the Brotherwise Dispatch INTERVIEWS & EXCLUSIVES

the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. LEWIS R. GORDON

2010-12-18T21:53:00.000-08:00

Welcome to another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

[this interview was conducted intermittently via email between March through November 2010 by A. Shahid Stover for the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH. Lewis R. Gordon is Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University.]

The Brotherwise Dispatch – VOL.2, ISSUE #5, DEC/2010-FEB/2011

BROTHERWISE DISPATCH-In your book Fanon and the Crisis of European Man you describe Fanon as the "Locus of many pressing questions in contemporary philosophy." Could you qualify that statement for our readers and maybe share what you consider those "pressing questions" to be?

Lewis R. Gordon - Certainly. First, among the pressing questions in philosophy is the matter of its own justification: how does philosophy justify itself when philosophical reason has been used to rationalize away the humanity of enslaved, colonized, and racialized peoples? Additionally, there are the age-old questions of the relation of theory to practice: How is thinking justified when there is so much to do, especially regarding developing viable responses to a world besieged by injustice and an overwhelming set of advantages by which very few get to dominate so many? These questions connect to philosophy’s relation to freedom and also to philosophy’s relation to itself, to metaphilosophy, to how philosophy assesses philosophy. And more, there is the question of what constitutes primary philosophical questions (a species of the metaphilosophical point). In different ages, these were questions of ontology (questions on and of what there is), questions of ethics (about what we ought to be, what we should strive to become), and questions of knowledge (what we can know). Fanon is among those who understood the significance of philosophical anthropology, of the question of our humanity, of what it means to be human. The immediate connection between that question and the ones I have introduced thus far is that for philosophy to respond to enslavement, colonialism, oppression, philosophy must take seriously how these activities affect human beings, including what it means to be human beings. It also means that philosophers must be aware of themselves in that regard, which means taking seriously the self-critical, the meta-critical tasks through which each of these concerns could be rendered meaningful. For me, that has meant taking seriously the triumvirate of philosophical anthropology, freedom, and metacritiques of reason. For Fanon, it took a similar route since he took seriously the question of the human sciences and the centrality of the meaning of “man” in his work. As well, Fanon never lost sight of the question of freedom, which, without naivety, he understood as fundamentally dialectical and not closed. I add the proviso of not closed since his philosophical anthropology took seriously the human being as, in his formulation at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, a question. That means that any serious dialectics of freedom cannot work with an overdetermined anthropology. Fanon also brought the metacritical question to the fore through his critique of method, where he, in effect, introduced the problem of epistemic colonization (colonization of knowledge) at even the methodological level. Finally, but not exhaustively, Fanon raised these issues at the level of style. He wrote, in other words, in a way that reached to the humanity of his readers. He understood, in other words, that the praxis of liberation is also the practice of communication.

BD- In that same work, you mention "current postmodern-poststructural excursions" which deny "the very theoretical assumptions" from which Fanon "may even demand his day in the tribunal of human affairs." Just what are these 'postmodern-poststructural excursions' and how might they undermine the 'theoretical assumptions' which ground a more Fanonist perspective of critique?

LRG - When I wrote that in 1994, there were people upset by that description of postmodern postructuralism since those approaches were being treated as the Second Coming, as a political advance over the politics of the liberation movements in the late 1950s through1960s. Among the tenets of postmodern poststructuralism, if I may be permitted the use of that term, are anti-humanism and the rejection of liberation discourses. Since Fanon argued that colonialism and racism, in spite of their talk about “man,” were assaults on the human being, and since Fanon was concerned with liberation and the complex philosophical anthropology that lay beneath quests for freedom and their study in the human sciences, his ideas were in a collision course with what was to come. Oddly enough, however, is that postmodern poststructuralism was well suited for an academic conception of politics wherein critique was evaluated more for tenure and professional advancement than the alleviation of social misery of flesh and blood people. Even more, a priority of certain motifs—such as sexuality and gender over race, class more as an abstraction than a reality (wherein it is very much racialized), and a profound insensitivity to the suffering of black people and condescension to our capacity to think and to learn—marked so much postmodern poststructural scholarship, especially those wedded to the designation “postcolonial,” that Fanon was inevitably posed as the dark demon (among others) of the moment. A similar development unfortunately happened in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre, who allied himself with thinkers like Fanon, in an academy that prefers didactic Nazis to courageous and intellectually gifted freedom fighters. There was much brilliant work in postmodern archaeological and genealogical readings of intellectual work in the modern age, but they were accompanied by much self-righteousness that elided reflection on concomitant concerns with struggles for freedom. It may be true that notions of freedom are wedded to anthropological presuppositions in a particular age, but we should also remember that such is our age, and by “our,” I mean people for whom freedom is a meaningful aspiration. Black people are among those people, but the historical circumstance, at least from the kinds of arguments that became hegemonic, has resulted in the treatment of black participation as a lost opportunity. In Fanon’s words from Black Skin, White Masks, it’s the realization of having arrived too late. In concrete form, it’s the experience of black mayors commanding cities in which capital has taken flight; it’s no doubt the experience of President Obama of achieving office when so much of the infrastructure has been gutted and the situation catastrophic. Returning to the conceptual point, how could the articulation of one’s humanity be achieved when those kinds of questions have been rendered illicit?

BD- What is the nature of the fight within the academy over Fanon's theoretical legacy? A legacy which, even today, has implications which extend well beyond the halls of academia itself.

LRG - Fanon’s ideas do not comport well with neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The thing is, they do not also work well with postmodernism, or at least how postmodern scholarship has been in opposition to liberatory and revolutionary aspirations. Some critics have argued that Fanon is more a relic of the past, even though much of what he wrote in, for example, Year V of the Algerian Revolution, known under the title of A Dying Colonialism, and many of his observations in the collection of essays edited by his widow Josèphe Dublé-Fanon, ring true to the current social and political climate of North Africa and West Asia. This applies to depersonalization, torture, suicide-bombing, conflicts over secularization, settlement colonialism, and more. Others try to ignore these issues by prioritizing a single set of problematics—for example, sexual politics—and offer those as the sole bases of assessing Fanon’s legacy. What they miss is that Fanon can be criticized for all of these precisely because he took the time to write on all of them. In other words, we may wonder, why did he devote attention to issues ranging from the quest for recognition in a racially hostile environment to the complexity of adornment and its relationship to gender embodiment? Above all, Fanon was concerned with the status, the value, the dignity, the struggles, of the human being, of what it means to be human, and what can be done at the level of intellectual work and engagement in praxis toward developing a better understanding and relationship of human being to human beings. This surely has implications well beyond the academy.

BD - Is there any relationship between this academic struggle over Fanon's theoretical legacy and Richard Philcox's latest translation of The Wretched of the Earth? For example how the French “phenomene” is now translated into English as “event” instead of “phenomenon”; doesn’t such a change at the very least, undermine the existential phenomenological methodology and implications of Fanon’s opus?

LRG - Nigel Gibson offers an excellent analysis of Philcox’s translation. The article is entitled, “Relative Opacity: A New Translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth—Mission Betrayed or Fulfilled?” Grove had consulted me about the translation, but I had no idea then about the Bhabha foreword and a few other elements. Still, a difficulty these days has been the effort to de-fang Fanon, so to speak, reflected in Anthony Appiah’s pedestrian foreword to Peau noire, masques blancs and Bhabha’s foreword. Their purpose, apparently, is to downplay the political significance of Fanon’s thought. But I don’t worry much about that since, in the end, Fanon’s voice comes through the cacophony of disputes. I don’t so much search for the “real” Fanon as I try to work out the many relationships I have to his thought. On one hand, as a scholar, I try to understand him. As a philosopher of human study, I try to learn from him. As a political thinker, I try to see what resources he offers for the understanding of political reality. In each instance, I have found his thought fruitful. I have the advantage of reading his work in the original French, but I found that the revisions I have had to make to the translations are minimal, although, as we know, a misconstrued word could lead to a thousand injustices—especially when poststructuralists would like to degrade the value of phenomenology, so your point about phenomena is well taken.

