c]ulture-specific mode of identity”
(Wynter 2000, 30). Freedom, socialism, Man function “[w]ithin the terms of a secular belief system or Grand Narrative of Emancipation,90 that is itself the transformed analogue [emphasis mine] of the religious belief system and Origin Narrative of feudal-Christian Europe, [they are] conceived as an acultural mode of being” (Wynter 2000, 30). The intellectual, writer, or artist who produces writing via current institutions might be, on Wynter’s account, more alienated than the narratively condemned outside the institutions since the intellectual’s psychic subjectivity is
responsibility for it. For freedom is not experienced by its enjoying its free subjective functioning, but in a creative act required by an imperative. This absolute end, this imperative which is transcendent, yet acquiesced in, which freedom itself adopts as its own, is what we call a value [emphasis added]. The work of art is a value because it is an appeal” (1978, 34). The reference of value is freedom that leads to an invention. I am arguing that for Wynter the reference of value is invention that makes possible a new understanding of human freedom. 89 This marks her difference from, yet close relationship to, Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Husserl’s Phenomenology. 90 Wynter adapts this phrase from Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of how Western discourse attempts to make the recognition of difference impossible by subsuming every divergence as merely a step in a grander narrative (Lyotard 1984). Wynter, like Lyotard, is not looking for the proliferation of innumerable and fragmented discourses but a change in the genre of interpretation and writing by which difference is engaged. 128 interwoven with the survival of the institution which makes her writing possible. How could one write against their own conditions of possibility? So long as institutional imaginaries continue to grip the imagination of the intellectual/writer/artist then it will be impossible to represent the current situation as anything other than “the way things are in themselves [and] the way they will have to be” (Wynter 2000a, 30) and thus will misperceive the poetics of those who are not beholden to institutions. The intellectual will write new maps, but remain on the same territory.
Wynter proposes that the “psychic cum political emancipation” (Wynter 2006, 111) of the
Black Arts/Black Aesthetics Movement shows that an invention of a new universal preceded the enactment and understanding of freedom. To return to Sartre’s proposition we might say: they wrote for those assumed to not be subjects of freedom. The conceptual metaphor which guides
Wynter in “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in the
Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project” is the distinction between the “map” and the “territory.” In phenomenological terms, the “map” is a particular instantiation of every discursive activity while the “territory” is the prereflective episteme that makes possible such everyday discursive activity in the first place. The Black
Arts/Aesthetics Movements of the 1960s was able to effect an “explosive psychic emancipation”
(Wynter 2006, 111) not because these authors and artists addressed themselves to their ontologically free contemporaries but because they revealed and invented the basis upon which one could even understand what it is to “be” free. Wynter’s poetic phenomenology prioritizes psychic emancipation as the necessary condition for political emancipation in order to question the assumed foundational meaning of being free.
The episteme which allows for “common-sense” agreement in everyday discourse about the presumed universal nature of freedom is often allowed to remain invisible without reflection.
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The historical consequences of this praxis are far-reaching. For instance, Wynter’s claim that the macro-discourse of Liberal humanism animates our present order of knowledge is supported by how the “Civil Rights Movement” has been institutionalized in civic memory as simply a demand for color-blind law enforcement. By flattening the “Civil Rights Movement” into simply the discourse of civil rights obscures, historically, the transnational, revolutionary consciousness that was being engaged by Black and colonized peoples throughout the world91 and, philosophically, assumes the very being of freedom and, thus, presumes to know the destiny of freedom’s inventions. To be free is to be an individual with equal rights before (United States) law.92 It is in no way clear that Liberalism (with its attendant variants and disagreements) actually represents the ontological being of freedom. To say that pragmatically Liberalism is the most coherent philosophical paradigm through which to investigate questions of freedom and emancipation is to concede that one is reinscribing an invention of freedom rather than the freedom of invention. After all, the current arrangement of Liberalism in the United States is historically coextensive with the
91 Sylvia Wynter is explicit on this point: “They were also linked synchronically to the global field of the still then ongoing global anti-colonial movements as well as to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa…All this led…to the psychic cum political emancipation not only of Blacks, but also of many other non-white peoples and other groups suffering from discrimination…” (2006, 111). James Baldwin’s 1963 text The Fire Next Time is emblematic of this transnational, Black consciousness: “Our power and our fear of change held bind [the oppressed] to their misery and bewilderment, and insofar as they find this state intolerable we are intolerably menaced[…]when, eventually, they do change their situation—as in Cuba—we are menaced more than ever, by the vacuum that succeeds all violent upheavals. We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve revolution[…]Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no[…]” (1998, 338). 92 For an example of how Marxist theory can fall into the same trap one needs only to turn to the Sartre of Black Orpheus. In Sartre’s treatment of negritude in Black Orpheus, after critiquing Western humanism and its attendant colonial violence, he avers, “the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of negritude ‘passes’ [passe], as Hegel says, into the objective, positive and precise, notion of the proletariat[…]Negritude appears as the minor moment of a dialectical progression[…]it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization [réalisation] of the human in a classless society. [It] is for destroying itself” (2001, 137). I dealt with this problem in the previous chapter. 130 institution of racialized chattel slavery. The two institutions did not live in contradiction. They abetted one another in the production of a particular discursive analogy of freedom: to be a free individual with equal rights before (United States) law was to not be like a slave. Prioritizing the political over the psychic mistakes what is actually a “map” as if it were the “territory.”
From a certain level of abstraction it would appear that Wynter’s argument in her essay ends in an irresolvable aporia. If we only have access to “maps,” to discourses, then any apprehension and reflection of the “territory,” the episteme, can only take place by means of the very discourse one wishes to subvert and move beyond. This “paradox” (Wynter 2006, 111) is the very source of the psychic emancipation of the Black Arts/Aesthetics Movements of the 1960s.
By employing Sylvia Wynter’s poetic phenomenology we are reminded that for us the “slave” has not been an abstract signifier designating the negation of being free: s/he was historically and semantically corporealized as “Black.” Thus, Wynter can argue, “…the systemic devalorization of blackness and correlated over-valorization of whiteness” are “proximate functions” (2006, 116) of a very particular “territory” of human freedom. Speaking subjects who are corporealized as
“Black” will feel in their very skin93 that the discourse of freedom they have inherited invents them as being wrong—desêtre (Wynter 2006, 116). If to be free can only be discursively constructed as being free of one’s very corporeality, one’s existential self, then the “Black” subject—or, precisely, the “slave”—would be the most productive site from which to reflect on the meaning of freedom and its hidden contradictions.
93 In fact, Sylvia Wynter describes being in Guyana in 1961 when riots broke out between the Black and Indian populations due to taxes being levied upon the former and not the latter: “And then all kinds of rashes, of eruptions, began to break out on my skin, because of the trauma of the situation” (2000, 141). 131
Wynter’s essay makes constant reference to Amiri Baraka’s (née LeRoi Jones) 1963 text
Blues People.94 Baraka argues in this text that the “blues” music of the slaves working in the fields makes it possible to view “from another landscape” the territory of Western thought (1963, 8).
Baraka shows that one cannot determine aesthetic value in a vacuum and, thus, the determination of “good” music or art proceeds from the social and historical conditions of value: “A blues singer and, say, a Wagenerian tenor cannot be compared to one another in any way. They issue from cultures that have almost nothing in common, and the musics [sic] they make are equally alien[…]For a Western to say that the Wagnerian tenor’s voice is ‘better’ than the African singer’s or the blues singer’s is analogous to a non-Westerner disparaging Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony because it wasn’t improvised[…]reference determines value” (Baraka 1963, 30). Wynter sees the literature of the Black Arts/Aesthetics Movements as having been able to make cognizable, for however brief a moment, the Western frame of reference that had been attempting to determine the value of the Black and colonized peoples of the world. In other words, a different genre of invention made possible a new feeling of freedom and not the other way around.
The “heretical dynamic” (Wynter 2006, 112) of the psychic emancipation glimpsed in the
1960s drew its radical potential from the ephemeral possibility of rewriting the episteme through which art/aesthetics/freedom could be discursively constructed and understood. From the “maps” of various literary texts, musical productions, and intellectual achievements the “territory” was approached and, however briefly, escaped. For Wynter, the “failure” of these movements cannot be found in their systemic revalorization of “Blackness” but in the incredible difficulty of changing the frame of reference, to use Baraka’s language. The valorization of “Blackness” was
94 The full title of his book is: Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It. 132
“reterritorialized” as a diversity issue that could be discursively addressed by institutionalizing various “Ethnic Studies” in the name of a Liberal Humanism (Wynter 2006, 112).95 The tragedy is that even this movement does not succeed in revalorizing the notion of “Blackness,” but instead positions it as an invention that can be abided by so long as there is a universally “free” subject beneath the “Blackness.”
Wynter is critical of how institutions and the praxis of institutionalized intellectual translates the language of resistance and psychic invention into the terms of the overarching episteme. Wynter’s discovery consists in how our institutions of knowledge impose through poiesis a fracture between who is human and “free” and who must be cast out and “unfree” in order to support freedom. This calls into question how well-equipped the institutions of the
Humanities are to bring about a new genre of invention when many of the universities in the United
States were built upon and through the institution of chattel slavery. From this historical fact
Wynter will ask, what must the nature of the “territory” be that such a contradiction in freedom could be possible? She answers that “all the other ‘ism’ issues that spontaneously erupted in the
US in the wake of the Black social liberation movement, all themselves, like the major ‘ism’ of class also, [were] specific maps to a single territory—that of the instituting of our present ethnoclass or Western bourgeois genre of the human” (2006, 116). Thus, when Sartre claims that
“One does not write for slaves” we might say that this statement is a “map” of the territorial question concerning the analogy of freedom. Literature is only for those who feel in their skin the need to invent before knowing freedom.
95 Wynter’s example here is the transformation of “Black Studies” into “African-American Studies.” The hyphen which connects the abstract notions of “Africa” and “America” serves to obscure how much of the Black population in the Americas were abducted into the territory and did not migrate. Thus, the radical questioning of the territory of “America” is held in abeyance as a theoretically justifiable category. 133
Wynter challenges us to ask what we are assuming when implicitly placing “freedom” as prior to invention rather than looking for and creating the conditions for inventing a “territory” whereupon freedom is not predicated on condemnation. She challenges us to reflect on the
“conditions of being human” (2006, 114) so that we might finally grasp these conditions and invent the freedom of Sartre’s “concrete universality” (1978, 115). Wynter’s poetic phenomenology demands that we rethink the conceptual relationship between freedom and invention. Her work provides us with the conceptual resources for challenging the ontological category of freedom as historical and recognizing the necessity of continuing to construct a frame of reference through which “Blackness” will not be institutionally devalorized. This arises in the concrete experiences of alienation that do not depend upon the reigning Western episteme for their resolution.
Our understanding of blackened humanism must explore how institutions develop scripts of Blackness as necessarily alienated. What Wynter is imploring her fellow writers and intellectuals to explore are the background conditions of possibility that make Black life a coherent theoretical object and then transforming those conditions. So long as Black men and women are conscripted into analogical paradigms of freedom there will be no authentic understanding human praxis. Wynter’s references to the “psychic explosion” of the Black Arts/Aesthetics Movements of the 1960s are meant to indicate how vital it is for the human creature to engender new symbolic births by which a community can come to know itself as a good kind of men and women.
Throughout this chapter I have been arguing how Wynter conceives of the human creature as being written into being according to sociogenic codes of knowledge that must be taken as if they were ahistorical or acultural. A great deal depends on this as if of Wynter’s analyses of violence and alienation. It is in this as if that the Western ratio can impose itself as a universal paradigm of interpretation. To be clear Wynter primarily places this problem at the feet of the intellectual who
134 ought to be committed to historicizing the situation. But if one historicizes only insofar as the blackened—Black life—is taken as a deviation from the a priori principle of Western, bourgeois humanness then one has not gotten very far in the project of rewriting humanity; they will only succeed in appropriating the authentic explosions of praxis into a history-for assimilation and commodification. The intellectual is symbolically “born” into this system via training, certification, and the required reading of canonized history. Can the intellectual write/read life otherwise?
The next step for the intellectual is to understand how the human creature comes to be
“born” in a significant way for others in a community. If the intellectual only attempts to understand the aesthetics of Black existence as the striving of Black men and women to join the ethnoclass of Western men and women then a nuanced engagement of how these men and women come to know themselves as men and women will be forestalled. What are the terms and practices by which a people come to “be” men and women? This would appear to be an even more primary question than understanding how the police officer comes to be a police officer since before assuming this position in adulthood s/he had been crafted according to a gendered human paradigm that s/he is then enlisted to secure and protect (against the ones inhabiting the category of N.H.I.).
Thus, Wynter’s genre critique implicitly contains a critique of how gender, for the intellectual, inscribes all men and women within the relationship of how Western, middle-class men and women conceive of themselves.96
96 Alexander Weheliye argues, “For Wynter, destroying only western bourgeois conceptions of gender leaves intact the genre of the human to which it is attached, and thus cannot serve as a harbinger of true emancipation, which requires abolishing Man once and for all” (2014, 22). Elsewhere Wynter states in an interview with Greg Thomas, “Our struggle as Black women has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the human of ‘Man’” (Proud/Flesh 2006). 135
If as I have been arguing in this section that, for Wynter, freedom, socialism, and human are already sedimented with a “[c]ulture-specific mode of identity” (Wynter 2000, 30), then the terms “man” and “woman” are no more free of these mystifications. What Wynter has been demonstrating with the Black Arts/Aesthetics Movements is how an hegemonic imaginary can transform authentic explosions of creativity and symbolic birth into mere analogy. The radical potential of Wynter’s poetic phenomenology consists in the fact that the language with which one apprehends the world can no longer be presumed as a firm and immediate grounding in reality.
The invention of new forms of freedom requires the invention of the assumed conditions of possibility for Black men and women to appear on their own terms, to write their own scripts of symbolic birth delinked from the Western ratio that demands their condemnation and alienation.
In the concluding section, I will argue that we now have the tools to understand Wynter’s heterodox apprehension of gender as a human problem and that the intellectual/writer/artist must be committed to making space for the appearance of new human creatures not necessarily tied metaphysically to Western, bourgeois conceptions of gender and humanity.
From Genre to Gender: On the Symbolic Birth of “Man,” “Woman,” and the Western Ratio
The sheer breadth of Wynter’s philosophical anthropology and its engagement with world- systems theory (à la Immanuel Wallerstein) bespeaks a theorist more concerned with totalization than emphasizing the singularity of lived experience. In other words, it might seem that Sylvia
Wynter subordinates the question of “gender” to the race/colonial issue of genre. If one reads only her most well-known essays97 this position has a certain plausibility, but it would mistake the intended frame of her project. What we (intellectuals of Western academia and institutions)
97 “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” (Fall 2003) and “The Ceremony Must Be Found” (1984), for instance. 136 mobilize as “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” and “class” are products of a “systemic praxis” (Wynter
1997, sec. 1) of knowledge and alienation. As Wynter often notes: genre and gender share the same etymological root.98 I will argue when she writes on genre she is also writing on gender. Poetics is the intellectual study of the laws that determine the bounds of intelligibility of a given genre while poiesis is the bringing into being of something new. In the interplay between the two there is praxis as the taking in and rendering intelligible the laws of a genre so that one can surpass them and bring something new into being. For Wynter, this is the interplay between the imaginary of the Western ratio and race, gender, sexuality, and class. The former attempts to determine the bounds and relationship of the latter.
She has been arguing that systemic praxis “give[s] expression to specific conceptions of the human (of what it means to be a good man or woman of one's kind) through whose mediation alone the individual of the uniquely language-capacitied species is enabled to experience, and thereby realize itself as human, as himself, herself” (Wynter 1997, sec. 1). Phenomenologically speaking, Wynter “brackets” the multiple “Western” discourses on race/gender/sexuality/class in order to interrogate the conditions of possibility for these discourses to appear to have “real” objects in the first place. Thus, immediate recourse to “lived experience” is not interrogated as some sort of (Marxian) “false consciousness” that would posit a real, authentic subject who has been mystified. Instead Wynter is interrogating how Western systemic praxis—epistemes—have attempted to institute the conditions of possibility for one’s experience of her/himself.
98 The close implication of “gender” and “genre” may be found in the French language where genre is translated as “gender.” Thus, we can see that Fanon’s relationship to gender is further complicated by a worldview deployed by the homology of “gender” and “genre” in the French language. 137
At this level of analysis “gender” along with “race” participates in reflecting a genre of what it means to be human. The alienation of these discourses, for Wynter, must be fundamentally challenged not at the level of discourse, but “systemic praxis.” Wynter’s genre of invention is decidedly not the proliferation of discourses on experience but changing the epistemological systems of reference that makes these discourses possible. This praxis, Wynter is claiming, is what will truly allow the singularity of lived experience to be fully enacted.
Wynter has noted that her relationship to (institutional and academic) forms of “feminism” and the question of gender, more broadly, while fraught, has been largely misunderstood (Wynter
2006, 20). In Wynter’s attention to “genre” and a new form of the “Human” as praxis it is thought that she elides gender in favor of race. What this misses is that race must always be seen as gendered and gender as racialized because they are part of the complex processes of instituting what it means to be “a good man or woman of one’s kind” (Wynter 1997, sec. 1). Gender and
“genre” share a common etymological root which leads Wynter to suggest that “‘gender’ has always been the function of the instituting of ‘kind’” (Wynter 2006, 20). In other words, there is no discourse on “woman” (or “man”) that does not beg the question of what it is to be a woman or man of a particular genre. The social inscriptions of “woman” are not ontologically independent of the semantic and linguistic practices that institute “woman” as a real category of being in the first place.
Wynter’s concern is that a Western episteme of humanism continues to underwrite geopolitical projects of liberation. But who, precisely, is the subject awaiting liberation? By implicitly assuming that the “gender” woman (and man) has acultural and ahistoric value, the
“generic referent subject of feminist discourse” is often a mask for “the culturally western and
Westernized middle class woman” (Wynter 1997, sec. 1). The stakes of this argument are clearly
138 outlined in her essay on the practice of “female circumcision” on the African continent and
Western reactions to the practice. Sylvia Wynter does not take a position for or against the practice, but phenomenologically reveals that cultures develop symbolic codes through which one becomes a “good” woman or man of that kind. The Black feminist challenge Wynter proposes is to reveal how our language and modes of apprehending the world remain complicit with a Western racial
“genre” of the human. To simply append the modifier “Black” to the subject “woman” does not necessarily disrupt the conditions of possibility that make such a phrase sensible. Wynter’s “genre of invention” aims to dislodge the West’s attempts to attain a “monopoly of humanity” (Wynter
1997).
In “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth’” (1997), Wynter examines how feminist scholars (Anglo, African, and African-American) have critiqued the practice of female circumcision/genital mutilation on the continent Africa. The title of the essay is meant to reveal that, depending on the background assumptions, the practice will be flattened as either “female circumcision” (and, thus, a cultural practice) or “genital mutilation” (a violent crime against women and humanity). It becomes clear early on in the essay that Wynter is not looking to take one side or the other on the practice, but, instead, she wants to examine what genre of the human is implicit in construing the question as a simple either/or. Much of the critique of the practice proceeds through the legalist framework of Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states: “No one shall be subject to torture, or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” Wynter asks what it must mean that a cultural practice must measure up to a Western legal framework in order to be considered humane? How does a presumable “universal” legal institution actually decide in advance what image of humanity must be secured and what imaginaries must be put out of question? For this is Wynter’s understanding of how law functions:
139 it decides, renders judgment. The law does not prevaricate or put itself into question. So, what does it mean to imagine that the meaning of what it is to be human and humane is within the province of Law? Who decides?
