WEEK+SIX

//datura zombies, not dead zombies//

//"The body of the despot, his frowns and smiles, decrees and commands, the public notices and communiqués repeat over and over: these are the primary signifiers, it is these hat have force, that get interpreted and reinterpreted, and feed further significance back into the system...The question of whether humor in the post colony is an expression of "resistance" or not, whether it is, a priori, opposition, or simply manifestation of hostility toward authority, is thus of secondary importance." (108)//

i dug into Achille Mbembe's text ravenously; i couldn't even contain my excitement as he laid out the way that Western thought falls short when trying to understand sub-Saharan Africa.

//"Speaking rationally about Africa is not something that has ever come naturally. Doing so, at this cusp between millennia, comes even less so." (OtPC, 1)//

was he about to explain the Other to me? was i about to understand the Other on its own terms?

FLASHBACK SIX DAYS

Sandra Harding said something in a talk while i sat fanboying, wide-eyed. she said that her postcolonial feminist philosophy of science wasn't about altruism, about trying to use her privilege to make spaces in which subjugated voices could speak. it was a very selfish project. she wanted to find better kinds of knowledge.

i wanted to ask her about this. "selfish" made it sound like something beyond "strong objectivity"; selfishness isn't about making better knowledge, it's about knowing better, knowing more. it's the will to know, not the will to craft knowledge (if that distinction is one that holds water). how do i read this expression of selfishness? i should have asked her, but my tongue trips up around intellectual celebrities...

BACK TO THE PRESENT

is this hunger for a post-colonial perspective the same feeling that drives Sandra Harding? and maybe more importantly, what does it mean to be a whiteboy living in the US and read postcolonial theory ravenously?

//" It flows from there being hardly ever any discourse about Africa for itself. In the very principle of its constitution, in its language, and in its finalities, narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity." (OtPC, 3) //

uff-dah. right in the privilege, Mbembe.

so perhaps this hunger is all about understanding myself. maybe i'm just looking to Mbembe for new lenses with which to look at a thoroughly Western world. is this what Harding meant when she called herself selfish?

HOW DO I INTERACT WITH THIS TEXT?

(this has been a common theme in this course)

tell me, Mbembe, what am i missing? of course, of course, //missing// is part and parcel of the problem:

//"Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West's obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of "absence," "lack," and "non-being," of identity and difference, of negativeness--in short, of nothingness." (OtPC, 4)//

so it's Africa that i'm missing--Africa which stands in as not just "other" and "thing" and "animal" but also "**nothing**" in the Western thought that i've inherited. damn.

FLASHBACK FOUR DAYS

on an East-bound flight, the biggest baby i've ever seen is snoring into my shoulder while i finish listening to Octavia Butler's slavery/time travel novel, //Kindred//. while the baby sleeps peacefully, i am crying quietly and hoping nobody notices. Alice (Dana's great (x10) grandmother) has just killed herself, and Dana just prevented Rufus, Alice's owner/lover (and her own great(x10) grandfather) from committing suicide. this despite everything Rufus has done to Dana, to Alice, and the rest of the slaves he owns. in going back in time, Dana keeps finding herself forced to //take care of// the horrible complications of her horrible history.

uff-dah. right in the privilege, Octavia.

Butler does something amazing in //Kindred//: in shuttling Dana back and forth through time (Dana thinks it's Rufus, summoning her from the past, but who would //actually// be able to control that fantastical movement?) she forces a condensing of the relations of //commandement// and objectification and genealogy that bind a family together through the unknowable violence of colonialism. Butler forces Dana to try to navigate the entanglements of history in order to figure out for herself what it means to //have// a history. while Dana brings her own narratorial power into the realm of the past, the past has no interest in her narrative because she is received as a slave.

//"To command an animal (the slave or the colonized) was to play the game of attempting to get him/her out of the encirclement while being fully aware that the circle was never thereby reduced, since grooming and domestication occurred almost always in the animal's own distinctive drives. In other words, it was to play this game while conscious that, although the animal (the colonized) could belong to the familiar world, have needs…it could never truly accede to the sphere of human possibility For by reason of the sort of life the colonized lived, he/she belonged to those forms of living whose distinctive feature was to remain forever enclosed in the virtual and contingent." (OtPC, 27-8)//

in //Kindred//, Dana is stuck in this circle in which she is never capable of being truly acceding to the sphere of human possibility, of escaping the roles of Other and object. no matter how many times she saves Rufus' life, no matter how she helps him to run his plantation, she is always going to remain base material for Rufus' shaping.

//"The colonial territory had its space, its shape, its borders. it had its geological make-up and its climates. It had resources; it had its soils, its minerals, its animal and plant species, its empty lands. In short, it had its qualities. There were, above all, the people who inhabited it, their characters and their customs (marriage, succession, property, forms of alienation and of productive labor, etc.), their ways of acting and thinking, their habits, the events they have lived. It is these people who were labeled natives. They constituted the raw material, as it were, of government. They had to be enclosed in relations of subjection, initially known as "politique des races" and later "politique indigène." "Politique indigène" set out how to dispose of this raw material, how to increase it, what laws to impose on it, what punishments and penalties and tortures to inflict on it, what services and contributions to compel it to provide, what enjoyments to forbid it; how to extract as much as possible from its labor, and in what conditions to care for its subsistence." (OtPC, 32-3)//

but it's not just subject-object relations that play out in Dana's time travel, it's a version of the non-linear timescales of the post-colony.

//"African social formations are not necessarily converging toward a single point, trend, or cycle. They harbor the possibility of a variety of trajectories neither convergent nor divergent but interlocked, paradoxical. More philosophically, it may be supposed that the present as experience of a time is precisely that moment when different forms of absence become mixed together: absence of those presences that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence of those others that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future)." (OtPC, 16)//

//"…one characteristic of African societies over the longue durée has been that they follow a great variety of temporal trajectories and a wide range of swings only reducible to an analysis in terms of convergent or divergent evolution at the cost of an extraordinary impoverishment of reality." (OtPC, 17)//

in order to understand what it means for Dana to be entangled with her colonial inheritance, Butler needs to push her into non-obvious temporal frames.

RETURN TO THE PRESENT

//"…we have been interested in the experience of a period that is far from being uniform and absolutely cannot be reduced to a succession of moments and events, but in which instants, moments, and events are, as it were, on top of one another, inside one another. In this sense, we must say that the post colony is a period of embedding, a space of proliferation that is not solely disorder, chance, and madness, but emerges from a sort of violent gust, with its languages, its beauty and ugliness, its ways of summing up the world." (242)//

//"…to account for both the mind-set and the effectiveness of postcolonial relations of power, we need to go beyond binary categories used in standard interpretations of domination, such as resistance vs. passivity, autonomy bs. subjection, state vs. civil society, hegemony vs. counter-hegemony, totalization vs. detotalization. These oppositions are not helpful; rather, they cloud our understandings of postcolonial relations. In the post colony, the commandement seeks to institutionalize itself, to achieve legitimation and hegemony…in the form of a fetish. The signs, vocabulary, and narratives that the commandement produces are meant not merely to be symbols; they are officially invested with as surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge. To ensure that no such challenge takes place, the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; bu they also resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain. The basic goal is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being, but to make it effective. We therefore need to examine: how the world of meanings thus produced is ordered; the types of institutions, the knowledges, norms, and practices structuring this new "common sense"; the light that the use of visual imagery and discourse throws on the nature of domination and subordination." (103)//