THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#18, DEC/2023-FEB/2024
Dear Colleagues:
You may have heard a radio news report which aired briefly during the days after the jury's acquittal of the policemen in the Rodney King beating case. The report stated that public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettoes. N. H. I. means “no humans involved.”
Stephen Jay Gould argues that “systems of classification direct our thinking and order our behaviors.”[1] By classifying this category as N.H.I. these public officials would have given the police of Los Angeles the green light to deal with its members in any way they pleased. You may remember too that in the earlier case of the numerous deaths of young Black males caused by a specific chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers to arrest young Black males, the police chief Darryl Gates explained away these judicial murders by arguing that Black males had something abnormal with their windpipes. That they had to be classified and thereby treated differently from all other North Americans, except to a secondary degree, the darker-skinned Latinos. For in this classificatory schema too all “minorities” are equal except one category – that of the peoples of African and of Afro-mixed descent who, as Andrew Hacker points out in his recent book, are the least equal of all.
“Certainly,” Hacker writes, in Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal “all persons deemed to be other than white, can detail how they have suffered discrimination at the hands of white America. Any allusions to racist attitudes and actions will find Cherokees and Chinese and Cubans agreeing with great vigor ... yet ...members of all these intermediate groups have been allowed to put a visible distance between themselves and Black Americans.”[2]
“The Vietnamese,” Richard Pryor quipped, “learned how to become good Americans by learning how to say nigger.”
WHERE DID THIS CLASSIFICATION COME FROM? THE POINT OF MY LETTER TO YOU
Yet where did this system of classification come from? One that was held both by the officers involved in this specific case of the routine “nigger breaking” of Black males, as well as by the mainly white, middle class suburban Simi Valley jurors? Most of all, and this is the point of my letter to you, why should the classifying acronym N.H.I., with its reflex anti-Black male behaviour-prescriptions, have been so actively held and deployed by the judicial officers of Los Angeles, and therefore by “the brightest and the best” graduates of both the professional and nonprofessional schools of the university system of the United States? By those whom we ourselves would have educated?
How did they come to conceive of what it means to be both human and North American in the kinds of terms (i.e. to be White, of Euroamerican culture and descent, middle-class, college educated and suburban) within whose logic, the jobless and usually school drop-out/push-out category of young Black males can be perceived, and therefore behaved towards, only as the Lack of the human, the Conceptual Other to being North American? The same way, as Zygmunt Bauman has been pointed out, that all Germans of Jewish descent were made into and behaved towards as the Conceptual Other to German identity in its then Pan-Aryan and Nazi form.[3]
If, as Ralph Ellison alerted us to in his Invisible Man[4], we see each other only through the “inner eyes” with which we look with our physical eyes upon reality, the question we must confront in the wake of the Rodney King Event becomes: What is our responsibility for the making of those “inner eyes?” Ones in which humanness and North Americanness are always already defined, not only in optimally White terms, but also in optimally middle class (i.e. both Simi Valley, and secondarily Cosby-Huxtable TV. family), variants of these terms? What have we had to do, and still have to do, with the putting in place of the classifying logic of that shared mode of “subjective understanding”[5] in whose “inner eyes,” young Black males, can be perceived as being justly, shut out from what Helen Fein calls the “universe of moral obligation” that bonds the interests of the Simi Valley jurors as Whites and non-Blacks (one Asian, one Hispanic), to the interests of the White policemen and the Los Angeles judicial office-holders who are our graduates?
In her book on the 1915 genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish pan-nationalists, and on the Jews by the Pan-Aryan racialists in the 1930’s-1940’s, Helen Fein points out that in both cases there was a common causal factor. This factor was that over the millennium which preceded their group annihilation, “both Jews and Armenians had been decreed by the dominant group that was to perpetrate in the crime to be outside the sanctified universe of obligation - that circle of people with reciprocal obligations to protect each other whose bonds arose from their relation to a deity or a sacred source of authority”.[6] In both cases, although the genocides were inflicted in the secular name of a now sacred “national” identity, based, in the case of the Turks on the discourse of a historical Pan-Turianism and, in the case of the German-Aryans, on that of the sanctity of a “pure” racial stock, both groups had been defined “within recent memory similarly to pariahs outside the sanctified social order.” It was this discursive classification that had enabled them to be misrecognized as aliens, as strangers who were, as if it were, of a different species; strangers, “not because they were aliens but because the dominant group was alienated from them by a traditional antipathy.”[7]
This is the same case, of course, with the N.H.I. acronym. For the social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the “sanctified universe of obligation,” of the category of young Black males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and everyday means.
Statistics with respect to this empirical fact have been cited over and over again. Andrew Hacker's recent book documents the systemic White/Black differential with respect to life-opportunity on which our present North American order is based. Nevertheless, this differential is replicated, and transracially so, between, on the one hand, the classes (upper middle, middle, lower middle and working, whether capital owners or jobholders), who are therefore classified within the “universe of obligation” integrating of our present world system and its nation-state subunits, and on the other hand, the category of the non-owning jobless young of the inner cities; primarily Black with Latino, and increasingly also, White, assimilated to its underclass category.