BD - Your first book Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism is a pioneering work which undertakes an existential phenomenological exploration of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean “Bad Faith.” Now in Being and Nothingness, as Sartre is developing his notion of “Bad Faith,” he engages in a virulent critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, going so far as to state that “psychoanalysis substitutes for the notion of bad faith, the idea of a lie without a liar.” Within the context of this advanced neo-liberal capitalist society in which we live, psychoanalysis, as an interpretive methodology, continues to exert a tremendous influence on our cultural landscape. Has this uncritical reliance on psychoanalysis assisted in furthering and exacerbating a socio-political climate in which we have racism without racists?

LRG - Among the observations Sartre made about bad faith is that it hates to be identified. A form of bad faith is the appeal to an unconscious. This aspect of Sartre’s work is often misunderstood. Sartre was well aware that there are degrees of consciousness. We are not as conscious when we are almost asleep as we are when we are wide awake. But these are psychophysicological phenomena. The philosophical aspect, the theory of consciousness in the phenomenological sense, is far more complicated. Alfred Schutz, among others, pointed out that a philosophical understanding of consciousness involves the theory of intentionality, for instance, which many confuse as a Cartesian notion of cogitating substance. This is technical stuff, but it amounts to this.

The phenomenological insight is that consciousness is always relational, which is the point behind its always being of something. The relationality of consciousness means that it cannot stand by itself as a reality—in fact, “it” is a problematic designation here. Consciousness is not, in other words, properly a thing, such ascriptions of substance—premised as it is in essence—are mischaracterizations. As a relationship, this means that the problem with an “unconscious,” versus, say, a “subconscious,” is that it introduces a dualism without a relation. The unconscious is in effect a consciousness out of relations since it exists in the psychic life of the consciousness that is in relation. In that inner world, the problems become more acute and its identification, as ultimately in a relation with the series of relations reaching out to the world of others, becomes a heresy because its whole point was to hide itself through denial of relations in the first place. In other words, bad faith wants to be in bad faith through denial of being in bad faith. This awkward formulation brings the political issues to the fore in the plethora of infelicities that which to remain unnamed or at least unidentified: racism would prefer not to be called racist; sexism would prefer the same; colonialism, the same.

At times, the response is downright indignant, so I’ve found it better to move on and not spend much time on that one: yes, advanced, neoliberal capitalism wants at least that form of psychoanalysis really bad, but I would question whether it is pro-psychoanalysis in general. I said “that form” because I notice, for instance, how Freud was attacked over, say, Jacques Lacan in the neoliberal academy. Lacan, however, as biographies of him reveal, was a terrible therapist. Many of his patients committed suicide, and he himself was part of an extraordinarily anti-humanist conception of human relationships—a view that is perfect for a world bent upon the valorization of cruelty. (Oddly enough, Sartre was one of Lacan’s patients during the former’s years at L’Ecole Normale Superior.) I actually like Freud, inspite of his many shortcomings, because he struck me as, in large, a courageous human being. Freud did something in his epoch that few could dare do: he actually analyzed himself, facing many of his frailties and (in his time) depravities. How many men of the nineteenth-century could confront and admit their desire to sleep with their mother? Sartre was also in favor of this aspect of psychoanalysis, not only in his notion of existential psychoanalysis but also in his homage to psychoanalysis as The Words, his autobiography of his childhood, and his monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, attest. That Fanon saw fruit in psychoanalytical reflection reveals its added potential. He, too, explored contradictions in the reach of Lacanian psychoanalysis (the preferred form, by the way, in Homi Bhabha’s approach to postcolonial critique). But in Fanon’s thought, as with Sartre’s, the point is to reveal responsibility and the contradictions of positing a subject outside of the framework of a wider system of relations. Fanon showed, for instance, that the colonial context had a bearing on the symbolic categories of patriarchy, sexuality, and projected imagoes (including his own). That every struggle must be waged not only on levels that shift material conditions but also on the meaning of those conditions offers much credence to psychoanalytical reflection. But the crucial reminder, as I take it from Sartre not only in Being and Nothingness and the other works I have mentioned but also from his Critique of Dialectical Reason, is that necessary conditions are not always sufficient ones, and a properly dialectical critique requires identifying the contradictions of overarching and closed concepts of reason. Fanon, too, argued that conceptual transformation alone is insufficient, but so, too, is material transformation alone. A “both-and” logic is needed, which is the crucial shift between mere behavior and praxis.

In my recent work, I have been pushing these issues further into an understanding of culture, which I regard, drawing upon Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontent (more properly translated, perhaps, as “Culture and Dissatisfaction”) as, in effect, a prosthetic god. Culture is the human attempt to respond to the dangers of nature, the vulnerability of the human body, and the challenges of living in a world with others. The struggle over these conditions moves from signification to the symbolic, and that transformation brings with it the birth of meaning through which a different dimension rules, a dimension constitutive of a human world of worlds. This last formulation is to discern the difference between custom and culture. The latter, as I understand it, is the condition by which the former is possible. It is the condition by which meaning, reality, and the publicity of the world are disclosed and, thus, what we could properly call human reality.

Returning to my initial remarks on bad faith, an aspect of that reality is that it doesn’t always like to see itself, is often ashamed of itself and hates its freedom. A dimension of freedom, for instance, is that really being free requires the ability to reject that freedom. Bad faith is a problem of human reality because without it, freedom would collapse into a necessity that annihilates itself. It is not that we are free to do whatever we choose. We are free to choose whatever we choose, which includes also the bad faith choice of evading choice and freedom. That we are not free to do whatever we choose brings back the material dimension of social reality and culture. I have characterized this as the point about options versus choices. The options available to us have an impact on how meaningful our choices can be. Much political work involves the expansion or contraction of options. When options are contracted, choices collapse inward in an imploding reality I call oppression. When options are expanded, choices are expressions of us reaching out to the world, and that intersubjective reach, rich with symbolic power of material consequence, brings to the fore the importance of bridging gaps between conceptual and material conditions of human life.

On behalf of Lewis R. Gordon and the Brotherwise Dispatch,

Peace,

-A. Shahid Stover

the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. MIAH O'MALLEY

2010-09-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

[this interview was conducted intermittently via email between March 19th-31st of 2010 by A. Shahid Stover for the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH. Miah O’Malley is a visual artist and socio-political activist based out of Brooklyn, New York City]

The Brotherwise Dispatch – VOL.2, ISSUE #4, SEPT-NOV/2010

BROTHERWISE DISPATCH - In the BIO on your website(www.jmomalley.net) you mention that your ideas are "flavored by the Southern Gothic tradition", what are the origins of that artistic tradition? and how did you become exposed to or decide to choose surrealism as your artistic methodology?

MIAH O’MALLEY - The Southern Gothic tradition exerted a natural influence on my way of seeing from a very early age because I was something of a quiet observer, and I saw a lot of disturbing things that nobody talked about. As a small child, I saw a lot of death firsthand (my grandmother choked to death and fell down a flight of stairs, for example) and, typical of the southern Irish American family I was born into, speaking about the incident was out of the question. This gave me an understanding of secrets, which are a motif of the Southern Gothic tradition. There was also mental illness and suicide in my family, which was accepted as part and parcel of any family, and was not to be talked about either.

Growing up as I did in Birmingham, there were also societal issues that were not talked about. My grandparents marked the progression of history in the city with statements like, "that was before the coloreds were on this side of town." When I was old enough to realize there was a problem with this kind of thinking, it was impossible to get anyone in my family to talk about it. It became another dark secret. Add to this that the women in my family were these overwrought southern archetypes who suffered from fainting spells and "visions" in which they communicated with the dead, and you can see all the elements of a Southern Gothic novel.

When I started to be exposed to art, and different "schools" in the history of art, I developed a deep and abiding interest in Surrealism right away. The imagery was the first thing that appealed to me- the disconnect from the logical spoke to my experiences. I started to study their methods eventually, and I felt they were more harmonious with the natural tendencies of human thinking than any other kind of art I'd seen. Later, I would realize that their ideas were based on indigenous methods of creation- shamanism, the collective unconscious, and so on. There was a spirituality that was lacking in all these other kinds of art that I'd seen at the museum or whatever. They were also involved in the the "Contre-Attaque" movement, an anti-facist "Fighting Union of Revolutionary Intellectuals." This gave me the idea that art could be all-encompassing as a way of living, and that a people's art had nothing to do with academic whims or the ruling class. I would also come to realize that this division accounted for the attitudes of the art institutions with regard to more pure art forms- for example, the pejorative use of terms like "outsider art", the refusal to acknowledge forms like graffiti, or the insistence that indigenous artists and street artists were "untrained". Of course, Salvador Dali ruined a lot of what the Surrealists were trying to do, but that's another rant...

