this essay was written in 2008 for Life, Power, Resistance: Critical Perspectives on a Post-Westphalian Era, an International Relations course at Sussex University
I
Interpretations of Fanon’s writings are multifarious and frequently misleading. He has been variously cast as a violent revolutionary, a critical psychologist and a repressed homophobe, among other things, none of which can be addressed in the scope of this study. Rather, I take as central Fanon’s insight into the racialisation of oppression, briefly outlining what is meant by this concept before locating it within the colonial moment, in order to draw it into a broader discussion of the failings of European humanism. I argue for its continued relevance both in terms of its explanation of the utility of ‘othering’, and because of the parallel we can draw between the dehumanising humanism that Fanon attacks, and the logic of sovereignty that constitutes ‘Westphalian’ norms. I then go on to consider possible alternatives to accepting this racialised and universalised objectification, echoing Fanon’s suspicion of strategic cultural essentialisms and pointing instead to his advocacy of openness towards the other as a meaningful politics of resistance.II
For Fanon, oppression means something more complex than the subjection to violence or the constraining of agency. Oppression is to be denied one’s own humanity: “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence” (1986:139). It is to negate the claim to be a ‘Man’. In other words, though he tries to master his own humanity, a humanity which has both been promised to him and which he senses in the immensity and depth of his soul (1986:140), he finds instead:
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors… I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (1986:112)This resonates with Said’s analysis (1978) of the discursive construction of the Orient, itself clearly influenced by Fanon’s account of how the European “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (1986:111). Fanon’s innovation was to show how this denial is racialised; how it is inscribed on the body. A process of self-composition becomes a construction of the black man according to “a racial epidermal schema,” a “uniform” from which he can never escape (1986:112, 114). The negative stereotypes attached to this epidermis may change, but ‘the fact of blackness’ remains. Fanon will continue to be “overdetermined from without… I am fixed” (1986:116).
Fanon’s work has been tremendously influential for later ‘neo-colonialism’ and Dependency Theory critiques, articulating the injustice of colonial rule and the hypocrisy of “native intellectuals” and post-independence leaders, whilst inspiring a revolutionary fervour in many Third World readers. His last book is a “bible of the decolonisation movement” (Stuart Hall, cited in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996). Of greater significance for this paper, however, is his characterisation of the colonial world as “a world cut in two”, as “a Manichaean world” (1990:29, 31). Again echoed by Said, Fanon describes how the native other is defined as lack, as being what we are not.
The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers… (1990:32)This, argues Fanon, is central to the psychology of colonial rule that is internalised by the native. Disrupting this “mentally debilitating” ideology (Gibson 1999:109) is crucial for attaining real independence, hence Fanon’s scathing attacks on new leaders of the new nations, the “spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments” who failed to mount a “real struggle for freedom” to effect the transfer of power (1990:37, 36).
It might be said that Fanon’s highly incisive critique of colonialism has now been rendered somewhat less potent within contemporary contexts. We no longer conceptualise oppression as a struggle between settler and native, and we may be apt to dismiss Fanon’s revolutionary zeal as a mere ‘apostle of violence’, as commentators frequently do (Pithouse 2003:2). However, this colonial Manichaean split has its present manifestations; a discriminatory denial of humanity once again taking a specifically racialised form. Taking just one example, representations of ‘Africa’ portray it as a place of famine, war, disease, genocide and hunger; these appear to be “‘native’ African products” (Taylor 1998:136). We have seen, consumed, and discarded countless black faces in the news, in Oxfam pamphlets, and in advertisements promising that you can ‘make a difference’ for just £2 per month. The accumulation of images of Africa construct a seemingly inconsequential realm of otherness, a reflection of the state of nature Europe is deemed to have long since transcended.
Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (Fanon 1990:33; emphasis added)Of course, this vocabulary serves its purpose. It permits us to remain undisturbed by ongoing structural violence suffered by vast numbers of the world’s population; it enables us to celebrate military interventions, to keep silent at the erosion of civil liberties, to penetrate weak economies with our capital. This much should be clear. What Fanon’s analysis highlights, in fact, is the more contentious observation that this violent dehumanisation is not made up of piecemeal aberrations and individualised acts, but rather is constitutive of European humanism.
