THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#8, SEPT-NOV/2019
“Philosophy must go to school not only with the poets,philosophy needs to go to school with the musicians.”
-Cornel West
Insurgent philosophy intervenes against the classical arrangement of thought between absolute claims of knowledge as set forth by scientific authority, absolute claims of truth as set forth by religious dogma and absolute claims of sovereign legitimacy as set forth by western imperialist power.
Indeed, it is the responsibility of the philosopher to destabilize the melody of the absolute towards introducing stark staccato breakbeats of the possible, confronting the normative gaze and disrupting established structures of meaning, thereby enabling spontaneous potentialities of Truth to emerge out of the epistemic dissonance of interrogations of the Real and enunciations of Revolt. As such, philosophy as a sustained discursive engagement of rupture with unarticulated meaning, does not produce Truth and can never lay claim to possess Truth, but rather manifests a rugged commitment to an uninhibited search for a method of engagement with the revelation of Truth as it rises and sets upon the lived horizons of Religion, Science, Art, Love and Justice. It is this rigorous uninhibited search for Truth that allows philosophy to develop an epistemic rhythm towards its own possibility. Wright discloses the radical tempo of this insurgent philosophical rhythm, with his emancipatory discursive imperative to “be on top of theory; don’t let theory be on top of you.” [1]
The philosopher thus passionately seeks out and unsettles Truth wherever it is discursively wed into comfortable arrangements with established power, arousing lived potentialities and seducing Truth towards rupture from any coercive bonds of affinity with the normative gaze that restrain discursive potentialities from an emancipatory trajectory of dialectic engagement with the call of history and response of human subjectivity. Indeed, insurgent philosophical engagement enunciates Revolt at a register that is openly hostile to an imperial symphony of tradition, culture and institutional memory, thus interrogating the Real without deference to the normative gaze.
Insurgent philosophy takes a B-Boy stance facing forward as lived certitude of risk filled confrontational intentionality against a future without guarantees, standing back to back with “the Angel of history” whose “face is turned toward the past.” [2] Indeed, “where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” [3] Insurgent philosophy begins in the Raw, as lived intensity of unfiltered proximity to the disaster of history, with an unapologetic orientation continuously tested by the socio-ontological weight of bearing witness to the global scope of human suffering, without the recuperative sentimentality Benjamin attributes to “the Angel of history” that seeks to “make whole what has been smashed”. Although it is common to seek cultural nationalist respite in a mythic wholeness to be regained from a past shattered by catastrophe, how long can Black subjectivity avoid and seek to delay the lived universality constituted in confronting this disaster of coloniality head on through emancipatory praxis against Empire towards lived potentialities of geonational egalitarian community?
And yet, insurgent philosophy commits to the Blues metaphysic as a possibility of rebirth from which to “awaken the dead”, by introducing discursive openings towards emancipatory praxis and sustaining epistemic disequilibrium against a refined linear orchestra of accumulated traditions, dogmatic presuppositions and conventional wisdom. Insurgent philosophy then begins to reproach the continuous global reconfiguration of structural-inert power that refurbishes this “pile of debris” under the veil of an epistemological harmony with a western imperialist continuum.
As such, insurgent philosophy interrogates the Real and enunciates Revolt to the beat of discursive rhythms of thought that resonate outside the chords of a cognitive predictability that abuses scientific method, religious authority and cultural tradition as horizons of absolute truth and totality of knowledge intent on preserving epistemic closure under coercion from the normative gaze of established power.
Insurgent philosophy thus suffers equally under the impatient ridicule of ‘common sense’ advocacy, the metaphysical veil of dogmatic religiosity and the formal rationality of academic sanction. For each exhibit an epistemological reliance upon an orthodox duality of thought intent on pacifying creative binary tensions by severing the medium of discourse from lived potentialities of the message it conveys. This analytical orientation appeases a pragmatic clarity of reductionist thought with a correlative promiscuity between necessary falsehood and attractive statistical findings as empirically meaningful, only the better to circumvent lived imperatives of insurgent philosophical method from dialectical realization as an epistemic catalyst towards emancipatory praxis.