BD - Your work, aside from being emotionally stark and spiritually haunting, has a very intimate sensibility to it. Does such an extreme personal method of catharsis assist or hinder its potential for social relevance? In what ways?

MM- This is a tough question for me, because I'm very sensitive about whether my work speaks to other people. My intention is to describe in symbolic form the lived reality of an individual struggle for meaning. Pain, a longing for beauty, sorrow, and existential anxiety are things every person experiences I think, so I hope that my portrayal of these experiences is universal. I try to use a language that is available to every person- for example I strive to create an image that can be read by the viewer based on an emotional response rather than an academic knowledge of art. I don't use institutional references in my work, either stylistically or with regard to ideas. I don't use models in my work, and this is so that I can communicate directly with the viewer. This was very challenging for me at first, both technically and emotionally. I've grown used to using a timer when exposing the film, and I'm still trying to become comfortable with the vulnerable position that I'm in by being the actor in these narratives. Anytime I'm satisfied with an image I've completed, the feeling that follows shortly after is anxiety that someone else is going to eventually be seeing it. But, I think artists have an obligation to give of themselves in this way. The role of the shaman, dreamer, or spiritual vessel in many cultures is to take on the pain of the tribe and use it to seek out information or enlightenment in the spiritual realm.

BD - So tell me what this NUMU ARTS COLLECTIVE is all about and how did you get involved with them?

MM - I actually got involved with Numu through an open call they had to participate in a group show. When I moved up here, I had been picked up by a commercial gallery, and my experience with that place was kind of the last straw for me in terms of being represented by galleries. I decided to try participating in an art collective because I wanted to see what it was about. I had done shows at smaller places like the gallery that was owned by CBGB's, kind of shit hole places you might say, and I found an authentic experience there. I was looking for something like that experience.

To me, the audience at the art collective show is superior to that at a gallery. What I mean is that the people come to an art collective show and they want to experience the work, and have a reaction to what's being shown. The commercial gallery audience is largely comprised of people who are there to "rub elbows", make contacts, and prostrate themselves before any "important people" who might be there. This is a depressing situation if you're hoping to show the work and get feedback, to actually share it with someone. In the art collective, or similar environment, people ask you questions about how you created the work and talk about their feelings about it, which is what I'm looking for.

There are also certain values that are present in the art collective. Craftsmanship is important. Many photographers who can be seen in commercial galleries don't create their own prints, which I find offensive. If you are a so-called photographer who can't print, can't light anything, and need an assistant to load and prep your camera, then you're not actually good at anything. There's also, in the collective, a regard for the creative process and the development of that process. There are workshops to attend, to distill your ideas and skills. I'm currently involved in a collaboration with another artist from the collective, and this is another thing that is encouraged. To me, the collaboration is an opportunity to examine your ideas from a different perspective and to push yourself to bring your best to the situation. That kind of thing would never be addressed in a commercial gallery.

The collective is also an opportunity to give inspiration to others by giving workshops. I present Surrealist process workshops, for example, and they are suitable for visual artists, writers, musicians, or anyone who wants to try a new way to develop ideas.

BD - You're part of a socio-political organization as well, the UHURU movement correct? Could you tell our readers what they are about and how did you end up getting involved with them?

MM - That's correct- I'm a member of Uhuru Solidarity Movement, which is an organization under the leadership of the African People's Socialist Party, and Chairman Omali Yeshitela. Uhuru is a Swahili word that means 'freedom', and was made popular by the Mau Mau freedom fighters in Kenya who resisted British colonial forces. The Solidarity Movement is the response to the call by the African liberation movement of the 1960's for white people to go out and organize other whites in solidarity with the African revolution. Many white groups have failed to do this, or only want to "help out" on their own terms, which is not effective- you can't fight for someone else's liberation on your terms. This is why we work under the leadership of African people themselves. When I say 'African', I am using the terminology of the Chairman and the African Socialist International, who do not differentiate between African and diasporic peoples. The phrase "One Africa! One Nation!" is used in the movement to describe the unity of the organized resistance of the worldwide African working class.

As a white person living in the largest imperialist country, I recognize the conditions of colonized people. African and Latino people are locked away in forced labor camps and terrorized by the state, while the native people of this land have been forced into concentration camps known as "reservations". The genocide of colonized people the world over is ongoing, and is not something that can be hidden away behind the neo-colonial figurehead we currently have as a president. Kwame Nkruma said that neo-colonial governments ("white power in black face") are the death throes of imperialism, and we can see that this is real. Colonized peoples of the world are fighting back, and the time is ripe for revolution. In the Solidarity Movement, we say no peace while imperialism is intact. We don't want "peace". We unite with victory to the Somalian insurgents, victory to the Palestinian insurgents, and all power to the people!
I get very excited about this. My involvement with the Uhuru Movement started after I saw a presentation by the Chairman in Philly. I had been involved with white socialist groups and had found them to be pointless and ineffective in terms of real change. They were generally reformist and just wanted a bigger piece of the pie from the system. I was brought into the movement by Ali Hoehne from Philadelphia, who provides leadership to me as I organize in NYC. I am currently working on our Earth Day action (among numerous other things) in which we put out the call to unite not just with "green" but with red, black, and green. The destruction of the environment and the exploitation of human beings are symptoms of the same disease, parasitic capitalism. It's not enough to plant a tree or join a car pool. Capitalism requires constant growth to survive, and this growth is driven through the theft of resources from people. There is no such thing as a more sustainable capitalism, or a "green" capitalism that is oiled by the blood of human beings. True peace and prosperity for Mother Earth and all humanity will come through the liberation of African and all colonized peoples. If you would like to join the movement as a member, or find out more information, contact me at miahuhuru@gmail.com.

BD - Well stated, nice plug at the end by the way, its no wonder you are such an effective activist. What is the relationship between your artistic endeavors and your responsibilities as an socio-political activist?

MM - I'm actually working this out for myself at the moment. I'm at a point of realization that my work has been very individualistic, and I'm starting to really think about that. For me, the work is a spiritual practice and I am thinking about how this spirituality can possibly be expanded to include others, beyond just sharing the work with viewers. I'm involved in a collaboration right now which will culminate in a show in July. The title of the show is 'Liminal Bodies', and is an exploration of thresholds in the creative process with regard to the individual. The purpose of the collaboration is to question accepted ideas of the creative process as an individual act resulting in a completed artifact. I don't know what exactly will happen, but I am really looking forward to it. My collaborative partner, Rebeca Olguin, and I have been working out a system of communication and hybridization as a point of departure, and I have already found this both expanding and intimidating in terms of artistic growth. It's a very intimate act, if you're following through on it completely. The work will not just be collaborative in terms of ideas, but in actual physical execution as well, meaning that she will paint and draw on my photographs and I will scratch and impose photographic work on her drawings and paintings. We will be creating the work in its physical form together, each dealing with the other's way of thinking, ideas, shortcomings, and skills. This is like having someone else's hands inside your mouth feeling for the subtleties of your speech.

Our way of thinking in this work is flavored by the influence of Peruvian shamanic traditions, among many other things. The Peruvian shaman of the Andes journeyed to the Lower World by traveling through four chambers, including the Chamber of Contracts, the Chamber of Grace, and the Chamber of Treasures. It is in the Chamber of Grace that one makes the decision whether or not to retrieve the younger self found in the first chamber, and to bring him home in a way that honors all that is good and beautiful in him, and all that is flawed, broken, and irretrievable.

on behalf of the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH and Miah O’Malley,

peace,

-A. Shahid Stover

the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Susan Buck-Morss

2010-06-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first of our BROTHERWISE FIVE series, where the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH will interrogate intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

[this interview was conducted intermittently via email between late April through May of 2010 by A. Shahid Stover for the BROTHERWISE DISPATCH. Susan Buck-Morss has authored several books including HEGEL, HAITI and UNIVERSAL HISTORY and is professor of political philosophy and social theory in the Department of Government at Cornell University.]

