THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#7, JUNE-AUGUST/2019
Readers often measure their initial approach to philosophy with overinflated valuations affording the cozy comforts of common sense, overreliance on the dogmatic religion of routine thought, overindulgence in the security of familiar words, and overemphasis on the tranquility of everyday consensus. However, it is precisely against such prescriptive means of epistemological harmony with the normative gaze of Empire that philosophy actively labors against.
Indeed, Empire overdetermines-from-without, imposing biopolitical pacification upon human ‘being’ towards reducing entire populations from lived potentialities of human subjectivity into dominated non-resisting masses of ‘empirical self’ and bewildered herds of rational animality. Objective violence and miseducation of soul work in tandem constituting the normative gaze of Empire with monotonous systematic efficiency towards insuring that the wretched of the earth, who suffer perpetually through a lived fatigue of racist dehumanization and coloniality, do not often choose to embrace emancipatory imperatives of responsibility for human liberation at every crossroads of historical possibility. The normative gaze thus aims at preventing uprisings like Ferguson and Baltimore from becoming even more frequent phenomena by encouraging everyday people to actively participate in our own biopolitical pacification, even as structural-inert conditions of oppression and exploitation mercilessly engulf our ‘being-in-the-world’.
Under such conditions, when the masses are clearly not in open rebellion against Empire, does not the very enunciation of Revolt find realization upon an avant-garde trajectory that ultimately risks exacerbating existing epistemological tensions between intellectual rigor, emancipatory relevance and popular accessibility? No doubt, efforts towards reducing the scope of emancipatory relevance to a mere therapeutic narrative of pragmatic assimilation into the imperial mainstream-as-civil society leave the radical imagination stranded in a logical positivist temperament of popular abdication to the normative gaze. For the normative gaze imposes a coercive anonymity upon human agency by violently inscribing fixed boundaries upon the horizon of lived Black experience which necessarily mediate against insurgent potentialities of thought by positing the Real of a western imperialist continuum as the historical culmination of all that is existentially possible.
Insurgent philosophy pierces the normative gaze, disrupting the topography of imperial coherence and unarticulated structures of meaning that preempt both the enunciation of cognition, perception and imagination in ordinary discourse, and the systematic organization of formal logic in the Academy. As such, if insurgent philosophy does not first provoke the reader to transcend the comforting rationality of discursive familiarity, by what measure can such thought claim to be challenging the normative gaze of established power? Indeed, how often does the socio-historical relevance of emancipatory praxis outpace the discursive capacity of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society? How might well intentioned oppositional strategies meant to frame the Black radical imagination within the stable rationality of popular accessibility, necessarily facilitate an epistemological pacification of insurgent thought by the normative gaze of western imperialist power?
“Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.” [1] Only several years removed from liberating himself from bondage, that’s the exact advice Douglass received from some of his fellow abolitionists, precisely as he began embarking on what would become a lifelong trajectory of intellectual engagement against western imperialist power as it was then constituted through direct human slavery. Although such pragmatic suggestions ultimately served as encouragement towards his Promethean autobiographical endeavors, Douglass clearly understood that facts in and of themselves, even facts regarding the indisputable horror of first-hand accounts about the violent regulatory imposition of slavery upon human ‘being’, are too often subsumed within established structures of meaning and thereby neutralize potentialities of insurrection against human slavery by epistemologically reinforcing the sovereign legitimacy of the socio-historical conditions of its possibility.
As such, Douglass never truly heeded such well-intentioned counsel by his close allies in the anti-slavery movement. No longer satisfied with the vitally important task of giving empirical account of oppression, Douglass chose to openly think against oppression, as the insurgent intellectual prowess that pervades all three of his autobiographies and five massive volumes of essays and lectures unequivocally discloses. “I could not always follow the injunction, for I was now reading and writing. New views on the subject were being presented to my mind. It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs – I felt like denouncing them.” [2] In this Douglass remained discursively undaunted, even as his abolitionist comrades began noticing that proclaiming him as a “fugitive slave lecturer” [3] became less and less believable to burgeoning crowds gathered to hear him speak out against human slavery from the vantage point of having actually freed himself from such brutal materialist socio-ontological tyranny.