Wynter does not take up a position for or against the practice because she is wondering whether Western trained intellectuals can even ask the question in good faith when there are such vast power differentials between Western institutions and indigenous communities. She states:
However, given both the vastly different nature of the repertoires that the members of each
group (that of Western feminists and the Westernized, Third World, African, Afro-
American feminists, on the one hand, and that of traditional women circumcisers and those
who adhere to the customary practices, both men and women, on the other) have at their
disposal, as well as the vast power-differential between the two, the dispute will tend to be
resolved in terms imposed by the former. Since it is the members of the first group who
now find themselves empowered, inter alia, by the ongoing techo-information revolution
of the West that is now penetrating the most distant corners of the globe, it is their
conception of the human and criterion of what it is to be a good man or woman of one’s
kind that will inevitably, as part of the completed Westernization of the planet, be
increasingly hegemonic. (1997, sec.1; emphasis mine)
It is here that the stakes of Wynter’s agnosticism concerning the various manifestations of “female circumcision”99 become clear: if Law, as defined by Western institutions and economic/military might, is the adjudicator between humane and inhumane then the Western ratio will be the value
99 Wynter notes that the practice ranges from the drastic “infibulation” to the mild, with low health risks, “symbolic prickings.” She and the African feminist legal scholar L. Amede Obiora (1997) note that the Western language of law erases any differences in the practices and gathers them all under the label of “inhumane.” 140 system against which humanity is measured. Wynter understands the practice as one in which the indigenous communities that to become a “man” or “woman” certain systemic habits make these signifiers effectual. If “gender” is a genre of social signification then more goes into forming it than simply biological genitalia. Thus, to press the point further, Wynter is asking what happens when Western institutions have the power to craft the imaginary of what it is to “be” a good man or woman and what happens to those who fall on the side of inhumane. Those cultures or persons designated as “inhumane” are made to be vulnerable to all manner of state and military intervention. After all, if humanity is at stake then there can be no limits to what an institution can do to secure it.
Thus, Wynter finds that the fracture between those who correspond to an image of Western, middle-class humanity and those who do not pervades Westernized institutions. What she thinks is at work here is the eclipse of whether it is possible to have different and dynamic conceptions of the human. She argues that Law can make its universal claims because it takes the “birth” of a
“man” or “woman” to occur primarily in biology. Since we are all biologically born then we must all share an essence. Wynter militates against the biological reduction of the human because it denies, in her words, that the human is a mix between law, governing poetics, and event, the rupture of poiesis.100 This is so because we are mediated by language and can turn our theory into flesh.
The denial of this original capacity is nothing less than the curtailment of the human as praxis.
100 Wynter writes, “[t]he universe in which we live is a dual one whose description involves both laws and events. While laws imply continuous unfolding, deterministic predictions, the negation of time, events, on the other hand, involve discontinuity, ruptures, change, and an arrow of time. Prigogine gave as examples of Events, "the birth of our universe and the emergence of (biological) life."[68] My proposal was that, added to these two, there was a Third Event. This event was that of the origin of specifically human life. Human life, therefore, rather than being defined in a relation of pure continuity with biological life (which is the founding premise of our contemporary culture and its conception of the human, Man, on the model of a purely natural organism), is re- defined as having come into existence only on the basis of the rupture and discontinuity which it 141
For a genre to sustain itself it must reproduce those who will reaffirm its laws. I have already analyzed how a police institution accomplishes this feat. Gender represents another such institution for Wynter. If humans are not only bound together by their biological ties (as in police institutions or nation-state “patriotism”) then it remains to be explained how these ties come to be experienced. Reproduction is not only biological, but symbolic. The image of the “family,” in the dominant imaginary, is that of blood ties, middle-class status, and, perhaps less often now, heterosexual kinship arrangements. Rather than this image being “natural” (purely biological) it was brought about by the “[t]ransformation of the biological identities male/female into the cultural identities husband/wife, father/mother” (Wynter 1997, sec. 3). The cultural identities of husband/wife and father/mother are “events” of poiesis that are transformed into “laws” of being by institutions. If this is forgotten then the capacity for transformation is obscured and alienation, now understood as the suppression of transformation, sets in.
In the last section I argued that Wynter, along with Sartre, takes care not to abstract the meaning of “freedom” from the concrete, historical and imaginative context. The mystification of institutions surround the human creature. Wynter’s interest in how the question of “female circumcision” is framed is that she wants to make theoretically explicit what is being assumed when Western institutions deploy law to protect “womanhood,” “motherhood,” or “family.”
Sounding remarkably existentialist, Wynter proffers, “Mothers and fathers in their cultural identity can never be “born,” but are rather “made” (and “made” by being subjected to humanly devised procedures, one of which was to be the six thousand year old procedure of male/female
effected with the genetic programs, or codes, that motivate and orient the eusocial, and therefore aggregating, behaviors of all forms of purely biological life. This Event was therefore that of the rupture by means of which, having evolved its unique capacity for the use of language, this form of life crossed a threshold after which it would come to motivate and orient its behaviors through the mediation of the Word” (1997, sec. 2). 142 circumcision)[…]The function of this institution was that of enacting the ritual of symbolic birth[…]” (1997, sec. 4). Again, without addressing the ethics of the practice, Wynter is calling attention to the fact that just as the human creature is “born” biologically, in order to become part of a broader linguistic community she or he must also be born symbolically. At all levels of human society Wynter sees the crafting of what will become known as “human” or “humane.” This work of language and its practices, effectively, change the human creature, crafts how they feel and experience themselves. Wynter supposes that there are laws at work in culture that attempt to regulate and control the “event” of the human creature.
If we are to get to these “laws”—sociogenic principles—as poetic phenomenology is meant to do then we must be willing to challenge our naturalizing image of what it is to be a good man or woman of one’s kind. The Western ratio cannot be substituted as if it were the human image.
What is remarkable and, potentially, aporetic about Wynter’s humanism is that it is a writing of humanity that militates against analogy and the “as if.” This also means that it does not attempt to impute any essential identity to the future. Wynter always writes for those caught in the “space of otherness” (Wynter 1989, 642) because it is only they who show the truth of the genre; it is they who can have an imagination that will exceed the bounds of intelligibility. It is the responsibility of the committed intellectual to continually make space for those new and unexpected symbolic births.
I doubt that Wynter’s understanding of blackened humanism can be captured by a further appeal to diversity. Diversity, for Wynter, risks being capture by dominant institutions in such a way that economic power and ideology escape critical engagement. It is not a question of whether beyond this genre the divide between blackened and not will persist in a racial/class/gender register. The point is to find spaces within the present where unforeseen historical experiences can
143 be crafted. If there is any futural content to Wynter’s blackened humanism it would simply be the continual creation of spaces of invention in response to the needs of everyone. I would argue that this is more of a shift in form rather than the positing of content. In this chapter I have contended that the form of humanism must be challenged and not only its content.
In the following chapter, I will investigate further how gender has been mobilized to deny the recognition of human creatures through the institution of chattel slavery. For now, it is possible to see how Wynter gives intellectuals a way of thinking alienation and “Black life” as guides to
“[m]ove us towards a new way of thinking[…]A way of thinking that could enable us to posit the functioning laws of culture that are regulatory of the “humanly devised procedures” (from that of circumcision to those of our processes of racial, class, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic inscriptions) by means of which we are brought to ‘symbolic birth’[…]” (1997, conclusion). This new writing of humanity, that in no way can be undertaken by a single individual, writes for the alienated and against the laws that demanded their birth as alienated. Only with this constant, imaginative apprehension can human praxis continually be born.
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Chapter 3 The Problem of Value: Hortense Spillers and the Mythologies of Blackened Gender
In a recent 2011 essay, Hortense Spillers observes that the “History” of the Transatlantic African slave trade “[o]nly projects personalities as and in an act of writing” (21; emphasis mine). From
Fanon to Wynter and now Spillers I have argued that the transmission and construction of historical experience must be inscribed, written into the very skin of the blackened. But this writing is hardly pure and neutral description. It is not as if the historical documents of the past, the scientific studies of Black bodies, and the economic ledgers and calculations of Western Capital were merely concerned with the disinterested accumulation of objective facts. Fanon and Wynter have shown, phenomenologically and systemically, that the writing of the “West” (itself more of a literary invention than a “real” fact) have been interested in the circumscription and invention of a particular genre of human “History” and being. The immense effectivity of these institutions consists in the reproduction of “objective” knowledge and “subjective” experience in such a way that a supervening system of violence can conceal itself as the background of human reality. Yet for many of the colonized this institutional language and writing is one of the most substantive avenues through which to access the “History” and “truth” that make one intelligible as a human creature. The question of this dissertation thus far has been, to paraphrase Sartre, how do the blackened make something out of what they have been made into? From this vantage point Spillers will contend, “[l]iterature and “History” are not the fictional and non-fictional vocations that stand at odds with one another, but are, rather, conjoined at the hip in a single body of narrative motivation that lends a name and a countenance to the legends of commodities, to the activities of profit margins and markets that are conducted over the heads of human flesh rendered inert by economic rationalization and abstraction” (2011, 21; emphasis mine).
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It is at the conjunction of literature and “History”, writing and knowledge, fiction and fact that Hortense Spillers makes her philosophical intervention that the human value of Black life is cast “between the lines” (2003a, 222)101 of Western discourse. The fundamental claim which undergirds Hortense Spillers’s analyses is that whatever access we have to ourselves or those black men and women of past generations is necessarily mediated by writing, by the institutionalization of an historiography that is interested in crafting a limited intelligibility to what it means “to be human.” If to participate in the genre of human life is to be “born” as a good “man” or “woman” of one’s kind102 then, Spillers asks, how is it possible for one to be “born” as property? Property does not participate in the metaphorics of gender as it has been written into the Western archive yet for the human and social system of chattel slavery and colonialism to make sense Black life had to be reproduced. Spillers elaborates how this writing of the human could not be pulled off cleanly or without contradiction. Spillers calls this, “[t]he moral and intellectual jujitsu that yielded the catachresis, person-as-property” (2003c, 20). Thus, Spillers is interested in the metaphorics of reading/writing “History” that makes it possible for this crisis in knowledge—catachresis—to escape our vision and asks what are the costs of continuing to accept this writing of the human and its metaphorics of “gender” in the present day? The complicity of literature and “History” means that the invention of a new system of humanity will not have as its aims the rescuing of pure and inert objectivity, but the development of new metaphors that will not be bound to analogy of the
Western ratio.
I will make clear in this chapter how and why Spillers makes these arguments concerning
Blackness, gender, and historiography. It is important not to take Spillers claims at face value or
101 Importantly, Spillers repeats this metaphor of reading/writing throughout her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (2003b, 210, 222, 223). 102 For this argument, see the last section of the previous chapter. 146 accept them as “ontological” fact. While “Mama’s Baby” has been so generative in a variety of contexts103 how she makes her argument, drawing on which theoretical texts, has been allowed to recede into the background. Little attention has been paid to Spillers’s constant invocation of
Roland Barthes and his reflections on the writing of “History” and the “History” of Writing in
Writing Degree-Zero104 or her recourse to the discourse of myth as one of the sites of violence for
Black life.105 Even her famous reference to how slavery leaves behind an intergenerational
“[h]ieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 2003b, 207) is an echo of Barthes.106 By reading these intellectual influences in Spillers’s text it will be possible to gain a clearer understanding of the status of her claims. I will argue that Spillers work intends for there to be the invention of different modes of reading/writing. Her project is meant to facilitate the creation of new metaphors for thinking and praxis. She means to change the “[v]aluational grids and grammars of feeling”
(Spillers 2003d, 20) that continue to conceal the catachresis of Black life as person-as-property.
Thus, in what follows, I will make clear how Spillers revises “gender” as caught in the metaphorics
103 Cf. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Hartman 1997), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Weheliye 2014), and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Snorton 2017). 104 “[b]efore the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography” (Spillers 2003b, 206; emphasis mine). Put quickly, what Roland Barthes aims to show in Writing Degree- Zero is that how we come to know “History” is bound up with institution of Literature. Thus, to understand the former it is necessary to reveal the latter. There is the study of how “History” as been written and then there is the interrelated study of how writing becomes institutionalized. 105 “‘Ethnicity’ in this case freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of the eternal. We could say, then, that in its powerful stillness, ‘ethnicity,’ from the point of view of the [Moynihan] Report, embodies nothing more than a mode of memorial time, as Roland Barthes outlines the dynamics of myth” (Spillers 2003b, 205). 106 “This hieratic [hieroglyphic] quality of written Signs establishes Literature as an institution and clearly tends to place it above “History”, for no limits can be set without some idea of permanence” (Barthes 1968, 2). Barthes, Roland. 1968. Writing Degree-Zero. Translated by Jonathan Cape. Boston: Beacon Press. 147 and historiography of slavery in such a way that Black men and women can only be read/written as analogies for “Western” and white, men and women. Her mobilization of Barthes semiotic theory and critique of mythology will be central here. I will then apply Spillers’s mode of reading/writing to some texts of Anna Julia Cooper in the 1890s and her engagement with the problems of value and gender. It will be shown how “between the lines” it can be seen that there are traditions in Black writing that contested the inherited “Western” grammar of what it means to be a “man” or “woman.” Finally, I will return to Spillers and provide a more theoretically comprehensive reading of her notion of “ungendering” and show how this is a new mode of writing that is meant to make possible a different historiography of blackened humanity.
Metaphor and Mythologies of Gender
Hortense Spillers describes “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
(2003b) as engaging the very old problem of trying to find a category for Black women (and men) that respected “History” rather than subsuming them within the work of mythologies and metaphors of the dominant culture. As evidence of this “old” problematic we will turn to the work of Anna Julia Cooper and the problem of value for the Black community post-emancipation.
Spillers immediately qualifies this claim about her 1987 essay by noting that “[w]hat was new was that I was trying to bring the language of a postmodern academy to a very old problem” (Spring
2007, 308). Spillers is clear that she participates in a rich lineage of Black feminist writing,107 but her reference to “the language of the postmodern academy” indicates an alteration in her historical
107 In the above cited interview she cites the Gloria T. Hull, Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith edited collection of essays All the Blacks are Men, All the Women are White, but Some of Us Are Brave (1982) and in the essay itself Spillers references bell hooks (2003b, 216) and Angela Y. Davis (2003b, 218). 148 experience that requires excavation. As I have done in the previous chapters I will show that it is important to theoretically situate the space of a thinker’s thought. I have been tracking the question of blackened gender and sexuality through Fanon to Wynter and now Spillers not to claim that there is a transhistorical conceptualization of the problem, but to demonstrate how their conceptual language and metaphors differ and begin to ask why that might be and what consequences this will have for our reading/writing of Black life. Thus, the language that Spillers employs is of a different quality than Fanon (who was never a part of the “proper” academy) and Wynter (a Black Jamaican woman who is contemporary with many of the “postmodern” theorists). But by taking these three theorists together “gender” and “humanism” will have to be radically rewritten through the historical experiences of enslavement and European colonialism. In order to begin understanding
Spillers’s project we will have to explicate the role of Roland Barthes in the “postmodern” theoretical architecture of her writing.
The central distinction in “Mama’s Baby” consists in Spillers’s claim that her reading/writing of the Transatlantic slave trade requires a distinction between “body” and “flesh.”
She goes on to say that the “[c]aptive and liberated subject-positions” (Spillers 2003b, 206) relate to the “body” and “flesh,” respectively. At this early point in the essay it is not immediately clear why this distinction is necessary or what work it is meant to do. Some headway can be made by turning to the following sentence where she clarifies that “[b]efore the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography” (Spillers 2003b, 206). What should first be noted is that the relationship between “body” and “flesh” is the primacy of the latter, its “zero degree,” to the former. It is not yet clear if this primacy is temporal, spatial, conceptual, or discursive. Following this, Spillers places both terms in scare quotes thus denoting that neither body nor flesh are
149 empirical objects, but discursive ones. Spillers elaborates elsewhere, “[I] would contend that the
‘body’ is neither given as an uncomplicated empirical rupture on the landscape of the human, nor do we ever actually ‘see’ it. In a very real sense, the ‘body,’ insofar as it is an analytical construct, does not exist in the person at all” (2003d, 21). Further on Spillers contends that the invocation of the body as transparent and real is the product of confusing and conflating the historical significations with “reality.” In other words, there is no direct and unmediated reference to the black body that does not have for its condition of possibility reference to a prior “History” that has crafted what “the” black body means.108 Spillers clearly states, “[t]he ‘body’ should be specified as a discursive and particular instance that belongs, always, to a context, and we must look for its import there” (2003d, 21).
Spillers’s contention may appear startling but she is preceded by Fanon and his reflections on the historicity of his “livery” in Peau noire (cf. chapter 1) and Wynter with her reflections on genre and sociogeny (cf. chapter 2). It is important to neither risk conflating Spillers’s theorization of the “body” with Fanon and Wynter especially since she has a concept of the “flesh” that neither one has, nor assume that there is a radical divergence between all three thinkers’ juxtaposition of
Black life under historic conditions of domination. For Spillers the “black body” is a contingent production of symbolic activity. The violence of the whips, chains, and sexual violations on the plantation and slave ships were not made possible because there is something ontologically and scientifically vulnerable or irresistible in the black body, but because a “context” had been constructed through which something called “the black body” can be perceived as a natural site of
108 It should be noted that while the English language does not permit it I am taking “means” as analogous to the French sens which equivocates between “meaning” and “sense of direction.” For Spillers, the “body” is filled with meaning but it also points towards a context. The “black body” must be read in this bivalent sense. 150 violation. On this account, the perception of Black bodies is mediated by metaphors which uproot and displace the Black person into a dangerous field of significations and human meaning-making.
For this reason Spillers argues that “[t]he captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor of value[…][The] dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation” (2003b, 208; emphasis mine). What this means is that slavery (as we have seen with colonialism in Fanon and Wynter) was not just empirical violence but was the gradual constitution of an immense and terrifying power to write/read Black bodies into and out of existence. The literal and spectacular violence that we are often compelled to take as the organizing principle of slavery and colonialism masks the regimes of meaning-making that made such violence possible and necessary. It is these meanings, their grammar, that we continue to employ today to understand our “bodies” and our ““History”.” The enforced compulsion to perceive, write, and read through an historical field of meaning whose metaphors are grounded in violence and domination leads Spillers to conclude that “[s]ticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (2003b, 209). The Black “body” is metaphor. It is not a direct reference, but a subtle displacement that only seems to have a natural connection between signifier and signified.
Now it is at this point that we must situate Spillers’s claims and analyses in relationship to
Barthes’s work on the function of “mythology.” To say that the Black body is metaphor does not explain how the metaphor comes to be and have force on life. According to Barthes, metaphor requires a background system of meaning in order to make sense. Therefore, when Spillers begins her essay claiming that “[she] is a marked woman, but not everybody knows [her] name” (2003b,
203) she goes on to list a series of names that have been attached to her Black female body:
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“Peaches” (a reference to a Nina Simone song), “Brown Sugar,” and “Sapphire” (the stereotypical image of the angry and dangerous Black woman) to name a few. These names are metaphors insofar as they name her Black female body as something that is what it is not in order to produce an alternate meaning of her body. But her further question is to investigate what makes it possible for these acts of misnaming to attach to her body.
We use metaphors all the time in order to organize our perceptions and sense of the world, or, as Ankersmit argues in “History” and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor the immense power of metaphor resides in its capacity to “[m]ake an unfamiliar reality familiar” (1994, 13) and, thus, adaptable for human and social purposes. Ankersmit uses the example of the phrase “The earth is a spaceship” (1994, 11). The earth, we might say, is not literally a “spaceship,” but this phrase does allow the speaker to organize and generate a certain reality and “truth” about what the complex object of earth might be for us. One can see how this was at work in Wynter’s analyses of Christopher Columbus whose grounding metaphor for apprehending the Earth was the split between the saved and the not-saved. Thus, to return to Spillers and her claim that the black body is never seen as such or exists as an empirical object she is calling attention to how metaphor saturates our speech and perception from the very moment of naming such that calling the Black female body, “Sapphire” is to naturalize what is actually a cultural perception. It is for this reason that Spillers describes the above misnamings (as all metaphors are to a certain extent) as “[l]oaded with mythical prepossession” (2003b, 203). Metaphors can never work in isolation; their effectivity requires a background meaning and relation.109 In other words, we must turn to histories and
109 For instance, if one were to simply say, “The Earth is a frog” one might expect to be asked, “How so?” In this way we can see that for a metaphor to pull of its trick of displacement there must be an implicit “form of life” that allows that statement to link with reality. Not every metaphor has this effectivity. 152 systems of power that allow certain metaphors to take root and organize reality and others to remain isolated statements. Mythological analysis allows us to grasp the “semiosis of procedure”
(Spillers 2003d, 21) that allows metaphorics to saturate social and political institutions.
Spillers cites Roland Barthes long essay “Myth Today” from Mythologies (1957/2012) in the context of her critical analysis of the 1965 Moynihan Report which I will engage below.110
First, it is necessary to lay out the theoretical architecture Spillers derives from Barthes. Written during the French/Algerian war (the same war that was analyzed in the first chapter with Fanon)
Barthes spends the first half the essay giving a dispassionate description of how “myth” differs from language as such through an analysis of a photograph of a Black man saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris-Match: “On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on the fold of the tricolor [French flag]. All this is the meaning [sens] of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies [signifie] to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors” (1957/2012, 228/225). Between sens (meaning/direction) and siginifie (signification) Barthes is deploying a topographical distinction.111 I argue Spillers mobilizes this distinction throughout the entirety of “Mama’s Baby.”