The Brotherwise Dispatch – VOL.2, ISSUE #3, JUNE–AUGUST/2010

BROTHERWISE DISPATCH-What are some of the most surprising aspects of the response(both the acclaim and the criticism) to your work HEGEL, HAITI and UNIVERSAL HISTORY? And as somewhat of a follow up, what is your response to the somewhat dismissive criticism leveled at your work from the NEW LEFT REVIEW?

SUSAN BUCK MORSS- Well, a lot of people don’t seem to get past the title. They think I am using the fact that Hegel was reading about the Haitian Revolution, when he wrote the dialectic of master and slave, in order to incorporate Haiti into a Hegelian version of universal history. Instead I am using that fact to criticize the whole Hegelian project and to redeem “universal history” on totally different grounds - away from identity theory, and identity politics. As for the NEW LEFT REVIEW critique, it focused exasperatingly on Hegel, as if he were the most important part of the story. Even here, the author ignored the enormous research that I did in the Hegel archives, and that I reported in the footnotes of “Hegel and Haiti” (lowering it to the status of supporting material), while he reached his own conclusion on his “own hunch, nothing more,” that I was wrong.

BD- That was one of the most troubling aspects of the NLR's review, in the sense that, rather than focus on the emancipatory potentialities your work unleashed, they were intent on towing the line and preserving the mythic integrity of a specific and fixed interpretation of Hegel which is grounded more on academic territorialism and western imperialism than on human liberation. But let's move on . . .

In your introduction to part one of your book, you state that "the construction of an object of research can hide as much as it illuminates". For our readers who are unfamiliar with your previous works and/or may have yet to read HEGEL, HAITI and UNIVERSAL HISTORY, would you explain how that relates to the very nature of your work as a critical theorist and how it informed the creation of this book on Hegel and the Haitian Revolution in particular?

SBM- Maybe that is the difference between a theorist and a historian. The historian already knows the object of research. The theorist writes in order to discover it. You are right that all of my books arrange historical data against the grain of traditional categories in order to expose the limits of conceptual imagination. DREAMWORLD and CATASTROPHE juxtaposed communist and capitalist forms to reveal how many beliefs and goals these two Cold-War enemies shared. In THINKING PAST TERROR, I considered Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and Mahmoud Mohamed Taha as belonging, not to some fundmentally “other” civilization, but to the sixties generation of radicals that included Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and even Theodor Adorno – the goal was to discover, as a new object, a global public sphere.

In putting Hegel together with the Haitian Revolution, again as belonging to the same generation, I was violating all sorts of taboos, and I have to admit that I felt timid about even suggesting it. Of course, it was logical that Hegel, an avid reader of political journals, would have been familiar with the slave revolution that went on for the whole decade immediately before he published the famous master-slave dialectic in THE PHENOMENOLOGY of SPIRIT. But the authority of academic tradition can be extremely intimidating. How could I be right to see the connection when generations of Hegel scholars hadn’t even noticed? Historians tend to keep to their own turf: there are Caribbean historians, but they never talk to German intellectual historians – and as for philosophers, their languages can be incomprehensible to any outsider. There is just no cross-over institutionally. That’s a huge disadvantage, not just academically, but politically.

BD-Again, referencing HEGEL, HAITI and UNIVERSAL HISTORY, how much does the fact that the global spread of Enlightenment ideals was underwritten by the "systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force" speak to the inherent limitations of the Enlightenment ideals themselves?

SBM- I am not convinced that to point out the discrepancy between the universal principles of the Enlightenment and their violation in practice is enough to discredit the principles. Or to discredit abstractions as such. They do work pragmatically as “regulatory ideas” in Kant’s sense, that is, as criteria against which really existing conditions can be criticized and present power relations can be held accountable. But you are absolutely right to point out the structural contradiction, the discrepancy between an exploitative global economy and any principle of political justice, whether in the 18th century or the 21st. We cannot resolve the issues of political equality and social justice without confronting the intolerable global consequences of the so-called free market system. When politicians couple “free societies” with “free markets” they are already duping the people – and maybe themselves. It just isn’t true that private vices (the self-interest actions of individuals) result happily in public virtues on a collective level. Even Adam Smith saw through that illusion.

BD-You write that this "paradox between the discourse of freedom and the practice of slavery" which "marked the ascendancy of a succession of Western nations within the early modern global economy" didn't "trouble the logical consciousness of contemporaries" and then express your surprise(albeit somewhat tongue in cheek) that "present-day writers, while fully cognizant of the facts, are still capable of constructing Western histories as coherent narratives of human freedom." Your own generosity aside in granting that "the reasons do not need to be intentional"; how much does the continued construction of the history of the West as a coherent narrative of human freedom reveal an intrinsic loyalty not only to Enlightenment ideals, but to the continued maintenance of the emancipatory contradictions which serve as the foundation for Modernity as established through Western imperialism?

SBM- When it comes to “constructing Western histories as coherent narratives of human freedom,” I totally agree that this cannot be done today in good faith. But here is the issue: we need knowledge of history, now more than ever. Fred Jameson is right to point out the post-modern dangers of collective amnesia. The question is, what kinds of histories. The enormous gains in historical knowledge were made in the nineteenth century by the same European societies that enacted world imperialism. These conterminous projects were not accidentally related. So the telling of alternative histories that actually change the structure of collective memory is a central task of education. And the philosophy of history – history (Benjamin), not ontology (Heidegger) – is a central task of critical theory.

BD- This last question is about the potentialities of emancipatory praxis and very much related to your statement that "in the name of universal humanity, the vanguard justifies its own violence as a higher truth" and again "imagination, intending to set the world aright, makes a virtue out of violence against the violator". How can it be otherwise when a "violator" has no intention of reigning in the oppressive violence which maintains his dominance? In other words, in attempting to rightfully address the possible excesses of revolutionary violence, do you not run the risk of endorsing the actual structural-inert violence of the status quo? Or worse, might such words be interpreted as complicit in stifling the human agency needed to resist and confront such oppressive violence and attempt to bring it to an end?

SBM- This is the central political dilemma, no matter what the theoretical frame of your argument. Of course, the slaves who revolted on Saint-Domingue didn’t just declare their liberty; they fought for it, to the death. It is hard to refute the necessity for counter-violence. Marxists, with reason, claim that when it comes to maintaining the violent status quo, “pacifism is the most murderous ideology.” Islamists, with just as much reason, argue that the ethical imperative of “forbidding wrong” justifies jihad against those who violate Muslims. But a reign of terror inevitably follows: the counter-racism of Haiti’s founding, the Red Terror of the Bolshevik Revolution, public executions by the revolutionary Republic of Iran. To be willing to die for your principles brings public honor. But it produces, on the other side of the coin, a willingness to kill for them. Principles are abstract; they entail an abstract “enemy,” so that anyone who is identified with the enemy label is vulnerable to destruction, no matter what that person’s actual intentions, feelings, sentiments, or moral code – no matter whether she or he has actually harmed anyone, no matter whether you actually like or respect the person, no matter whether that person is your sister or brother! This logic has been repeated so many times in history – regardless of the ideology – that no political movement should consider itself exempt. There must be another way to imagine collective life. The logical resolution to the master-slave dialectic is recognition among equals. Hegel saw that actually happen in the Haitian Revolution. There must also be a way to resolve the dialectic between friend and foe, self and other. That is the political task of our time.

on behalf of Susan Buck-Morss and the Brotherwise Dispatch,

peace,

-A. Shahid Stover

POSTMODERN ICONOCLASTIC FRAGMENTS:an interview with JEAN BAUDRILLARD

2010-03-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

Jean Baudrillard interviewed by Francois L’Yvonnet

The Brotherwise Dispatch, VOL.2, ISSUE#2, MARCH-MAY/2010

Francois L’Yvonnet – You actually seem to be quite a solitary person. Though you’ve been part of various intellectual movements and close to some groups, you’ve never had any affiliations to any of them, even the Situationist International.

Jean Baudrillard – I referred to the Situationists, but never in my writings or analyses. I spoke about them, in my lectures at Nanterre, for example. How could you not speak about them? And then, we were very close, but I never had any direct personal relations with their leaders. I knew Raoul Vaneigem a little, but I never met Guy Debord.

FL – A solitude which brought you some unkind remarks from the S.I. In the groups journal you even came in for an attack, alongside Henri Lefebvre, in articles full of name-calling. Doubtless you were paying a price for your marginality. It has to be said the Situationists had a rather curious way of referring to people.

