THE
BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#16, JUNE-AUG/2023
The genesis of the meaning of the Blues metaphysic can be sought in the question of being-towards-the Divine[1] as Yearning towards an unforeseen rupture, sublime possibility and inexhaustible horizon of meaning that reveals the Truth of the human condition moved by an emancipatory imperative towards radically interrogating the absolute comprehensiveness of the Real as constituted by the normative gaze[2] of a western imperialist continuum that saturates lived Black experience with biopolitical pacification.
For the process of biopolitical pacification is never truly accomplished until human subjectivity abdicates its own sovereignty of situated consciousness by adopting the normative gaze of established power and therefore begins to see lived dynamics of human ‘being’ as a fixed plenum of ‘objecthood’ that culminates into an empirical self-as-rational animal which ontologically substantiates an unyielding socio-historical positionality of human suffering as an empirically verifiable Fact of Blackness[3] amidst a vast monistic aggregate of materialist determinism that constitutes the world according to the Raw coloniality of structural-inert violence which generates a Manichean coherence between the imperial mainstream and the underground of modernity.[4]
The question of the Blues metaphysic as a radical beginning constitutes an interrogation of the Real; for a radical beginning implicates the chosen point of departure towards emancipatory praxis as a mere foothold upon the mountain of total commitment, a lived wager of socio-historical momentum and ontological relevance against an exhaustive materiality of existence that situates consciousness to adversity and thus mediates the emancipatory potentialities of lived experience. Epistemic abdication to the Real encourages retreat from the conditions of possibility for a radical beginning by prioritizing necessity towards preserving the harmonious continuity of the world guaranteed by the normative gaze of established power.
The Blues metaphysic, as initiated through emancipatory intentionality of striving against the Real, renews the question of the meaning of a radical beginning as a lived rhythm of disequilibrium against the imperial coherence of the world and lyrical rupture against established structures of meaning that disclose an uprising of consciousness against the Real that situates it.
No doubt, the question of the meaning of the Blues metaphysic as a radical beginning always already outpaces the comprehensive encroachment of a western imperialist continuum upon human ‘being’, and speaks through the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as an exceptional antagonism against the normative gaze of modernity. Thus, the Blues metaphysic, as a vast creative wellspring of emancipatory aesthetics, radical imagination and insurgent discourse,[5] begins with lived Black experience as the call of human ‘being’ through “intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual unrest”[6] and response of human community as “plaintive rhythmic melody, with touching minor cadences, which despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing”[7] amidst the disaster of history.
To be sure, “The disaster of the man of color is to have been enslaved. The disaster of white inhumanity is to have somewhere committed the murder of Man. And still today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally”[8] through materialist significations of ‘race’. Accordingly, the Blues metaphysic enunciates a socio-ontological disequilibrium of being-towards-the Divine that at times finds existential expression through “a guttural cry and a wrenching moan”[9] as Yearning that sustains a kinetic distance of interiority as the constitutive self-determining movement of human ‘being’ towards human subjectivity against being overdetermined-from-without by the Real, and thus introduces ruptures within established structures of meaning towards potentialities of Revolt against the racist dehumanization that inscribes modernity.
Indeed, the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ is countered by a western imperialist continuum with a “succession of negations of Man” that preserve the ethical basis of modern secular humanism with an “avalanche of murders”[10] towards the biopolitical pacification of socio-ontological potentialities of Black liberation that speak to a radical universality beyond the materialist scope of a western imperialist continuum and its dehumanizing nihilism as scantily clad in a fetish of rationality.
As such, the question of the Blues metaphysic voices a lived wager towards overcoming nihilism[11] through improvisational search for provisional foundations[12] as a radical beginning from which to engage questions of human ‘being’, reality, freedom, universality, consciousness, temporality, Justice, mortality, liberation and the Divine, without recourse to a preordained harmony of social equilibrium, guarantee of ontological stability or restorative necessity of historical precedent.
By manifesting lived potentialities of Truth beyond the reach of objective scrutiny and comprehensive examinations of the Real, the Blues metaphysic calls into question the dogmatic fundamentalism that informs contemporary materialist conceptions about the world, the constitutive frameworks of our inherited beliefs and the everyday familiarity of sanctioned epistemologies about what is immediately given in the form of empirical sense perception in correlation to established power.