III
This is explicit during, though not limited to, the colonial period. The discrepancy between Western discourses on “human dignity”, and the “Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe” (1990:34, 251), is a discrepancy observable today – the most obvious example being calls for ‘democratisation’ and ‘freedom’ whilst deposing recalcitrant leaders or invading uncooperative states. Fanon exhibits a frustration that Europe continues to be held up as the exemplar, as “a paradise close at hand” (1990:41), when all he sees is the most terrible violence. The oppressed subject finds himself in a catch-22: invited to join the ranks of universally equal men whilst simultaneously discovering he has been rendered immobile by that same universality. It is the settler who “makes history and is conscious of making it” (1990:40); his is the plot whereby the native is constructed as the background.
Thus it is not the physical violence done to the native that results in his dehumanisation, nor is it merely the creation of an ideology that can legitimate such violence. For Fanon, it is the assumption of universality which necessitates the subsumption of the colonised subject into a pre-given understanding of humanity, with a pre-defined telos. As such, it may well be the liberal – perhaps even “colour-blind” or “anti-racist” – perspective which actually replicates this racist objectification, as argued by Schmitt (1996) and Lentin (2003). Like overt racism it simply stops at the racialised epidermis, declaring a “disavowal of difference… [a] political raciology, which constantly reinvokes the body while disavowing its primacy” (Ali 2005:166-167; emphasis added). Fanon laments this disavowal which is once again rooted in the invariability of his aspect: “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle” (1986:116). This refusal to engage with the other may be termed “the prejudice of equality”, stripping the other of his otherness (Rasch 2003:140), or what Schmitt calls ‘objectification’ – “a carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal of genuinely human relationships” (1996:36).
We can draw a parallel between this dehumanising humanity and the Westphalian logic of sovereignty. This too paradoxically combines universal equality with particularism, resulting in a system of containment which exercises the externalisation and repression of the Other in the name of “sameness” (Blaney & Inayatullah 2000:32). As Walker (1993) identifies, orthodox international relations theory actively constitutes this “inside/outside” or self/other demarcation insofar as it continues to insist on the primacy of state sovereignty. Sovereignty, like objectification, seems to say: “I am “my own man” and you are yours. We are separate. We do not share with each other; at best we do things alongside each other” (Schmitt 1996:44). And yet, significantly, this recognition rests upon a refusal to entertain challenges to the basic principle of liberal pluralism, namely “an overriding monism, the monism of humanity” (Rasch 2003:136). It denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (Todorov 1984:42-3), a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. Western humanism is inseparable from its simultaneous constitution of the inhuman – which takes the form of any such challenge – and therefore from the project of the ‘civilising mission’; the project of “correcting” those who fail to fulfil their human potential (Rasch 2003:137-138). Furthermore, this once again takes on a racialised character, being grounded in the inclusion of the New World as a bestial state-of-nature against which Europe could achieve a ‘bracketing of war’ (Schmitt 2003:142). The European pluriverse relied on externalising the hierarchical relation to extra-European territory (Rasch 2003:127).
IV
What alternatives to this totalising, racialising metaphysics might be offered by Fanon’s work? One immediate counter to a dominating universalism is the reassertion of particularism, exemplified in the contemporary context by arguments for cultural relativism. These seem to challenge dominant actors to live up to the ideal of mutual recognition by refraining from imposing ‘Western’ norms on noncompliant societies. However, this strategy may result in an essentialised authenticity, reducing contestation to an identity politics whose only possible tactic is to demand “recognition” (Lentin 2006). Fanon’s initial seduction by Cesaire’s negritude – “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (1986:123) – like contemporary identity politics, ultimately fails to address or indeed challenge the way in which the politicised ‘identity’ in question is itself called into being by a dominant conception of humanity. It reinforces the egocentrism of the European, allowing him to say “We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world… In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves” (Fanon 1986:132).It also permits the voice of the oppressor to seize upon this strategic essentialism and sublimate it within another teleology, hijacking the self-representation of the oppressed. Fanon accuses Sartre of doing precisely this in his Black Orpheus (1948), denying Fanon the ability to define his own end: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (1986:134). A similar utilisation can be identified in the advocacy of many contemporary NGOs ‘on behalf’ of the marginalised groups they seek to represent. For example, activists and academics among the Karen hill tribes in Thailand have inadvertently produced what Walker (2001) labels “the Karen Consensus”, trapping the Karen in a fixed primordial identity (sustainable, egalitarian, non-commercial) in order to demand certain rights from the state – to the detriment of those Karen who wish to make other sorts of claims (for government schooling, televisions, trade).