JB – Their attacks were aimed mainly at Henri Lefebvre, and there were undoubtedly some real issues between them. After the Father, they took against the false sons, one of whom was me. They stigmatized me as the house Maoist, all because Felix Guattari and I and few others had set up what I think was called the Franco-Chinese People’s Association, with a newspaper.

FL – When was this?

JB – At the time of the Cultural Revolution, in the early sixties. Felix had connections with a very committed bookshop based near the Paris Mosque, and we became quite close friends. It was his idea to found this association. We published a newspaper, the title of which I forget. It ran only two or three issues, no more than that, because the Chinese never recognized us. One of us even went to Algiers to meet Chou En-Lai, but he didn’t want anything to do with us. The Chinese preferred upstanding, law-abiding right-wing associations, not an uncontrollable little far-left group! Others went to Geneva, also to meet with officials from the People’s Republic, but they had no more success. We organized a big meeting at the Salle de Horticultures that ended in violence, with OAS heavies moving in to break it up using strong-arm tactics. Having no ideological baggage and not belonging to any political organization, I was just the right man to edit a paper like that! I was a bit of a front-man. The venture didn’t go any further and the paper disappeared. I have happy memories of it, though it was more or less historically stillborn. It’s a great story from the wild years!

FL – Was that your last episode as an activist?

JB – Activist is going a bit far. I’ve never been any kind of activist.

FL – In Henri Lefebvre, it wasn’t so much the one-time Communist that interested you, the witness to the ideological conflicts of the past, as the theorist of everyday life.

JB – It was, certainly, the critique of everyday life that interested me. I never really took my lead from Lefebvre’s work. I found what he did quite free-spirited, light and wittily written, but it seemed to me already to belong to another age, an age still closed to psychoanalysis and semiology. He wouldn’t have anything to do with any of that. Structuralism was his number one enemy. And what I was doing didn’t quite fit in with his own work, but we remained very good friends. When I arrived at Nanterre University in 1966-7, Lefebvre had just broken with the Situationists at the famous Strasbourg Congress.

FL – Let’s recall what that was about: in 1965, Debord broke with Lefebvre, whom he regarded as too abstract and philosophical, arguing that his book La Proclamation de la Commune(1965) had plagiarized a Situationist pamphlet.

JB – There were points on which we were ideologically in disagreement with the Siutationists. For example, ‘workers’ councils’ and the councils movement as a whole seemed very dated to us. On the other hand, their radicalism interested me, and everyone went along with their idea of radical subjectivity! In the end, all these things remained in the imaginary register, the political imagination. It was a phenomenon which quite rightly disappeared. That was all it could do. And those who criticize the Situationists for not having succeeded are barking up the wrong tree, since Situationism wasn’t made to succeed! Today, they’re reviving its ghost again, with Debord.

FL – In Situationism, there’s both an innovative, ludic thinking and, at the same time, an incredibly classical rhetoric, with ponderous theoretical demonstrations of papal seriousness, equipped with a conceptual apparatus taken directly from German philosophy – demonstrations which fascinated them. They were still in dissertation mode. Your won way of thinking and writing breaks unequivocally with all that.

JB – They had a great force of conviction and the desire to be clear. This was the last form in which an avant-garde phenomenon of this kind appeared, though the term ‘avant-garde’ isn’t appropriate – at any rate, a movement with such a ‘pointed’ critique. It was the end of a kind of revolutionary idealism, which had moved on to new ground such as daily life, the city, etc. Thanks to them, all the Marxists superstructures were greatly weakened, even if they did remain attached to old ways of thinking. All that blew away after 1970 with all the business about desire and revolution and the mixing of the two . . .

FL – Freudo-Marxism . . .

JB – Some saw an extreme radicalism in that. But the mix sounded the death-knell of both desire and revolution. The blending of the two led to each being neutralized by the other. There were many who based themselves on the idea for a long time. As far as the question of desire was concerned, I already had some marked disagreements with Jean-Francois Lyotard, and even with Gilles Deleuze . . . while entirely admiring their ‘machine’, which was very desirable, but from my point of view not really operative! A whole generation based themselves on this terrible ambiguity, on things that had, to all intents and purposes, already disappeared.

FL – What makes desire and revolution irreconcilable?

JB – The political and libidinal dimensions lose their singularity. It was their singularity alone that gave them their force. To mix the two was to contravene their irreducibility. It was, when all’s said and done, one hell of a misappropriation of Marx and Freud.

FL – Which led to neutralizing the subversive dimensions of each man’s thought?

JB – There was a kind of outpouring of the one into the other, with a total loss of intensity, to sue the terms then in vogue. It would be stupid to make pejorative analysis of this retrospectively. At the time everyone dived in, including the best minds, but, with some distance, we have to agree it was a trap, and a trap that still operates more or less everywhere today. Like the revolt of the Situationists, these ideas serve as a reference today for what I won’t call the most impoverished thinking, but at least the most conventional.

FL – We need only think of those who claim to be the heirs apparent to the Situationists today – real embezzlers of the heritage!

JB – Let’s not talk about them.

FL – And poor old Debord, who will soon be included in the school textbooks! Isn’t it always a bit suspicious for an author to be a classic so easily?

JB – You can admire Debord’s language, but that’s to make an aesthetic object out of it, which wasn’t the case. Form is always important, but his language wasn’t an object of admiration in itself. The same thing happened when they began to analyse the thought of Freud and Marx from the ideological, emotional or even the everyday standpoint, talking about their maids and I don’t know what else. To sexualize Marx and to politicize Freud was a thoroughly dubious mix. This kind of mishmash or patchwork has become the vulgate today. Among the sensible critiques of Debord, one of the most pertinent came from Regis Debray. In an article which appeared, I think, in Le Debat, while also settling some old personal scores, he said some very apposite things about alienation, man’s separation from himself. He pointed out that we weren’t in that ball-game at all now; on the contrary, we’re threatened not by separation or alienation, but by total immersion.

FL – The language of the Situationists bears the hallmarks of German idealism with the notions of alienation, objectification, reification.

JB – I remember Situationism as something really admirable, but it’s an extinct phenomenon, a dead star. Which isn’t the case with Nietzsche or some others. The Situationists were like meteors, and I wouldn’t want publicly to dissociate myself with them, since, in terms of events, it was an important moment. It’s in the moment when things appear that their essentials are revealed.

FL – It’s in their nascent state that we should attempt to grasp movements of thought. When they have matured, they often cease to be fertile and stiffen for a last dogmatic burst before their inevitable decline.

JB – In 1966-7, with the journal Utopie, we created our own little domain. We developed some major objections to Situationist thinking. We went further beyond politics and ideology than they were – beyond alienation.

FL – Utopie also broke the ‘Bolshevik’ arrogance of the Situationists, their anathemas, their impoverished tribunals, their condemnations of all kinds, which ended up occupying most of their mental and militant energies. With a clear ‘schoolboy’ dimension evident in their wordplay.

JB – You’re right. There was something adolescent in that revolt. For me, Utopie was the preparatory phase for my work on objects, on the consumer society and political economy. The Mirror of Production was the break with Marx, with the emergence of symbolic exchange in prospect. It was that thinking that went into Utopie. We were already in the transpolitical.

this interview is excerpted from Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Conversations with Francois L’Yvonnet, (London, Routledge, 2001, 2004) pp.15-20.

CAPITALISM, MARXISM AND THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: An Interview with CEDRIC ROBINSON

2009-12-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH VOL.2,ISSUE#1,DEC/2009-FEB/2010

It is the task of the radical critic to illuminate what is repressed and excluded by the basic mechanisms of a given social order. It is the task of the politically engaged radical critic to side with the excluded and repressed: to develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice, to nourish cultures of resistance, and to help define the means with which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities.

Cedric Robinson has embraced these tasks. His work explores the relationship between our social order and its negations, particularly Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition. He has examined this relationship in historical, political, and philosophical terms with an orientation that is as comprehensive as it is anti-authoritarian.

I interviewed Robinson by e-mail in January 1999. ~ Chuck Morse

In the conclusion of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition you write that "the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition." Your writings (especially Black Marxism and Black Movements in America) are attempts to introduce a level of self-consciousness to this tradition. Why is this important now and what do you hope this can offer to the development of Black radicalism and radical movements generally?