In the wake of the Civil Rights movements, and of the Affirmative Action programs which incorporated a now new Black middle class into the “American Dream,” the jobless category has been made to bear the weight of the Deviant status that, before the Sixties had been imposed on all Americans of African and Afromixed descent, by the nation-state order of the U.S., as an imperative condition of its own systemic functioning. Indeed, it may be said that it is this category of the jobless young Black males who have been made to pay the “sacrificial costs” (in the terms of René Girard's The Scapegoat[8]) for the relatively improved conditions since the 1960’s that have impelled many Black Americans out of the ghettoes and into the suburbs; that made possible therefore the universal acclamation for the Cosby-Huxtable TV family who proved that some Black Americans could aspire to, and even be, drawn inside, the “sanctified category” of Americans just like us - if still secondarily so, behind “women” and the other “minorities.”
The price paid by the jobless Black male category for this social transformation is inescapably clear. With respect to the judicial apparatus itself, statistics show that whilst Black men constitute 6% of the U.S. population, they have come to make up 47% of the prison population. Whilst, in the entire prison population, in the wake of the mandatory sentences for drug offenses imposed by (largely White and middle class) Drug War officials, both Afro-Black young males and Latino-Brown ones, are to be found out of all proportion to their numbers in the society. The May 7, 1992 New York Times editorial which gives these statistics, also point out that it costs $25,000 a year “to keep a kid in prison; which is more than the Job Corps or college.” However, for society at large to choose the latter option in place of the former would mean that the “kids” in question could no longer be “perceived” in N.H.I. terms as they are now perceived by all; nor could they continue to be induced to so perceive themselves within these same terms, as they now do, fratricidally turning upon themselves, killing each other off in gang wars or by other violent methods.
Where does this “inner eye” which leads the society to choose the former option in dealing with the North American variant of the jobless category of the post-Industrial New Poor,[9] the category to which at the global level, Frantz Fanon has given the name les damnés, the condemned,[10] come from? Why is this “eye” so intricately bound up with that code, so determinant of our collective behaviours, to which we have given the name, race?
“It seems” a sociology professor, Christopher Jenks, points out in the wake of the L.A. [uprising] “that we're always trying to reduce race to something else. Yet out there on the streets race does not reduce to something else.”[11] I have come to believe, after struggling with this issue from the “lay” perspective of Black Studies (which was itself able to enter academia only in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the Watts urban riots, and the protests which erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King), not only that “race” cannot be reduced as an issue, to anything else, but that it is we in academia who alone hold the key to “race,” and therefore to the classificatory logic of the acronym, N.H.I.
My major proposal is that both the issue of “race” and its classificatory logic (as, in David Duke's belief that “the Negro is an evolutionarily lower level than the Caucasian”) lies in the founding premise, on which our present order of knowledge or episteme[12] and its rigorously elaborated disciplinary paradigms, are based.
TAKING THE MAP FOR THE TERRITORY: THE FALLACY OF SUPRACULTURALISM
What is this premise? Michel Foucault traces the processes by which our present major disciplines came to be put in place at the end of the eighteenth century by European thinkers, to a central representation by means of which the human would come to perceive and know itself as if it were a purely natural organism in complete continuity with organic life.[13] For if, in the terms specific to the “local” culture[14] of Western Europe, and therefore to its founding Judaeo-Christian Narrative of human emancipation[15] the human had been represented as a divinely created being in the terms of the Biblical Genesis account of origins, the new conception of the human, that would be based during the nineteenth century on the new Narrative of Evolution, would be that of an evolutionarily selected being. In this conception the human was held to pre-exist the “local cultures,” including ours, by means of which alone human "forms of life" can come to exist,[16] as the hybridly biological (bios) and narrative-discursive (logos) level of existence that they are.[17] That is, as they are outside the mode of subjective understanding or “inner eyes” constituted by the “prescriptive categories” of the “native cultural model”[18] which is itself rigorously elaborated by the present disciplinary paradigms of the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
The Eritrean anthropologist Asmarom Legesse points out that our present organization of knowledge is premised on what he terms the technocultural fallacy. This fallacy, he asserts, “derives from the failure of anthropology [and the other disciplines as well] to distinguish the purposive aspects of human behavior …and the unconscious structure in human culture (as reflected in language and the cognitive bases of life) from the nonconscious empirical processes that link man directly to animal societies and the ecosystem [to in effect economic processes]”.[19]
It is this fallacy which underlies the premise of the discipline of economics, (as the present master discipline in the place of theology), that our human behaviours are motivated primarily by the imperative common to all organic species of securing the material basis of their existence; rather than by imperative of securing the overall conditions of existence, (cultural, religious, representational and through their mediation, material), of each local culture's represented conception of the Self (Wittgenstein's "form of life). In this context, history falls into the trap of taking its narration of what happened in the past, a narration clearly oriented by our present culture specific conception of the human, as if indeed it were what actually happened, when seen from a transcultural perspective. The recent controversy over the California school textbook, America Will Be, which imagines the United States as a “nation of immigrants” provides an instructive example of the historical paradigm's conflation of narrative history with “history as what happened”.[20]
The classificatory logic of the acronym N.H.I., (as well as the belief system of a David Duke for whom whilst the “Caucasian” incarnates the ostensibly most highly evolved and selected mode of “normal” human being, the “lower non-White races” and most ultimately the “Negro,” incarnate the most atavistic non-evolved Lack of the human), derives therefore from a second fallacy related to the above; one which underlies our present disciplinary paradigms, and their hegemonic mode of economic rationality. This second fallacy, that of supraculturalism, mistakes our present “local” culture’s representation-of-the-human-as-a-natural organism as if it were the human-in-itself, mistakes the representation for the reality, the map for the territory.