For the Blues metaphysic intones the tragedy, ambiguity, bleakness and unceasing socio-historical range of human suffering as an imperative that commits the question of the meaning of human ‘being’, as radical ontological freedom and unprecedented register of universality, to a lived trajectory of emancipatory praxis that is at once immersed in the disaster of history, and yet implicated by a relentless transcendence beyond the physics of reductionist materialism that racially foregrounds modern secular humanism. The Blues metaphysic thus disrupts the absolute totality and sovereign legitimacy of the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum.
And yet, although the Blues metaphysic cannot be grasped through objective studies of the Real that refuse to venture outside the empirical scope of human sense perception, what does the question of the meaning of the Blues metaphysic reveal about the ontological consequence of western imperialist power that inscribes the epistemic basis of modernity with nihilism? “Nihilism is to be understood here not” only “as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world.”[13]
Nihilism arises with the deafening awareness that the objective basis with which modernity attempts to justify itself through the normative gaze, both to itself and to the world, as an ethically sound and objectively meaningful foundation of sovereign legitimacy, is in itself objectively meaningless outside of its inexorable relation to a western imperialist continuum. And in the face of this nihilism, what happens as the Blues metaphysic calls into question the unreflective imposition of power upon structures of meaning by which we approach and thus constitute the Real, especially in the correspondence between human ‘being’ and the exhaustive materiality of existence that situates consciousness?
To be sure, the socio-historical relevance, soul moving vitality and ontological significance of Negro Spirituals[14] bear witness to the irreducibility of agency and irreconcilability with the Real that defines the human condition as a phenomenon of presence towards self, engagement in the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another. For the origin of Negro Spirituals by human ‘being’ suffering under the systematic violent imposition of chattel slavery discloses the Blues metaphysic as an existential commitment of radical ontological freedom, situated consciousness realizing itself as a kinetic distance of interiority that introduces meaning into the world, surpasses the situated present and uproots from the constituted past. “While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound; — and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone . . . they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.”[15]
And in thus transcending epistemic limitations of philosophical discourse, the Blues metaphysic reveals the constitutive self-determination, relentless transcendence and spiritual upheaval of the human condition as a socio-ontological depth of Yearning against the Real that engages the disaster of history by manifesting being-towards-the Divine as lived potentialities of human subjectivity that inaugurate instability within the materialist determinism that informs the normative gaze of western imperialist power. An existential instability that profoundly uproots and fundamentally contests the almost indiscernible background framework of the Real that corresponds to the barbaric imposition of ‘objecthood’ upon human ‘being’ through chattel slavery.
The Blues metaphysic heralds the conditions of possibility for a lived rhythm of praxis that keeps on pushing beyond deterministic boundaries of social death, materialistic causality and substantive consistency that mischaracterize the human condition as an empirical self-as-rational animal. “I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”[16]
As such, Negro Spirituals testify to a Yearning and socio-ontological movement of being-towards-the Divine as the source of emancipatory praxis for an enslaved community of human ‘being’ emerging into history by way of resisting the Real of chattel slavery as Revolt against the violent imposition of ‘objecthood’ upon the human condition.[17] “Not only did those Blacks, torn from their tribal moorings in Africa, transported across the Atlantic, survive under hostile conditions of life, but they left a vivid record of their sufferings and longings in those astounding religious songs known as spirituals, and their descendants, freed and cast upon their own in an alien culture, created the blues.”[18] Indeed, be it Dutty Boukman, Tacky, Harriet Tubman, Nganga Nzumbi, Samuel Sharpe or Nat Turner, the emergence of the Divine into the disaster of history through emancipatory praxis does not occur unscathed, as there is always a cost that the burden of Promethean resistance against human slavery exacts upon lived Black experience.