My work is in a sense notational - reinscribing historical experience - for a political objective. Present generations must know, at the very least, what has been known in order to achieve greater clarification and effectiveness. Just as Thucydides believed that historical consciousness of a people in crisis provided the possibility of more virtuous action, more informed and rational choices, so do I.

At the time I was writing Black Marxism and Black Mass Movements I felt strongly that Black nationalism as it was beings pursued by spokespersons like Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan was a failed enterprise. As a peevish and perverse inversion of the political culture and racialism which had been used to justify the worst excesses of the exploitation and oppression of Black people, it served as a fictive radicalism, a surrogate mirage of the Black struggle. So both of these works, politically, were written to address the miscomprehensions and conceits of Black nationalism in historical terms: to examine how our ancestors responded to the seductions of this construction of the struggle and their visions of the future social order.

Black Marxism is not a chronological narrative of Black radicalism but a dialectical analysis of the development of racial capitalism, Marxism, and Black opposition. What is it about the Black Radical Tradition that requires this method of analysis?

There are several rationales for the employment of dialectical analysis to the Radical Tradition: they relate to the subject matter, to the audience, and to the method itself.

The Tradition's first stage of development is oppositional, i.e. the negation (resistance) of the negation (slavery); the response to the attempted cultural alienation and the effected physical, geographical and social alienation of slavery.

But slavery itself must be understood in a new way by readers familiar with the melodramatic and Eurocentric narrative of slavery as the capture, impressment, and exploitation of primitive peoples. I attempted to intrude upon the familiar construction of slavery as a superior culture overtaking an inferior culture. This narrative is hegemonic and must be ruptured.

In order to present this to the readers it is important to recognize the cultural history of the enslaved, but this is not easily done. The Black Radical Tradition is not a biological reflex, but a reconstitution of historical, cultural, and moral materials, a transcendence which both transfers and edits earlier knowledges and understandings among the several African peoples enslaved.

The dialectical method is well suited to these tasks.

In Black Marxism you point to a distinctively ‘African consciousness’ that informed the commitments, insights, and politics of Black radicals. What is this consciousness and what is its importance for Black radical politics?

I believe that the historical struggles in Africa and the New World culled some of the best virtues of their native cultures. One such virtue was democracy, the commitment to a social order in which no voice was greater than another (I wrote about some of the precedents for this regime in The Terms of Order).

This alternative to hierarchy also produced a critique of political order; and during the anti-slavery struggles, it achieved a rather sophisticated critique of the rule of law. And the core and tributaries of this moral philosophy were what Greek classicists term the transmutation of the soul. So, from the center of a world view in which the reiteration of names (an African convention in which the name of a recently deceased loved one is given to the next child born) reflected the conservatism and responsibilities of a community, the resolve to value our historical and immediate interdependence substantiates democracy.

This heritage gave Black Radicals many things. For example, it gave them an ability to retain the value of life, a fact that had many consequences, such as presenting restraints on the use of violence as a political instrument.

C.L.R. James

In analyzing the contributions made by W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright to the Black Radical Tradition you highlight DuBois’s emphasis on the peasants’ revolutionary role, James’s critique of the Leninist party model, and Wright’s emphasis on the cultural dimensions of revolutionary politics. These observations have been constitutive of the anarchist tradition and, to a lesser degree, libertarian socialism. Do they create a unique common ground upon which Black radicals and anti-authoritarians from other backgrounds can meet?

What these anti-authoritarian traditions have in common is that they confront and show the necessity of avoiding certain conceits which follow from the general theory of revolution in Marxism.

One conceit is class; another is determinancy; and another is the stage-construction of history. As Amilcar Cabral argued thirty years ago, class is not a world-historical phenomena enveloping the histories of all peoples; and culture and consciousness are as powerful in determining choice and behavior as the material reproduction of a society. Finally, the discrete stages of history which Marx borrowed from the Scottish Enlightenment of the 17th century hardly corresponds with any human history, even European’s.

However, I do not believe that it is necessary for a convergence of these traditions to take place. They are all assaults on the same social and political authority. We should remember, for example, that the Russian Revolution - despite its reconstruction as a consequence of the Leninist party - was the result of many different revolutions (revolutions for which Lenin or Trotsky had no responsibility or theoretical understanding). The Tsarist regime did not collapse under the weight of a single force.

Black and other radicals originate and articulate distinct histories which converge and diverge depending on historical circumstance: this was James's conception of the confluences of the Haitian slaves and the French peasantry, etc.; a historical correspondence which was broken by the time Frantz Fanon wrote of French colonialism, French workers, and the colonized subject. These histories of radicalism are neither determined nor dictated by the world-system, merely given local impulse.

Marx believed that a communist society could only emerge from the European working class. Black radicals and others excluded from world-historical significance by Marx confronted this claim and produced important insights into the nature of capitalist development and revolutionary agency. Are these insights developed by Black radicals distinct from those generated by similar confrontations among other peoples?

What is similar is the historical tendency to succumb to the seductions of nationalism on the premise that Marxism is essentially Eurocentric. It is as a response to the denial of historical agency within Marx that many non-western radicals have often thrown themselves into nationalist projects. (Although many recent movements, such as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, are no longer concerned or consumed by that problem.)

But confrontations with Marx’s historical vision are also shaped by the social context in which they unfold. The Black Radical Tradition emerged in the belly of the beast, in a setting where physical and cultural problems were very immediate and the surveillance of Black radicals was omnipresent. Black radicals thus took slave society, colonial, and post-colonial society at its word and attempted to subvert in on this basis. Whereas Chinese Marxists, for example, saw capitalism and the West as an invasive force coming from without. The Chinese revolutionaries never conceded to the West its self-definition, and thus had a different relationship to Marx's historical vision.

The relationship between the West and Africa, mediated by the development of capitalism, is central to your discussion of Black radical politics. However, at a time when capitalist firms are increasingly globalized and various non-western economies are major factors of the world economy, the ‘West’ plays a more ambiguous role as a center of capitalism. How does this change the character of Black radical politics?

Changes in capitalism have produced changes in Black Radical politics and they also provide new opportunities. For instance, racial capitalism in England and the US exposes the instability of race categories. In England, where South Asians are Black as well as Africans and West Indians, this creates an opportunity for political alliances which were never anticipated by capitalism.

However, Marx and later Marxists were enthralled with the notion that capital would organize the world into a single order and then the proletariat would inherit that ordered world. I have never conceded the notion that the West has ordered the world in a rational whole: no coherent order, no singular whole, has ever been forged under the authority of capital and the unifying language of world systems theory simply does not capture the chaos of capitalism.

For the purposes of liberation, it is not necessary for Black radicalism to shadow or reiterate the world-system. There will be no proletarian armageddon with capitalism. Centralism is anathema to revolutionary change for the courage, resolve, and intelligence necessary to defeat oppression issues from different historical and cultural sites.

I believe it is necessary for the Black Radical Tradition to remain focused upon the cultural legacies that have provided for its strengths. The Tradition is most powerful when it draws on its own historical experiences while resisting the simplifications of Black nationalism. This protocol allows for the emergence and recognition of other radical traditions, drawing their own power from alternative historical experiences.

In Black Marxism you argue that racism is integral to the development of capitalism. However, given the emergence of various Asian economies (including ‘socialist’ China), it appears that capitalism has taken on a much more multi-cultural character. Has the relationship between race and capitalism changed in fundamental ways and, if so, what does this imply for a radical, anti-racist politics?

When we inspect the expansions of capital in Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. we discover racial protocols. These are encrusted from much earlier histories (for example, a thousand years of slavery in Korea).

What is important to remember is that capital never develops according to pure market exigencies or rational calculus. Whatever the organization of capitalism may be and whoever constitutes its particular agencies, capitalism has a specific culture. As Aristotle first revealed, capital accumulation is essentially irrational. And as was the case in his time, race, ethnicity, and gender were powerful procedures for the conduct of accumulation and value appropriation.

You describe a dialectic between Black radicalism and the larger social order in which Black radicalism gradually evolves, understanding itself more deeply and articulating a more incisive, revolutionary critique. However, revolutionary, anti-capitalist commitments are far less prevalent in Black politics and theory today than a decade or two ago. What does this indicate about the evolution of the Tradition as a whole?