110 “We could say, then, that in its powerful stillness, ‘ethnicity,’ from the point of view of the [Moynihan] Report, embodies nothing more than a mode of memorial time, as Roland Barthes outlines the dynamics of myth. As a signifier that shows no movement in the field of signification, the use of ‘ethnicity’ for the living becomes purely appreciative [increases in value], although one would be unwise not to concede its dangerous and fatal effects” (Spillers 2003b, 205). 111 Both Spillers and Barthes reference the work of Freud, in particular his The Interpretation of Dreams, which makes the topographical distinction between “manifest content” and “latent content.” Freud reads the dreams of his patients in the tension of the actually content of what they describe and the form which hides within what they say. As is well known about Freudian psychoanalysis it takes a signifier or symptom and reads it as a metaphor for something else. Thus, a dream about, say, being eaten by a lion is not really about one’s fear of being eaten by a lion. 153
Barthes’s distinction sees sens as what is simply there to be looked at (the content of the photograph) and signifie as what overdetermines how the photograph is read (the form of deployment). Barthes defines myth as “[a] system of communication[…]a mode of signification
[signification], a form[…]a type of speech [parole][…][that] is not defined by the object of its message, but the way in which it utters this message” (1957/2012, 225/217; emphasis mine). What
Barthes is saying is the Black male body has meaning that myth as a system parasitically feeds off and employs for its own purposes which in this context would be the defense of French empire and French masculinity/virility.
To put it simply, language occurs within a certain medium or type of speech which allows it to respond to a variety of contexts. If metaphors are content (“The Earth is a spaceship,” “The
Black female is ‘Sapphire’”) we still do not know the form of how these phrases are deployed, what system of meaning they are meant to organize or justify. Spillers’s quarrel is not with misnaming per se (as with Barthes it is far from clear that Spillers thinks we can do without metaphor and mythology), but with how the naming of the Black female (and male) body is carried out. Barthes’s most vociferous critique of mythology is that it is a theft of language (langage volé).
He goes further to say that it is “[a] robbery by colonization [c’est un vol par colonization]”
(1957/2012, 235/243). Mythology works language and metaphor towards severing an object from its original context and deploying it for an altogether differently motivated system of meaning.112
Freudian reading/writing requires a commitment to a certain background paradigm of the subject in society that we do not have the space here to explicate. I also referenced this work in connection with Fanon in the first chapter. 112 The issue of motivation is key for Barthes understanding of myth because its work is to make what might be arbitrary into a seeming necessity with the aim of conserving and generating a system of power (he is thinking of bourgeois imperialism and racism): “We know that in a language, the sign is arbitrary: nothing compels the acoustic image tree ‘naturally’ to mean the concept tree: the sign, here, is unmotivated[…]The mythical signification, on the other hand, is never arbitrary; it is always in part motivated, and unavoidably contains some analogy[…]for 154
As one commentator describes Barthes’s critique, myth “[s]crapes out the full “History” and meaning of a sign and discards the fullness of meaning so that it may be ready for a new set of associations” (Boer 2011, 217; emphasis mine). The loss of “History” as meaning (sens) is the loss of an original context and direction. Leaving aside for the moment whether any medium of language can avoid a certain degree of mythologizing (to anticipate the argument of this chapter neither Spillers nor Barthes ever make this claim), it important to recognize that mythology becomes dangerous when aligned with political and economic institutions of domination. Spillers makes this contention when she notes that the “[N]ew World, diasporic plight” of African and indigenous peoples “marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent[…]severing of the captive body from its motive [emphasis mine] will[…]” (2003b, 206). The Black or African “body” becomes wrapped up in the myth-making medium of Western invested powers of enslavement.
Or, to put it another way, African “bodies” become inscribed as Black “bodies.” The motivation of linking the signifier “Black” or “Blackness” to the concept of the Black “body” can no longer be considered accidental. In my own language, the body becomes blackened.
The reference to Barthes is clear though implicit at this point. In fact, her reliance on
Barthes shifts the focus of her essay away from the empirical nature of the violence of enslavement towards the conditions and contexts which motivated such violence. Furthermore, the “body” is no longer simply a “real” organism which has a “gender,” but it is the site of motivated significations. What Spillers seems to imply in the above quotation is that the Transatlantic slave trade not only abducted African persons, but denied these persons the concrete medium through
French imperiality to get hold of the saluting Negro, there must be identity between the Negro’s salute and that of the French soldier. Motivation is necessary to the very duplicity of myth: myth plays on the analogy between meaning [sens] and form, there is no myth without motivated form” (1957/2012, 232-233/236). 155 which they could employ metaphors of themselves and elaborate mythological systems for their
“bodies.”113 For this reason I argue that Spillers does not intend for us to reach some pre or post mythological space, but instead wants to show that the development of mythologies in the
Barthesian sense can be inventive. To be severed from one’s “motive will” (Spillers 2003b, 206) is to be vulnerable to the invention of others. Under conditions of economic expropriation and political domination this invention can mean nothing less than being the constant and shifting deployment of reproducing an existing system. The human “body” which must be produced and reproduced in service of constantly stabilizing a determined system (such as racialized capitalism) is never the body as such, but a particular type—a genre—of body. Marxism, Feminism, and
Critical Philosophy of Race have done a great deal of work to show how systems produce the
“body” as a metaphor for “the worker,” “Woman,” and “the racialized.”
Spillers brings these discourses together and argues that slavery was not only in the business of producing wealth for “the West” but elaborating a mythological system that signifies a genre of human “History” that continues to implicitly justify the continued exploitation, expropriation, and vulnerability of the blackened “body.” But for there to be more blackened bodies there must be a system that can demand and make sense of their reproduction. Spillers argues that “gender” has often functioned as a mythological robbery of Black life. What “we,” in the Western world, call “gender” has been motivated into a set of associations or grid of intelligibility, to use Foucault’s phrasing, that makes it seem natural that human life and “History”
113 Compare this line of argumentation with Sylvia Wynter’s 1972 essay “One Love,” which was discussed at length in the previous chapter wherein she writes, “The disruption across the Middle Passage, was a disruption, for each individual tribal man, from his tribal language; and therefore, to borrow Heidegger’s definition, his disruption from that ‘clearing in the forest where man has his Being.’ The experience of exile was linguistic[…]” (78). 156 is reproduced according to a certain grammar that is often white, often heterosexual, almost always middle-class.
Gender, on this account, would be a crucial mythological system for the construction of a blackened humanism. This is so not because gender constitutes some universal ontological ground, but because the significations of gender have so overdetermined the Black diasporic “body” that one cannot avoid its theoretical discourse. Spillers states this clearly, “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time; over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there awaits whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” (2003b, 203).
In this section I have simply described the theory of metaphor and mythology that is often implicit in Spillers’s thought. The following section will become more concrete in its investigation of what connection Spillers draws between gender, historiography, and a new mode of writing. In doing so it will be possible to appreciate what Spillers means by “flesh” and its relationship to
Roland Barthes’s metaphor of “zero degree.”
The “Flesh” of Historiography: On the Zero Degree and the Form of Writing
The concept-metaphor “zero degree” shows up only twice in “Mama’s Baby” near the beginning and the end of the essay. I have cited the first reference when she makes her distinction between “body” and “flesh.”114 The second reference, when juxtaposed, with the first begins to illuminate what the flesh as “zero degree” means for Spillers’s historiographical practice: “It is, perhaps, not by chance that laws regarding slavery appear to crystallize in the precise moment
114 “But I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that case, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography” (Spillers 2003b, 206). 157 when agitation against the arrangement becomes articulate in certain European and New World communities. In that regard, the slave codes[…]are themselves an instance of the counter and isolated text that seeks to silence the contradictions and antitheses engendered by it [emphasis mine][…][t]he uneasy oxymoronic character that the ‘peculiar institution’ attempts to sustain in transforming personality into property[…]As I read this, the law itself is compelled to a point of saturation, or a reverse zero degree [emphasis mine], beyond which it cannot move in the behalf of the enslaved or the free” (2003b, 225).115 Spillers argues that the enforcement or praxis of the law is “[r]iddled[…]with contradictions, accident, and surprise” (2003b, 225). These contradictions, accidents, and surprises are inevitable because the law governing the slave “body” is written upon a catachresis of “person-as-property” (Spillers 2003d, 20). Spillers calls this the
“doubleness of the law” (2003d, 19). The problem is that the writing of the law is not supposed to evince such an instability if it is to support the dominant system of exploitation and expropriation.
Thus, the law must absorb and enforce an “[e]ssence of stillness” (Spillers 2003b, 224) onto the slave “body” that can mitigate and obscure the “outside” contradictions and surprises of blackened
“flesh.” In other words, Spillers is contending that the law is a mode of writing which almost
115 Spillers is referencing here the abolitionist William Goodell’s 1853 work The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts. Goodell attempts to reveal the contradictions of the law as it concerns the slave insofar as it could not decide whether the “slave” was, in fact, to be regarded as a “person” or “property.” For a compelling account of this contradiction in slave law the work of Saidiya Hartman (1997) shows the problem of claiming the slave body is “property” and, thus, without agency while also claiming that slaves can be punished for breaking the law which would mean they are “persons” with agency. Spillers first turns to Goodell’s work in the paragraph following her first use of “zero degree” (cf. footnote 114) in which he gives visceral descriptions of all the technologies used to corporeally punish the slave body. Part of Goodell’s argument is to show that the law could not possible abet such gratuitous violence. The citation of Goodell and the written codes of slave law in both these contexts lends further evidence that the “flesh” and zero degree have to do with writing. 158 inevitably decides in favor of power.116 Writing is neither innocent nor ineffectual when interpreted through Spillers’s semiotic paradigm as was shown in the previous section. In fact,
Spillers notes that because of the mode of writing that is the law “[t]he ‘master’[…]is impelled to treat the enslaved as property [the work of metaphor again], and not as personality” (2003b, 225).
At this point it is possible to understand the “colonial ‘choreography’” which is instantiated by
“words, words, words” (Spillers 2003d, 22).
But what, exactly, is “zero degree”? Why does Spillers turn to this concept to differentiate
“body” and “flesh”? Thus far it is possible to ascertain that “zero degree” is associated with a certain fugitivity that is not captured by the dominant symbolics of institutions. We might call it
“freedom” if not for the persistent historiography of conceptualizing the freedom of slaves and their descendants as having its telos in being written into law. When “freedom” is constantly captured by the mere dispensation of “civil rights” more radical imaginings of freedom are foreclosed.
Yet it is not clear that the term “freedom” is wholly inappropriate if its meaning can be invented. Once again it is necessary to turn to Roland Barthes and, this time, his 1953 Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero). As in the previous section I will read Spillers alongside
Barthes to bring clarity to the theoretical architecture of her essay. If in the previous section I was concerned with showing Spillers’s particular conception of the “body” as written and discursive I will now argue that the “flesh” is also a writing, and not some material “real.” It is a writing that is concerned with form rather than content. These two sections, taken together, will highlight
116 Indeed, this is another important connection that can be drawn between Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter. For Wynter’s reflections on international law and gender practices on the African continent see the last section of the previous chapter. 159
Spillers’s idiosyncratic understanding of blackened gender as well as the concrete praxis of invention in writing.
Le degré zéro de l’écriture is, in part, an extended response to Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature (What is Literature?) and his notion of committed literature. The fact that the first chapter of both texts begins with an essay entitled “What is Writing [L’écriture]?” provides further evidence that Barthes intended to link his book to Sartre’s. Barthes does not disagree with Sartre’s argument that writing and literature can and must have political commitments; Barthes’s break with Sartre consists in his belief “[t]hat there is no writing [d’écriture] which can be lastingly revolutionary” (1953/1967, 107/75). Thus, even if the writer is writing towards Sartre’s “virtual public” (1978, 186), or a revolutionary readership which does not yet exist within alienated bourgeois society, s/he cannot guarantee that their writing will be able to meet this task since it will inevitably be vulnerable to the workings of mythology.117 Literature has become an institution
(1963/1967, 56/37) and, therefore, can be uprooted and filled with a new content according to the demands of supervening interests. What Barthes means by “institution” is a dynamic system that reliably reproduces itself. An institution can take almost any writing or action that purports to be
“revolutionary” and turn it back against itself. This was Wynter’s critique of how Black Studies, an outgrowth of the 1960s social and political tumult in the United States, was vulnerable to being
117 In “Myth Today,” Barthes reflects on this text and claims, “A voluntary acceptance of myth can in fact define the whole of our traditional Literature. According to our norms [normativement], this Literature is an undoubted mythical system; there is meaning [sens], that of the discourse; there is a signifier, which is this same discourse as form or writing [écriture]; there is a signified, which is the concept of literature; there is signification, which is literary discourse. I began discussing this problem in Writing Degree Zero, which was, all told, a mythology of literary language [langage]. There I defined writing [écriture] as the signifier of the literary myth, that is, as a form which is already filled with meaning [sens] and which receives from the concept of Literature a new signification” (1957/1972, 236/245-246). This is an important passage where Barthes connects the two texts which have immense theoretical importance to Spillers’s project. We will return to it below. 160 institutionalized as “African-American Studies.” On Barthes account, every writing, once it becomes “Literature,” will be shorn of its revolutionary potential.
Barthes contention is that Sartre claims too much revolutionary authority for the writer and does not emphasize enough that writing is not neutral (recall that Sartre argues the writer is decidedly not a propagandist) and language cannot reach a pure ratio of equivalence between man
(l’homme) and a disalienated society. Barthes calls this dream of a neutral and clear writing une
écriture blanche (1953, 111).118 A “white” writing, like a blank sheet of white paper, would represent a zero degree of invention, or the bringing into existence of an absolutely new meaning free of mythology. But Barthes laments that every time a writer approaches this écriture
“[m]echanical habits [les automatismes] are developed in the very place where freedom existed, a network of set forms hem in more and more the pristine freshness of discourse, a mode of writing
[une écriture] appears afresh in lieu of an indefinite language. The writer, taking his place as a
‘classic,’ becomes the slavish imitator of his original creation, society demotes his writing
[écriture] to a mere manner, and returns him a prisoner to his own formal myths” (1953/1967,
111/78). Thus, Barthes will describe the zero degree of writing as “[c]es écritures neutres” in which
“on peut facilement discerner le mouvement même d’une négation, et l’impuissance à l’accomplir dans une durée” (1953, 12).119
There is a tension within Barthes’s thought, running from Le degré zéro de l’écriture to
Mythologies, which Spillers exploits. At the very same time that Barthes seems to say that writing
118 Translated as “colourless writing” (1967, 78). 119 This line is translated as: “[t]hose neutral modes of writing[…]we can easily discern a negative momentum, and an inability to maintain it within time’s flow” (1967, 5). I have chosen to present the full French because the translation eclipses the French philosophical discourse Barthes shares with Sartre, and then, later, with Foucault. “Negative momentum” is not the same “the movement itself of negation” and “time’s flow” does not quite capture the notion of “durée” which would be closer to duration and the question of consciousness. 161 is inevitably preyed upon by mythology he also, in a somewhat muted voice, seems to posit that writing can counter mythology from within. This tension constitutes Spillers’s most explicit break with the early writing of Barthes. Barthes makes distinctions between language (langue not parole), style, and writing (écriture). Language is “[a] corpus [corps] of prescriptions and habits common to all the writers of a period[…]a horizon” (1953/1967, 17/9). By this what Barthes means is that language is simply the words, meanings, and signs we inherit upon coming into the world.
Style is the writer’s idiosyncratic deployment of language. Barthes describes style as “biological or biographical [d’un passé], not historical [d’une Histoire]” (1953/1967, 20/11) and that it is
“[n]ever anything but metaphor, that is, equivalence of the author’s literary intention and carnal structure (it must be remembered that structure is the residual deposit of duration [durée])”
(1953/1967, 21/12). It seems Barthes understands style as the facticity of the writer’s body such as being born with white skin or a certain set of organs. Style inevitably confronts language and attempts to produce some meaning while language confronts style and attempts to circumscribe its inventiveness with a body of prescriptions and habits. Bringing these two concepts together
Barthes surmises, “A language is therefore a horizon, and style a vertical dimension, which together map out for the writer a Nature, since he does not choose either[…]In the former, he finds a familiar “History”, in the latter, a familiar personal past [celle de son propre passé]” (1953/1967,
23/13). Both language and style are forms that serve to constrain the writer, but they are also values insofar they designate one way of being rather than another; between language and style there is the possibility for contingency and surprise. For this reason Barthes will conclude, “Now every
Form is also a Value, which is why there is room, between language and style, for another formal reality: writing [l’écriture][…]A language and a style are blind forces; a mode of writing
[l’écriture] is an act of historical solidarity” (1953/1967, 24/14). L’écriture occurs at the interstices
162 between the forces of language and style in order to inaugurate a choice of solidarity. Barthes seems to mean that l’écriture is a way of speaking, a parole. Yet this very same language Barthes uses to describe l’écriture is the same, almost word for word, for how he characterizes myth. Myth is formal and “Myth is a value” (1957/2012, 231/233). L’écriture has duplicitous value: it can be a zone of freedom or become the site of capture.
How is the Black female “body” to be written when this body has been mythically caught between an imposed language and style? To come back to one of her most important lines Spillers claims, “[I] must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings[…]and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” (2003b, 203). We are now able to appreciate with greater clarity what Spillers could mean here. These “attenuated meanings” or meanings that have been rendered thin are a reference to the ravages of mythology which does not obliterate meaning but deprives it of duration. Myth keeps meaning in circulation as an alibi that provides the myth with the thin veneer of plausibility. The black male soldier really did salute the French flag but whether the salute was ironic or an attempt at making a political statement about French war in Algeria is lost.
Turning to the Moynihan Report that claimed the black community was in crisis because it had become matrilineal and the black fathers seemed to not be around one could say that these
“facts” might be true, but the consequences of enforced segregation, racial terrorism, economic deprivation fades from view. In other words, context is lost. Myth distorts but does not obliterate.
It “[d]eforms [déforme], but does not abolish meaning [sens]” and so “[a] word can perfectly render this contradiction: it alienates it” (Barthes 1957/2012, 231/232). Spillers endeavors to reform and transform the historiographic context of the Black female. The manner in which colonial and slave societies of the West have uprooted the Black female “body” and used her to reproduce a system of domination does leave marks even if institutional historiography has not “[r]egistered the
163 wounding” (2003b, 206). The wounding is left upon the “flesh” or, following Barthes, that fragile site of “[f]reedom and remembrance” (1953/1967, 28/16). When Spillers writes, “This [captive,
Black] body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside” (2003b, 207) she is saying that the “History” and memory of wounding and captivity produced by enslavement also carries the possibility of another writing, a writing of blackened skin that is not quite “true,” but still might make an historical solidarity with freedom possible. Myth and l’écriture are inextricably intertwined; the latter will always be vulnerable to former and the former provides the material conditions of possibility for the latter. Thus, in “Mama’s Baby,” Hortense Spillers is playing the role of mythologist and it attempting to produce a counter-myth of the “flesh” to the dominant historiography of the Black female “body.”
It is for this reason that Spillers never refers to the “female flesh ‘ungendered’” as “real” or “true,” but as a “[p]raxis and a theory, a text for living and dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations” (2003b, 207; emphasis mine). The “flesh” will be taken up within the limits of language and style we have inherited and attempt to reveal their alienating myths. It is important to remember this tension between invention and the tools that one has inherited because Spillers does not think that one is free to write whatever one chooses. Indeed,
Barthes reflections on écriture make clear why Spillers makes constant rejoinders to the problematics of “gender”: “It is not granted to the writer to choose his mode of writing [son
écriture] from a kind of non-temporal store of literary forms. It is under the pressure of ‘History’ and Tradition that the possible modes of writing [les écritures] for a given writer are established; there is a ‘History’ of Writing[…]Writing as Freedom is therefore a mere moment” (1953/1967,
27-28, 16-17). The writing that Spillers is after would be a writing of constant invention and not
164 mere reporting of historical “fact.” After all, “facts” are just as vulnerable to mythology as any other mode of writing (as we will see below with Anna Julia Cooper). This does not mean that
Spillers entitles herself to simply making things up. Instead she notes, “We write and think, then, about an outcome of aspects of African-American life in the United States under the pressure of those events. I might as well add that the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, oft- told events of their power, even now, to startle. In a very real sense, every writing as revision makes the discovery all over again” (2003b, 209; emphasis mine). The closeness of her language to Barthes reflects their shared conception of the writer or historiographer. What is different is that
Spillers is not looking for the dream of a “colorless writing” or une écriture blanche (Barthes 1953,
111), but a blackened writing which would understand how “gender” instituted our current mythological system of humanity. Following this understanding, Spillers calls for rewriting this system, but not towards abstract “truth.” Instead, as I will argue below she is calling for the robbery of mythology in the name of a new myth.