For whilst the human species is bio-evolutionarily programmed to be human on the basis of the unique nature of its capacity for speech[21] it realizes itself as human only by coming to regulate its behaviours, no longer primarily, by the genetic programs specific to its genome, but by means of its narratively instituted conceptions of itself; and therefore by the culture-specific discursive programs, to which these conceptions give rise. As in the case of our present scholarly elaboration of the natural organism idea of the human, and of its representation as a “form of life” regulated in its behaviours by the same imperatives of material food production and of procreation that also regulate the lives of purely organic species. Rather than, I propose here by the narratively instituted goal-trees[22] or purposes specific to each “local culture” including our own.
It is only within the terms of our present local culture, in which the earlier feudal-Christian religious ethic and its goal of Spiritual Redemption and Eternal Salvation has been inverted and replaced by the goal of Material Redemption, and, therefore, by the transcendental imperative of securing the economic well-being, of the now biologized body of the Nation (and of national security!), that the human can at all be conceived of as if it were a mode of being which exists in a relation of pure continuity with the that of organic life. Whilst it is only within these terms, that the N.H.I. acronym and its classificatory logic is to be understood as part of the genetic status-organizing principle of which the phenomenon that we have come to know as “race”, is the expression. The feudal-Christian order of Europe had conceived of the caste (noble birth and descent) organizing principle of its order as being divinely ordained (theocentric paradigm). Equally it is only on the basis of our present conception of a genetic status organizing principle, based on evolutionarily pre-selected degrees of biological value, as iconized in the White/Black invariant differential, that our present world system and its nation-state subunits, can be hierarchically allocated on the basis of each category's ostensible pre-selection for higher and lower degrees of genetic worth (biocentric paradigm). One ostensibly “verified” by the individual or category's place on the social ladder.
“The problem of the twentieth century” W. E. B. Du Bois predicted in 1903, would be the problem of the Color Line.[23] This line is made fixed and invariant by the institutionally determined differential between Whites (as the bearers of the ostensibly highest degrees of eugenic descent), and Blacks (as the bearers of the ostensibly lowest degrees of the lack of this descent); by its highest degree of its nigger dysgenicity as the extreme form of the “native” within the logic of the “Man”/non-White Native code deciphered by Fanon and Sartre.[24]
Consequently the White/Black invariant Absolute serves to provide the status organizing principle that the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia identified as being based on the superiority/inferiority ranking rule according to which all other non-White groups as “intermediate categories,” place themselves, and are assessed on their relative “worth” according to their nearness to the one and distance from the other.[25] At the same time, as it also enables the middle classes to institutionally legitimate their own ostensible analogically selected genetic superiority, as a group category over the non-middle classes; most of all over the underclass of South Central Los Angeles and its global extensions.
FROM “NOBLE” TO “EUGENIC” DESCENT, “CASTE” TO “RACE,” WHITE/BLACK TO OWNERS, JOBHOLDERS/NON-OWNING JOBHOLDERS DIFFERENTIAL
Before the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, the institutionally secured White/Black segregation served to absolutize, as the icon of an ostensibly pre-selected genetic value differential between human hereditary variations, the representation of eugenic descent on whose basis the global middle classes legitimate their ontological hegemonic social status. In the same way as in the earlier feudal order of Europe the Noble/Peasant invariant status differential had recursively served to verify the “truth” of the divinely ordered hegemony of the aristocracy based on its Noble line of descent; one which legitimated their caste dominance. This earlier truth had only been brought to an end by the intellectual revolution of humanism of fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe, when the lay humanists had challenged and displaced the absolutism of the theological categories of the then mainstream Scholastic order of knowledge, presided over by the Clergy - categories, whose primary function was to “verify” the ostensibly divinely ordained status principles of the order, and its code of “Caste.” Equally the code of “Race” can only be brought to an end with the bringing to an end of the “our present mode of truth” together with the Absolutism of its economic categories.
Both W. E. B. Du Bois and Elsa Goveia have emphasized the way in which the code of “Race” or the Color Line, functions to systemically pre-determine the sharply unequal re-distribution of the collectively produced global resources; and, therefore, the correlation of the racial ranking rule with the Rich/Poor rule. Goveia pointed out that all American societies are integrated on the basis of a central cultural belief in which all share. This belief, that of the genetic-racial inferiority of Black people to all others, functions to enable our social hierarchies, including those of rich and poor determined directly by the economic system, to be perceived as having been as pre-determined by “that great crap game called life,” as have also ostensibly been the invariant hierarchy between White and Black. Consequently in the Caribbean and Latin America, within the terms of this sociosymbolic calculus, to be “rich” was also to be “White,” to be poor was also to be “Black.”
Where the segregation system of the United States’ variant had made the White/Black invariant into the absolute and primary invariant, with the Civil Rights struggle and the rise of the Post-Industrial consumer-driven economy, the primary focus has shifted to a variant of the old differential. This differential is one between the suburban category of the owners and job-holders on the one hand (of all races including the Cosby-Huxtable and A Different World Black Americans), and the Black non-owners and nonjobholders on the other. Consequently, since the Sixties, this new variant of the eugenic/dysgenic status organizing principle has been expressed primarily by the growing life style differential between the suburban middle classes (who are metonymically White), and the inner city category of the Post-Industrial Jobless (who are metonymically young Black males). Where the category of the owners/jobholders are, of whatever race, assimilated to the category of “Whites,” the opposed category of the non-owners, and the non-jobholders are assimilated to the category of the “young Black males.”