I do not believe that the Black Radical Tradition is at a low point. For example, there are vanguard movements in the Tradition: think of the reception of Nelson Mandela in the US after his release from prison. He became a marker for the advance of the Black Radical Tradition as a whole in the minds of many Black Americans. On the other hand, local conditions in places like the US have not produced such world historical individuals in recent times.

But the world is dynamic, constantly changing, constantly creating new possibilities (see, for instance, how far revolutionary agendas were pursued by youth gangs in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the post-Civil Rights era). All over the US, Black Radicalism is manifesting itself in urban churches, in theory (i.e. doctrine) and practice (i.e. volunteerism). What will be the next phase, when the rule of law becomes transparently farcical, the Christian right achieves its fascist perfection, and the State acquires a predominantly carceral posture towards the majority of Blacks, Latinos, etc.?

The conflicted relationship between intellectuals and popular movements is an important theme in your work. Does the emergence of high-profile Black Studies departments (at Harvard, example) and the popularity of writers such as Cornell West, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates Jr., etc. mark a new stage in the relationship between Black intellectuals and movements?

Hegemonic control of Black Studies is as important to capital as any other field of knowledge production. The selective breeding of Black intellectuals in this country is even older than the appearance of the philanthropic Black colleges of the late 19th century; and the necessity of dominating Black knowledge production finds a template in the Gunnar Myrdahl enterprise in the years of World War II.

However, Black Studies is revolutionary in its political and historical origins and intellectual impulses. To paraphrase C.L.R. James, who insisted that Black Studies was the study of Western Civilization, Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization. This is all too apparent in one of the first articulations of radicalism by David Walker in 1829. Modern slavery, Walker demonstrated, was not like Ancient Mediterranean slavery; modern Christianity could not oblige a Just God; education had to have a revolutionary emancipation as its central virtue, etc. So at those sites of its inception, Black Studies was seen as preparatory to re-articulating justice and the Good.

The Tradition is by now well prepared to defend itself against attempts to colonize it: after all Black revolutionists were working with George Washington Carver at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee preserve. Imagine the contradictions!

As a new and controversial development in the analysis of ethnicity, what role do you think ‘Whiteness Studies’ can play in fighting white supremacy and what are its limitations?

Whiteness Studies deconstruct and decenter whiteness, showing that it is an artifice, that it has a history and one that does not go back very far. The best of the work (like George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness) is an extension of radical Black Studies.

Although it is currently in fairly progressive hands, problems could emerge. For example, it could be used to challenge the very existence of Black Studies. It could lend itself to arguments such as: "we’ve gone too far: we’ve had Black Studies, now we have White Studies, what we need to do is prosecute a universal American identity". Or, in the same vein: "if you can’t give us resources for White Studies then the you shouldn’t provide resources for Black Studies." These are possibilities.

The American University integrates people into the capitalist social order and is also the primary setting in which radical social criticism is (currently) developed. How has academia helped or hindered your work as radical social critic?

The academy is indifferent if not hostile to Black Studies. Since WWII the University has become very dependent upon state support and Black Studies has remained outside the pale of this support. For example, the most well funded research on Black youth are essentially police studies. Racism simply remains a powerful break on Black Studies and research in the academy.

The hostility and indifference to Black Studies makes collaborative work very difficult. So, too often, serious work is done in the singularity of private labor. This has presented difficulties for me and many others working in the field. This obstacle frustrates not only individual efforts but also the development of Black Studies as such.

Given the distinctions you have made between Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition, how do you define your own political commitments?

What name do you give to the nature of the Universe? There are some realms in which names, nomination, is premature. My only loyalties are to the morally just world; and my happiest and most stunning opportunity for raising hell with corruption and deceit are with other Black people. I suppose that makes me a part, an expression, of Black Radicalism.

Please tell me about your forthcoming book, The Anthropology of Marxism: A Study of Western Socialism?

This work attempts to extricate the history and origins of socialism in the West from Marxism. This requires moving beyond the chronological constraints imposed by Marx (socialism can only follow capitalism, etc.) and suggesting a more open epistemology of socialism. In a sense I revisit familiar sites (Hegel, Kant, Engels, etc.) only to mark forgotten and suppressed work (e.g. Hegel's study of British political economy) in order to proceed to the unexpected richness of the history of socialist visions and pursuits.

Please tell me about future projects you have planned.

My next project concerns the American racial imagination formed from and cast through American films. This is another attempt to get at the social imagination, particularly how it relates to the changing construction of Blackness.

As someone fascinated with culture and its potentialities, interrogating film is another means of determining how popular cultures contest with mass cultures; the latter being stories about the world and human experience which are manufactured for the masses by elites. Aristotle once wrote that the many are wiser than the few. In the best sense of this observation, the conflict between social history and popular cultures, on the one hand, and induced memories of the past on the other may be the most important site of analysis in a civilization whose technicians can now design virtual reality. Under these changed circumstances it becomes even more imperative that we can distinguish authentic (historical) radicalism from imagined radicalism.

**Cedric Robinson - Interviewed by Chuck Morse for Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Vol.3, No.1, Spring 1999**

Spotrushin' Mr.Charlie!!:an interview with DARRYL LAMONT JENKINS

2007-10-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Brotherwise Dispatch caught up with Darryl Lamont Jenkins, who represents a new era in freedom fighting as the official spokesman for the influential anti-racist organization One People’s Project (www.onepeoplesproject.com), at Union Square Park in New York City on Sunday, April 10, 2005.

Brotherwise Dispatch- I’m here with an ally and friend, if you could introduce yourself sir please?

Darryl Lamont Jenkins- My name is Darryl Lamont Jenkins, I am the spokesperson for One People’s Project and . . .

BD- Could you explain exactly what that is, One People’s Project?

DLJ– Yeah it’s an anti-racist organization that was formed July 4^th 2000, out of the ashes of an anti-racist rally, basically, where as we say on the website, an online resource for those on the frontline fighting fascism, especially those who don’t play nice.

(joint laughter)

BD – Nice . . . nice, nice, so what do you mean by not playing nice, like what differentiates your organization from say, some other anti-racist organizations? Even though in general, I think there aren’t too many still around these days.

DLJ – Well there’s quite a few anti-racist organizations out there but a lot of times you see them kind of at their wits end with trying to do stuff. I think it was with us, and I would say this about a lot of the progressive organizations, it was about trying to find a way to force some hands out there. So what we do, we actually get inside a lot of these Right wing and racist organizations I mean . . .

BD – You mean infiltration when you say get inside?

DLJ – Infiltration, whatever it takes, just whatever we can do to learn and gather any and all information on them and we’re not just talking about the groups. We actually try to put a face on those we have a problem with. We go after the individuals themselves and we go after them pretty aggressively, we just don’t talk trash about ‘em on the web site . .

BD – Ok

DLJ – we get their names, addresses, phone numbers, occupations, pet’s names, blood type . . .

BD – So that’s what you mean when you say put a face on ‘em.

DLJ – Yup, put a face on ‘em and put all of that information on blast and let everybody else . . .

BD – so you’re about exposure, you’re trying to really expose these people for who they are . . .

DLJ – Absolutely, absolutely. I think a lot of times people don’t even realize who it is they’re fightin’, and what it is that they’re fightin’ and we try too basically connect some dots that they didn’t even know that were there.

BD – True, true, that makes sense.

brief interruption after which the interview resumes

BD – But basically, we were kind of discussing, you were talking about tactics, can we get back into that as far as tactics and exposure and how you really put some of these people on blast so to speak?

DLJ – Ok, a couple of years back there was an anti-abortion activist named Neil Horsley who started a web site called the Christian Gallery in which he provided the names and addresses of abortion providers . . .

BD – OK

DLJ – and when somebody got killed off that site - Bernard Slepian - off that information, he crossed the name out. A lot of people who were on that site with their names and addresses basically filed suit against him and other anti-abortion activists. But the courts ruled in the favor of Neil Horsley, saying that it is freedom of speech and he has the right to put out this information if he so desires, it is in fact public information. Now freedom of speech is something that a lot of these folks try to hide behind, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are right or wrong, the fact is they are allowed to say whatever it is they want to say. That’s fine, but they use that freedom of speech line to shut everybody up. My attitude when Neil Horsley won that, was that, that was a copout that just went a little bit too far, so I said alright screw it . . .

BD – (chuckles)

DLJ – what we’re going to do is the same damn thing only to them.