Between Slavery and “Slavery”: Hortense Spillers’s Double-Writing of Blackened Gender
In the previous two sections I have reconstructed Spillers’s argument by bringing to the fore the roots of some of her most important concepts and phrases in the semiological work of
Roland Barthes. In doing this it was possible to see that the difference between “body” and “flesh” is not that one is materially more “real” than the other but that both are the product of a double- writing. The phrase “double-writing” does not appear anywhere in Spillers’s corpus but I am claiming that it best captures Spillers’s praxis and methodology. What I mean by double-writing is that Spillers’s produces alternate spaces of thought by constant reading the divergences between
165
“body” and “flesh.” It is a method that resolves the aporia of the previous chapter of how to changes the “territory” when one only has access to “maps.” Spillers’s work as a mythologist is the constant attempt to read against the grain of dominant epistemes so that contingency and surprise may arise again. But this cannot be done by simply jettisoning the “body” in favor of the
“flesh.” The two have to be read/written together.
The “body” is the product of a mythological robbery by a variety of discourses such as sociology (Moynihan’s Report), biology (“race science” of the 1890s), and law (the slave codes of the United States), to name a few. These discourses can produce the Black body as dysfunctional, as hyperphysical, or as property, respectively. The work of metaphorical displacement in these discourses is made possible by a mythological system that transforms the content of these discourses into parole, a formal mode of writing, that inevitably aims to justify the current order of things. The “flesh” is the robbed and distorted site of meaning. If mythology is a metalanguage and parasitic then the “flesh” is what is commented and fed upon. For this reason, the “flesh” can never be obliterated, but must always be kept at a distance so that mythology can always return to it to produce new significations that are relevant to the current historical circumstance. Barthes describes the spatial structure of myth as that of an alibi (1957/1972, 231/ 233).120 The “body” is the distortion and the “flesh” is what is distorted. Myth flits in between the two, constantly
120 “[t]he ubiquity of the signifier in myth exactly reproduces the physique of the alibi (which is, as one realizes, a spatial term): in the alibi too, there is a place which is full and one which is empty, linked by a relation of negative identity (“I am not where you think I am, I am where you think I am not”). But the ordinary alibi (for the police, for instance) has an end; reality stops the turnstile’s revolving at a certain point. Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides [emphasis mine], for it always to have an ‘elsewhere’ at its disposal. The meaning [sens] is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning [sens]. And there is never any contradiction, conflict, or split between the meaning [sens] and the form: they are never at the same place” (Barthes 1957/1972, 231/233). 166 rejuvenating itself, while leaving the “flesh” of the black female locked in place as constant reservoir of meaning.
Spillers’s language can often obscure her meaning or the level at which she is aiming her critique. Reading her as a mythologist makes it possible to apprehend her close relationship to psychoanalysis and Marxism while also being able to discuss why she would describe this essay as part of “[a] larger human project” (Spillers Spring 2007, 303). What I am calling the “double- writing” of Spillers in this section brings her distinction of “body” and “flesh” together in order to argue that her interrogation of “gender” is meant to disrupt our assumptions that “black woman” or “black man” are translucent phrases that directly refer to “real,” empirical Black women and men. To put it in the mythological language that Spillers has appropriated from Barthes she is asking whether “black woman” is already a phrase in the grips of a metalanguage that can be appropriated for an alienating field of associations. If our understanding of “gender” as, to return to Sylvia Wynter, what it is “to be a good man or woman of one’s kind” (1997) draws its “natural” appearance from the discursive arrangements of slavery then to challenge this distortion we require the conceptual tools for apprehending the dynamic shifting of myth.121 The difficulty in reading
Spillers’s text is that she also, like myth, flits between slavery and “slavery,” between the “real” historical and sociological object and the literary metalanguage of slavery about itself. This is her double-writing: engaging with both the distortion and the distorted, with the “real” historical event
121 “[t]he subject of my long-term project in connection with [“Mama’s Baby”], commences an investigation of gender-making in British colonial North America. It was rather clear to me from the start that ‘gender,’ like ‘race,’ is not given, although it would be counterintuitive to make such a claim: after all, the ‘facts’ of human reproductive biology cannot be contravened. But the powerful additions of culture render such facts not simply descriptive, or differential, but, as we know, evaluative [emphasis mine] and inherent. If that is so, then it must be possible to point the switch in frames of reference from one category of narrative figurations to another” (Spillers 2003d, 22). 167 and how that event has been written. She acknowledges her interest in this problem (Spillers 2003d,
16) but when Spillers claims that African men and women were ungendered aboard the vessels of slave ships (2003b, 214) it is hard to parse whether this is a disquieting sociological claim or her reflection on the mythological robbery of Black “flesh.”
Spillers’s “double-writing” makes this tension explicit and open for a different order of investigation rather than resolve it. For instance, Spillers wonders why in the dominant historiography slave insurrection is constantly written as an “[a]gonisitic engagement of confrontational hostilities among males” (2003b, 215). Revolution, Spillers argues, is metaphorically configured as a masculine activity that will occur in response to being made into a
“slave” (often reduced to enforced and exploited labor). The turn that Spillers makes is not to argue that revolution can be “feminine,” but instead rhetorically assumes that revolution and insurrection are masculine activities. Thus, she writes, “Because it was the rule, however—not the exception— that the African female, in both indigenous African cultures and in what becomes her ‘home,’ performed tasks of hard physical labor [emphasis mine]—so much so that the quintessential
‘slave’ is not a male, but a female—we wonder at the seeming docility of the [female] subject, granting her a ‘feminization’ that enslavement kept at bay” (Spillers 2003b, 215). What Spillers is saying can be rendered in this way: if what we understand as insurrection is a “masculine” response of the slave to the indignities of violence and hard labor, then Black female slaves who were
“masculinized” under the arrangement of slavery by being subjected to violence and hard labor must have also rebelled and engaged in insurrection. If this is not the case, then the investigator of this historical archive must provide an explanation for why Black female slaves would not have engaged in acts of insurrection. Spillers claims that most readers of the archive implicitly assume that the lack of historiographical evidence for Black female insurrection is due to their
168
“feminization,” and, thus, lack the impetus to rebel. But immediately it is possible to see that this cannot make sense: how could the Black female slave be, at the same time, “masculinized” and
“feminized”? Briefly, we are able to glimpse the flitting of myth, its structure of alibi, as it constantly displaces the Black female “body” in order to distort the systemic violence of enslavement. In this moment, Spillers makes clear why under the conditions of “slavery” the signifiers “female” and “male” “[a]dhere to no symbolic integrity” (2003b, 204).
It would be a mistake to read Spillers’s concept of ungendered female “flesh” as either claiming that Black women (and men) are currently lacking gender or that in the past Black women
(and men) lacked gender as if European men and women simply did not notice that Black women and men possessed genitalia. A misreading such as this proceeds from an assumption that “gender” for the Black subject ought to be reduced to genitalia. Spillers is a diachronic reader and, thus, she is interested in how “gender” gets displaced across the written archive in relationship to the dominant evaluative system of the “colonial” Americas. In this way, Spillers requires that the investigator, the synthesizer of “History,” take seriously how “incomplete” (2003b, 215) the Black archive remains. In other words, one becomes attuned to the form of distortion rather than its content. It becomes possible to see how dominance and exploitation are supported not only by what culture says about Black people, but how culture makes these proclamations. In the absence of counter-evidence, Spillers turns to a “double-writing” that could make a new understanding of the historical experience of blackened gender possible.
Nowhere is the productivity of this “double-writing” more apparent than when Spillers turns to Linda Brent’s/Harriet Jacob’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2003b,
221-223). “Linda Brent” is the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs chose when publishing her narrative on the horrors of slavery for Black females. Spillers takes the double nature of Jacobs’s name
169 seriously and cautions against reading the text as simply an unmediated and direct representation of enslavement. Not only is the text clearly a reworking of the genres of the slave narrative and sentimental novel, but, historically, Incidents was dictated to the white female abolitionist Lydia
Maria Child. The presence of a white female “body” was necessary to vouch for the “authenticity” of the narrative. The further twist comes from a scene within the narrative that recounts how “Mrs.
Flint,” the wife of Brent’s/Jacobs’s master named “Dr. Flint” in the text, would sneak into
Brent’s/Jacobs’s bed while she was sleeping and whisper into her ear as if she were “Dr. Flint.”
The narrative recounts the obvious sexual designs “Dr. Flint” has on Brent’s/Jacobs’s black female body, but Spillers forces the reader to ask: what, exactly, was “Mrs. Flint” whispering into the ear of Brent/Jacobs? Were these simply the actions of a “jealous mistress” (Spillers 2003b, 222) looking for proof that her black female slave had been seducing her husband? A direct answer is not given within the text. But why assume a “heteronormativity” in our reading of this scene? As if the white mistress could only be impelled by her sexual desire for the white male “body.” Is it impossible to imagine that “Mrs. Flint” may have sexually desired Brent’s/Jacobs’s black female
“body”? Spillers opens onto this question when she writes, “[Mrs. Flint] is analogous to the master to the extent that male domination gives the male the material means to fully act out what the female might only wish” (2003b, 222). What myths of white feminine sexuality prepossess our reading of this historiographical scene?
The point is not to claim that it is true that this scene with “Mrs. Flint” is meant to smuggle the real secret of this historical event to the reader. Indeed, the entanglement of Linda Brent’s
“body” with that of “Mrs. Flint” and Harriet Jacobs’s “body” with that of Lydia Maria Child puts into question this scene as “purportedly based on ‘real’ life” (Spillers 2003b, 222). By putting
“real” in scare quotes Spillers is indicating that our, often translucid, assumptions of how slavery
170 must have been in its most intimate violations is often dependent on texts that have been mediated by the white “bodies” of oppressors and abolitionists alike. Remembering that the “body” is a metaphorical construct that participates in a mythological system of signification Spillers demands that we continue to think the black female “body” in relation to white “bodies” (in this way she echoes the argument made about Fanon’s Peau noire in the first chapter of this dissertation). But these significations are not originary meanings; they are already displacements that require Spillers to read “[b]etween the lines” (2003b, 222). At this point in the text Spillers turns to an implicitly
Barthesian mobilization of Freud and the topography of dream work.122 She argues that “Mrs.
Flint” “[e]mbodies [Dr. Flint’s] madness[…]enacts a male alibi[…]at the material place of the dream work” (2003b, 222). The spatial language of “alibi” here brings us back to Spillers’s mobilization of myth in a more concrete situation. “Mrs. Flint” takes up the body of male desire without the male being in the room (he is where you think he is not; he is not where you think he is). Spillers contests this reading in order to show that the “alibi” renders missing the possibility of white feminine desire for the black female “body.” Thus, the “real” object of slavery is revealed to already have provide its own metalanguage for how to read “slavery.” Double-writing contests how mythology forms our readings and make explicit how it attempts to conflate slavery (as
122 As stated in supra note 111 both Spillers and Barthes make use of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and his argument that the dream cannot be reduced to its manifest data nor can it simply be revealed in its latent content. The meaning of the dream is to be found in the disjunct between the two, what Barthes calls its “parapraxis [l’acte manqué]” (1957/2012, 227/222). The missed, or lost, action (l’acte manqué) is exactly what the psychoanalyst must listen for with both ears and the mythologist must read/write with both eyes and hands. The lexical gap is what allows for the apprehension of the constantly mobile myth, but that means one must take what is manifest and what is “hidden” together without sacrificing either. The photo of the Black man saluting the French flag is the best example for Barthes since he realizes the “hidden” content of French imperialism could not have effect without the manifest data of the photo. Between the two the mythologist is able to read the justification of French imperialism that mythology attempts to leave unsaid. 171 empirical, historical event) with “slavery” (as a genre of discursive analyses with its own laws of signification).
It is possible to view what Spillers does with the narrative of Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs as merely an exercise in a “literary” reading that is divorced from the material reality of enslavement. Such a position is only tenable if one can posit and justify an objective principle that distinguishes true “History” from the mythological vulnerabilities of “literature.” The fact of the matter is that the material conditions and system of what we call slavery left all forms of writing the Black “body” as vulnerable to myth, vulnerable to being severed from its original meaning and filled with a motivated signification. Slavery/“Slavery,” “Linda Brent”/Harriet Jacobs, become so enmeshed that the investigator or writer of historiography must be extremely careful when attempting to disentangle the two. After all, there will never be an exact accounting of how much sexual violence and vulnerability there was on the slave ships or the plantations. The writer can posit that it was ubiquitous, but the records or texts that would capture this ubiquity have not been conserved if they were ever written in the first place.123 We have examples of these violations from which we can extrapolate what real slavery (without scare quotes) was like, but these extrapolations are the work of the writer and not a product of the self-evidence of the archive.
Furthermore, what do we, the viewer here in the present, categorize as sexual violation? Does
“Mrs. Flint” sneaking into the bed of Brent/Jacobs count even if she never “touched” her body?
What of the sexual relations between the white male “body” and the black male “body”? Does whipping count as sexual violation? Or even being deprived of the “right” to name one’s children?
123 “[t]he sexual violation of captive females and their own express rage against their oppressors did not constitute events that captains and their crews rushed to record in letters to their sponsoring companies, or sons on board in letters home to heir New England mamas” (Spillers 2003, 216; emphasis mine). 172
These questions resist an easy “yes or no” since they would require an analysis of how the
Black “body” is approached in the present. It would require that we investigate whether the grammar we use to make sense of violence and violation continue to be caught in a system of mythical signification. For this reason, Spillers notes, “Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might say that the ungendered female—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential
[emphasis mine]—might be invaded/raided by another woman or man” (2003b, 222). The
“double-writing” of Spillers allows us to mobilize “slavery” in the interrogation of myths of
“normal” sexuality and gender. Ungendering is never dialectically separated from gendering on
Spillers’s account. In fact, it reveals how historiography continues to plunder the “flesh” of the
Black female in order to constitute a way of reading “[t]he African-American female’s historic claim to the territory of womanhood and femininity [as] still tend[ing] to rest too solidly on the subtle and shifting calibrations of a liberal ideology” (Spillers 2003b, 223). “Black woman” is only read as woman insofar as she is attempting to gain access to liberal, white “womanhood.” Undoing this misnaming requires a “double-writing” that counters dominant myths in the name of creating new metaphors of understanding.
To read the missed action (l’acte manqué) between slavery and “slavery” provides a different method of reading Black life that does not presuppose its “reality” or lack of opacity. A presupposition such as this has the effect of rendering Black life up again to myth and stealing the potential for dynamism. I have provided the theoretical architecture of Spillers’s most important concepts and the generative method that she employs when engaging with historical texts. In what follows I will take seriously these semiological and ideological ways of reading in my engagement with Anna Julia Cooper and her reflections on the values of antebellum Black life in the 1890s. In so doing it will possible to see what Spillers means by invention and going outside “[t]he traditional
173 symbolics of female gender” in order to “[m]ake a place for this different social subject” (2003b,
228).
Anna Julia Cooper and the Value of Black Womanhood
The 1890s, in the United States, saw the intensification and proliferation of a “scientific racism” that claimed to prove the irredeemable nature of the African-American “race” and, thus, prophesied its eventual extinction.124 At this historical moment, African-American thinkers such as Anna Julia Cooper were confronted with the risk of being devalued by the presumed disinterestedness of “truth.” As the statistics of Black criminality and depravity increasingly made their way into institutions of knowledge production and governmental structures, Cooper gave a series of speeches whose subversive aim was to challenge and undo these scientific notions of
“truth.” I argue that these speeches, which constitute the beginning of her book A Voice from the
South, can be read through Spillers’s double-writing. By doing so we will be able to take seriously how difficult it was to displace not only the prejudiced values constituting “scientific racism” but, more importantly, the paradigm of “truth” which allowed for the validation of this science in the first place. The latter, as distinct from critiquing particular values, is the problem of evaluation.
Thus, the radical nature of Cooper’s thought along with Spillers, I will show, is the call for the
124 For instance, Khalil Muhammed, in his The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010) cites Frederick L. Hoffman’s 1892 article “Vital Statistics of the Negro” as one of the landmark attempts to validate and institutionalize this discourse. In the article Hoffman combines data with anecdote and claims, “Thus we reach the conclusion that the colored race is showing every sign of an undermined constitution, a diseased manhood and womanhood; in short, all the indications of a race on the road to extinction” (qtd. in Muhammed 2010, 39). Hoffman would go on to publish in 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro in which “statistical data on black criminality secured a permanent place in modern race-relations discourse” (ibid., 35). 174 continual creation of new measures by which to understand the values of “truth.” I will describe
Cooper’s work as the “praxis of transvaluation.”
I understand praxis as “an organising project which transcends material conditions towards an end” and thus rearranges “the practical field” upon which “truth” can be understood
(Sartre 1960/1982, 687/734). In other words, collective action is preceded and supported by the very situation it means to go beyond. Cooper navigates the problem of how the Black race must all at once make use of the material they have inherited while also transforming this material into a new form of knowledge. The “scientific racism” of the 1890s could not simply be ignored. Doing so would not have disrupted how these “truths” were circulating through institutions of knowledge which had material effects on policy and reality. This scientific discourse had to be taken up and transcended from within. In this way we can read how, for Cooper, praxis will always take place within a “structure of ambivalence” (Spillers 2003c, 254).125 And so the very same evolutionary science, which purported to claim that the African American race was genealogically corrupted because of its foremothers and forefathers, is reformulated by Cooper in her 1892 speech “What are We Worth?”: “No life is bound up within the period of its conscious existence. No personality dates its origin from its birthday[…]The materials that go to make the man[…]have been accumulating and gathering momentum for generations. So that, as one tersely expresses it, in order to reform a man, you must begin with his great grandmother” (1998d, 164). My formulation of Cooper’s “praxis of transvaluation” has two central components. First, it is preceded by
125 Eddie S. Glaude Jr., describes this form of praxis in his Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, when he uses Hortense Spillers’s phrase “structure of ambivalence” to capture the realities of “…African-American life in the United States in ways that extend beyond the psychic torment of black individuals” (2000, 33). This reality, Glaude argues, configured the relationship African-Americans had to the dominant American culture of the 19th century. It is this historical experience of “being in but not of” (ibid.) the dominant culture that I am arguing constitutes Cooper’s reflections. 175 ambivalence with current organizations of knowledge and practices and, thus, does not begin as a radically new form of knowledge. Second, this praxis can only become a new form of knowledge by being organized over generations rather than individually.
From these two central components, my reading of Cooper will address the critique of biological essentialism in the secondary literature on Cooper’s thought126 by making ambivalence a constituent feature of her thought. First, I will show how Cooper’s speeches turn the discourse of “scientific racism” and biological essentialism against itself in order to open up the possibility for a new paradigm of “truth.” Cooper will articulate this subversion through the “unique position” of Black womanhood (1998c, 112). Second, I will continue Cooper’s intergenerational praxis by connecting Cooper’s thought to the work of Hortense Spillers. Bringing these two thinkers of race and gender in the aftermath of chattel slavery together will allow for the apprehension of a transformative social epistemology. By the end of this chapter I will show that a “praxis of transvaluation” can never be completed by an individual thinker but must be a recurrent project undertaken over generations by multiple thinkers. It must permeate our forms of understanding and transform our sensibilities. In this way a new field of “truth” can by constructed.
Cooper was an early pioneer of Black feminist thought.127 She challenged the dominant paradigms of knowledge that evaluated race oppression as “male” and gender oppression as
“white,” and, thus, did not consider the distinctiveness of Black women. These evaluative paradigms construed the categories of “race” and “gender” as analytic and separable without considering how they impact and ramify one another. Cooper responds to these erasures by calling
126 This is known as the Black Gift Thesis and the Female Gift Thesis. Cf. Chike Jeffers (2016) below. 127 Cf. Vivian M. May (2004, 2007), Kathryn T. Gines (2010, 2011, 2014), Shirley Moody-Turner (2009, 2013) 176 for a new social epistemology that will not reduce “race” and “gender” to discrete, abstract categories. But if the problem were only that the institutions of knowledge were not considering how race could be gendered and gender could be racialized then Cooper’s epistemology would call for nothing more than the continued aggregation of Black female voices for the epistemological archive. But Cooper’s concern, I argue, cannot be separated from an historical context wherein the entire Black race is on trial for being criminal, degenerate, savage, and, possibly, destined for extinction (Muhammed 2010, 45).