For as the Divine enters the disaster of history, the Blues metaphysic emerges in its wake. “The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, — and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because ‘there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.’”[19]
And yet, is it not the very movement of situated consciousness, that in communicating “the soul-killing effects of slavery”, deliberately initiates existential liberationist potentialities of resistance preceding essence in defiance of social death at a vital juncture of constitutive self-determination that discloses the universality of radical ontological freedom? That same radical ontological freedom that dialectically emerges into history through slave Revolt against the very structural-inert violence that works to systematically negate the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’?
By definition, the Blues metaphysic speaks to a way out of no way, arising as it does out of the anti-slavery dialectic as the movement of consciousness constituting itself through lived rhythm of praxis as presence towards self, which is always already engagement in the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another, as defiance of the Real that both situates and mediates against it. “I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”[20] And just what is this “same emotion” if not the mood of situated consciousness committed towards a radical beginning and thus overcoming dread by actualizing itself as defiance to the world of joy and pain, in all its splendid contingency, through lived rhythm of praxis as very the basis of human subjectivity?
Indeed, what happens when we grapple with the restless ambiguity of choice that confronts human ‘being’ as dread in the face of the catastrophic violence of racist dehumanization and coloniality in the Raw[21] that ushers in “the complete emergence of secular man”, and thus consecrates the Americas as “the largest single depository for humanism” which all but cements the Fact of Blackness as a positionality of human suffering withdrawn from ethical consideration and legal redress, insofar as “the Black man was set apart throughout the New World from the start”?[22] Significantly, the structural-inert violence that socio-historically displaces human ‘being’ outside the register of modern secular humanism through chattel slavery, itself, generates the conditions of possibility for an exceptional antagonism that authorizes the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as the harbinger of a radical universality of the human condition beyond the scope of the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum.
For even as the Blues metaphysic sustains a kinetic distance of interiority that defines the human condition as constitutive self-determination, relentless transcendence and spiritual upheaval against a biopolitical pacification that systematically reduces human ‘being’ to ‘the body’ – a clear sign that the abdication of human subjectivity can operate with the same materialist efficiency as a slave ledger recording fiscal transactions of inhumanity at an auction block, the normative gaze of western imperialist power continues to propagate this reductionist materialism through objective violence and miseducation of soul that ultimately preserves its global hegemony as an ontology endorsed by the absolute authority of a materialist conception of the world that overdetermines-from-without as the Real and thus structurally violates radical ontological freedom as the threshold of human subjectivity.
To be sure, the Blues metaphysic thwarts a western imperialist continuum by appropriating the “zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily barren and arid region, a positionality stripped bare of every essential from which an authentic upheaval can arise”[23]” as the condition of possibility for an unprecedented socio-ontological upheaval arising out of the exceptional antagonism introduced by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ against the Real. The Blues metaphysic thus sets in motion openings against the demeaning of human ‘being’ as a vulgar reflexive pantomime of materialist determinism by the normative gaze of modernity.
Consequently, by implicating the ontological relevance and socio-historical movement of emancipatory praxis as a lived wager upon the human condition itself, the Blues metaphysic lyrically pervades existential orientations of insurgent thought that disclose Black liberation as the contested horizon upon which the radical universality of human subjectivity is being decided in our contemporary world.
Indeed, the question of the meaning of the Blues metaphysic bears witness to an exceptional antagonism as the rhythm of possibility for Black subjectivity to realize itself as renunciation against the Real of a western imperialist continuum with respect to the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ through emancipatory praxis. Thus, the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, as an exceptional antagonism, by disputing the Real as absolute, discloses the Blues metaphysic as a radical beginning and spiritual reservoir of recurring potentialities of the anti-slavery dialectic as open-ended insurgent movement to the breakbeat of radical ontological freedom.
This radical ontological freedom defines human ‘being’ as the irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real, and as the lived rhythm of praxis that is responsible for constituting human subjectivity out of the disaster of history and force of contingency that situates consciousness as presence towards self, engagement in the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another.
As such, the question of the Blues metaphysic as a radical beginning confronts the coercive gravity of the Real with a profound transformation of perspective, intuitive reach and intentionality of situated consciousness that communicates the Truth of human ‘being’ as radical ontological freedom by destabilizing an imperial coherence of materialist determinism as ‘race’, and an entirety of epistemic presuppositions and established structures of meaning that have their origin in the violent imposition of ‘objecthood’ upon human ‘being’ through chattel slavery by western imperialist power.