BD – yeah (still chuckling)

DLJ – So we started gathering all kinds of information on the Right and the racists out there and we just put ‘em on blast and it has really been pretty effective. I think that we have gotten people fired from their jobs, we got people kicked out of the military, some go to jail . . .

BD- That’s what I was about to say, what have been some of the consequences from some of the exposure you guys have given these racist fascists?

DLJ – Well, I’ll give you an example of one case. There’s a guy named Roger Williams and this is something that we mention on our postcard that we pass out. This guy named Roger Williams who is the deputy . . . no, no I’m sorry, the national regional coordinator of a white supremacist group called National Alliance. Give you an idea of how bad National Alliance is, the guy who founded National Alliance wrote the Turner Diaries which everybody says was the blueprint to the Oklahoma City Bombing.

BD – wow, ok

DLJ – Now with that, National Alliance got a lot of notoriety and a huge membership behind it, and you’re talking about college professors, you’re talking about cops . . .

BD – So you’re not just talking about fringe, cause it seems to be that view that a lot of these white supremacist organizations are on the fringe.

DLJ – Well see that’s the thing. Our main mission has always been, we wanted to connect that fringe with the elements that we’ve been fighting in the mainstream and we’ve done that pretty effectively. Roger Williams, when we done our research on him, found out that he was working as a market analyst for Halle Burton . . .

BD – wow

DLJ – and when we put that information out he got booted, he got booted and he was there for years . . .

BD – interesting, interesting

DLJ – It’s that kind of information that we put out there. Another example I’ll give you that’s even real on point. There’s a white supremacist that has or had an internet radio show by the name of Hal Turner. Now he’s being recently going around the airwaves on this like virtual press junket, talking about that there are certain judges targeted for murder. Now they said that was freedom of speech, OK that’s fine, but I digress. We can talk about that later on, but we found out, we didn’t find out, we’ve known ever since we heard of him, that he was friends with Sean Hannity and he told us this.

BD – This is Sean Hannity from the FOX NEWS SHOW - Hannity & Colmes.

DLJ – Yes indeed and also has his Radio Show on WABC on 77 WABC radio, I mean it was something that he himself put out there . . .

BD – So you’re connecting a sort of fringe white supremacist fringe with a mainstream that aren’t really known as white supremacists but their in bed together.

DLJ – Exactly

BD – And there’s a connection and they kinda looking at, it sounds, it appears you’re exposing the fact that they have each others backs so to speak.

DLJ – Absolutely, when you think about the fact that you have over 30 elected officials from the South that are members of this group called the Council of Conservative Citizens, another white supremacist organization.

BD – Ok, could you explain what this Council of Conservative Citizens is?

DLJ – Council of Conservative Citizens is a group that was formed out of the white citizens councils back in the ‘60s, it’s pretty much the same people . . .

BD - just a new name, same game

DLJ – just a new name and they basically promote anti-immigration, they promote neo-confederacy, they promote eugenics, believing that African Americans or Black people in general are intellectually inferior to whites. And they have their juice too, like I said, over 30 elected officials up and down the South are members of this group. That includes Trent Lott, that includes the last governor of Tennessee, the commissioner, former commissioner of Agriculture in South Carolina and that’s important to all you black farmers out there, and the list goes on and on and on and on and on. And when you think about that and you think about all the problems that we’ve had racially and the fact that these guys are in power and steering things, then you know what you have to do.

BD – So basically you’re taking an invisible hand and making it seen.

DLJ – Indeed, indeed

(laughter)

BD – Like there’s no more invisible hands, they can do what they have to do but there may be consequences and repercussions.

(more laughter)

DLJ – Yeah, see that’s the other problem. There hasn’t been, there needs to be some consequences. The only reason why I think that there hasn’t been, is because a lot of us are asleep. Well wake the F*ck up! Because if you don’t do anything, then they’re going to continue to cause damage to you and yours. I’m not one of those people that likes to just sit around and watch things happen to me.

BD – So you’re providing a valuable service through the media, the internet media and its onepeoplesproject.org . . .

DLJ – NO, NO, NO, NO, No, I’m glad you said that, I’m glad you said that . . .

BD – ooh, break that down, break that down for me.

DLJ – it is www.onepeoplesproject.com , if you go to onepeoplesproject.org you will find out that the aforementioned National Alliance has registered that domain name and it will go straight to their site . . .

(laughter)

DLJ – and do not go to onepeoplesproject.net either!

BD – So they’re very aware of you then?

DLJ – Oh they don’t like me. If you go on any of the white supremacist web sites and type in a search for www.onepeoplesproject.com, you’ll see a whole bunch of bad things said about me, about the organization. We have done some damage to them, we have done some mad damage to them and I think that a lot of your folks on the Right, in the mainstream Right I’m referring to, are particularly concerned because we are . . .

BD – they’re getting exposed

DLJ – Not just getting exposed, but we’re doing it with a level head. A lot of times when you’re dealing with, not just progressive politics but with activist politics in general you’re dealing with a lot of folks that have a lot of emotion behind what they do. And I’m not going to lie, I have my . . .

BD – yeah there’s a certain, you have a passion about what you do . . .

DLJ – Yes I have my passions but I’m also focused. It used to be a time when if you said the “N” word to me that would probably be your last words . . .

(laughter)

DLJ – I have been called the “N” word so much in like the past five years, I think I have developed a thick skin about it. And my attitude has always been I’m not going to get you now, in time I’ll have you and sure enough that’s the way it’s been.

BD – Nice, nice, that’s very important, so once again repeat the actual address, the web address for the . . .

DLJ – yes its www.onepeoplesproject.com as in commie, I’m not a commie, I’m an anarchist . . .

(more laughter)

. . . but that’s where you can find me and you can find our organization and believe me, you’ll have a lot of information you can work with. You probably already heard of us if you was googlin’ some Right wingers name and our site came up.

BD – So it’s definitely a popular site, you guys get a lot of hits, well it must be if they were coming after you already . . .

DLJ – They’ve been coming after me for a long time and they have yet to touch me with the exception of what happened last week . . .

BD – What happened last week?

DLJ – There was a show, an anti-racist show that some other people were organizing. They were doing it to benefit both my organization and Anti-Racist Action, which is another anti-racist organization around here. Klan, Neo-Nazis a couple of other idiots out there hit the firehouse. Basically phone jammed the firehouse that it was supposed to be at and they in effect shut down the show temporarily. We are going to have the show again.

BD – Yeah, I was about to say, what do you mean hit the firehouse? Can you explain that?

DLJ – Well, they basically called up the firehouse and told them that if the show went on they was gonna be outside, and the firehouse officials were basically down with us, but the problem was that they had to consider . . .

BD – the safety concerns

DLJ – the safety concerns and their mission I mean right now Wayne, New Jersey, that’s where it was going to be. Wayne, New Jersey has a flooding problem right now because of the rains and they’ve been dealing with that and been trying to keep the lines open for the emergencies. And these idiots come up and so they said naw we can’t do the show and we say, hey we understand. We just have to move on that’s all good and that’s exactly what we’re gonna do and I’m a tell you this right now the Klansmen’s name is Joe Bednarsky, I am going to get him!!

(laughter)

BD – OK, Joe Bednarsky watch your back baby!!

(more laughter)

DLJ – All I got to say, he will be got, legally, but he will be got!

BD – No doubt, no doubt, legally, intellectually . . .

DLJ – yes indeed!

BD – Drop the media bomb on ‘em! Alright, well definitely once again, if you can sign off? Let everybody know who you are, what you representin’ and any last thoughts for our readers at the Brotherwise Dispatch?

DLJ – Alright once again, my name is Darryl Lamont Jenkins from One People’s Project. We’re always lookin’ for heads who want to help us out and write about whatever’s going on in your neighborhood or research and gather information. If you can, just hit us up on the website you can reach us also by phone 212-479-7362 and I hope to hear from y’all soon thanks much.

BD – No doubt, I’m signing off, this is A.Shahid Stover with the Brotherwise Dispatch. Peace, God is One.

Introduction to the Brotherwise Dispatch Interviews & Exclusives

2007-10-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

The Brotherwise Dispatch is an online journal focused on Radical Theory, Social Critiques and Human Liberation. This blog will publish interviews conducted by the Brotherwise Dispatch and exclusive coverage of events by the Brotherwise Dispatch.