What was at stake in the 1890s was not only the lack of knowledge concerning Black women’s voices, but also how Black womanhood and maternity were being codified as the reproductive site of Blackness.128 From within a context where Blackness is also being epistemologically constructed as tied to criminality, Cooper’s demand for the voice of Black women is nothing less than the attempt to transform the evaluative paradigm of the status quo.
Cooper subtly reflects on the material reality of these legal and epistemological indictments of
Black people through the denigration of Black womanhood by beginning her book, A Voice from the South, in a metaphorical courtroom. In the chapter titled “Our Raison d’Être,” Cooper states that while the Black man has served as a witness—though his voice has been “vague and uncomprehended”—there has been “One important witness [that] has not yet been heard from[…]the Black Woman” (1998d, 51). Immediately following this observation Cooper seemingly affirms her belief in the democratic value of deliberation and the existence of a just, democratic evaluative paradigm: “It is because I believe the American people to be conscientiously
128 It is important to remember that the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined the notion of “separate, but equal,” was decided in 1896. Alys Eve Weinbaum cautions against missing the “reproductive or genealogical lens” of the case which “produced black maternity as anathema to national belonging” (2004, 41) since Homer Plessy’s “blackness” came from his paternal grandmother. 177 committed to a fair trial and ungarbled evidence, and because I feel it essential to a perfect understanding and an equitable verdict that truth from each standpoint be presented at the bar— that this little Voice has been added to the already full chorus” (1998d, 51). Cooper’s courtroom frame articulates an important ambivalence within the dominant epistemological structure: Black women’s voices are not being heard, yet their bodies are being mobilized as the genealogical source of the race. She is silenced, yet present.
Though Cooper seems to construe the courtroom as the universal site for democratic deliberation and the construction of equitable knowledge, she undercuts this idea near the end of her short essay. “At any rate, as our Caucasian barristers are not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man’s place,” Cooper writes, “neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman” (1998d, 52; emphasis in text). It is true that Cooper is claiming that Black men cannot be the source of knowledge on Black women, but I argue that this is not the only point she is making. By designating the White world as the “barristers” (the lawyers and advocates) she leaves in place the fact that Black women and men are still the witnesses being evaluated. The Black race remains on trial. Rather than a democratic ethos this epistemological structure retains a power differential wherein the White world is the advocate and measure of “truth.” Woven into the text of Cooper’s framing device is an ambivalence that requires that the reader be aware of “Cooper’s strategies of appropriation, irony, and indirection” (May 2004, 80). After all, the courtroom, as “History” has so often demonstrated, has not been the site of racial or gender justice for African Americans.
The material reality of speaking as a Black woman in the 19th century, Vivian M. May notes, required that Cooper make reference to the objective possibility of “truth” while undercutting how her audience evaluates truth claims. The courtroom metaphor allows Cooper to
178 appeal to democratic ideals and, thereby, instill in her readers that she is an authority who is a
“fully rational person speaking with other open-minded persons” (May 2004, 77). Of course, if this were absolutely the case then Cooper would not need to take up various rhetorical strategies of indirection in order to make her argument. A problem presents itself here if we assume that
Cooper deploys irony rather than directly giving the truth: does Cooper’s irony cloud the true knowledge her readers are meant to derive from her statements? When Cooper concludes “Our
Raison d’Être” by saying, “Delicately sensitive at every pore to social atmospheric conditions, her
[the Black Woman’s] calorimeter may well be studied in the interest of accuracy and fairness in diagnosing what is often conceded to be a ‘puzzling’ case. If these broken utterances can in any way help to a clearer vision and a truer pulse-beat in studying our Nation’s Problem, this Voice by a Black Woman of the South will not have been raised in vain” (1998d, 52). What “accuracy and fairness” can be assessed if irony and indirection are at play? Following this, what might we say the “Problem” of the nation is and what is the reason of being for Black women? The ambivalence, at the outset of Cooper’s text, is an epistemological strategy of revealing “the prejudice and false universals within[…]democratic premises” (May 2004, 77) and, thus, critiquing how knowledge is constructed.
This argument risks being supported solely by the contemporary reader’s desire for Cooper to have not been complicit with any of the biological essentialism that was being transformed into knowledge at the time. In other words, reading in this manner risks completely separating Cooper from her material context and, thus, arguing that she did not believe what she actually wrote. In
“Anna Julia Cooper and the Black Gift Thesis” Jeffers argues against Vivian M. May that Cooper should not be read this way. He claims there is more evidence that she did, in fact, hold a Black
Gift Thesis and a Female Gift Thesis (2016, 81, 87) whereby Black people and Womankind have
179 a unique and natural message for the world. For instance, Cooper, in 1892, articulates the Black
Gift Thesis by claiming, “Each race has its badge, its exponent, its message, branded in its forehead by the great Master’s hand which is its own peculiar keynote, and its contribution to the harmony of nations” (1998a, 122) and concludes from this that “America needs the Negro for ballast if for nothing else. His tropical warmth and spontaneous emotionalism may form no unseemly counterpart to the cold and calculating Anglo-Saxon” (1998a, 132). Her Female Gift Thesis appears in “The Higher Education of Women,” where she argues that “there is a feminine as well as masculine side to truth[…]That as the man is more noble in reason, so the woman is more quick in sympathy. That while we not unfrequently see women who reason, we say, with the coolness and precision of a man, and men as considerate of helplessness as a woman, still there is a general consensus of mankind that one trait is essentially masculine and the other is peculiarly feminine”
(1998a, 78). From these comments Jeffers argues that Cooper is at least influenced by the racial science of Johann Gottfried Herder who argued that there is an essential “uniqueness of different peoples at different times” (2016, 81). Thus, while May claims that Cooper only deploys essentialist tropes of the Black race and Womanhood to subvert them (2004, 80), Jeffers argues that rendering Cooper’s thought consistent requires accepting that she did not completely overcome the epistemological values of her historical context.
There are important reasons, Jeffers argues, for trying to understand why Cooper might deploy essentialism. He cashes this out in the ambivalent exigencies of racism and gender oppression to all at once deny similarity (of the out-group) and demand similarity (with the dominant group) (Jeffers 2016, 92). Refusing the cul-de-sac of either being defined essentially as
“abnormal” difference or being required to erase oneself into what is considered “normal,” Cooper argues that the Black people and Womankind play a distinct role in the evolution of humanity.
180
These claims must be held in tension with Cooper’s rejection of stereotypes and generalizations.
For instance, she criticizes Maurice Thompson’s poem “Voodoo Prophecy” because it simply portrayed the Negro “[m]erely as a revelation of the white man[…]his own soul” (1998c, 155).
Now one could coherently argue that there is a difference in truth value between “true” essence and “counterfeit” stereotype. This would mean that the question is about how to evaluate knowledge and not only the content of knowledge claims. Jeffers misses this potential aspect of
Cooper’s work. Double-writing as I have described it allows us to make this question of the form of evaluation and the content of value explicit as a continuing problem for Black life. The evaluation of the truth of the Female Gift Thesis is justified by “a general consensus of mankind”
(1998a, 78). But the “general consensus” is exactly what is to be challenged as we saw in her metaphorical frame of the courtroom. We can now see how the ambivalence in Cooper’s courtroom essay reverberates through her arguments throughout A Voice from the South. Cooper understands that if one must give the “truth” under “untrue” conditions a different praxis will be required.
One of Cooper’s rhetorical strategies for this different praxis is to trace her intellectual origins “to a long line of remarkable women who went against the grain” (May 2004, 82) For example in “The Status of Woman in America” Cooper links her voice to others: “Not unfelt, then, if unproclaimed has been the work and influence of the colored women of America. Our list of chieftains in the service, though not long, is not inferior in strength or excellence…” (1998e, 115).
Cooper’s polyvocal and intergenerational rhetoric is reflected in her philosophical praxis when she claims, “Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the retraining of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman”
(1998g, 62; emphasis in text). Jeffers interprets this moment as a change in approach from the
181
Black Gift Thesis and Female Gift Thesis. Cooper delimits the “gift” of the Black woman to the race and not the world at-large (Jeffers 2016, 88). Far from arguing that the “Black Woman” has a definite essence she argues, returning to “The Status of Woman in America,” that “The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both” (1998e, 112). Her unknown and unique position, for Jeffers, reveals that the “Black Woman” is not a timeless essence à la the
Black race and Womankind. Her unique position derives from the historicity of material, “painful experiences” (2016, 90). Thus, there is not the Black Woman, but Black women, unique and intergenerational.
This returns us to the question of what, exactly, the Black race may be if it is at once timeless, yet its progress depends on historically situated and intergenerational Black women. The ambivalence between eternal timelessness and historicity in Cooper’s thought reflects “the praxis of transvaluation” aimed at working through the scientific racism of the times without accepting that scientific measure must be the ahistorical measure of the value of Black people. Cooper’s ambivalence aims to refute the scientific condemnation of the Black people by offering a timeless truth that will not be refuted by statistics and data. At the same time Cooper attempts to prevent this timeless thesis from collapsing into generalizations and stereotypes by calling attention to the historically obscured Black women who are caught between the “woman question” and the “race problem.” The “unique position” of Black women, for Cooper, is an indeterminacy that calls for the transvaluation of how “truth” is assessed. No longer must the epistemology of the courtroom
182 with its “Caucasian barristers” (1998d, 52) be the measure of “truth” even while one must begin there.
Anna Julia Cooper and the Existential Search for Measure
The problem of beginning a search for a new measure of truth and value is central to
Cooper’s essay “What are We Worth?” I want to venture an interpretation of this essay that takes seriously the “unique position” of Cooper’s voice as a Black woman. Even when Cooper appears to be eliding the intersecting dynamics of the “woman question” and the “race problem” in “What are We Worth?”—her preferred pronoun in the essay is “he”—she is performing how one must work through dominant discursive structures in order to arrive at new forms of knowledge. The conclusion of her essay bears this out: “…our great ‘problem’ after all is to be solved not by brooding over it, and orating about it, but by living into it” (1998f, 187; emphasis in text). “Living into it” is Cooper’s existential call to engage and work through the dominant system of meaning of the era and not to content oneself with trying to argue against or refute it. I argue there is a connection to be made here between Cooper and Spillers since both do not think you can simply ignore the language and grammar one has inherited; but it is in engaging and disrupting the system from within that one can wrench free, for however briefly. To brood or orate forgets that the task is to open the future and reject the permanence of the present. This begins by changing how one evaluates problems and the “truth” that will solve these problems. Cooper is calling for praxis that is not individual, but intergenerational. The inability to leap outside of one’s historical situation will always make this praxis ambivalent.129
129 Cooper’s social epistemology has wider ramifications as shown by Kathryn T. Gines’s analysis of “Woman versus the Indian” wherein Cooper breaks down dichotomies between educated and non-educated women, black, brown, and First Nation’s women. Gines argues that Cooper 183
By beginning her 1892 essay “What are We Worth?” with a quote from Henry Ward
Beecher’s concerning the relative lack of value inherent within Africa and Africans, Cooper returns to the problematic of how the Black race is measured. Beecher asks, “Were Africa and the
Africans to sink to-morrow, how much poorer would the world be? A little less gold and ivory, a little less coffee, a considerable ripple, perhaps, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans would come together—that is all; not a poem, not an invention, not a piece of art would be missed from the world” (qtd. in 1998f on 161). There is an important ambivalence in Beecher’s statement to which
Cooper will respond. The loss of Africa would not be an unequivocal loss according to Beecher; there would be the loss of quantifiable material resources, but not cultural value. Cooper’s ambivalent praxis is drawn from this ambivalence, as Cooper reads Beecher. As we will see,
Cooper is ambivalent about the former claim. It is the latter that most concerns her.130 The horns of the dilemma, for Cooper, are that she needs to avoid affirming the value of African Americans only according to their quantifiable output and avoid equating African American culture and
“History” according to the measure of Western civilization.
Emphasis on culture and “History” recalls the importance of the intergenerational for
Cooper’s thought. The problem is that she cannot assert this importance without a standard of measure or else, Cooper believes, her claims can be ignored as being beholden to sentiment rather
“identifies multiple intersecting systems of oppression—on the basis of intellectual abilities, skin colour, and/or race and gender—while also theorizing these oppressions beyond the black/white binary” (2014, 17). Gines’s analysis supports my contention that Cooper’s social epistemology moves away from centering the individual and attempts to break down reified epistemological barriers of race, gender, and class. 130 For instance, as it concerns Cooper and Black folkloric culture, Shirley Moody-Turner argues, “For Cooper, the politics of cultural representation were intricately tied to issues of equality, social justice, and democracy” (2013, 90). Moody-Turner continues in her discussion of Cooper’s relationship to Black folklore that Cooper “call[s] into question the need to civilize ‘folk,’ instead deploying ‘folk’ as a critique of civilization rather than as a barometer against which the ‘civilization’ could measure their progress” (2013, 89). 184 than reason. “It may not be unprofitable then for us to address ourselves to the task of casting up our account,” Cooper writes, “and carefully overhauling our books. It may be well to remember at the outset that the operation is purely a mathematical one and allows no room for sentiment”
(1998f, 161).131 Crucial for the argumentative structure of the essay is that Cooper signals her intent to give concrete facts rooted directly in material reality. If she is going to refute the claim of pure quantifiable value she will not do so by recourse to feeling or sentiment, but the empirical calculation of reason. The ambivalent tension between calculative reason and the search for a new measure works its way through the entire essay. From within the paradigm of the calculation,
Cooper defines sentiment “[w]hether adverse or favorable, [as] ephemeral” (1998f, 162).
Calculative reason represents a fixed structure while sentiment will always be fleeting.
Cooper’s critique of sentiment is that it is the mere “association of ideas” and the “unreason of feeling” (1998f, 162). On her account “…rhetoric cannot annihilate the association of ideas” and, thus, “impervious to reason is the man who is dominated by the sentiment of race prejudice.
You can only consign him to the fatherly hand of Time” (1998f, 163). Sentiment is problematic not because it does not have staying power, but because it is not open to the calculation of reason.
Thus, sentiment cannot serve as the foundation for any argument concerning the comprehension of value because it does not have a universal standard of measure. For Cooper, there is too much idiosyncrasy in sentiment that makes it immune to universal deliberation. An evaluative system founded on sentiment or concerned only with addressing sentiment will never produce a new
131 Cooper’s reference to “sentiment” may be an implicit rejection of anti-racist works in the sentimental tradition such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). While Cooper will reject a purely mathematical measure she does not see how attempting to appeal to the idea of the essential humility and lack of critical intelligence of Black people will move a culture forward either. 185 measure of “truth.” It will find itself beholden to the whims of the present and the feelings of individuals in power.
This would seem, at first, a worthy critique of sentiment, but it is necessary not to lose sight of exactly why she would make this claim. Cooper is not interested in simply advising African
American men and women to not concern themselves with the racist sentiments of White men and women. Instead she claims to be interested in advancing a very particular form of reason that will go beyond such concerns: “Sentiment and cant, then, both being ruled out, let us try to study our subject [of our worth] as the world finally reckons it—not certain crevices and crannies of the earth, but the cool, practical, business-like world” (1998f, 163). Reason ought to be “cool, practical, and business-like” (1998f, 163). Cooper suggests this form of reason is universal and not confined to “certain crevices and crannies” (1998f, 163). As with Cooper’s seeming affirmation of biological essentialism, her claim that the evaluation of worth should proceed according to the calculation of business may give us pause. How could accepting this paradigm for knowledge possibly avoid Henry Ward Beecher’s claim that the only value Africa and Africans have is quantifiable, economic value?
Cooper’s apprehension of value appears to attain its difference from sentiment by grounding itself within the commercial and transactional paradigm of culture. Under this logic, value is not rooted in the ephemera of sentiment, but the logic of the market. Lewis Gordon calls this her “efficiency theory of value” (2008, 72). According to efficiency theory, the market contains all the information available and thus will always accurately decide. The individual subject cannot trust her/his sentiment as a basis for judgment because s/he is not following the concrete reality apprehended by the market. The question of one’s value can be proven only by recourse to the facts available and not felt ephemera. Rather than contest that Cooper seems to
186 accept, provisionally, such an understanding of value we must search for how she makes her ambivalence towards this dominant epistemology known.
Lewis Gordon, in his interpretation of Cooper, does not fully elucidate the status of efficiency theory in Cooper’s essay. In this way he fails to make apparent her ambivalence. The question that ought to be asked is: why does she make recourse to this form of reasoning? It is not because she takes it to be empirically the better paradigm of evaluation. Without making explicit
Cooper’s rhetorical strategy, to use Vivian May’s language, it is not clear how what follows in
Cooper’s essay differs structurally from the paradigm of slavery. We know what the African body is worth because of the ledgers that were left behind from the trade. To anticipate the analysis when we return to Spillers, I will argue that this is one of the fundamental structures of Spillers’s
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” She gives evidence of how fastidiously slave ship captains and governments documented the economic property value of African bodies. Insurance companies, and even reparations to slave owners after the abolition of slavery, evince the acknowledgment of calculable worth for these bodies. Even in death, as demonstrated by the slave ship Zong where
African slaves were thrown overboard and the insurance money collected (Baucom 2005), these bodies had quantifiable value. The question turns on this: does value, for Cooper, reside in submitting to this evaluative paradigm of capture?
Turning to an important passage at the opening of the essay makes clear the form of
Cooper’s ambivalent praxis. By claiming that sentiment, racist or otherwise, is an “association of ideas” (1998f 162) Cooper is arguing against how sentiment can only make indirect connections.
It does not get the real facts but depends on abstraction. This is crucial because if we take Cooper at her word we run into a problem of how, exactly, are our concrete evaluations are to be carried out. Cooper seems to provide an answer in the following passage: “What is your real value in the
187 world’s economy?[...]What are you worth? What of actual value would go down with you if you were sunk into the ocean or buried by an earthquake to-morrow? Show up your cash account and your balance sheet” (1998f, 161). Cooper makes constant reference to “cash account” and “balance sheet” throughout her essay. This accords with her rhetorical demand that reason provide the numbers. Except there is an unavoidable issue in that it is not at all possible that the Black community can provide all the documentation of their quantifiable value, leaving aside whether these documents could evaluate the worth of African American art and poetry. Not all the documentation of the worth of Black bodies were kept by the masters and enslavers. Often, the names of slaves were not even recorded. Thus, contra efficiency theory, the market does not hold all the information for reason to make a judgment about the value of African Americans. The answer as to why Cooper would develop her argument in this way can be found at the end of the passage: “In the final reckoning do you belong on the debit or the credit side of the account? according to a fair and square, an impartial and practical reckoning. It is by this standard that society estimates individuals; and by this standard finally and inevitably the world will measure and judge nations and races” (1998f, 163; emphasis added).
Cooper does not say that she estimates and measures nations and races according to the balance sheet; “society” and the “the world” do. Cooper is engaging this form of reason not because it is a priori true. She is working through the imposed measure of the dominant culture’s epistemological practices by engaging how judgment is inevitably rendered for Black men and women. Further on in the essay Cooper explicitly disputes that the calculative and business-like form of reason captures the value of African American life:
To feed is not the chief function of this material that has fallen to our care to be developed
and perfected. It is an enormous waste of values to harness the whole man in the narrow
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furrow, plowing for bread. There are other hungerings in man besides the eternal all-
subduing hungering of his despotic stomach. There is the hunger of the eye for beauty, the
hunger of the ear for concords, the hungering of the mind for development and growth, of
the soul for communion and love, for a higher, richer, fuller living—a more abundant life!
(1998f, 174).
These values—hungerings—cannot be calculated. But according to Cooper’s own measure they cannot merely be the ephemera of sentiment either. Thus, I argue, these values exceed the very parameters of reason that society demands. Labor provides the bedrock of life for Cooper, but when one is reduced only to the measure of one’s labor power then s/he is vulnerable to exploitation and the denial of a human future.
