THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#4, SEPT-NOV/2018
Ascendant humanity remains defenseless against the structural-inert violence of established power only to the degree to which we cede existential responsibility for the irreducibility of our human agency. For no matter the scope or consequence, all modes of resistance against injustice and oppression begin with a decision of irreducible agency as commitment to a trajectory of emancipatory praxis, thus initiating lived potentialities for the cultivation of human subjectivity from which to continually manifest ever more dynamic realizations of human liberation.
Even in the face of overwhelming odds as maintained through an unaccountable violence constituted by neo-colonial police towards renewing the sovereign legitimacy of Empire, the rebellion of even one human ‘being’ implicates ascendant humanity with potentialities of intersubjective resonance from which to either accept or reject the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum. Hence a horizon of possibility manifests from which to decide to get in groove with that socio-ontological rhythm of constitutive self-determination, relentless transcendence and spiritual upheaval which discloses the human condition as situated consciousness.
In the midst of insurrection-in-itself as an ongoing dynamic of protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion, an ominous moving wall of neo-colonial police in full riot gear amasses before a loose formation of Black youth-as-ascendant humanity in Baltimore, Maryland. An immediacy of dread conditions the intersubjective resonance of these youth towards uniting against the Raw coloniality of an approaching confrontation with structural-inert violence embodied in police agents.
And yet, as dread distinguishes itself from fear by heralding the possibility of emancipatory praxis against the tidal inevitability of imperial repression, an uninhibited rediscovery of human agency against the Real of a pervasive biopolitical pacification of Black community achieves realization in the decision of one brother to pick up a rock, throw it at the neo-colonial police and initiate a Return of structural-inert violence back to source. This compelling rediscovery of human agency floods lived Black experience with a vertigo of emancipatory praxis against the dread of biopolitical persecution, disrupting the concrete stability of the Real as tremors of history begin to accelerate against the imperial coherence of a world seismically shifting unpredictably and moving spontaneously from underneath.
Invariably, another brother picks up a rock in solidarity and joins the melee by launching a throw. Then another brother chooses to do so, and then yet another. Each brother emulates another through an intermediary gaze, by which they see each other resisting, as each constitutes such resistance as themselves in Revolt; not only by choosing to join in the resistance, but by recognizing the social trajectory and ontological implications of each brother’s resistance as their own. As such, each act of resistance simultaneously binds their kinetic distance of interiority with an intersubjective resonance as unity in renunciation of the sovereign legitimacy of western imperialist power and affirmation of their shared and inviolable human ‘being’.
As each decision towards asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ contributes a rhythmic acceleration increasing the dialectic tempo of intersubjective resonance of Revolt amongst them, the antagonistic reciprocity realized by their emancipatory praxis manifests itself through the sheer socio-ontological momentum of resistance that tangibly halts the explicit gravitational impetus of neo-colonial police repression before the intermediary gaze of the world, and pushes back against the barricades of sovereign legitimacy meant to isolate Black liberation within the veil of symbolic victory and hence at a safe distance from engaging history.
As such, what begins as an insufficient act of resistance by one brother becomes an ontological point of departure, which raises the social threshold of spiritual unity for all of those present to existentially overcome the geohistorical limitations enforced against the intersubjective resonance of human solidarity by the violent aggression of neo-colonial police. For as each brother hurls Davidian projectiles at the Goliath of oppression, the simulacrum of ‘protest-as-ritual event’ dissipates, unable to sustain the weight of historical significance introduced by an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity which discloses ever new horizons of emancipatory potentialities in affirmation of authentic human subjectivity-as-lived universal through simultaneous renunciation of the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum.
Hence the intersubjective resonance of Revolt embodied in these Black youth encounters the precipice of anomie, not as a one-way street or cul de sac, but as a lived acclivity and declivity of ethical and legal indeterminacy which structures existing relations of socio-ontological positionality between sovereign legitimacy of western imperialist power and exceptional antagonism of lived Black experience. [1] For the socio-onotological positionality of lived Black experience asymmetrically undercuts the juridical structure and maintenance of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.
No doubt, even relevant concerns regarding the transformation of ‘liberal-democracy’ into totalitarianism risk veiling the Raw of coloniality that already exists between western imperialist power and the wretched of the earth, and thus render obsolete the racist dehumanization that substantiates the juridical scope of ‘liberal democracy’. “But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means.” [2] Therefore, in resisting the accumulative slaughter of human ‘being’ by neo-colonial police via this biopolitical threshold of indeterminacy, emancipatory praxis confronts an imposition of structural-inert violence without legitimate form that incessantly legitimates and reconfigures the topographical coherence of Empire. [3] As such, emancipatory praxis unsettles the coercive anonymity of structural-inert violence, thus reigniting an originary confrontation of exceptional antagonistic reciprocity which calls into question the sovereign legitimacy of a western imperialist continuum. Indeed, “how do we pass from an atmosphere of violence to violence in action?” [4]
The ensuing confrontation between a rebirth of genuine human subjectivity-as-lived universal and the tyranny of established unjust global power, constitutes insurrection-in-itself as yet another socio-historical opening towards making geonational insurrection-for-itself possible . . .
[1] “Modern sovereignties harbor a blind spot, a zone in which power is above the law and thus, at least potentially, a terrain of terror. This wild zone of power, by its very structure impossible to domesticate, is intrinsic to mass-democratic regimes. It makes no difference whether the model of their legitimacy is the liberal claim of political (formal) democracy based on universal, mass suffrage, or the socialist claim of economic (substantive) democracy based on egalitarian distribution of social goods.” Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, (MIT Press, 2000) pp.2-3.
[2] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol.1 1913-1926, (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996, 2004) p.252.
[3] “the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order.” Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (University of Chicago Press, 2003, 2005) p.23.
[4] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.71.
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