THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#19, MARCH-MAY/2016
The normative gaze[1] renders a western imperialist continuum coherent unto itself through objective violence and miseducation of soul, thus constituting hegemony through the topographical legitimation of coloniality.[2] In organizing social consciousness and sanctioning ahistorical memory towards an unreflective public constellation of values, standards and narratives, the normative gaze ideologically veils the concerted praxis and systematic imperatives of globalized structural-inert power with a disinterested existential legitimacy as arbitrary circumstances of the Real.
And yet, the normative gaze is not solely an “ideal from which to order and compare observations”,[3] nor should it be reduced to a rational consensus of interests, for it arises as the epistemological correlate of established power functioning as the Real of absolute authority outside any dependence upon intersubjective resonance, thus imposing itself upon social interactions. Indeed, the normative gaze is ignored only at great consequence to authentic ‘being-in-the-world’.
By preempting both the enunciation of spontaneous thought in ordinary discourse and the articulation of formal rationality in academia, the normative gaze constitutes objective truth as an intervention of materiality upon human agency, mediating against the constitutive self-determination, relentless transcendence and spiritual upheaval of human ‘being’.
Abdicating the irreducibility of human agency to the normative gaze promotes conditions for achieving a substantive identity anchored in stable positionality to the imperial mainstream of modernity.[4] In contrast, human subjectivity is predicated solely upon a lived rhythm of praxis as spiritual resistance of human ‘being’ to this overdetermination-from-without that is subsidized by structural-inert violence and miseducation of soul. Therefore, the normative gaze, as reflexivity of established power imposing the Real upon situated consciousness, operates irrespective of intersubjective modalities of consent or dissent, existing as a sword suspended by a thread over lived Black experience. For “racism has to become a practice: it is not contemplation awakening the significations engraved on things; it is in itself self-justifying violence: violence presenting itself as induced violence, counter-violence and legitimate defense.”[5]
Indeed, the phenomenon of lived Black experience discloses the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum which yields “no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world”[6] as an “object in the midst of other objects”,[7] rendering naked a profound abdication of human subjectivity as the anthropological correlate of Empire.
And yet, against imperialist structures of meaning[8] attempting to suffocate our ascendant humanity, suppressing our capacity to disclose the Real of contemporary human suffering under the weight of established power: we choose to cultivate our all too human voice precisely by speaking loudly, in an unruly manner, and completely out of turn, with a demeanor still simmering from historical injustice, ready at the slightest provocation to boil over into a discursive melee, or social incident.
Against the dread virus of repressive neo-colonial police presence which infects consciousness and inoculates communities of human ‘being’ with a violent omniscience that seeks to silence dissent and contravene socio-historical rebellion at its most nascent ontological and organic expressions: every autonomous thought, every emancipatory gaze at a police agent, every middle finger directed at a politician, every ‘uncouth’ projection of Black masculine bravado, and every semiotic ‘irrational’ expression of Black feminine attitude in the public sphere is indicative of cultural dispositions as persistent and invaluable challenges to unjust authority.
Against the gravity of biopolitical danger that permanently fixes and materially prefigures our guilt before we carry out a single act, when even the mere assertion of our human agency inspires perpetual criminalization: is it any wonder why we often choose to reject the dehumanizing premise, and test the imperial parameters of legality as suggested by globalized structural-inert power?
Against the counterinsurgent dictates of ‘law and order’ that murder, hound, torture, harass and systematically quarantine the wretched of the earth[9] within a vast prison industrial complex, hence fueling mass incarceration and immigrant internment: we experience ‘being-in-the-world’ as socio-ontological fugitives on the run from an omnipresent neo-colonial surveillance apparatus which sees, documents and records everything imaginable, with the exception of our Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. “Racism, as a function of extraordinary individuals conceals the structural dimension of a society that conceals itself from itself through making its noxious values so familiar and frequent that they cease to function as objects of observation and reflection; they, in short, become unreflective and so steeped in familiarity that they become invisible.”[10] Indeed, under the normative gaze of western imperialist power, the human condition exists in coercive anonymity.
[1] Early philosophical engagements with the normative gaze can be found in the work of Frederick Douglass, “it is necessary to resort to these cruelties, in order to make the slave a slave, and to keep him a slave . . . and this can be done only by shutting out the light of education from their minds and brutalizing their persons.” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.1, (New York: International Publishers, 1846, 1950) p.157, and W.E.B. DuBois through his emphasis on ‘double consciousness’ in The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: Dover, 1903, 1994). However, Cornel West initiates the conceptual formulation of the term “normative gaze” towards an insurgent philosophical discourse in “The Genealogy of Modern Racism”, Prophesy Deliverance!, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) p.53.
[2] Although theoretical antecedents grappling with coloniality are found in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Harold Cruse and Eldridge Cleaver, it is Anibal Quijano who ushers in its explicit conceptual breakthrough. See “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America”, Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3, included in Coloniality At Large, edited by Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), see also The Brotherwise Dispatch Vol.2, #17, Sept-Nov/2015.
[3] Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!, p.54.
[4] “Modernity is born when Europe (the peripheral Europe of the Muslim and Ottoman world), begins its expansion beyond its historical limits. Europe arrives in Africa; in India and Japan, thanks to Portugal; in Latin America, and from there to the Philippines, thanks to the Spanish conquest. That is to say, Europe has become itself ‘center.’ The other races and cultures now appear as ‘immature,’ barbarous, underdeveloped. . . . And lastly, the victims of modernity in the periphery (the extermination of the indians, the enslavement of the Africans, the colonization of the Asians) and in the center (the genocide of Jews, the third holocaust) are the "responsible" ones for their own victimization.” Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity, (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996) p.52.
[5] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London: Verso, 1960, 1991) p.720.
[6] DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, p.2.
[7] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.109.
[8] “It concerns a fundamental arrangement of knowledge, which orders the knowledge of beings so as to make it possible to represent them in a system of names. There were doubtless, in this region we now term life, many inquiries other than attempts at classification, many kinds of analysis other than that of identities and differences. But they all rested upon a sort of historical a priori, which authorized them in their dispersion and in their singular and divergent projects, and rendered equally possible all the differences of opinion of which they were the source. This a priori does not consist of a set of constant problems uninterruptedly presented to men’s curiosity by concrete phenomena as so many enigmas; nor is it made up of a certain state of acquired knowledge laid down in the course of the preceding ages and providing a ground for the more or less irregular, more or less rapid, progress of rationality; it is doubtless not even determined by what is called the mentality or the ‘framework of thought’ of any given period, if we are to understand by that the historical outline of the speculative interests, beliefs, or broad theoretical options of the time. This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Vintage, 1966, 1994) p.157-8.
[9] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press: New York, 1961, 1963).
[10] Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, p.38.
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