Cooper apprehends clearly the double-bind the African American community is being placed within. After the abolition of slavery, it may have seemed possible that African American worth would not be reduced to pure calculation, but with the rise of scientific racism it appeared that a new form of quantification was on the horizon. To escape this indictment Cooper claims that
Black men went in search of a “manhood” that exceeded the calculable measurements of labor. At this historical moment, the two options for producing knowledge of African American worth were to work hard enough to be on the debit side of the world account or prove how far from Blackness one was by measuring oneself according to the dominant culture’s values. Both options are traps and Cooper’s ambivalence is to search for measure that partakes of neither:
Industrial training has been hitherto neglected or despised among us [Black people], due, I
think, as I have said elsewhere, to two causes: first, a mistaken estimate of labor arising
from its association with slavery[…]and secondly, the fact that the Negro’s ability to work
had never been called in question, while his ability to learn Latin and construe Greek syntax
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needed to be proved to sneering critics[…]Stung by such imputations as that of Calhoun
that if a Negro could prove his ability to master the Greek subjunctive he might vindicate
his title to manhood, the newly liberated race first shot forward along this line with an
energy and success which astonished its most sanguine friends. (1998f, 175-176; emphasis
added)
The dual claim is that the Black community has the sentiment that physical labor remains connected to the institution of enslavement and that the value of the Black body as a producer of work has never really been in doubt. A tension makes itself apparent in Cooper’ formulations. On the one hand, life cannot be reduced to the material facticity of laboring to eat; it must go beyond this to attain true value. On the other hand, this laboring is necessary and of value, but it is a value that has already been accorded to the Black body. It is not at all clear that “society” or “the world” has ceased associating the laboring Black body with slavery. So Cooper understands why many would abjure labor since it appears that the epistemological structure of chattel slavery actually survived the abolition of the latter.
We are now in a position to apprehend Cooper’s ambivalent praxis. Her focus on language, such as the Greek subjunctive, as a marker of “manhood” demonstrates how some Black men have attempted to resist white Western society’s evaluation of the Black body. While she is most certainly critiquing calculative “reason,” her use of “manhood” and the gendered pronouns raises the question of why she did not say men and women. I claim that she is also criticizing Black men who resist dehumanizing evaluations by trying to adequately measure up to white Western values.
Rather than search for new standards of measure these men caught themselves in the double-bind of resisting the white Western paradigm of reason by accepting it. This created a dynamic where
Black men were caught in a cycle of proving that they were not those other (laboring) Black men.
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Yet a standard of measure is necessary; sentiment is not enough. There is a “truth” that Cooper is looking for, but it must be a truth that opens out from the current standard of measure. Far from being created ex nihilo Cooper returns to the unique position that has not yet been captured by the governing paradigms of evaluation: “Black womanhood.” When Cooper argues, “…in order to reform a man, you must begin with his great grandmother” (1998f, 164) we must read this insinuation of female gender into an essay that only uses masculine pronouns as critical. For
Cooper, “living into it” (1998f, 187; emphasis in text) requires a transvaluation of how one understands past generations in order to develop measures of value for present and future generations. The crucial idea here is that Cooper sees the African American race as remaining bound to the past of chattel slavery (by being reduced to quantifiable value in labor) and the past of Western civilization (by attempting to gain liberation through the assumption of the Greek language, for example). These two pasts continue to capture the future since they are really a part of one and the same epistemological structure. The voices of Black women, Cooper implies, allows for the possibility of a new orientation, a new freedom in existence. A new epistemological structure cannot be formulated a priori, but must be lived and realized concretely.
Cooper’s search for a new measure must be conceptualized in the tension between her timeless Black Gift Thesis and the historicity of “yet…unknown” (“Status of Woman,” 112) Black women who are essential for the “truth” of the Black people. It is a timeless “truth” that is yet to be constructed. An argumentative position such as this would appear incoherent if not juxtaposed with the manifest incoherence of dominant rationality. Cooper is attentive to how supposedly objective calculative rationality is intermingled with the pernicious “association of ideas” that are impervious to reason. Being in, but not of, this rationality does not require arguing with unreason.
Instead a praxis of transvaluation requires the long work of developing another form of reason
191 within the current rationality. This movement is apparent in the work of Hortense Spillers. Spillers argues that our form of calculable reason remains enmeshed with our current epistemological scheme for understanding gender. She calls this epistemological scheme “symbolic economy”
(Spillers 2003e, xv). By returning to Hortense Spillers, I will not only show the similarity between
Spillers’s critique and Cooper’s. I will also illustrate how reading “between the lines” can construct an intergenerational praxis.
The Symbolic Economy of Slavery
Both Cooper and Spillers are attempting to demystify not only the stated values of dominant U.S. culture—for example, being able to master the Greek subjunctive (1998f, 176)—but the paradigm of evaluation which allows these abstract values to have concrete effects on the world. The intergenerational trauma of the chattel slavery, for Spillers, is insidiously repeated via a continued adherence to an historically constructed evaluative paradigm for determining what it means to be
“respectable,” “civilized,” and “human.” Attaching ethical value to the genders “man” and
“woman,” as if they were naturally coextensive with the abstract concept of “human civilization,” hides from view the doubleness of mythology within the institution of slavery. The doubleness— ambivalence—within the symbolic apparatus of enslavement was that not all (biological) females and males were gendered “women” and “men” and thus capable of kinship structures that would not be “invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations” (Spillers 2003b,
218; emphasis in text). The mistake would be to conceptualize this violence as a mere historical artifact of the past since this violence, now evaluated as “inhumane,” produced a writing of U.S. culture that signified human value was to be attained through the creation of family. “It seems clear, however,” Spillers concludes, “that ‘family,’ as we practice and understand it ‘in the West’— the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and 192 the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’ from fathers to sons[…]becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community” (Spillers 2003b, 218; emphasis mine). To become a part of the
“free and freed community” is to have the right to gender formation and kinship structure of the supervening Western culture. The conclusion is clear: the abolition of the institution of slavery is ethically evaluated as an evolution into humanity for the Black, formerly enslaved population and not a transvaluation of white, Western schemas of evaluating the human community.
Spillers develops a theory of Transatlantic enslavement and colonialism as a violence against particular bodies which generated violent economies of meaningful representations and knowledges of the world, of “History”, of gender and sexuality, and of kinship. The symbolic and epistemological representations of human “History” and what it means to be human weave their way into human praxis. This is so because, to repeat Cooper, “No life is bound up within the period of its conscious existence. No personality dates its origin from its birthday[…]The materials that go to make the man[…]have been accumulating and gathering momentum for generations” (1998f
164).132 For this reason Spillers argues that “Freudian and Marxists problematics[…][find] one of the principal sites of[…]convergence” (2003d, 35) in Black culture. Symbolic economy, for
Spillers, is the ambivalence of political economy and psychic economy. How one evaluates the
132 Jean-Paul Sartre captures this troubling dynamic in the first volume of his Critique de la raison dialectique in his analysis of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. He argues that this relationship can only make sense and be concretely realized—made actual—in the context of a particular social situation and “History” that continues to make the symbolic identities of “colonizer” and “colonized” efficacious. Sartre writes, “The employer may curse or beat his workers, for example. He does this because that is what one does; he is the Other, the fleeting, unrealizable character called the colonialist. The employee allows himself to be beaten, also in so far as he is an Other…But he feels the blows of the colonialist in so far as other men of his religion are, also, at that very minute, being beaten, like him” (1960/1982, 685/731). In other words, the colonizer and colonized do not meet each other as singular individuals but through already constituted values and meanings. This example demonstrates how structures of oppression “invent” individuals who are both “in but not of” (Glaude 2000, 33) the background symbolic economy. 193
“History” of Black life in the Diaspora must displace the epistemological ambivalence within U.S. culture. This “ambivalence” positions the Black population as constantly evolving into—but never quite succeeding in this task—the white, Western family and thus continually constructs Black bodies as vulnerable to violence. An intergenerational, “radically different text” (2003b, 229) of praxis remains to be constructed from this ambivalence.
If, for Cooper, African Americans were wary of physical labor because they associated it with physical and psychic pain of chattel slavery Spillers reformulates this argument to ask what form of knowledge becomes possible when the dominant culture continues to repeat mythological images of the Black body as wedded to pain. Does the epistemological normalization of pain affect how a culture apprehends the humanity of the Black body?133 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf interprets Spillers as describing an epistemological economy of violence which “[e]ntailed a deconstruction and unmaking of the captive’s subjectivity” (1999, 311). She argues that the corporeal violence inflicted upon on the Black body was an effort to create a subject-position from which a voice could not arise to speak for her/himself. Referencing Spillers’s use of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Bakare-Yusuf claims that “for as long as we conceive of pain as an activity of the body, and language as the function of the mind, pain will continue to be resistance to language, and its sedimentation in the body will continue to confirm the notion that the body is always outside of culture and pre-language” (1999, 314). It is for this reason that Spillers reminds the reader of the corporeal violence of “[…]calculated work of iron,
133 This question continues to have contemporary urgency with the proliferation of videos documenting violence against Black men and women. What is often taken to be “evidence” of violence is symbolized as evidence of criminality. Robert Gooding-Williams first chapter in his Look, A Negro: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (2006) examines this phenomenon in the context of the Rodney King beating. For more on the relationship between Black pain and visual knowledge cf. David Marriott’s Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (2007). 194 whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet” and asks “if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments” (2003a, 207; emphasis in text). If the Black body is known within the symbolic economy as being in pain then can her or his voice attain any value other than that which must be escaped? When Spillers attempts, at the beginning of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” “…to speak a truer word concerning myself” she is responding to how her body is always already “[e]mbedded in a bizarre axiological ground”
(2003b, 203). Axiology, the philosophical study of value, frames Spillers understanding of herself as a speaking being buried underneath a world of meanings and values historically rooted in the violent dynamics of chattel slavery.134
Language attains force via its being spoken by particular bodies in relation to one another, or else it is simply something abstract that does not organize the world in any meaningful way. But that does not mean that the speaking subject simply determines the meaning of language through her individual act of will. The symbolic also affects the subject’s relationship to her body and the world. Fanon’s famous fifth chapter, in Peau noire, “The Lived Experience of the Black” which begins with the sight and naming of the Black body as “negro” illustrates this dynamic. In this moment he is altogether shattered and captured; he becomes aware of his body through a language that epistemologically constructs him as outsides “normal” white humanity while retaining its grip on him by overlaying his body with the stereotypes and representations of the “negro” as angry, sexualized, or cannibalistic (Fanon 2011/2008, 153-155/89-92). It is important to keep in mind the
134 As I have been arguing up until now, the question of value and invention links the thought of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers across the spatialized “History” of the Black diaspora. For instance, Fanon writes in “Antillais et Africains” of Nègritude in the 1940s: “It meant demanding of him an axiological activity in reverse [une activité axiologique inverse], a valorization of what he had rejected” (Fanon 2011/1967, 710/24). 195 corporeal descriptions of this chapter in Peau noire as this is what Spillers is echoing at the beginning of her essay: “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.
‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God’s ‘Holy
Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium’…” (2003b, 203). This naming is evidence of the “mythical prepossession” (2003b, 203) of value that has already been assigned to her body by a preexisting epistemological schema. To write is already an act of counterwriting against dominant arrangements of knowledge.
What Spillers is asking is how might a Black woman, on the other side of chattel slavery, give voice to her value of herself as herself? For once one’s body is known within a symbolic economy as property the question of value takes on the most potent urgency. The battle does not become between the existence of inherent value and the denial of that value by language and regimes of meaning-making. With enslavement—the literal and symbolic capture of the life of the
Black body—a more complex confrontation must be undertaken between articulating one’s truer value and the imputation of counterfeit value to one’s work. Again, returning to Cooper, the difference between “truth” and its “counterfeit” value becomes an intricate engagement which requires an alternate mode of praxis from within the dominant epistemological economy of meaning. The problem that Spillers addresses is not that Black women are seen to have no value, but that they are caught within “a particular historical order” (2003b, 203) that continues to presuppose their value. Chattel slavery facilitated the epistemological construction of value for
Black bodies as an uneasy ambivalence between monetary value and symbolic value such that the former leads to the latter and back again. What one’s existence means is equated with one’s quantifiable worth and vice versa. Context is continually deformed.
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While describing how the Black “body,” historically, has been used for medical experimentation and thus “value for medical research” (2003b, 208) Spillers proposes that “The captive body[…]brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless” (2003b, 208; emphasis in text). Indeed, she goes on to state that in this “divided flesh[…]we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions” (2003b, 208). The literal (monetary) value of the
Black body is intertwined with the predetermined metaphorical (symbolic) value that language has assigned this body. Both registers—quantification and qualification—mutually support and make possible enactments of violence against Black bodies and Black life; it becomes impossible to determine which has priority and thus, when attempting to make sense, the Black body runs the risk of getting caught in this evaluative loop.
When Spillers notes that the formal and symbolic discourse of the slave vessels coming from, for example, Britain’s Parliament captured Black bodies according to the calculation of how much space would be allotted to the Black male or female body and what the equivalent value between these Black bodies should be (for instance, that five females equals four males) she is not making a mere historical observation (2003b, 214). She is arguing that these “scaled inequalities” are only possible because they are coextensive with how the African slave’s body is a site that can be given determinate value. The possibility of this appropriation of the Black body was made effective by an epistemological ordering of “reality” where to name was to claim and the slave ship was nothing, if not, the most literal demonstration of this power of language. The equivalence of value between male and female Black bodies enforced, according to Spillers, the “ungendering”
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(2003b, 214) of these men and women. Yet in this cultural space where the Black body seems to be absolutely captured a productive ambivalence is generated within the slave economy. Even while undergoing “ungendering” the economy still required the reproduction of the Black body.
This realization, for Spillers, centers Black women in thinking this violence. Thus, Spillers will argue that from the position of the “Black Mother” one can apprehend how “ungendering” creates an unstable aftereffect that could be the site of an “unclaimed richness of possibility” (2003b, 215).
This instability, which remains in but not of the symbolic economy of slavery, is an alternate mode of writing, it is “the flesh” (2003b, 206). And for Spillers she is the intergenerational site for the possibility of epistemological transvaluation.
The Transvaluation of “Black Motherhood”
The importance of Spiller’s distinction between “body” and “flesh” is that she takes the
Black body as a reified site of knowledge. Throughout generations institutions of knowledge have developed the Black body as a known quantity. The “flesh” is Spillers’s conceptual attempt to return to the inventiveness that is buried beneath the epistemological structures of dominant U.S. culture. When she posits that the “flesh” is “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (2003b, 206) she is calling attention to how language and social representation abstracts away from the materiality of “History” and the concepts that have been developed over time. The metaphor of the “flesh” evinces not only an intergenerational trauma of silence within the articulation of “History” and culture proceeding from chattel slavery. The “flesh” is also Spillers’s demand that we engage an alternate “History” that lived beyond our dominant epistemological representations of the abolition of chattel slavery.
She is looking for the possibility of a new historical praxis. Thus, the stealing of bodies into the
198 symbolic economy of slavery is a “human and social irreparability” that ought to be regarded as
“high crimes against the flesh” (2003b, 206) since this theft attempted to substitute its own measure of knowledge for the origin of African American life. For Spillers it is not that every Black body will experience violence of enslavement in the past or racist violence in the present. But, to repeat, she is concerned with demonstrating what it means to be considered part of a “free and freed community” (2003b, 218). “Freedom,” if considered to have transhistorical and transcultural value, only has this value according to an established economy of knowledge. The symbolic economy sets the terms for how freedom can be described and represented. What Spillers challenges via the “flesh” is how we represent our knowledge of freedom.
For so long as freedom is represented as the freedom to sell one’s labor and body there will not have been a transvaluation of measure. Ewa Ziarek (2012) emphasizes this Marxist dynamic of Spillers’s thought in her interpretation of “Mama’s Baby.” She describes Spillers’s understanding of the slave economy as an extension of Marx’s understanding of the violence of abstraction “[t]he split between the abstraction of the commodity form, which determines the value of commodified objects and bodies in total separation from their specificity and materiality…” (2012, 130; emphasis in text). The documents left behind by the enslavers are evidence of how commodity relations work in language and how language further produces the logic of commodities. In a reciprocal circularity, the symbolic economy of chattel slavery locks out any notion of difference by making gender for the Black body simply an accidental feature that covers over the fundamental equivalence of Black men and women to each other. Ziarek argues that this is “[t]he traumatic reality of black flesh stripped from values and reduced to social illegitimacy” (2012, 140) that cannot be captured by the commodification of gender. The Black body does not labor and then produce value; it is this value that is worked upon by other bodies.
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Alienation on this account would not be the alienation of one’s body from the work of her or his property, but alienation from one’s “body” as the only site from which to produce value.
Furthermore, the ramifications for how the dominant symbolic economy interpreted Black kinship cannot be underestimated. “One of the deadly contradictions of the ‘grammar” of slavery,”
Ziarek explains, “is that the commodification of the captive body was in fact synonymous with the destruction of the social significance of gender” (2012, 140). Indeed, this is what Spillers means when she writes, “the enslaved must not be permitted to perceive that he or she has any human rights that matter. Certainly if kinship were possible, the property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then ‘belong’ to a mother and a father” (2003a, 220; emphasis in text) and thus Spillers suggests that we cannot understand “birth” in the social significance we commonly attribute to it (2003b, 224). The robbing of the parental function, retroactively, relied on instituting a reversed logic of gender and kinship wherein the Black mother occupied the symbolic position of the “father” who, instead of passing down name or property, reproduced the child’s condition as a slave. Ziarek calls this the “enforced maternal reproduction of the social nonvalue of slavery” (2012, 140). The unintended aftereffect of this symbolic economy—its ambivalence—is that at the very moment Black maternity is made impossible what is revealed is a “hidden dependence of power on flesh even in the instances of their violent destruction” (Ziarek
2012, 147).
Through the abrogation of Black paternity and the substitution of Black maternity in its symbolic place an epistemological impossibility was constructed. While the Black female was not a “woman” (her body could be equaled to the Black male in terms of value) she could, and indeed must, be a “mother.” It was by way of her flesh and the mode of writing that was the law that she could reproduce and pass down the condition of enslavement to her children’s bodies. This, for
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Spillers, creates a dangerous and radical incoherence in the symbolic economy: how can Black women not be “women” and be “mothers” at the same time. If the symbolic economy gives way and absolutely determines Black women to not be women then an economy of knowledge which presumes that children can only come from heterosexual kinship arrangements has a problem of meaningfully representing where these Black bodies come from if there are no “women” and
“men.” At the very same time if the economy claims that Black women are absolutely “mothers” then it will have to square how these mothers can give birth to property in a manner that is radically different from white mothers. This tension in the grammar cannot afford to definitively choose either option and, thus, remains precariously ambivalent. On the symbolic economy’s own terms,
Spillers argues, the “possibility” for a radical rewriting of Black life may occur from within this violent process of knowledge.135
The possibility that Spillers wants to recover for our present knowledge is that gender and kinship for the African American community was not always developed according the dominant epistemological norms of U.S. culture. In fact, inventive arrangements of living were realized under these violent conditions. Spillers’s embrace of the “flesh” guides her postulation that “it is probably truer than we know at this distance (and truer than contemporary social practice in the community would suggest on occasion) that the captive developed, time and time again, certain ethical and sentimental features that tied her and him across the landscape to others, often sold from hand to hand, of the same and different blood in a common fabric of memory and inspiration”
135 The logic of this claim would unfold something like this: If we can now accept that it would be untrue to say that all those who belong to the class of women belong equally to the class of “mothers” (since this would fail to account for women who choose not to raise children or cannot conceive) then Spillers, controversially, overturns the epistemic priority of biology by claiming that in the symbolic economy of chattel slavery not all “mothers” belong to the class known as women. The further consequences of this disruptive formulation of gender require elaboration but that task exceeds the limits of this chapter. 201
(2003b, 219). Throughout the essay, Spillers gestures towards intergenerational possibilities of reconfiguring how we ethically evaluate gender and kinship ties. For her, the “flesh” no longer becomes bound to simple ties of blood. At the very same time, in the above citation, she claims that in “contemporary social practice” the Black community has not always embraced this praxis.
In an interview about “Mama’s Baby” Spillers returns to this problem: “that’s why men were in
‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.’ That is what I was trying to suggest about certain performances of maleness on the part of black men, and what I was hoping to suggest is that black men can’t afford to appropriate the gender prerogatives of white men because they have a different kind of
“History”; so you can’t just simply be patriarchal[…]” (Spillers Spring 2007, 304). Remarkably consistent with Cooper’s framing of the problem in “What are We Worth?” Spillers presents the
“flesh” as an intergenerational praxis of acting from one’s conditions in order to reorganize the field of “truth.”
