Enunciations of Revolt by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#1, DEC/2017-FEB/2018

Universal consent is no requisite for geohistorical insurrection. Overemphasis on discovering a ‘fixed’ totality of objective social conditions from which to rationally impose scientific rigor and mathematical precision upon historical events, as politically inevitable ‘revolution’ generated by mechanistic economic contradictions hemmed up within the boundaries of a particular nation-state, inherently hinders socio-ontological potentialities for constituting human subjectivity commensurate with the genesis of insurrection-for-itself.

Laundered throughout academia as an oppositional stance without an insurgent trajectory, ‘revolution’ becomes a commodified plaything, a fetishistic pastime, an eschatological construct for a sedentary and parasitic amalgamation of pigeon holed bureaucrats, scholarly experts and crumb snatching uberspecialists, hiding behind precepts of intellectual quietism, while exhibiting socio-ontological cowardice whenever delegitimizing historical Revolt that refuses to conform towards dogmatic theoretical presumptions as epistemologically sanctioned by a western imperialist continuum. These les chiens de garde [1] are much more likely to riot for a tenured position within a sanctioned academic institution of a socio-political system they claim to struggle so virulently against, then get their pens dirty and implicate their notebooks and laptops by engaging themselves as intellectuals towards actual emancipatory praxis against Empire. [2] Indeed, emancipatory praxis undermines the topographical coherence of objective violence and miseducation of soul which sustains the normative gaze, and hence upsets the very pretext from which they derive their credentialed authority.

However, it is only insofar as the Academy is not an ivory tower leaning towards disinterested pursuit of knowledge that it should be reproached. For such a fate is indicative of more radical possibilities than pragmatic fulfillment of the restorative epistemological needs of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. Indeed, does not even the very fetishization of genuine radical discourse within the Academy simultaneously preserve the long range epistemological potency of that which it momentarily curtails from lived historical immediacy?

Authentic enunciations of Revolt open out towards socio-historical relevance, informing lived trajectories of human subjectivity and revealing new horizons of emancipatory praxis, thereby heightening potentialities of insurrection-for-itself. “There’s something more dangerous about attacking the pigs of the power structure verbally than there is in walking into the Bank of America with a gun and attacking it forthrightly.” [3] Here, Cleaver’s allusion towards “something more dangerous” discloses an epistemological crisis which erupts during attempts at enunciating the socio-onotological imperative towards Revolt ignited by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. For the geohistorical imperative of Black liberation overwhelms in scope the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum which informs and regulates that which can be discursively conceptualized. As such, uninformed action is just as much a debasement of emancipatory praxis as irrelevant theory, even when uninformed action finds itself in direct confrontation with a representative institution of advanced neo-liberal capitalism ie. “walking into the Bank of America with a gun”.

[1] Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs, (Monthly Review Press, 1961).

[2] David L. Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower, (University of Nebraska Press, 1991, 2005).

[3] Eldridge Cleaver, Post-Prison Writings & Speeches, (Vintage, 1969) p.150.