Indeed, the more Douglass triumphed at interpreting the meaning and insurgency of his own existence, rather than merely statically regurgitating the dehumanizing visceral facts that situate and implicate lived Black experience – “People doubted if I had ever been a slave. They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, or act like a slave, and that they believed I had never been south of the Mason and Dixon’s line.” [4] No doubt, for how could anyone expecting an example of racially dehumanized ‘objecthood’ seeking pity, and walking social death beseeching approbation, truly be prepared for the towering unapologetic human figure of Douglass enunciating potentialities of human solidarity in Revolt against tyranny by manifesting the rebirth of human subjectivity-as-lived universal through emancipatory praxis against the ontological weight of social death perpetuated by direct human slavery? It seems that even expressed sympathy for the legal abolition of human slavery within the confines of a nation-state, does little to alleviate an unreflective culturally inbred weight of racist skepticism towards the possibility of human subjectivity outside the anthropological coordinates of ‘white’ identity as embodiment of the universal.
Thus Black intellectual engagement has an intense social burden and ontological severity associated with it, precisely because of the exceptional antagonism which exists between the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ and the imposition of modernity upon the world by a western imperialist continuum. Indeed, modernity itself is inexorably wedded to a global praxis of chattel slavery that generated specific structural-inert conditions of coloniality in the Raw that simultaneously attempt to reduce human ‘being’ to mere matter through objective violence, and then maintain this ‘objecthood’ as a permanent and ‘natural’ fact of life through miseducation of soul.
“To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man that takes his earnings, must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force; the slave must know no Higher Law than his master’s will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate, to his mind, its necessity, but also its absolute rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust away the slave’s chain.” [5] And yet a “contented slave” is not truly “thoughtless”, even if it is only thoughts about self-preservation and pursuit of happiness. For such thoughts serve to acclimate the “slave” as an ‘empirical self’ well within the circumference of the Real as historically constituted by the normative gaze of western imperialist power that seeks to “annihilate his power of reason” towards maintaining “no Higher Law than his master’s will”. What Douglass means by thought is thus existentially weighted with an emancipatory relevance and intellectual rigor that breaches the passive reflexivity and “absolute rightfulness” of an everyday awareness predicated upon the violent systematic biopolitical pacification of human subjectivity which constitutes the “whole relationship” that imposes slavery upon human ‘being’ and yet “must not depend on mere force” alone. Therefore, to be “thoughtless” is to cede the emancipatory relevance of intellectual rigor to an informal logic of ordinary discourse that veils any “inconsistencies in slavery” as thoroughly as, and often in correlation with, the systematic formal rationality of the Academy.
As such, by intellectual rigor is not meant the mathematical rigor of the scientist who reifies formulaic experimental repetition towards utilitarian ends, or the rigor of logical analysis that retreats from the creative tension of enigma into the objective shelter of prescribed rules of thought that culminate in a reassuring clarity of epistemic closure.
Rather it is the intuitive questioning rigor of human ‘being’ enslaved and yet learning to read, write and interrogate the Real under constant threat of torture and death. And the undaunted interpretive rigor of human ‘being’ as fugitive from the systematic imposition of slavery hermeneutically navigating through hostile environments while discerning emancipatory potentialities out of an entire constellation of everyday phenomena, when a sudden wrong interpretation leads not only to her own recapture, but to certain torture and death for all those brothers and sisters who wager their own freedom upon the rigorous fugitive pedagogy of the runaway slave, escaping through the underground railroads of modernity towards a liberated territory of consciousness.
[1] Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, (New York, Collier Books, 1892, 1962) p.217.
[2] Douglass, Life and Times, p.217.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Douglass, p.218.
[5] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, (Barnes and Noble Classics, 1855, 2005) p.238.
No comments:
Post a Comment