Praxis consists in constructing a different “History” from which the present may be understood differently. For this reason, Spillers resists collapsing the kinship of Black women and men, unbound by blood, into the general name of “family.” This kinship of the “flesh” is the possibility of “a rather different case from the moves of a dominant symbolic order [that is] pledged to maintain the supremacy of race. It is that order that forces ‘family’ to modify itself when it does not mean family of the master” (2003b, 219). She refuses that standard of measure derived from dominant U.S. culture even though, at the very same time, this order does impress itself onto her speech. Hence, there remains “the structure of ambivalence” (2003c, 254). This ambivalence may be the ground from which her praxis begins, but she does not intend for the movement of the
“flesh” to remain in this bind. “I wanted to point out what is problematic about black women stopping at the gender question.” Spillers claims, “Because the refusal of certain gender privileges
202 to black women was historically part of the problem. At the same time[…]you have to see that and get beyond it and get to something else, because you are trying to go through gender to get to something wider” (Spring 2007, 303-304). To do this she must show that the symbolic economy of chattel slavery does not capture all forms of knowledge. The ambivalence within its social epistemology can be used against it. Spillers leaves us with the future question of what a politics of the flesh might be so that “Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to
‘name’ [to develop a symbolic economy of valuing for Black life])[…]might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment” (2003b, 229; emphasis in text). But what we can now see is that from Cooper to Spillers it is possible to develop a praxis which continues the work of constructing to new measures for value. For as long as the epistemological structures of U.S. culture are bound to the “History” of “race” it will be fruitful to unearth the voices of African
American women from past generations to help us go beyond the values of the present. In this way, writing may open the way to the invention of a counter-mythology.
Hortense Spillers and the Counter-Mythology of Black Life
Before concluding this chapter, I want to return to the language of “zero degree” and
Barthes contention that perhaps it could be the site from which to steal value back from the mythological robbery of language. In the midst of describing how all modes of writing such as surrealism and mathematical science are vulnerable to mythology Barthes notes, “Now, in a fully constituted myth, the meaning [sens] is never at zero degree, and this is why the concept can distort it, naturalize it. We must remember once again that the privation of meaning [sens] is in no way a
203 zero degree:136 this is why myth can perfectly well get hold of it, give it, for instance, the signification of the absurd, of surrealism, etc. At bottom it would only be the zero degree which could resist myth” (1957/2012, 235/243). Barthes argument is that the formal nature of myth suggests that any content whatsoever can be repurposed. The only avenue of resistance would be a zero degree that did not signify at all. The zero degree would have to be a site of missed or missing action (l’acte manqué or, as translated in Barthes text, parapraxis) that does not have any meaning as such. The problem, Barthes realizes, is that the human creature cannot help but engage in meaning and, thus, any zero degree will inevitably be swept up by social and political institutions. The impossibility of remaining at zero degree, or in Spillers’s discourse the impossibility of not becoming a “body,” leads Barthes to conclude: “Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?” (1957/2012, 237/246-247). Perhaps the zero degree can make possible a counter- mythology, a distortion of what distorts.
Near the end of “Mama’s Baby” Spillers describes the dominant culture’s “[f]atal misunderstanding” of assigning “[a] matriarchist value where it does not belong” (2003b, 228; emphasis mine) onto the enslaved, Black community. The myth of Black life being condemned
136 Here Barthes is critiquing the pretensions of surrealists like André Breton who believed that a mode of writing that actively resisted making sense could escape the bourgeois pressures of conformism. In his 1924 manifesto he calls surrealism a “[p]sychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought[…]in the absence of any control exercised by reason[…]” (1969, 26). It is important to recall that back in Le degré zéro de l’écriture Barthes had cautioned against the inventive writer who becomes a “classic” when “[m]echanical habits [les automatismes] are developed in the very place where freedom existed” (1953/1967, 111/78). The reference to les automatismes seems to be an implicit reference to the Surrealists who do not realize that myth can capture the idea of “nonsense” and give it a conformist signification. 204 because it follows “the line of the Mother” (Spillers 2003b, 203) in the past and present is false
“[b]ecause the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because motherhood is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance”
(Spillers 2003b, 228). Spillers does not resolve this paradox of value, the persistent catechresis in the writing of Black life. Instead, as I have shown with her readings of slave insurrections and the slave narrative of Brent/Jacobs, she seizes the metaphor and turns it against the mythical system.
If the “[black] female stands in the flesh both mother and mother-dispossessed,” a “[b]loodrite
[that] is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment” (Spillers 2003b, 228) then Spillers argues a different mode of historiographical writing may become possible in claiming, rather than rebuking or resolving, this contradiction.
As a philosophical mythologist, a la Barthes, Spillers attempts to make explicit how our institutions of sense and meaning-making distort and rob the meanings of Black life. It is important to be clear that Spillers is an unabashedly systematic thinker. Thus, for her, no meaning, interpretation, or signification is simply the property of an individual in isolation, but they are always engagements with prior systems of existence and reference. We may be condemned to speak, think, and write in metaphors which are not originally of our choosing and prevent a “pure” access to who we are in “reality.” For Spillers, the point is not to kill metaphor and approach the unmarked “flesh” of one’s identity.137 Again, there is no l’écriture blanche (Barthes 1953, 111) or
137 I take this to be her meaning when she writes after citing William Goodell’s descriptions the whipped Black body: “These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color” (Spillers 2003b, 207). Even once the mythologist uncovers the Black “body,” looks beyond the spectacular images of Black suffering under enslavement, she will not find the real historical subject. The theft by myth has left its mark by constructing a formal system in which all meaning from Black subjects or Black life can be deformed. Once again, Spillers mobilization of 205
“neutral writing” in Spillers’s thought. The point is to catch myth in the act, to comprehend the spatial structure of its alibis. To comprehend a formal system of which one participates it becomes necessary to take up its terms in order to name its misnamings.
The myth of the Strong Black Mother. The myth of the Absent Black Father. The myth of the Black Child Superpredator. The myth of the maternal Black Mammy. The myth of the childlike
Uncle Tom. The myth of the Angry Black Woman. The myth of the Vengeful Black Man. And, through it all, stunningly, the myth of the Forgiving and Absolving Black Body (MLK is constantly distorted as the latter). The “History” for which these images are meant to stand in testifies to the fact that the myths of the Black body can abide by numerous contradictions, quite comfortably.
Refute one myth and another will come to take its place. Spillers’s “double-writing” provides a metalanguage by which it becomes possible to understand the formal characteristics of myth that can abide by any number of contradictory content. The search for a “[d]ifferent cultural text”
(Spillers 2003b, 228) might begin with “[a]ctually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’)” (Spillers 2003b, 229). This would be a counter mythology. Or, better yet, an attempt to rewrite the formal conditions under which sense is crafted. What human project might
“hieroglyphics” is drawn from Barthes introduction to Le degré zéro de l’écriture which is worth quoting at length: “It is impossible to write without labeling oneself: as with Le Père Duchêne, so equally with Literature. It too must signify something other than its content and its individual form, something which defines its limits [sa propre clôture] and imposes it as Literature. Whence a set of signs unrelated to the ideas, the language or the style, and setting out to give definition, within the body of every possible mode of expression, to the utter separateness of a ritual language. This hieratic [hieroglyphic] quality of written Signs [Cet ordre sacral des Signes] establishes Literature as an institution and clearly tends to place it above “History” [à l’abstraire de l’Histoire], for no limits [clôture] can be set without some idea of permanence” (1953/1967, 7-8/1-2). While Barthes does not use word “hieroglyphic” here his understanding of cet ordre sacral des Signes performs the same function: it designates the formal limits which makes the sense of “History” possible. The hieroglyphs do not have meaning in and of themselves, but they are the abstractions that allow the closure of meaning. Thus, Spillers is claiming that the corporeal violence done to the Black “body” under enslavement was made possible by a signifying system that one cannot simply step outside or get clean of. 206 proceed from such an invention cannot be predicted since the evaluative system does not yet exist.
In this way Spillers restores a fundamental indeterminacy to Black life that will have to be rewritten again and again.
In this chapter I have argued that reading Hortense Spillers with Anna Julia Cooper allows for the apprehension of her “double-writing” of Blackness and gender. Her new mode of writing is necessarily intergenerational and participates in the legacy of Black feminist philosophy.
Constructing new social epistemologies requires creativity and inventiveness that takes seriously the antecedent historical and material conditions of a particular philosopher’s thought while also making it possible to see how thought escapes the context from which it was produced. Modes of knowing neither arise from a tabula rasa nor are they completely confined within their contexts.
If new measures of value will become possible in the present and future they will have to be constructed via strategies of ambivalence that take seriously the ambivalences which organize our current representations of the world. Gender, race, and class, when thought together, demand the invention of new genealogies of knowledge and action. This means bringing together thinkers who may be separated by generations. By making these connections we can continue developing richer historical accounts of our present. The development of these accounts ought not disavow the workings of myth on our thought, but search for a method of reading between myths in order to find the points where one may begin a radical rewriting of new myths. Spillers places “gender” as one of the central junctures that Black life can invent “representational potentialities” (2003b,
228) of the past and present.
207
Chapter Four Conclusion The Value of Invention: The Flesh of Blackened Humanism in Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers
The figures covered in this dissertation form a constellation of Black life through which we can understand that the value of invention consists in the search for a usable past.138 I have shown that for Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers, in the Black diaspora, the close imbrication of “History” and mythology poses a number of phenomenological and historiographical issues for understanding who the blackened communities were and what they may become. For all three, the making of
History (faire l’Histoire) inevitably encounters the mythological narratives that the colonial systems of “the West” have attempted to impose upon the colonized and the enslaved—whom I have called the blackened in the Fanon chapter. The inventive turn in all three figures consists in their development of a mode of writing that can continually navigate the bind between “real”
History and “fake” mythology. As Spillers argued in the previous chapter, History and mythology are not mutually exclusive, but instead the latter is parasitic on the former, History nourishes mythology. Thus, a turn to the “real” (Fanon), “science” (Wynter), or the supposedly pure and empirical positivity of the “body” (Spillers) will not be enough to move beyond the systemic devalorization of Black life. As I have argued the poiesis/poetics of their work, when brought together, makes it possible to justify the employment of a new mode of writing that would not leave invention only for the future, but would dare to invent the past so that the present may be altered.
Gender becomes a rich site of contestation upon which these new modes of writing could offer a new form of reading and living Black life rather than a new content that would propose:
138 This phrase is the subject of Hortense Spillers’s early 1977 essay on Ralph Ellison entitled “Ellison’s ‘Usable Past’: Toward a Theory of Myth” (2003a). We will turn to this important piece below. 208 this is how Black men and women really are. Insofar as gender, for us in “the West,” has never only been a mere positivistic reference to genitalia but has been a system of value by which to organize desire, sexuality, and kinship (on the European psychoanalytic level) and integral to the logic of Capital to enforce the reproduction of economic systems of wealth and the material divisions of labor (on the Marxist level) it is necessary to comprehend how gender has been mobilized vis-à-vis Black life within colonialism and chattel slavery. From the systemic points of view provided by Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers, gender becomes less about individual human creatures and more about the fundamental arrangement of the racialized reproduction of Western histories (plural) that often justify our present form of “humanity.” The sense of humanity that has been given to us is little more than a mask for processes of exploitation and alienation. The call for Black life to divide itself into a “respectable” aggregate mass of good “men” and “women” who endeavor to marry and join the “middle-class” is yet another distortion of bourgeois mythology that attempts to obscure how, in the past, colonial systems denied Black populations these very same “privileges” in order to accumulate massive amounts of wealth and power. As I stated in the previous chapter it is imperative to catch myth in the act, to apprehend how gender can be mobilized both as a racialized site of abjection and assimilation. I have argued that this dynamic of mythic violence will not be unsettled by offering up new content of who Black people are individually and, thus, proving that they are really “human,” but instead challenging the form of engagement by claiming a blackened humanism that has yet to be written.
I have chosen to entitle this dissertation “The Value of Invention” rather than “The
Invention of Value” because this work is meant to be sensitive to how the fundamental epistemological arrangements of “the West,” never quite escaping their origins in colonialism and
Transatlantic slave trade, constantly appropriate the production of new values in service of
209 reproducing an existing system of existence. We might call this system of existence “Capitalism” in order to denote the unending theft of labor that continues to make it possible. But even the word
“capitalism” is vulnerable to mythology and can distort how intimate the violence of colonialism and chattel slavery was in the West, it can obscure how dominant culture continues to decide what is meaningful in Black life and what can be discarded as nonsense. Thus, rather than offering new contents of Black life I have turned to asking what it means to search for inventions, for breakthroughs, in History that will allow us to seize the workings of mythology. In the last chapter
I formalized this reading and praxis of invention as searching for “l’acte manqué” (translated as
“parapraxis,” but literally means missed or missing action)139 which refuses dominant interpretations of History and brings into view the dynamics of myth in distorting History. The value of invention consists in finding the missing or missed act that has been covered over by our current arrangement of discourse. A blackened humanism, on this reading, searches for those missed opportunities of revolutionizing the form by which we are trained to understand History and attempts to rob mythology of its distorting powers for other aims. “Ungendering,” rather than a positivist fact, might more productively be read as a counter-mythological tactic that demonstrates the need for new arrangements of knowledge as it concerns Black life. I have found this mode of reading and writing in Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers while also showing that bringing these three philosophers together can move our apprehension of Black life into a new space. Such a space would constantly recuperate the value of invention rather than positing new values of what is “real.”
139 It is important to remember Fanon’s methodology in Peau noire of listening for the “misfires” of the colonized like an engine backfiring (2011/2008, 75/6-7) and Wynter’s refusal of either condemning or approving of female circumcision in the last section of her chapter. Both Fanon and Wynter are practicing an attunement for feeling what cannot be said within a present historical context while also suspecting that what cannot be said still finds a way to breakthrough. 210
On my account, neither pessimism nor optimism are appropriate for the apparatus of blackened humanism generated by Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers. The former forgets that we are
History making creatures whose systems constantly returns to and transforms what is understood as the “past” in order to bring it into the dynamism of the present. The latter elides how we are myth made creatures who arrive in the midst of a system of values that we have not chosen, but inevitably participate in. The constant conflict between what is “taken” and what is “given” need not give way to a teleological and progressive dialectic of development. Rather, by concretely focusing on Black life in the West it might be possible to gain a more comprehensive view on how this dynamic continues to reproduce alienation and exploitation. “Humanism” would no longer be anything metaphysical, but an epistemological object that arises from and grounds violent processes. But for this very same reason it is not a word that we need to avoid but can be taken up again as a challenge that must be met. Thus, I have mobilized blackened humanism as a form and counter-mythology that does refer to any ahistorical content. If the critique of Western humanism is not only its content but its form, I claim that blackened humanism can transform the deformation.
In this concluding chapter I will bring Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers together in order to break down the three aspects of writing a blackened humanism that they offer. As the Introduction funneled into the dissertation by moving from Fanon to Wynter to Spillers I will reverse the movement out by going from Spillers to Wynter to Fanon. First, I will show that Spillers introduced the importance of mythology in the struggle of the human project. In this section I will turn to her early essay on Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man titled “Ellison’s ‘Usable Past’: Toward a
Theory of Myth” (2003a) where she clearly outlines how she thinks mythology can be revolutionary and, thus, allows us to see “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” as a sequel whose object is the invisible woman of Black life. Second, I will turn back to Wynter and her singular
211 understanding of humanism as what remains to be invented rather than posited as “real.” Here I will give a brief gloss of another one of her early essays entitled “Novel and History, Plot and
Plantation” in order to show how humanism for her constitutes a heretofore unclaimed point of view on “History” that would change the fundamental arrangement of knowledge. Finally, Fanon will be shown to have provided the important concept of the blackened which makes it possible to see that Blackness is generated and imposed by systems rather than being ontologically and ahistorically “real.” All three together provides a glimpse of the flesh as an inventive mode of writing between “History” and mythology.
Hortense Spillers and the Theory of Mythology
In much contemporary scholarship on Hortense Spillers the focus has almost solely been on her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (2003b). There is good reason for this: the essay constitutes an important breakthrough in how we, in the academy, conceptualize the historiography of “gender” and U.S. enslavement. But, I have argued, this almost exclusive focus on one of her essays has had the unfortunate outcome of producing readings which have taken the essay in isolation and have viewed it as a starting point rather than a piece that is a continuation of prior and ongoing conversations. The isolation of her work, along with the peculiarly dense prose of the piece, has led some discourses, what has been called
“Afropessimism” being only one example, in the academy to misinterpret the theoretical space of her thought. These discourses have begat interpretations of Spillers’s comments on “gender” and
“ungendering” as metaphysical or, even, ontological. While these interpretations are not completely false, they do retain bits of Spillers’s meaning, they distort and uproot the essay. In a
212 rather predictable twist, a work on mythology becomes, itself, prey to the forces of mythologization.
In order to advance a critical and methodical interpretation of Spillers’s work while also weaving her into a broader tradition of Black philosophical thought, I have argued that Spillers is a mythologist. Taken in the Barthesian sense, this means that she engages in philosophical critique that attempts to illumine how our rationality, our understanding, and our sense are conditioned and distorted by the systemic forces of language and ideology. So to say that Black women and men were “ungendered” in an ontological sense is only true if one understands “ontology” to be historically constituted by a society’s given arrangements of institutions and discourses. Perhaps ontology is just another name for a dominant system’s formal ability to interpret what it means “to be.” Thus, ontology is a distortion, a mythical parole, that attempts to conserve and legitimate a particular configuration of accumulated power. As a mythologist, Spillers attempts to provide the critical tools with which we can create space between ourselves and an ideological system in order to observe its practices of distortion and robbery. It in this critical space that one can collectively begin the invention of counter-mythologies that would “[m]ake a place for [a different] social subject” (Spillers 2003b, 228).
Perhaps it will be argued that too much weight has been put on Spillers’s connection to the work of Roland Barthes, that this freights her work with too much of “Europe,” of “the West.”
And in doing this I have missed that the message of “Black life” consists in the pure repudiation of “the West.” I argue that this is a theoretical and political mistake. The former leads to the latter.
I will deal with the theory before analyzing the outcome for a critical politics. Theoretically, I have given an analysis of Spillers that attempts to follow the path that she has followed in order to give an interpretation of her arguments that hews most closely to her historical context. Doing so has
213 led me not only to her constant references to Barthes in connection to the problem of historiography, but to her 1977 essay, ten years prior to “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” called
“Ellison’s ‘Usable Past’: Toward a Theory of Myth” (Spillers 2003a). In this essay she provides a clear and concise elaboration of mythology as the theoretical architecture of her future work through an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. In this essay Spillers explicitly states that her concern is to understand “the theme of alienation” (2003a, 65)140 through the dehumanization of art that separates it from living forms in much the same way that myth separates meaning from its living contexts.
She begins by claiming, “We have no exact name yet for ‘dehumanization’ as a systematic mode of expression; perhaps ‘modernism’ is the best we can do, but for sure, this deviant attitude toward the human problematic—this flight from it that Ortega determines as the goal of modernism—pursues a structural reality[…]that consigns language itself to an area of the phenomenal, unprivileged among other things” (Spillers 2003a, 66; emphasis mine). Language is not a pure and translucent tool of communication that escapes structural conditions of reality.
Indeed, for Spillers, one can begin to catch a glimpse of “dehumanization” in how language is deformed, the “mode of expression” that it is forced to take. What this means is that
“dehumanization” is not only an act or content that one can point to, but it leaves the marks of distortion in the system of language. Language clarifies and distorts. Spillers claims that Ellison realizes this and, thus, refuses any “naturalist” presentation of Black experience. It is from Ellison that she defends two propositions. First, the “[b]lack American experience is vulnerable to mythic dilation” and, thus, “[a] coherent system of signs [must bring] into play the entire repertory of
140 She bookends the essay with analyses of José Ortega y Gasset (Spillers 2003, 65-66) and Søren Kierkegaard (Spillers 2003, 78-80) in another connection to an archive Fanon draws upon in Peao noire. Cf. chapter 1. 214
American cultural traits” (Spillers 2003a, 67). Second, she argues that we cannot “[i]solate issues of craft from ethical considerations[…]language does speak, and it clarifies selective experience”
(Spillers 2003a, 67). These propositions, taken together, make clear that Spillers sees value in thinking at a metadiscursive level that can begin to apprehend the sheer breadth of
“dehumanization” for Black subjects in “the West.”
It is mythology that provides this metadiscourse. Thus, after enumerating these propositions Spillers embarks upon her most explicit engagement with Roland Barthes (2003a, 67-
69). She notes that “Myth, then, is a form of selective discourse since its life and death are governed by human history” (Spillers 2003a, 67; emphasis mine). In other words, myth requires the material of human history in order for it to have effects. Myth does not constitute itself out of nothing. Thus, myth cannot have just any meaning whatsoever. What is important about this claim is that it allows
Spillers to avoid any sort of epistemological relativism that could charge her with attacking the violence of myth on the Black “body” simply because it is her personal, idiosyncratic interest.