The analogy I want make here is this. That if the ostensibly divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe's feudal-Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep these systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Given that once the physical and the biological sciences had, after long struggles, freed human knowledge of the physical and biological levels of reality, from having to verify, as they still did in the feudal-European and all other pre-Sixteenth century human cultures, the “truth” or mode of subjective understanding/inner eyes on whose basis the role allocation system of each order can alone be perceived as having been extra-humanly determined, and therefore as just, only the “truths” with respect to our knowledge of the social reality of which we are subjects (and therefore always already subjected and socialized agents/observers), could now be deployed to verify the ostensible extra-human, because bio-evolutionary determined nature of our present status-organizing principle based on the code of “Race.” As the Liberal analogue therefore of the feudal code of “Caste.”
My proposal here therefore is that it is only on the basis of the classificatory logic of our present Humanities and Social Sciences, and its related mode of subjective understanding or “inner eyes” generated from the representation of the human as an evolutionarily selected organism, (and who can therefore be more or less human, even totally lacking in humanness as in the case of the N.H.I.), that we can be induced to see all those outside our present “sanctified universe of obligation,” whether as racial or as Jobless Other, as having been placed in their inferiorized status, not by our culture-specific institutional mechanisms but rather by the extra-human ordering of bio-evolutionary Natural Selection. That our global and nation-state socio-systemic hierarchies are therefore the expression, not of the prescriptive categories of our now globalized cultural epistemological model, but of the, in the last instance, evolutionarily pre-selected degrees of eugenic “worth” between human groups at the level of race, culture, religion, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and sex.
THE NEW QUESTION, FROM WOODSON TO WIESEL TO ORR: WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR EDUCATION?
The central institutional mechanisms which integrate and regulate our present world system, I propose here, are the prescriptive categories of our present order of knowledge, as disseminated in our present global university system and its correlated textbook industry. How and why is this so? Paul Ricœur[26] has based himself on the thesis of Clifford Geertz[27] that “ideology is a function of human cultural systems,” to propose that the systems of knowledge by which human orders know themselves, must serve to provide a “generalized horizon of understanding” able to induce the collective behaviours of each order's subjects. Since these are the behaviours by means of which each order is integrated and made stably replicable as such an order, without such horizons of understanding or “inner eyes,” no human order could exist.
Legesse further suggests that all mainstream scholars necessarily function as the grammarians of our order; that is, as “men and women” who are well-versed in the “techniques of ordering a select body of facts within a framework that is completely consistent with the system of values, the weltanschauung and, above all, the cognitive model” of the society to which they belong.[28] It is only by the “trained skills” which we bring to the ordering of such facts, that intellectuals as a category, are able to ensure the existence of each order's conceptual framework, which we rework and elaborate in order to provide the “inner eyes” by whose mode of subjective understanding, each order's subjects regulate their behaviours, for both enormous good and evil.
So what are we to do as the grammarians by means of whose rigorous elaboration of the “prescriptive categories” of our present epistemological order, and therefore of our “local culture”,[29] “inner eyes,” the collective behaviours which bring the present nation-state order of the United States into being as such a specific order of reality are oriented, now that we are confronted with the price paid for the putting in place of this order of reality, as in the case of the Rodney King Beating/jury acquittal/South Central Los Angeles uprising Event? What are we, specifically as Black intellectuals, to do?
For we as Black intellectuals owe our group presence in the university system (rather than as pre-Sixties, where our exceptionality as the token Black scholar verified the rule which excluded our ostensibly I.Q.- lacking population group), to the call for a new intellectual order of knowledge that was originally made in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. This call that had been reinforced and made powerful, then too by the burning cities of Watts, of other ghettoes, as well as the uprisings after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination of the “captive population,” who, as James Baldwin wrote, normally have no means of enforcing their will upon the city or State. Given this situation, are we then to recycle the same old pieties? Shall we continue to settle for the Bantustans in which, as David Bradley wrote in 1982, we have been trapped?
Bradley had first pointed to the systemic nature of the curriculum exclusion imposed on all Black Americans as the function of the United States continuing to conceive of itself as a White and Euroamerican “Nation of Immigrants.” He had then argued that in the wake of the Sixties and Seventies social movements, Black American intellectuals had been trapped by their refusal to confront a central question. This question was that of the systemic nature of the rules which governed their exclusion from the mainstream conception of the United States, and which erased their centrality to the existential reality of North America. Bradley wrote “As a result of rallies we got courses in ‘Black literature’ and ‘Black history’ and a special Black adviser for Black students and a Black cultural center...rotting white washed house on neither edge of campus...reachable...by way of a scramble up a muddy bank...And all those new courses did was exempt the departments from the unsettling necessity of altering existing ones, so they could go right advertising a course in ‘American Fiction’ that explicitly includes Hawthorne, Clemens, James, Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and implicitly excludes Chesnutt, Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.”[30]
The issue here was that of deconstructing the curriculum mechanisms which expelled the Black Conceptual Other outside the “universe of obligation;” that therefore of redefining White America, as simply America. The issue therefore of a curriculum freed from the coding of race, on which it is at present instituted, and one that would have necessarily led to the asking of a central question - that of the validity of our present order of knowledge itself.