[1] "Only religion and the arts were not completely submerged by Euro-American concepts. Music, dance, religion, do not have artifacts as their end products, so they were saved. These nonmaterial aspects of the African's culture were almost impossible to eradicate." Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Blues People, (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963) p.16.
“Spirituals helped to construct community among the slaves and infused this imagined community with hope for a better life. … Spirituals were embedded in and gave expression to a powerful yearning for freedom.” Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1998) p.7.
[2] The normative gaze is constituted through objective violence and miseducation of soul as the unreflective imposition of established power that provides a comprehensive background context to lived experience, and thus frames what is possible by mediating against both what we see and what we expect to see.
[3] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967) Chapter Five pp.109-140.
[4] “The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible. . . . This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963) pp.38-40.
[5] "the African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable. Afro-Americans … inherited all these complexities with, of course, whatever individual nuances were dictated by their particular lives." Jones/Baraka, p.7.
“Through the blues, menacing problems are ferreted out from the isolated individual experience and restructured as problems shared by the community. As shared problems, threats can be met and addressed within a public and collective context.” Davis, p.33
[6] W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1903, 1989) p.164.
[7] Ibid, pp.155-156.
[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.231. modified translation mine own.
[9] Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader, “Black Strivings at the Twilight of Civilization” (New York: Basic Civitas, 1999) p.102.
[10] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.312.
[11] “Nihilism is not new in Black America. The first African encounter with the New World was an encounter with a distinctive form of the Absurd. The initial Black struggle against degradation and devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the New World was, in part, a struggle against nihilism.” Cornel West, Race Matters, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) p.23.
[12] "The Negro's way in this part of the Western world was adaptation and reinterpretation." Jones/Baraka, p.27.
“that great literacy of musical speech towering up over the dialect and the broken, sometimes feeble words to make an instinctive welding of all this into an amalgam of music that shades every meaning and evokes a mood almost independently of the words. . . . And their style also calls for, not a set form, but an improvisation of feeling and of singing idiom according as the spirit moves." Alain Locke, The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings, Edited by Jeffrey Stewart, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2022) pp.180-181.
[13] Cornel West, pp.22-23.
[14] "the true spiritual is always the voice of a naive unshaken faith for which the things of the spirit are as real as the things of the flesh." Alain Locke, p.179.
"And not only were African songs transformed into a kind of completely personal Christian liturgical music but African prayers and chants as well. … The traditional African call-and-response song shaped the form this kind of worship took on. … no matter how closely a Negro spiritual might resemble superficially one of the white hymns taken from sources like the Bay Psalm Book, the Wesleyan Hymnal, the Anglican Hymnal, or the Moody Hymnal, when the song was actually sung, there could be no mistake that it had been made over into an original Negro song." Jones/Baraka, pp.45-47.
[15] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,1845, 1997) pp.18-19.
[16] Douglass, pp.18-19.
[17] "Now, there was a double meaning in a great deal of spirituals, even to the illiterate Negro, because of this way in which they symbolized their own experience. … It's a commonplace that this accomodation of circumstances and this Christian tradition set the slave's and the Negro's eye on the other world, and gave him perhaps an otherworldly, and, in these days, what we call an escapist philosophy. But we must remember that the slave really, always had his eye on freedom of the body, as well as the soul. There was that frequent phenomenon of the slave rebellion, and of the still more frequent phenomenon of the fugitive slave." Alain Locke, pp.181-183
“The spirituals and the work songs confirm that the individual concerns of Black people expressed through music during slavery centered on a collective desire for an end to the system that enslaved them.” Davis, p.4
[18] Richard Wright, Foreword to Paul Oliver, The Meaning of the Blues, (New York: Collier Books, 1960) p.8.
[19] Douglass, pp.18-19.
[20] Douglass, pp.18-19
[21] Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
[22] Jones/Baraka, Blues People, pp.4 & 11.
For a brilliant examination of this phenomenon see – LaRose T. Parris, Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
[23] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.10. modified translation mine own.
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