Chattel slavery and colonialism did constitute the material human history of our present moment and it is this material upon which myth preys. Though Barthes attempts to differentiate between
“[t]he semiological and ideological boundaries of myth,” Spillers is “[p]rimarily concerned with
Invisible Man as a literary countermyth of good intentions” (2003a, 68). What Spillers means here is that she is not simply interested in an abstract philosophy of language that would attempt to understand how signs, or language, shift and move from content to context; she is interested in how language is vulnerable to the machination of power.141 It is in Ellison’s Invisible Man that
Spillers finds the means to not only apprehend how myth uses form to distort content, but how one
141 Indeed, I would claim, that Barthes has difficulty separating the semiological from the ideological as well. 215 might invent, rebel, by crafting a new form that would distort the prior myth. She proposes,
“Though from my point of view, any countermyth is preferable to prevailing myth and is, therefore, good” (Spillers 2003a, 68). Before one can develop a countermyth for the better, it is necessary to attain a metadiscourse on the prevailing myth of one’s context.
Spillers is not naïve on the risks of such a maneuver. In fact, she contends that she cannot simply accept Barthes formulations wholesale which tend towards an absolute rejection of myth:
“Inevitably, some intentions are ‘more good’ than others to the group wishing to appropriate them, and as Barthes’s orientation leads into the ideological category of myth as an impoverishment of history, its nullification at the hands of the bourgeoisie, I would have to agree with him.
Recognizing, then, the high danger of applying a term laden, a priori, with valuation that justifies it on the one hand and condemns it on the other, I can only proceed with caution” (Spillers 2003,
68; emphasis mine). In the previous chapter, I argued that Spillers does not search for or dream of an écriture blanche, a neutral mode of writing that would not distort its content. It would appear that she thinks this is impossible for Black life after the ravages of enslavement. What it is possible to see here is that Spillers enters into the treacherous territory of contradictory valuations quite purposefully. Thus, for Spillers “[m]yth becomes a tactic for explanation” that makes use of a
“[c]omplicated scheme of conceptual images that refer to a particular historical order” (2003a, 69).
It is not possible to read this line without recalling how closely it resembles Spillers remarks on invention in “Mama’s Baby”: “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time; over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there awaits the marvel of my own inventiveness” (Spillers
2003b, 203). The connection between these two essays reveals that invention is not a “pure” creative act, but it is the praxis of stripping down, of coming to understand one’s “particular
216 historical order” and then using that order against itself. The risk of being recaptured is high, but to simply deny the limits and determinations of one’s historical experience is to risk ineffectual fantasy.
The most pertinent connection between this early essay on Ellison and “Mama’s Baby” is the theoretical relationship Spillers constructs between the historical experience of
“disembodiment” and the discovery of inner rebellion. She reads the “[p]ersistent anonymity” of the narrator in Invisible Man as “[t]he crucial ingredient of ironic disclosure” (Spillers 2003a, 78).
The anonymity of the black narrator constitutes a “[v]eritable disembodiment” but since “this no- name[…]acknowledges invisibility[…]why should he have a name that could confine him to orders of affection and kinship, therefore, limitation?” (Spillers 2003a, 78). Irony is understood here not only as misdirection, but a poetics through which the individual can gain the inner space to critique and delink from a culture of alienation. Spillers’s reference to Kierkegaard142 in these passages constitutes yet another thematic link between her understanding of subjectivity and
Fanon’s. For Spillers is clear on this point: the achievement of an ironic voice, the withdrawal from the imposed limitations of the “body,” is the condition of possibility for freedom and rebellion. When one is no longer solely determined by the laws of one’s culture, then heretofore undetermined and incalculable acts become possible in the future. The historical theft of the Black
“body” need not only be a tragedy that demands one recoup a “body” like any other; perhaps the body no longer needs to be the sine qua non of Black life and politics. If the Black “body” is already a mythic displacement then another mythology might be possible by taking distance from this “body.”
142 She draws from his The Concept of Irony. 217
Spillers calls this distance “[t]he achievement of an ironic [or “inner”] voice” which
“[t]hrough the density of struggle and error, proffers a countermyth against the founders of
‘Sambo,’ the damaged humanity of an acquisitive culture” (2003a, 79; emphasis mine). The invention of a countermyth is not simply a “new” narrative that one can sell on the market; it is the invention of a form of humanity against what has been damaged. Thus, “humanism” neither becomes an unquestioned background nor a word one can simply reject tout court. The achievement of an ironic voice necessitates that the subject constantly bring sinto view the damaged system one is inextricably entangled so that one can produce an “[u]nalterable disenchantment” (Spillers 2003a, 78) that will continually deny that the dominant culture’s bourgeois humanism simply means what it says. In this way, from theory to politics, Black diasporic subjects cannot for once and for all reject “the West” since doing so may just allow the damage of its mythic humanity to slide out of sight.
In a profound way, “Mama’s Baby” could be considered a sequel to this early essay on
Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. Indeed, I contend that “Mama’s Baby” can be read as an account of the invisible woman. The invention of the countermyth “Black life” cannot come only from one part of the Black community but must comprehend as much of the historical experience of “Black life” as possible for the countermyth to stand the test. Taken together “ungendering” might be another phrase by which it is possible to envision new forms of Black life that are not hopelessly elided or pathologized by dominant notions of kinship and humanity. None of this is to say that it is possible to detail from Spillers works what, exactly, this new form might look like. Spillers notes that the perils of producing a countermyth against a dominant known order is that “[i]t usually takes the form of a language that nobody recognizes at first” (2003a, 79). Systemic critique, such as Spillers’s, risks becoming trapped at the metadiscursive level. It risks becoming perpetual
218 commentary. But what Spillers allows us to grasp is that this moment of metadiscursivity, double- writing as I have called it in the previous chapter, is a necessary condition for disobedience, and, finally, revolution.
At the very end of the essay Spillers makes an implicit reference to the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960s. She reads Invisible Man as providing the ingredients by which we can understand how such a rebellion was possible. She notes, “Invisible Man, seeking the why of his acts, cuts loose from prevailing myth in a sequence of subversive moves that conjoin him with other myths of conscience—the countermythologies” (Spillers 2003a, 80). She argues that in this journey—what she terms “[t]he cycle of experience” (Spillers 2003a, 78; emphasis mine)—there is the “[n]otion of black disobedience” (Spillers 2003a, 80). What is interesting in this passage is that Spillers concludes with a notion of “blackness” that is decidedly not racial or visual, but countermythological. She goes on to say, “[t]he qualified [black] is no necessary illumination since all disobedience, in the very force of language, is black” (Spillers 2003a, 80). The signifier “black” becomes an opening onto other terrains of struggle and revolution that need not be locked into a parochial understanding of identity. Instead “black” becomes a grounded historical experience from which one can become entangled with those who have also been elided by dominant systems of power. She concludes the essay with the “revolutionary” question: “If ‘I’ am to be victimized, why not let it be for good reason?” (Spillers 2003a, 80). What might it mean to write a humanism from the invisible sites of violence? For this, we will turn to an early essay of Sylvia Wynter.
Sylvia Wynter and the Plot of Humanism
The key to understanding Sylvia Wynter’s contribution of “humanism” to Black life is to understand the value of its poetic function under historical systems of alienation and domination.
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To be more precise, as a Jamaican woman, her thought and contention in the name of humanism is drawn from the Caribbean experience of the plantation. The space of the plantation as a site of alienation and domination is distinct from much “Western” philosophical investigation that has analyzed the prison, the asylum, the hospital, or the factory. It is for this reason that Wynter claims,
“The Caribbean area is the classic plantation area since many of its units were ‘planted’ with people, not in order to form societies, but[…]to produce single crops for the market” (1971, 95).
The specificity of the Caribbean plantation is that it opens out onto a greater majority of the world via the products it produces and the market system it reproduces. From this space, Wynter notes,
“[o]ur [plantation] societies were both cause and effect of the emergence of the market economy; and emergence which marked a change of such world historical magnitude, that we are all, without exception still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality”
(1971, 95). The plantation engineered and was produced by an ever proliferating value system that has had immense consequences not only for the blackenedon Caribbean soil, but the expropriating societies in “the West.”
Sylvia Wynter never uses the word “humanism” in “Novel and History, Plot and
Plantation” (1971), but it is undoubtedly the target and source of her critique. As Spillers argued for an “unalterable disenchantment” (2003, 78) with the language and concepts that have been imposed upon the blackened subject, we can see that Wynter also claims that we have been
“enchanted” by dehumanizing values. What this means is that we continually assume that a system of alienation is a “natural” system of existence. I will show, further down, how the plantation allows Wynter to offer a “disenchantment” of a market system that poses itself as if it were human by noting a diremption between novel and history, plot and plantation. The former terms in each
220 of the two phrases represent a poetic production that is constantly covered over and distorted by the latter. I will deal with each pair in isolation first.
The importance of the novel in contradistinction to “History,” is that it can register the plight of the individual subsumed in the alienating relations of the market. “History,” on the other hand, writes the individual as if they are “naturally” coincident with the relations of Capital and dehumanization. The plantation offers a precise angle into capturing the contradiction between slave labor that has been uprooted and removed from their indigenous history and then, subsequently, given a total, fabricated “History” that centers a foreign land. Wynter summarizes this, thusly, “History, then, these things that happen, is, in the plantation context, itself, fiction; a fiction written, dominated, controlled by forces external to itself. It is clear then, that it is only when the society, or elements of the society rise up in rebellion against its external authors and manipulators that our prolonged fiction becomes temporary fact” (1971, 95). When slaves, those who have been blackened as those who must accept their role as minor term to be overcome, begin to write their own text, the totality of alienation is thrown into relief. It is revealed that “[t]he history taught in the schools is a history based around a Manichean myth” (Wynter 1971, 96; emphasis mine). The plantation, for Wynter, grounds and reproduces myth that justifies an international economic context.
Wynter’s often latent Marxism, in her later work, is made explicit in her analyses of the plantation as conflict of values. She frames the plantation as a confrontation between use value and exchange value. The indigenous population is mostly concerned with use value “[w]here a product is made in response to a human need” while the managing class imposes the structure of exchange value “[w]here the product is made in response to its profitability on the market” (Wynter
1971, 97). The importance of the novelist or the artist is that their “[c]raft [is] linked to the structure
221 of use value statements, the impulse of creation thus being directed by human needs” (Wynter
1971, 97). The problem is that this impulse cannot be divorced from the historical experience of alienation that has “[b]egun to fragment the very human community” (Wynter 1971, 97). Wynter makes this observation in order conclude that the new values that must challenge the system can neither come from a purely exterior point nor purely interior site. It is this problem of ambivalence for the Caribbean writer that is “[a]t once the root cause of our alienation; and the possibility of our salvation” (Wynter 1971, 99).
The richness of Caribbean ambivalence is concretely constituted in Wynter’s plantation/plot distinction. The value system wherein exchange value predominates is of the plantation that reduces humanity to “labor” and nature to “land” (Wynter 1971, 99). The difference between this exploitative relationship in Europe and this relationship in the Caribbean is that the former had a tradition of use value that could drawn upon to resist the new system of dehumanization; the latter, according to Wynter, was invented explicitly for the market and, thus, a prior rooted tradition of use value seemed to not be possible (Wynter 1971, 99). But even the attempt to create a system of total domination and hegemony could not help but produce its own unique ambivalences since “[t]he planters gave the slaves plots of land on which to grow food and feed themselves in order to maximize profits” and, thus, Wynter argues that “[t]his plot system, was, like the novel form in literature terms, the focus of resistance to the market system and market values” (1971, 99). The plot of land embedded within, and made invisible by, the plantation system constitutes, in Spillers language, the zero degree of the unfolding global market system of value.
It was the space where slaves had to replenish and reproduce themselves as labor, but it was also the site whereupon slaves could develop their own sense of culture, of being, of humanism away from the overseers’ eyes. Wynter proposes that “[a]round the growing of yam, of food for survival,
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[the slave] created on the plot a folk culture—the basis of a social order—in three hundred years”
(1971, 99). At the seeming absolute point of domination another writing, another plot, became possible.
The appearance of absolute domination, alienation, and the impetus to invent must be held in tension for Wynter. In her Marxian language she notes, “The plantation was the superstructure of civilization; and the plot was the roots of culture. But there was a rupture between them, the superstructure was not related to the base, but rather to the demands of the of external shareholders and the metropolitan market” (Wynter 1971, 100). In other words, Wynter’s humanism is a response to a systemic rupture. It is the apprehension that “History” and plantation will take the blackened as a necessary resource for their reproduction, but will take as their referent subject a class that is beyond its borders. Wynter takes the 1835 and 1938 economic rebellions in Jamaica to be an inevitable result unless “[t]he system itself is transformed” (1971, 100). A total invention of a system of values must be precipitated by a total apprehension of how one is enmeshed in the system that must be transformed. To avoid this, to claim some “purity” that would deny responsibility or completely disavow whatever has come from “the West,” risks allowing the current system of inhumanity to remain enchanted. To ward against this Wynter argues that the folk culture of the plot can provide “[a] point outside the system” that can “[g]ive us a focus of criticism against the impossible reality in which we are enmeshed” (1971, 100). But she qualifies her invocation of the “outside” by noting, “[t]here is no question of going back to a society, a folk pattern whose structure has already been undermined by the pervasive market economy” (1971,
100). The point of the plot is make possible a vantage point from which to move beyond the current system of values.
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For this moving “beyond” to happen it is necessary to see that “History” has been crafted to justify the plantation and not the plot. Our current humanism is a plantation humanism whose
“[h]istory [we have been] taught[…]The only history which has been written” (Wynter 1971, 101).
Yet, unseen and unbeknownst to “the West,” “[t]he plot has its own history[…][a] secret history”
(Wynter 1971, 101) that does not belong to the abstract law of the plantation and its concern with the reproduction of property, but a concrete justice that would continually invent itself “[b]ased on the needs of the people who form the community” (Wynter 1971, 102). The plot of humanism as described by Wynter throughout her oeuvre would trace the value of this unmet invention as always in response to the plantation values that structure our “human” world. Thus, Wynter’s humanism of “Black life” is a product of rupture and not any metaphysical essentialism. What changes in Wynter’s thought is the explicit elaboration of the plantation as no longer contained
“in” the Caribbean, but reproduced throughout the world. To meet the need of the blackened community would mean nothing less than writing what it would mean to meet the needs of the world. In this way we can say that the plot of humanism has been unwritten and unfinished; it calls for a blackened imagination that would no longer justify the current order of existence, but would live to challenge it. This brings us to the final aspect of the dissertation: the notion of the blackened in an international context as theorized by Fanon.
Frantz Fanon and the Blackened Spaces of the World
The closing section of Fanon’s chapter “On Violence” of his Les damnés de la terre focuses on the international context of violence and, in his words, “[t]he geography of hunger” (2011/2004,
498/53). In fact, Fanon seems to conceptualize the violence of global capitalism mostly in terms of hunger, famine, and need. The background international violence has created “A world of
224 underdevelopment, a world of poverty and inhumanity” (Fanon 2011/2004, 498/53). Fanon, I argue, is disarticulating the problem of “blackness” or being blackened from a merely racial, epidermal registers. To be blackened is to experience the starvation and deprivation of the resources necessary to invent forms of existence. The focus on hunger and starvation is not meant to indicate that Fanon is only interested in the bare necessities of biological life. Instead, Fanon means to show that the deprivation of sustenance is concurrent with the deprivation of developing concrete and complex engagements with the world. In a footnote on the Cuban revolution and the perceived threat the United States thought it posed, Fanon notes, “The almighty power of the dollar, whose security after all is only guaranteed by the slaves of this world, toiling in the oil wells of the Middle East, the mines of Peru and the Congo, and the United Fruit or Firestone plantations, will then cease to dominate these slaves who created [the dollar] and who continue to drain their heads and bellies of all their substance to feed it” (2011/2004, 499/54; emphasis mine). The plantations of the world are not only parasitic, like Spillersian/Barthesian myth, on the literal sustenance of food, but they attempt to consume the metaphorical inventiveness of slaves to craft their own world of sense. In this way we can understand “poverty and inhumanity” as far more than a country’s GDP or unemployment rate.
What I have called Fanon’s “skin of the world” is a metaphor in search of a new mythical system of sense and thought. It is this metaphor that can remind us of how the ravages of Western
“History” and Capitalism converge onto the space and geography of the blackened such that a narrative of development and teleology can no longer be thought to be appropriate to Black thought and praxis. The mythical and economic stature of what became “the West” is not a future point of progress in time, but was produced, and is reproduced, by the simultaneous violence of enslavement, colonization, and the plantation. “Skin” allows us to grasp this simultaneity that a
225 focus on the myth of time, progress, and development would distort. It is for this reason that Fanon can ceaselessly return to the thematic that he is not looking to follow or chase after “the West” as if “the West” were to come rather than constantly existing in the same space as the “blackened,” deriving the means of its existence from blackened skin. Thus, Fanon exhorts les damnés to “[n]ot be content to define [themselves] in relation to the values which preceded [them]” and “[t]o focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them” (2011/2004, 500/55; emphasis mine). Fanon endeavors to think the relation of the plantation system in order to methodically rupture that relation so that their may be a new relationship of skin on the world.
The flesh of humanism would be a new plot, a new form, and a countermyth to our current plantation humanism. Fanon reminds us that, “Moral reparation for national independence does not fool us and it doesn’t feed us. The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth”
(2011/2004, 502/58). The flesh, as I argue with Spillers, is the resource that is preyed upon and constantly distorted so that new meanings of exploitation and domination may be engendered.
Whatever we could be, whatever a blackened humanism that would turn to the ravages of the flesh might come to mean, has been distorted by the economic, political, and erotic practices of the plantation. In this way, what we are often trained to think of as “natural” Black gender and sexuality may itself be another distortion that feeds a system of domination. What I have shown in this dissertation is that the writing that comes from the blackened spaces of the world makes explicit these distortions that pose themselves as “human” reality. The apprehensions of these distortions leads to the desire for invention, the feeling of a new system of existence. By bringing
Spillers, Wynter, and Fanon together I have argued that a new mode of writing/reading and praxis can be constructed. The new mode of writing/reading would ceaselessly search for the missing action (l’acte manqué) of the archives we have inherited. The plantation neither saw nor recorded
226 everything though it reproduced immense value for our current world. We are searching for the possibility of inventions that escaped appropriation. And in the search there is value.
Perhaps it will be claimed that this search would inevitably turn into a mythology that would distort what is “real.” But in no way is it clear that any form of existence is possible without the work of mythology that can adapt sensation and meaning to the dynamic and shifting contexts of our lives. Furthermore, our “humanism” (whether it be bourgeois or plantation) is already a mythology that supports our present structures and global space; it is already a theft. The question of this dissertation has been: what do you do with stolen life? I have ventured that we can neither simply turn away from the theft in the hopes of finding some “pure” and unmarked form of
Blackness nor can we simply accept the value system that this theft has produced. Thus, a complex engagement must be entered into that would allow us to invent through the dominant systems of
“the West.” After all, if mythology has robbed us why not rob mythology? In doing so invention would contest our present forms of life that often are allowed to recede into the background, craft new metaphors of ourselves, and, perhaps, invent the space of black mythologies with the potential to name Black life for itself.
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WILLIAM M. PARIS Pennsylvania State University • Department of Philosophy 228 Sparks • State College • PA 16801 Phone: (814) 865-1150 [email protected] ______
EDUCATION
2012-2018 The Pennsylvania State University PhD, Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Expected 2018)
Dissertation Title: The Value of Invention: On the Ungendering of Black Life in Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers Dissertation Committee: Nancy Tuana and Robert Bernasconi (Co-Chairs), Leonard Lawlor, AnneMarie Mingo
Abstract: My dissertation is a contribution to Ethics, Social/Political Philosophy, and Social Epistemology from African-American, Africana, and Black Feminist Philosophy perspectives. I argue that anti-racist struggle must be animated by the invention of new values within gender, sexuality, and class. By bringing Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers together I show that the invention of more human values calls for different modes of knowing what it is to be human. Understanding how chattel slavery and European colonialism constructed “Black life” offers generative epistemological and ethical resources for making the human a site of invention.
2010-2012 New York University MA, Interdisciplinary Studies
2006-2010 Susquehanna University BA, Philosophy and Creative Writing, summa cum laude
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Black Feminist Philosophy, Africana Philosophy, African-American Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race
AREAS OF CONCENTRATION
Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, 20th Century Continental Philosophy
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
2018-Present Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow in Philosophy at Northwestern University