This question had been raised by the Black American educator Carter G. Woodson as early as 1933 in his book The Miseducation of the Negro[31] and has been re-asked in somewhat different but still related terms by Elie Wiesel,[32] a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, as well as by David Orr,[33] an environmentalist educator. Woodson had asked then, what was wrong with our present system of education? One whose scholarly curriculum not only served to strongly demotivate Black students, and to lead to their dropping out, but which also socialized White students to be the lynchers (and policemen-beaters) of Black Americans when they became adults. Woodson then used his analysis of the 1933 school curriculum, to argue that the demotivated and inferior intellectual performance of Black students, as a category, should be sought in the same source from which the deep-seated anti-Black phobia shared in by White students (as well as by the students of all other intermediate non-White groups) was also generated. These effects, he proposed, should be sought for, neither in the I.Q. deficiency of Blacks as an ostensibly evolutionarily retarded population group,[34] nor in the “innately racist” psyche, of the White lynchers. Instead both were to be seen as psycho-social responses that were regularly induced by the systemic nature of the cognitive distortions with respect to the North American, as well as to the human past and present, that were everywhere present in the 1933 curriculum/textbooks.
These distortions, he went on, served an extra-cognitive function. This function was that of inducing the White students to believe that their ancestors had done everything worth doing in both the past, and at the same time, to induce the Black students to believe that their ancestors had done nothing worth doing, whether in the human or in the American past. One of the clues to this extra-cognitive function was that all non-Whites were not equally stigmatized. Whilst the past of all other groups was stigmatized, they were nevertheless left with certain shreds of human dignity. This was not so with respect to the 1933 curriculum’s misrepresentation of the Afro-American past and as well as its present.
Woodson’s “epistemological break” at this juncture was to see that the function of these White/Black misrepresentations was that of differentially motivating the respective categories of White and Black, in order to ensure the stable replication of the invariant relation of dominance/subordination between the two social categories as the empirical embodiment of the socio-symbolic analogy from which the genetic status-organizing principle, about which our present global national order institutes itself as an autopoetic or self-organizing living system,[35] can alone be generated. It was therefore the role of these systemic cognitive distortions to provide the mode of “truth” able to induce the White students (as the potential enforcers of their totemic group differential status vis-à-vis the Black category, whether as adult lyncher, policeman-beater or Simi Valley juror), to perceive it as their “just” and legitimate duty to keep the order's Conceptual Other in its systemic place. “Why not,” Woodson asked, “exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?” “There would be,” he further pointed out, “no lynching if it did not start in the classroom.” Why not judicially “lynch” those who had been made perceivable as “no humans involved?” This all the more so in the case of the Rodney Kings, who since the Sixties have come to occupy a doubled pariah status, no longer that of only being Black, but of also belonging to the rapidly accelerating Post-Industrial category of the poor and jobless? As the category which, defined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as that of the New Poor, embodies a plight, which like that of the ongoing degradation of the planetary environment, is not even posable, not to say resolvable, within the conceptual framework of our present order of knowledge.
Which is of course, where we come in, and the new form of the question - what is wrong with our education? Environmental educator, David Orr pointed out in a 1990 commencement address, that the blame for the environmental destruction of a planet on which we are losing “116 square miles of rain forest or an acre a second,” and on which at the same time we send up “2, 700 tons of chlorofluorocarbon into the atmosphere” as well as other behaviours destructive of our ecosystemic life support system, should be placed where it belongs. All of these effects, he argues, are the results of decisions taken not by ignorant and unlearned people. Rather, they were and are decisions taken by the “best and brightest” products of our present system of education; of its highest levels of learning, of universities like ours here at Stanford. Orr then cited in this context a point made by Elie Wiesel to a Global Forum held in Moscow in the Winter of 1989.
“The designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust,” Wiesel pointed out, “were the heirs of Kant and Goethe.” Although, “in most respects the Germans were the best educated people on earth, their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education?”
THE ISSUE THAT CONFRONTS US: TO MARRY OUR THOUGHT TO THE PLIGHT OF THE NEW POOR AND THE ENVIRONMENT
I come now to the final point of my letter to you. Jesse Jackson made the point that the uprising of South Central L.A. “was a spontaneous combustion - this time not of discarded material but of discarded people.” As is the case with the also hitherto discardable environment, its ongoing pollution, and ozone layer depletion, the reality of the throwaway lives, both at the global socio-human level, of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the “favela/shanty town” of the globe and their jobless archipelagoes, as well, at the national level, of Baldwin’s “captive population” in the urban inner cities, (and on the Indian Reservations of the United States), have not been hitherto easily perceivable within the classificatory logic of our “inner eyes.” In other words, the two phenomena, that of the physical and that of the global socio-human environments, have been hidden costs which necessarily remained invisible to the “inner eyes” of the mode of “subjective understanding,” generated from our present disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities. And therefore, within the mode of “truth” or epistemological order based upon the representation of the human as if it were a natural organism.
My proposal here is that both of these “hidden costs” cannot be normally seen as costs within the terms of the hegemonic economic categories, and therefore of the absolutism of its related economic ethic (as the analogues of the theological categories/Absolutism of the Scholastic order of knowledge of feudal-Christian Europe). That furthermore it is by this ethic, and its supraordinate goal of higher and higher “standards of living” (i.e. the goal of Material Redemption, whereas in the feudal order the behaviour-orienting goal was that of Spiritual Redemption), which now sets the limits of our culture-specific “inner eyes” - the limits therefore of how we can see, know and behave upon our present global and national order; the limits therefore of our “Truth.” That it sets these limits (as the now purely secularized form of the original Judaeo-Christian theological ethic in its feudal form), as rule-governedly as that ethic had set “limits,” before the revolution of lay humanism, with respect to how the subjects of its then order could see, know and behave upon the world. In the same way also, as before the intellectual revolution which took place from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the political ethic (with which the humanists had replaced the theological), had itself set the limits of how the then sociocultural reality of PreIndustrial Europe could be seen, known and behaved upon; within the terms therefore of what Foucault defined as the Classical episteme.
