#sociogeny

“Though Marxism remains a primary referent (and “Orthodox Marxism” a central target), Wynter’s sublation of Marx can, in this sense of overturning, be thought to exceed his frame of reference without abandoning it, as Marx famously proceeded to turn Hegel. Black Metamorphosis’s creative process of rejection and enfolding is doubled across the long trajectory of Wynter’s work, from her engagement in Marxist party politics to her role as founding editor of Social Text with Fredric Jameson (Roberts 171–73), and manifests in a 1985 interview as a taking leave of Marxism: “For a good many years I had tried to cling, sometimes tenuously, to the Marxist tradition. But then my own experience kept contradicting the theory. And while liberalism can be self-correcting, Marxism cannot. You take or leave it all in one piece. I had to leave it” (Qtd. in White 2010, 135). More recently, Wynter clarifies that she does not abandon but instead recontextualizes Marxism: “It was not a matter of negating the Marxian paradigm but of realizing that it was one aspect of something that was larger” (Scott and Wynter 2000, 142). The sociogenic principle provides the explanatory entry towards this “something larger,” articulated with the recognition that she “would still need some concept that could carry over Marx’s formidable insights, like his ideas of activity, of productivity, of something that one is instituting” (200). This active sense of instituting that Wynter conveys from Marx is itself a kind of transcendental necessity for critique only insofar as one reads blackness as substance instead of the problem thought and action (including, reflexively, Wynter’s own) organizes its intelligibility around.”

That against the acultural belief system and supracultural fallacy of our present order of knowledge, that the human is a purely natural organism who pre-exists culture-and who can therefore be valued and socially stratified according to degrees of genetic value as ostensibly signified by the aesthetic value of its literary production (Bloom’s Western bourgeois canon) or its alleged IQ (The Bell Curve), a Black Studies hypothesis redefines the human in the following terms: That although being human is implemented by the physiological processes of the body - how else? - being human is not itself a property of these processes. Rather, being human, including our model of being human, Man, in its present Western bourgeois or ethno-class conception, is a property of the narratively instituted governing codes of symbolic life and death or sociogenetic principle enacting of our human forms of life as a third level of hybridly bios and logos existence. Being human can therefore not pre-exist the cultural systems and institutional mechanisms, including the institution of knowledge, by means of which we are socialized to be human. That the elaboration and the guardianship of these governing codes and of their founding narratives are carried out, in all human orders, by the grammarians or intellectuals of each order - from the diviners of Africa, the shamans of Mesoamerica, the priest-scholars of ancient Egypt, the philosophers of Greece, the theologians of the feudal Clergy, to ourselves, the academicians of our present Western bourgeois epistemological order. That therefore, both the “misery of the poor/ and of the homeless in general the ongoing degradation of the lives of people in the inner cities, their everyday dying in the streets, as well as the ongoing degradation of the planetary environment, are only possible because of the lawlikely motivated ensemble of our collective behaviors that are made to seem just and legitimate by our present order of knowledge: by the sense of right and reasons of the economic and the aesthetic that we ourselves elaborate. (So much for our canons, literary and economic!) That our continued complicity with this order of knowledge entails our continued complicity with its truths of power - whether in its mainstream form or in the now proposed "multicultural” sub-variants.

In the autosociographical system of Beyond A Boundary, James places his act of separation from Trotskyism within a larger question, which is the structuring motif of the book. In posing the fundamental Tolstoy an [sic] question "What do men live by?" the system of Beyond A Boundary displaces at one thrust the bourgeois "mirror of the natural" and its related ''mirror of production."[1] The presuppositions of both "mirrors," i.e. .of man as a "natural being," of man as identified by the labor with which he produces his "material life," his means of physical subsistence,[2] represses the awareness that these definitions are cultural representations. That, like the feudal definition of man as a spiritual being, they are context-bound and historical, and become a "mythology" when they are spread over the expanse of human life; made into a teleology. Beyond A Boundary relativizes and deabsolutizes the "material representation" of man's identity when it asks the question central to the cultural life of man: What do men live by? The answer to this question moves the Jamesian poeisis beyond the national, the class question, into the contemporary dimensions of the popular question.[...] The pattern of Beyond A Boundary, working out the logic of its own motifs, uncovers "large areas of human existence," as James points out, that his "history, economics, politics" had left unaccounted for. Here it reveals that a separation, a gap appeared between the mode of popular desire, i.e., what the masses wanted to "live" by and what the "ruling elements" wanted them to live by. In other words, what is at issue here in a struggle between two modes of desire — that of the bourgeoisie and that of the popular forces: the bourgeoisie for whom sports were "mere entertainment", for whom play served as "recuperation" from the real work of labor, rather than as an alternative life-activity in its own right, for whom the aesthetic was a luxury or even in the case of bourgeois aesthetes, for whom the "fine arts" — split off from the popular arts — were the high culture used to cultivate individual sensibilities to mark off the differential value of bourgeois concerns, to be guarded from the hoi polloi, as the sacred animal in the sacred pool (in Levi-Strauss's term) that canonized the middle-class mode of desire as a desire for the "higher things" whilst stigmatizing all non middle class desire as crass.

I want to remind you of what Black Studies asked for. Gerald McWhorter in “The Case of Black Studies” [from Armstead Robinson, Craig Foster and Donald Ogilvie’s Black Studies and the University] (1969), he said, “I would like to refer you to an essay by the late Dr. DuBois in What the Negro Wants, where he said that up until the point that he really came to terms with Marx and Freud he thought that truth wins. But when he came to reflect on the set of lived experiences that he had and the notions of these two men he saw that if one was concerned about surviving, about the good life and moving any society toward that, then you have to include a little something other than an interesting appeal to truth in some abstract universal sense.” So he’s contradicting the truth of what I had been taught about the negativity of everything Black and the positivity of everything white. Okay? The question then is the issue of “truth.” Remember, he’s saying this in ’69. In the ’70s [Michel] Foucault comes up with the idea of “truth and power,” and he’s saying the exact same thing. He’s saying that every society has a regime of truth. So what our consciousness has been battling against, the regime of “truth” which has structured our “consciousness,” is functioning against our best interests. It is negating ourselves; and so there’s this constant struggle. You see, it’s not just an intellectual struggle. You could call it a psycho-intellectual struggle. Then you could understand why in the ’60s it wasn’t just a call for Black Studies; it was a call for Black Aesthetics, it was a call for Black Art(s), it was a call for Black Power. It was an understanding that, as Lewis Gordon has been the first to keep insisting, we live in an anti-Black world--a systemically anti-Black world; and, therefore, whites are not [simply] “racists.” They too live in the same world in which we live. The truth that structures their minds, their “consciousness,” structures ours. SO THE GREAT BATTLE NOW IS GOING TO BE AGAINST “THE TRUTH.”

This central oversight would then enable both Western and westernized intellectuals to systematically repress what Geertz has identified as the "fugitive truth" of its own "local culturality" - of, in Bruno Latour's terms, its specific "constitution with a capital C," or cultural constitution that underlies and charters our present order, as the parallel constitutions of all other human orders that Western anthropologists have brilliantly elucidated underlie and charter all other human orders - doing so according to the same hybrid nature-culture, ontogeny/sociogeny laws or rules. With this systemic repression ensuring that we oversee (thereby failing to recognize) the culture and class-specific relativity of our present mode of being human: Man in the second, transumed, and now purely biocentric and homo oeconomicus form of that first invention that was to lead to Winant's "immense historical rupture," to Quijano's "Racism/Ethnicism" complex, and to Mignolo's modernity/coloniality complementarity.