Conventional thought hence charts its success in commercial terms as tone-deaf objectivity based upon selling itself as a commodification of acquired knowledge at an inaudible distance from the Real. No doubt, reactionary efforts toward such cognitive distance reproduce thought-as-commodity towards the renewal of objective registers of discursive commitment that demean and undermine the Blues metaphysic of lyrically dense layered imperatives of philosophical possibility over minimalist beats within close range and hence intimately coarse proximity to the Real.
To enunciate Revolt catalyzes thought through language towards disrupting the familiar continuity of the Real. Breakbeats of discontinuity from the lived topography of imperial coherence invigorate the philosophical trajectory of Black liberation discourse with an emancipatory relevance and intellectual rigor that confers merit upon thought by the insurgent caliber of its epistemic dissonance against the legitimating harmony of a western imperialist continuum. Thus thought merits consideration as insurgent in so far as it inscribes a lyrical constancy of intellectual rigor upon breakbeats of epistemological dissonance with emancipatory relevance as refusal of melodic approximation to the normative gaze.
Without an awareness of the emancipatory relevance of intellectual rigor as indispensable to the socio-historical narrative of human liberation which conditions lived Black experience towards an opening, a possibility – a way out of no way – since the imposition of modernity by western imperialist power, it becomes that much easier to uncritically succumb to the normative gaze that legitimizes what Cruse condemns as the “fundamentally anti-theoretical, anti-aesthetic, anti-cultural, anti-intellectual . . . application of values in the pursuit of materialistic ends.” [4] Indeed, insurgent philosophy rejects such sound pragmatic injunctions that dull the cutting edge of Black radical discourse into an accessible language of informal logic tailored to non-resisting masses already mercilessly conditioned to approach thought as yet another market oriented commodity.
To enunciate Revolt dislocates Truth from its stable firmament within an imperial constellation and traces its once celestial trajectory of veracity, coming to terms with its violent structural positionality and newfound relativity within that “pile of debris” as readily visible to dogmatic regulations of thought unearthed in archaeological fashion by sifting through the epistemic ruins of authority leaning upon the weathered pillars of science and religion to stabilize the lived topography of its own socio-historical coherence. As such, the normative gaze coerces Truth into an impossible stability that deliberately exiles Truth from the Real, the better to further masquerade the source of its sovereign legitimacy by the very propagation of objective violence and miseducation of soul that imposes an unreflective fealty unto itself as absolute authority in the absence of Truth that it necessarily veils by sheer volume of its dogmatic claims.
Empire anchors its epistemic cartography as the Real through coloniality of power at the expense of Truth. As such, when no longer visible as a fixed firmament in the sky of the Divine, the emergence of Truth into the Real of history thus becomes contingent upon emancipatory praxis. To be sure, emancipatory praxis does not itself create Truth, but rather introduces the conditions of possibility for its emergence upon the horizon of lived experience as Religion, Science, Art, Love or Justice against the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum. No philosophy worthy of the name, dismisses the ardor of search or reasons away the risk of undertaking required of human ‘being’ when encountering Truth, indeed, insurgent philosophy compels one to seek Truth even where it leads to messianic Revelation towards the Divine in a Persian dungeon or messianic Revolt against human slavery throughout the Americas.
Indeed, the Black radical imagination discloses enunciations of Revolt towards lived potentialities of emancipatory praxis under even the harshest of socio-historical circumstances by virtue of its genesis through existential resistance against the systematic biopolitical imposition of direct slavery upon human ‘being’.