Keith Tribe points out in his book Land, Labour and Economic Discourse[36] that it was only with Adam Smith’s partial, and with David Ricardo’s completed putting in place of new “economic categories,” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the earlier order of knowledge based on the hegemony of political categories was finally displaced; and that the emergent centrality of the processes of Industrial production, over against the earlier hegemony of agricultural production, was given epistemological, and therefore, optimally behaviour-prescriptive status.
Black Americans are the only population group of the post-1492 Americas who had been legitimately owned, i.e. enslaved, over several centuries. Their owned and enslaved status had been systemically perceived within the “inner eyes” and the classificatory logic of the earlier episteme, its hegemonic political categories and behaviour-orienting political ethic, to be legitimate and just. The frequent slave revolts as well as the Abolition Movement, together with the Haitian Revolution and the Civil War in the United States, fundamentally broke the military power which had sustained that perception. Nevertheless, the displacement of that earlier “Truth” had been only verified at the level of the cognitive models of the society, when “heretical” thinkers like Smith and Ricardo had been able to “marry their thought” to the cause of the emergent forces of the Industrial world - i.e. to the cause of “free trade” (against “protection” for agricultural producers) and of the activity of the Industrial bourgeoisie - forces that were then blocked in their emergence, not only by the restrictive laws, but also, by the behaviour-prescriptive categories of the earlier episteme in whose logic the “hidden costs” of protectionist policies for agricultural produce (including products grown by forced slave labor), could not be seen as costs.
This is the central point that Bauman makes with respect to the now global category of the New Poor. Consequently, the central issue that confronts us here, is whether we too will be able to move beyond the epistemic limits of our present “inner eyes” in order, in Bauman’s words, to “marry our thought” to the emergent post-Industrial plights of both the planetary as well as the global socio-human environment. Specifically with the “captive population” and, jobless category of South Central Los Angeles, who can have no peaceful way of imposing their will upon a city and State, whose ordered hierarchies, and everyday behaviours are legitimated in the last instance by the world view encoded by our present order of knowledge.
Zygmunt Bauman points out that the emergence of the category of the New Poor is due to a systemic factor. Capital, with the rise of the global processes of technological automation, has increasingly freed itself from its dependence on labor. The organized working class, in consequence, which had been seen as the potential agent of social transformation during the phase of capital accumulation, one that had been primarily based on production, no longer has enough clout, to put a stop to the process of expanding job erosion, now that consumption has displaced production as the primary medium of capital accumulation. During the production phase, the category of the jobless Poor, both in the First as well as in the reserve “native” Third worlds, had a function. This function had been that of providing an excess of labor supply over demand, in order to put a brake on wage costs. In this new consumption phase of capital accumulation, it has no function.
Illiterate, unskilled and without job experiences, as the more and more low-skilled jobs dwindle with the acceleration of automated work processes, the jobless New Poor are without the wherewithal to serve as a reserve army of consumption. Where they receive welfare checks, (as in Britain and the United States), as part of an internal “pacification program,” the neighborhood shops,[37] serve as the mechanism to siphon what little wealth there is, out of the ghettos; to thereby lock the New Poor into their discardable throwaway status at the same time as the shop owners (including the Black owners) realize the American Dream, represented as social mobility out of the ghettos. As successful “breadwinners,” their Conceptual Others are those who make possible their accelerated enrichment; that is, the members of the “captive population” of the ghettoes (and of the global jobless archipelagoes) who are like the environment, the negative systemic costs, that are not perceivable within the logic of our present “inner eyes” and behaviour-regulating ethic, and its mode of hegemonic economic (rather than ecosystemic or human) reason.
It is within the “Truth” of our present epistemological order, and therefore within the terms of its related “grand narrative of human emancipation”,[38] whose supraordinate goal or purpose, rather than being as it had been in the case of the earlier Classical episteme that of the expansion of the state, is now that of securing the material well-being of the biologized Body of the Nation, and therefore of its optimal middle class mode of the subject, Foucault's Man, that, as Bauman points out, we cannot as intellectuals, whether Liberal Positivist or Marxist-Leninist, marry our thought to the plight of the New Poor; cannot marry our thought to the well-being of the human, rather than only to that of “Man,” i.e. our present middle class mode of the subject (or of sociogeny).[39]
The poor and the oppressed, Bauman notes, have therefore come to lose all attractions for the intellectuals. This category, unlike the working class jobholders cannot be seen, within the economic logic of our present organization of knowledge, as contributors to the process of production who have been unjustly deprived of the “full value of their labor power.” Moreover, the fact that this New Poor, seduced too, like all of us, by the clamor of advertisements which urge them to consume, so that frustrated in their consumption goals, they turn on one another, mutilate and kill each other, or “damage themselves with alcohol and drugs” convinced of their own worthlessness, or in brief episodes of eruption, “fire the ghettoes, riot, looting whatever they can lay their hands on,” means that today's intellectuals, whilst they feel and express their pity, refrain from proposing to marry their thought with this particular variety of human suffering. “They theorize,” Bauman writes, “the reason for their reluctance. Habermas would say that the New Poor are not exploited. Offe would add that they are politically ineffective, as having no labor to withdraw, they are deprived of bargaining power... [The] New Poor need help on humane grounds: they are unfit for grooming as the future remakers of the world.”[40]
How then did they change the course of North American history in two days? How did they, the proscribed category of the N.H.I., Baldwin’s “captive population,” Fanon's les damnés, come to not only impose their will upon the city and the state, but to also directly challenge the mode of “Truth” in whose logic their plight, like that of the environment's, is neither posable nor resolvable?
