#mbembe

Returning to the literature of political science and development economics, it becomes clear these disciplines have undermined the very possibility of understanding African economic and political facts. In spite of the countless critiques made of theories of social  evolutionism and ideologies of development and modernization, the academic output in these disciplines continues, almost entirely, in total thrall to these two teleologies. This thralldom has had implications for understanding the purposes of these disciplines in Africa, for the conception of their object, and for the choice of their methods. Mired in the demands of what is immediately useful, enclosed in the narrow horizon of 'good governance' and the neo liberal catechism about the market economy, torn by the current fads for 'civil society,' 'conflict resolution,' and alleged 'transitions to democracy,' the discussion, as habitually engaged, is primarily concerned, not with comprehending the political in Africa or with producing knowledge in general, but with social engineering. As a general rule, what is stated is dogmatically programmatic; interpretations are almost always cavalier, and what passes for argument is almost always reductionist. The criteria that African agents accept as valid, the reasons they exchange within their own instituted rationalities, are, to many, of no value. What African agents accept as reasons for acting, what their claim to act in the light of reason implies (as a general claim to be right, avoir raison), what makes their action intelligible to themselves: all this is of virtually no account in the eyes of analysts. Since the models are seen as self-sufficient, history does not exist. Nor does anthropology. It is enough to postulate, somehow, in a form totally timeless, the necessity of 'freeing' the economy from the shackles of the state, and of a reform of institutions from above, for this economy, these institutions, to function on the basis of norms decreed universal and desirable.

Neoliberalism has created the conditions for a renewed convergence, and at times fusion, between the living human being and objects, artifacts, or the technologies that supplement or augment us and are in the process transfigured and transformed by us. This event, which we can equate to a return to animism, is nevertheless not without danger for the idea of emancipation in this age of crypto-fascism. [...] A first reason has to do with science's having turned into fiction and fiction into the real--all of which has led to a profound destabilization of what, not so long ago, counted as the ground for knowledge and, by extension, power and accountability. After all, the fact is that today there is hardly any consensus concerning what constitutes reality and how to access it. [...] A major consequence of this apparent collapse of the basic foundations of knowledge and cognition is the impossibility of accountability, the radical impossibility we increasingly find ourselves in, specifying what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong--and in fact the obsolescence of those very categories. [...] This condition of epistemic obsolescence and indeterminacy is itself a consequence of--or has been exacerbated by--the overreliance, under late capitalism, on modes of production of knowledge that take for facts only that which can be measured and experimented with. The trend toward a relentless impoverishment of the real has only escalated during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. It has reached a point where today, knowledge is increasingly defined as knowledge for the market. The market in turn is increasingly reimagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures and technologies, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic. Instead of actual human beings with a body, history, and flesh, big data and statistical inferences are all that count, and both are mostly derived from computation.

The present, as present, draws on both the sense of the past and that of the future or, more radically, seeks to abolish both, hence, in novelistic writing, the predominance of a time that might be called paradoxical, since it is never fully anchored in the present, nor is it ever completely cut off from the past or the future. It is a time of differential duration whose two laws are those of disjuncture and simultaneity (co-occurence). The Black novel therefore always speaks of time and its flow in the plural. Novelistic writing is preoccupied with describing the processes of the transmutation of time, or the accumulation of time.

Every archive, being always linked to a past and having necessarily dealt with a history of memory, has a sort of slit. It is at once a breaching (frayage), an opening, and a separation, a fissure and a breaking, a crazing and a disjunction, a crevasse and a rift, or indeed a tear. But the archive is above all a fissile material, its specificity being that, at its source, it is made of cuts. Indeed, no archive exists without its cracks (lézardes). One enters into it as though through a narrow door, with the hope of penetrating in depth the thickness of the event and its cavities. To penetrate archival material means to revisit traces. But above all it means to dig right into the slope. A risky effort, since, in our case, often the point has been to create a memory by obstinately fixing shadows rather than real events, or rather historical events submerged in the force of shadow. Often it has been necessary to outline, on preexisting traces, our own silhouette, to gasp for ourselves the contours of the shadow, and to try to see ourselves from the shadow, as shadow.

"For its part, the primary function of the medical gesture was not the absolute eradication of illness or the suppression of death and the advent of immortality. The ill human was the human with no family, no love, no human relations, and no communion with a community. It was the person deprived of the possibility of an authentic encounter with other humans, others with whom there were a priori no shared bonds of descent or of origin. This world of people without bonds (or of people who aspire only to take their leave of others) is still with us, albeit in ever shifting configurations. It inhabits the twists and turns of renewed Judeophobia and its mimetic counterpart, Islamophobia. It inhabits the desire for apartheid and endogamy that harry our epoch and engulf us in the hallucinatory dream of a 'community without strangers.'

To experience time is in part to know no longer where one stands in relation to oneself.