We are all, in the sense derived from Walter Benjamin, formed from the catastrophe of history. Some of us have come out of that catastrophe with property, wealth, education, social standing and access to the agora. Others are impoverished, socially-scorned and governed with welfare, incarceration and violence. Some of us are valued. Some of us are disposable.
On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The movement that grew out of the rebellion that followed inaugurated a new sequence in the struggle against racism in the United States. As with previous sequences in that struggle it quickly acquired an international dimension, including here in South Africa. One aspect of this international moment has been an urgent confrontation with the reality that what Césaire called ‘abstract equality’ does not, on its own, mark an end to the racialization of life.
In the United States, and elsewhere, there is a sense that history is as present as it is past. Just over a decade ago, Baucom observed that “what-has-been is, cannot be undone, cannot cease to alter all the future-presents that flow out of it. Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates”. It is the sense that time accumulates into the present that has often led to the invocation of William Faulkner’s famous line from Requiem for a Nun in discussions about race: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The past does not merely haunt or shape the present via the enduring power of deep and impersonal structural forces. Across Europe, and in settler societies like Australia, Brazil and the United States, racism is an increasingly explicit and menacing presence at the centre of political and social life. White revanchism has rallied, often under demagogic leadership, to secure the racial order that emerged from the event of 1492. It has already resulted in Brexit in England, the impeachment of an elected President in Brazil and the election of a figure as grotesque as Trump in the United States.
We will not be able to transcend the epoch that began in 1492 without a politics that can confront and defeat this revanchism. And we will not have transcended this epoch until “things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word” are, as Fanon insists, “restored to their proper places”. But the catastrophe from which we are all derived is not solely a matter of material dispossession and accumulation. As Michael Monahan argues, in conversation with Wynter, “the history of colonialism is also the history of the emergence of the idea of Europe and of Europeans, and . . . it is such ideas and cultural practices that inevitably shape our consciousness, conditioning what counts as normal and, ultimately, as rational”.
For Wynter, the accumulation of crisis cannot be posed as a serious question, understood or resolved “within the conceptual framework of our present order of knowledge”. The production, authorisation and dissemination of knowledge are not, at all, the sole province of the university. But in South Africa it is in the university where the breach in the established order that followed the murder of Michael Brown has acquired most intensity.
Wynter’s insights speak to the university as a site of contestation with particular acuity. It is, she notes, “the ‘best and brightest’ products of our present system of education; of its highest levels of learning” that sustain the accumulation of crisis. She argues, following Fanon, that the university will only be able to work against the order from which it emerges, and is sustained, when its intellectuals are able to shift the ground of reason into the terrain of the liminal, into new forms of mutuality with people defined as “pariahs outside the sanctified order”. She insists that the imperative to mutuality requires that reason, as it is developed in the academy, be enmeshed with “the degradation of the jobless, of the incarcerated, the homeless, the archipelago of the underdeveloped, the expendable throwaways”.
What Wynter calls “a counter-humanism made” – and here she borrows from Césaire – “to the measure of the world” requires that we “for the first time, experience ourselves, not only as we do now, as this or that genre of the human, but also as human”. This is a matter of praxis. It requires, “the transformation of our original dominant/subordinate social structure and its attendant perceptual and cognitive matrices into new ones founded on reciprocal relations”. This mutuality can also be the basis for the kind of emancipatory praxis – the constitution of new forms of organisation and popular democratic power – that was often developed out of the encounter between dissidents in our universities and wider society in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