If, as Legesse suggests, because of our role as the grammarians of our order, we must ourselves, normally, and as the condition of our order's integration and stable replication, remain imprisoned in the “structural models” that we ourselves put in place, then how are we to be enabled to break out of one cultural specific native model of reality (one variant of our “inner eyes”) and make the transition from one Foucauldian episteme, from one founding and behaviour-regulating narrative, to another? In other words, how can we marry our thought so that we can now pose the questions whose answers can resolve the plight of the Jobless archipelagoes, the N.H.I. categories, and the environment?
The answer to both will necessarily call for us to move beyond the Absolutism of our present economic categories, as in the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries the lay humanists of Europe moved beyond that of the theological categories of Scholasticism; and the nineteenth century Classical economists moved beyond that of the political categories of the earlier epistemological order. For Legesse defines his explanatory key in the new terms of culture-systemic categories which move outside the logic of our present mode of subjective understanding, based on the concept of the human as a purely natural organism which can pre-exist the culturally instituted and “sanctified universe of obligation” by means of which we are alone “socialized” as inter-altruistically bonded mode of symbolic “kin;” and therefore as specific modes of the sociogenic subject[41] and of systemic sociality.[42]
Legesse suggests that the cognitive escape hatch is always to be found in the category of the liminal. This is the category whose rule-governed negation, institutes a principle of difference from which both the optimal criterion of being and the “fake” mode of similarity or of unanimity,[43] on which each order can alone institute itself as a living system, are dynamically generated. Whether that of the “fallen” lay humanists of medieval Europe, who were negatively represented as being “enslaved to Original Sin” unlike the celibate Clergy who were as such, the guardians of the mainstream system of Scholastic knowledge, or, in the case of the peoples of African and Afro-mixed descent as the category of the Human Other, represented as enslaved to its dysselected evolutionary origins and whose physiognomic distance from “normal” being, provides the genetic principle of difference and similarity which bonds all Whites, and increasingly nonBlacks, non-Whites at the level of race, and of all middle class subjects at the level of class. Most crucially of course, since the Sixties the liminal category of les damnés, i.e. the N.H.I. category of South Central Los Angeles whose doubled pariah status as Poor/Jobless and Black, has come to serve a central systemic function for the now Post-Industrial nation-state order of the United States.
Because the negative proscription of the liminal category, is the very condition of each human order's functioning as an organizationally and cognitively closed self-regulating or autopoetic system,[44] the premise of this category’s proscription is central to the “ground” from which the “regimes of truth” of each epistemological order and its disciplinary paradigms are rule-governedly generated. The liminal category’s empirical exclusion, like that of the exclusion of the inner city ghetto of South Central Los Angeles, is therefore a condition of each order’s “truth.”
It is only when such a category moves out of its negated place, therefore, that the grammarians of an order (as in the case where the lay humanists intelligentsia refused their liminal role in the Scholastic system of knowledge), can be freed from their system-maintaining “structural models” and prescriptive categories.
For it is precisely, Legesse argues, out of the field of dynamic interaction between “the generalized horizon of understanding” or “inner eyes” put in place by the prescriptive categories of all culture-specific orders of knowledge, and the empirical on-the-ground process to which the collective behaviours of each order's subjects, as oriented by these prescriptive categories, give rise, that there emerges the liminal category which, in its thrust towards emancipation from its systemic role can serve to “remind us that we need not forever remain prisoners of our prescriptions.” Since by its very movement out of its proscribed place, as in the uprising that followed on the Simi Valley jurors’ acquittal of the policemen “Nigger-breakers” - such a category generates conscious change in all subjects, by exposing all the injustices inherent in structure; and again, like the N.H.I. category of South Central Los Angeles, in two days of rage, “by creating a real contradiction between structure and anti-structure, social order and man-made anarchy,” epistemological orders and new modes of knowing.
THE SPEECH OF THE STREET? OR THE SPEECH OF A SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM?: TOWARDS THE REWRITING OF KNOWLEDGE
In a 1984 essay, I had proposed that the task of Black Studies, together with those of all the other New Studies that had also entered academia in the wake of the Sixties uprisings, should be that of rewriting knowledge. I had proposed then that we should attempt to do so in the terms of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela’s new insights into the rules which govern the ways in which humans can and do know the social reality of which they are always already socialized subjects.[45] I had then cited Sir Stafford Beer's argument (who wrote the introduction to their book) to this effect. Beer, as I wrote then had argued that “contemporary scholarship is trapped in its present organization of knowledge” in which, anyone “who can lay claim to knowledge about some categorized bit of the world, however tiny, which is greater than anyone else's knowledge of that bit, is safe for life.” As a result, “while papers increase exponentially, and knowledge grows by infinitesimals, our understanding of the world actually recedes.” Consequently, “because our world is an interacting system in dynamic change, our system of scholarship rooted in its own sanctified categories, is in a large part, unavailing to the needs of mankind.” If, Beer concluded, “we are to understand a newer and still evolving world; if we are to educate people to live in that world; if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to a vanished world as it is well nigh desperate that we should... then knowledge must be rewritten.”