Thus the insurgent philosophical discourse of Black liberation incites interrogations of the Real without ceding sovereign legitimacy to a western imperialist continuum. Cleaver understood this far too well. “For too long Black people have relied upon the analyses and ideological perspectives of others. Our struggle has reached a point now where it would be absolutely suicidal for us to continue this posture of dependency. No other people in the world are in the same position as we are, and no other people in the world can get us out of it except ourselves. There are those who are all too willing to do our thinking for us, even if it gets us killed. However, they are not willing to follow through and do our dying for us. If thoughts bring about our deaths, let them at least be our own thoughts, so that we will have broken, once and for all, with the flunkeyism of dying for every cause and every error—except our own.” [5] Remembering always that it is precisely due to the geohistorical significance of the fact that “no other people in the world are in the same position as we are” that Black liberation constitutes the universal scope of its emancipatory relevance.
And yet, in movement towards constituting socio-historically relevant enunciations of Revolt, no self-respecting Black radical intellectual refuses to engage with “the analyses and ideological perspectives of others”. The insurgent trajectory of Cleaver’s own thought contributes towards the theoretical basis for the Black Panther Party’s unrivaled revolutionary internationalist orientation and working non-paternalistic solidarity with the New Left. [6] As such, it is reliance on the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum towards bestowing legitimacy upon insurgent thought that Cleaver stridently warns against.
Insurgent philosophical discourse is characterized by interrogating the Real and enunciating Revolt towards generating epistemic ruptures between thought and the easy familiarity of self-evident imperial consensus. “This raises a crucial question as to whether members of the established white American radical movement would even recognize a new radical theory if they saw it. This is especially true when and if such a new radical theory emanates from the Black direction.” [7] For such a radical theory emanating from the socio-ontological underground of modernity as “the Black direction”, does not speak in oppositional idioms of civil society vying for reconciliation within the imperial mainstream. Rather “the Black direction” of thought, disrupts the imperial coherence of modernity itself by voicing an exceptional antagonism that discloses its irreconcilable trajectory of emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power.
Unfamiliar ideas and conceptual difficulties arise from interrogating the exceptional antagonism of lived Black experience, thus provoking unfamiliar thoughts and difficult questions in relation to the Real that revoke the epistemological sanctity of the normative gaze, all in favor of a lived insecurity of spiritual anxiety and metaphysical dread that unveils the possibility of intellectual growth at the expense of unreflective culture and popular consensus guaranteed by miseducation of soul and objective violence.
How is it possible to then expect Black radical thought to be so easily susceptible to passive comprehension when it consists of destabilizing a formal logic that stubbornly recognizes its own possibility as the result of deterministic replications predicated upon fixed constellations of imperial coherence? For as Wright tellingly enunciates, “And at the moment this process starts, at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.” [8] No doubt, the Black radical imagination exerts an unbearable socio-ontological weight of emancipatory dissonance upon ordinary discourse and formal logic, unsettling an entire coloniality of reference that posits itself as epistemologically exhaustive and in complete harmony with the Real.
Indeed, the discursive movement of Black radical thought against the normative gaze constitutes an emancipatory rhythm of insurgent philosophy between increasing epistemic proximity to the Real, socio-ontological disequilibrium and historical gravity of unavoidable confrontation against Empire.
As enunciation of Revolt, Black liberation discourse does not correspond to a melodic epistemological synchronicity with the Real, but rather opens potentialities of rupture against the Real through its very interrogation, and as such cannot be enunciated authentically within the normative gaze without calling modernity itself, as imposed by western imperialist power, fundamentally into question.
[1] Richard Wright, from Black Power, included in Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997) p.107.
[2] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol.4, 1938-1940, (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Harvard Press, 2006) p.392.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, (New York: Apollo Editions, 1967) p.100.
[5] Eldridge Cleaver, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party”, Target Zero, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1969, 2006) p.172. emphasis mine.
[6] Cleaver, Soul on Ice, (New York: Delta/Dell Publishing, 1968, 1991) and Post-Prison Writings & Speeches, (New York: Vintage, 1969). Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
[7] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution, (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1968) p.27.
[8] Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing”, Richard Wright Reader, p.41.
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