It is this tendency which provokes Fanon to refuse outright any sort of transcendent ideal, to articulate instead a humanism based upon immanent power (Pithouse 2003:10-11).
In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself… I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. (Fanon 1986:135)Moulard-Leonard recasts Fanon within a Deleuzian non-dialectical becoming premised on the concept of “Difference-in-itself” and hence the possibility of “radically creative self-alteration” (2005:242-243). It is a transformation which does not necessitate a given end to the process of becoming.
Despite this, however, it is possible to discern in Fanon’s new humanism a latent telos framed by residual assumptions of European humanism, specifically the notions of history-making, progress and self-determination. He declares that to be human is to “introduc[e] invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself” (1990:229); that “no attempt must be made to encase a man, for it is his destiny to be set free” (1990:230). Yet we must historicise the idea that history-making is emancipatory, active, and self-consciously dynamic. Once again, the European encounter with the New World constitutes a formative moment, necessitating a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some are more advanced than others, a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii). Such Eurocentric values clearly run right through many postcolonial and subalternist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988). There may not be space in this humanism for even more radically different conceptions of history-making.
V
This may be reconciled, however, by the fluidity of Fanon’s approach and his radical commitment to destabilising all fixed identities, and the fluidity of his approach to dialogic communication. He states clearly on the first page of his first book, “I do not come with timeless truths” (1986:9). Thus, rather than seeking to positively define The New Humanity, Fanon’s work permits a new humanity to arise out of every moment where there is a “genuine transcendence of the divisions and hierarchies that push us into unequal spaces and trap us in limited, reductive identities” (Pithouse 2003:18). Although he has often been mistaken for an uncritical advocate of violent revolution, as noted above, and certainly comes across as dismissive of the more incremental social changes or post-colonial (neo-colonial) structures that have characterised many ex-colonies, it would be unfair to characterise Fanon’s revolutionary zeal within a simplistic dichotomy between the evil coloniser and the struggling colonised, in which the principle objective is to destroy (and replace) colonial authority. His method of resisting colonial Manichaeanism is precisely to advocate an openness to the other – an openness echoed by Blaney and Inayatullah in their call for a “critical dialogue” (2004:219), or by a Levinasian “ethics of alterity” (Campbell 1994:477).Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. (Fanon 1986:231-232).
Bibliography
Ali, S. 2005. ‘Uses of the Exotic: Body, Narrative, Mixedness’ in C. Alexander and C. Knowles (eds.) Making Race Matter: Bodies, Space and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan)
Bernasconi, R. ‘Casting the Slough: Fanon’s New Humanism for a New Humanity’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)
Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2000. ‘The Westphalian Deferral’ in International Studies Review 2 (2), 29-64
Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2004. International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge)
Campbell, D. 1994. ‘The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida and Ethics after the End of Philosophy’ in Alternatives, 19:4, 455-484
Fanon, F. 1986 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press)
Fanon, F. 1990 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin)
Gibson, N. 1999. ‘Thoughts about Doing Fanonism in the 1990s’ in College Literature 26 (2), 96-117
Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press)
Lentin, A. 2006. ‘De-authenticating Fanon: Self-organised anti-racism and the politics of experience’. Available at http://www.alanalentin.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=25. Accessed 16/02/08
Moulard-Leonard, V. 2005. ‘Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude’s Anti-Humanist Humanism’ in Human Studies 28, 231-249
O’Hanlon, R. 1988. ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’ in Modern Asian Studies, 22:1
Pithouse, R. 2003. ‘That the Tool Never Possess the Man: Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously’. Available at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/afphil/docs/pithouse1.pdf. Accessed 8/2/08
Rasch, W. 2003. ‘Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy’ in Cultural Critique 54, 120-147
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Sartre, J-P. 1948. ‘Orphée Noir’ in L. Senghor (ed.) L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)
Schmitt, C. 2003 [1950]. The Nomos of the Earth in the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press)
Schmitt, R. 1996. ‘Racism and Objectification: Reflections on Themes from Fanon’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)
Taylor, J. 1998. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press)
Todorov, T. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row)
Walker, A. 2001. ‘The ‘Karen Consensus’, Ethnic Politics and Resource-Use Legitimacy in Northern Thailand’ in Asian Ethnicity, 2 (2), 145-162
Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin)
1996. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask [film], directed by I. Julien
No comments:
Post a Comment