My proposal did not get very far then. After Los Angeles, however, both the times and the situation have changed. Hence my open letter to you. St. Clair Drake, one of the founders of the AfroAmerican Studies Program at Stanford, always pointed out to students that there were “street tasks” and intellectual tasks. To extrapolate from Drake, there is street speech and intellectual speech. It is not unfair to say that the recent Los Angeles example of the street tasks and street speech of a “captive population” imposing its will upon the city and the State by the only means it had available, took place in the absence of that new Post-Industrial and post nation-state speech or order of knowledge which it was the collective task of all the New “lay” Studies to have effected in the wake of the Sixties; in the wake of those first urban uprisings therefore which challenged the "Truth" of our present episteme.
The eruption of the N.H.I./liminal category in South Central Los Angeles has again opened a horizon from which to spearhead the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us toward a new, correlated human species, and eco-systemic, ethic. Such a new horizon, I propose, will also find itself convergent with other horizons being opened up, at all levels of learning - as for example in the case of the new sciences of complexity related to the rise of the computer as Heinz Pagels points out in his 1988 book The Dreams of Reason.[46] It is this convergence that will make it possible for us to understand the rules governing our human modes of perception and the behaviours to which they lead – as in the case of the misrecognition of human kinship expressed in the N.H.I. acronym, in the beating, and the verdict, as well as in the systemic condemnation of all the Rodney Kings, and of the global Poor and Jobless, to the futility and misery of the lives they live, as the price paid for our well-being. It is only by this mutation of knowledge that we shall be able to secure, as a species, the full dimensions of our human autonomy with respect to the systemic and always narratively instituted purposes that have hitherto governed us - hitherto outside of our conscious awareness and consensual intentionality.
“I believe,” Pagels wrote at the end of his book, “that the most dramatic impact of the new sciences will be to narrow the gap between the natural and the human world. For as we come to grasp the management of complexity, the rich structures of symbols, and perhaps consciousness itself, it is clear that the traditional barriers – barriers erected on both sides – between natural science and the humanities cannot forever be maintained. The narrative order of culturally constructed worlds, the order of human feeling and beliefs, will become subject to scientific description in a new way. Just as it did during the Italian Renaissance, a new image of humanity will emerge in the future as science and art interact in the complementary spheres... I continue to believe that the distant day will come when the order of human affairs is not entirely established by domination”.[47]
The point of this letter is to propose that the coming of that distant day, and the end, therefore, of the need for the violent speech of the inner city streets, is up to us.
The starving fellah, (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global New Poor or les damnés), Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. He is, they are, the Truth.[48] It is we who institute this “Truth.” We must now undo their narratively condemned status.
I am
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Wynter
Professor, Afro-American Studies
May 1992
(originally published as “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” in Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, Vol.1, No.1, Fall 1994)
[1] Gould, Stephen Jay, Hen's Tooth and Horse's Toes. New York: Norton, 1983.
[2] Hacker, Andrew, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, (New York: Scribner's, 1992).
[3] Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
[4] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (New York: Random House, 1952).
[5] Jaime Carbonell, cited by M. Mitchell Wardrop in Man-Made Minds: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, (New York: Walker and Co. 1987).
[6] Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. (New York: Free Press, 1979).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Rene Girard, The Scapegoat Trans. Bouc Emissaire, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986).
[9] Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, PostModernity and Intellectuals, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
[10] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Trans. Les Damnés de la terre (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
[11] Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 1992.
[12] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Humans Sciences. Trans. Les Mots et les choses, (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
[13] Ibid.
[14] Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
[15] Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
[16] D.T. Campbell, "On the Genetics of Altruism and the CounterHedonic Components in Human Culture," Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1972). Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought and Selfless Behaviors, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
[17] Sylvia Wynter, "Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos," in Discovering Columbus, issue of the Annals of Scholarship Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 1991): 251-286.
[18] Asmaron Legesse, GADA: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society, (New York: Free Press, 1973).
[19] Ibid.
[20] Richard Waswo, "The History That Literature Makes", New Literary History Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring 1988): 541-564.
[21] Philip Lieberman, Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought and Selfless Behaviors, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
[22] Jaime Carbonell, cited by M. Mitchell Wardrop in Man-Made Minds: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, (New York: Walker and Co. 1987).
[23] W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: New American Library, 1903, 1969).
[24] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Trans. Les Damnés de la terre, (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
[25] Elsa Goveia, "The Social Framework," Savacou: Journal of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. 1972.
[26] Paul Ricoeur, "Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination," in Being Human in a Technological Age, Borchert and Stewart, eds. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979).
[27] Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
[28] Asmaron Legesse, GADA: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society, (New York: Free Press, 1973).
[29] Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology.
[30] David Bradley, “Black and American, 1982", Esquire, May 1, 1982.
[31] Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro, (New York: A. M. S., 1933, 1977).
[32] Elie Wiesel, Night, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958).
[33] David Orr, "A Commencement Address," reprinted in In Context, issue The Learning Evolution: Education, Innovations for Global Citizens, No. 27 (Winter 1991).
[34] C.D. Darlington, "Epilogue: The Evolution and Variation of Human Intelligence" in Osborne et al, Human Variation, (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
[35] Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980).
[36] Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Reason, (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1978).
[37] As we have seen in the case of South Central Los Angeles, where these shops are owned by new immigrant groups such as Iranian, Taiwanese, Korean, Mexican, most of whom maintain a protected labor market by employing their own “ethnic” kin, see Time, May 18, 1992.
[38] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
[39] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Trans. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs.(New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967).
[40] Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, PostModernity and Intellectuals, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
[41] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
[42] D.T. Campbell, "On the Genetics of Altruism and the CounterHedonic Components in Human Culture," Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1972.
[43] Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, Trans. Bouc Emissaire, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986.
[44] Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living.
[45] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
[46] Heinz R. Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
[47] Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity.
[48] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
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