Exceptional Antagonism of Ascendant Humanity by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#16, JUNE-AUGUST/2015

The global hegemony of Empire-as-western imperialist power constitutes an exceptional situation of ‘being-in-the-world’ against which we experience the spiritual vitality and uncanny freedom of our human condition. Indeed, the rational signification of subhumanity designated as ‘race’, ideologically colludes with a massive global importation, exportation and enslavement of human ‘being’ that rounded up people, families, communities by the masses; murdering, displacing, imprisoning, raping, beating, branding and torturing humans into a functional subservience of ‘objecthood’. This violent biopolitical crucible of chattel slavery and colonization relegated the vast majority of humanity into a socio-ontological underground of modernity, as subhuman foils to a mainstream populated and organized according to the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum.

‘Race’ thus serves as an anthropological conduit for the reception of objective violence and production of ceaseless labor which spearheaded the vast accumulation of capital that facilitated a flourishing of systematic world trade which laid the structural-inert foundations for the socio-historical triumph of modernity itself.

Therefore, genuine assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ constitutes a ‘problem’(1) and ‘biopolitical danger’(2) that introduces an ascendant rupture at the anthropological core of modernity, disclosing even more socio-ontological terrain to the human condition, and hence simultaneously revealing more variable atmospheres of emancipatory praxis, than can possibly be exhausted by vulgar non-mediated loyalty to any loud mechanistic deities of biological determinism. Deities which lead us further along an arid epistemological labyrinth of materialist causality that somehow always culminates in that all too familiar and comfortable cul de sac of an ‘end of history’ as an unrepentant clone and exact reproduction of a western imperialist continuum.

No reconciliation is possible between the everyday strivings of an ascendant humanity asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ and contemporary reconfigurations of western imperialist power that inscribe the originary violent biopolitical reduction of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’ through chattel slavery into a sovereign legitimacy of Empire. This structural-inert violence which is inscribed in modernity as passive socio-cultural mediations, transforms into outright oppressive violent praxis whenever confronted by human agency originating from Black subjectivity.(3) This is why a neo-colonial police agent, overcome with an alarming sense of ‘biopolitical danger’, feels impelled to draw, aim and wield a gun at pre-teens during a pool party while mashing a 15 year old girl's face into the ground.(4) Indeed, the socio-ontologically stifling structural-inert rigor of globalized racist dehumanization is in itself a stirring testament to the very force of ascendant humanity being subjugated.

Maintaining the topographic anthropological hierarchy of modernity, which consists of an imperial mainstream of western bourgeois subjectivity, and a socio-ontological underground ‘overpopulated’ by the wretched of the earth, necessitates a constant renewal of that constitutive primacy of violence against Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, thereby rendering such violence objective in scope and rational in application. Thus neo-colonial police agents function in accordance to the normative gaze of established power; whether beating Rodney King down to a writhing disfigured mass of blood and flesh in Los Angeles, California; or murdering Tyron Lewis in St. Petersburg, Florida; or murdering Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati, Ohio; or ‘accidentally’ electrocuting Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore to death in the suburbs of Paris, France; or murdering Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London, England; or putting a bullet in Oscar Grant while he was lying face down with his hands over the back of his head in Oakland, California; or murdering Kimani Gray in Brooklyn, New York; or murdering Michael Brown with his hands raised to the sky in Ferguson, Missouri; or ‘accidentally’ breaking the spinal cord and thereby killing Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, they are merely operating with whatever reasonable force is required to pacify the insurgent trajectory of an ascendant humanity by “murdering men wherever they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.”(5) And yet still, each one of these ‘racial incidents’ ignited a Return of that oppressive violence back to source as geonational insurrection-in-itself against Empire.

As such, any radical shift of philosophical interrogation and epistemological orientation which existentially recognizes the irreducible human ‘being’ of lived Black experience, discloses an exceptional antagonism,(6) introducing inevitable tremors of historical disequilibrium along socio-ontological fault lines of racist dehumanization and coloniality in the Raw which undergird the entire historical project of modernity.

(1) W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Dover, 1903, 1994) p.1-7.

(2)Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.161-5. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, (Picador, 1976, 2003) p.254-5.

(3)Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (Verso, 1960, 1991) p.718.

(4)Carol Cole-Frowe and Richard Fausset, nytimes.com, “Jarring Image of Police’s Use of Force at Texas Pool Party”, The New York Times, June 8, 2015.

(5)Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1961) p.311.

(6)Frank B. Wilderson III speaks of this antagonism as decisively destabilizing and disarticulating “the categories foundational to the assumptive logic of Marxism”. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?”, Social Identities, Vol.9, Number 2, 2003, see also The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.2, Issue#1, DEC/2009-JAN/2010.