Читать книгу Cedric Robinson - Joshua Myers - Страница 7

The Bakongo peoples of West-Central Africa saw Life as a cycle. This was not merely the invocation of the idea that all time is the same, that all experience is constant. Rather, what is meant is that we experience time in ways that allow us to see how all other time was experienced, that our experiences of time are not without deep connections to the cosmological. Human life is mapped, spatially oriented in the Kongo cosmogram (tendwa nza Kongo) as a mode of realizing how “the four moments of the sun” mirror not only individual lives, but also communal existence. We live our lives as we experience being within the larger universe. Human existence is akin to bodies arranged about the sun: constant motion and movement, darkness and light. But the creation of society, of human relationships within and amid existence, is not mechanical. The cycles that the Bakongo observed did not produce natural laws that govern our interaction in space. To be human, for the Bakongo, is to seek to understand, grow, and mature in rhythm with ancestors and the natural world, and to align them with a vision of and for community. Yet there is no guarantee that simply being alive will produce such connections. The Bakongo believed that tuzingu, or “rolls of life,” give us a record of what happened in the experiences of our ancestors, as we ourselves experience the cycles that mark our journeys around the sun. These records are required to pass down “lived accumulated experienceknowledge” to create social togetherness. They are there for us to see how it looked for others, so we can sense how it will be for us. Our lives are inherently linked, but they are our lives.¹ As Jacob Carruthers writes, time and eternity coexist and are in communion.²

Perhaps this is also a conceptual foundation for one definition of the Black Radical tradition found in the work of Cedric James Robinson. In the 2000 preface to his bestknown text, Black Marxism, he describes that tradition as “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle.”³ Enslavement, inasmuch as it provided the occasion for struggle over and within a particular kind of existence, was ultimately a challenge that required Africans to remain connected, to create the records – the collective intelligence – of those struggles and prior knowledges in order to continuously apply them to the realization of an otherwise to that existence and a more familiar mode of being à la Bakongo. Cedric’s conception of the Black Radical tradition as that accretion, then, is consistent with the worldviews of our enslaved African ancestors. And we might easily find direct familial and ancestral ties between Cedric, an African with roots in Alabama, and the peoples of the region who conceived of the tendwa nza Kongo, who later found themselves in the western hemisphere in large numbers, helping to produce the artistic and spiritual cultures that have been collected under the designation, “black Atlantic.”⁴

But, while interesting, an immediate genealogical relation is not required to reveal the greater insight: that these ways of seeing and imagining connections to each other across time and space were shared across Africana cultures. And so much so that what became the “deep thought” of the Bakongo might also be perceived as part of the tuzingu of countless other African intellectual traditions.⁵ That it appeared among Africans in a space called “the Americas” at a particular point in time is, however, also deeply significant and consequential in its own right. For it was in this context, this moment of the sun, that the foundation for that accretion of intelligence – of which the genius of significant Black thinkers was derivative, of which the thought of Cedric Robinson was derivative – was necessarily realized.⁶ This is to say, Cedric’s time occasioned a unique vantage point for comprehending reality and questions of existence that were both exceptional and constitutive of the very traditions he named and narrated.

The construct of time is useful – as any among a range of possibilities, such as space, geography, race, class, sociality, or systems – for thinking the life of Cedric Robinson. If the method of his work is, as Erica R. Edwards describes it, “to carefully excavate the mechanisms of power and to just as meticulously, and with a singular determination that I think can only be called faith, detail the radical epistemologies and ontologies that those mechanisms have been erected to restrain,” then we might use constructions of time as a route to understanding the ordering logic of those forces of restraint.⁷ This is indeed the aim of Damien M. Sojoyner, who writes in Futures of Black Radicalism that time, as a mechanism of restraint, structures and utilizes difference while imposing ideological adherence to the regimes that require that structuration by instituting the “disciplinary mechanisms aimed at ideological positions that counter western notions of law and order.” Resistance, then, if it is to be truly effective, requires us to initiate a “Black Radical time” – a time against the practices of difference making and othering.⁸ And within such alternatives to time as imposition, we would also develop alternative modes of relating to each other and to the past. Cedric himself perhaps sums up the importance of this framing most effectively in Black Marxism, where at a pivotal point in the text he states:

The point is that the construction of periods of time is only a sort of catchment for events. Their limited utility, though, is often abused when we turn from the ordering of things, that is chronological sequencings, to the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations. Increments of time contoured to abstract measure rarely match the rhythms of human action.⁹

“Significances, meanings, and relations” are deeper than the order of time and are the points of departure that this text will take in thinking with the life of Cedric Robinson. As an intellectual biography, it speaks to and with the larger themes and considerations of his work, while thinking through the contexts that made the work, the moments that made the worker. It is chronological but also thematic. The first few chapters look at the foundation of Cedric’s relations. They are followed by chapters that consider the meanings of his work. And a final chapter considers the significance of it all. This book is imagined as a contribution to the larger constellation of that work, an offering to future workers, an entry into Cedric’s roll of life.

Western time was constructed to do more than serve as a “catchment” for events – it was an attempt to impose order on the rhythms of human action, rather than simply understand them. And, as such, intellectuals operating under these assumptions have maintained the useful fiction that Black Radicalism is at best derivative of western thought or western temporal systems. This is, as Cedric has maintained, an ordering conceit that made liberation from the terms of order unimaginable. But it had been imagined. As a tradition of seeking otherwise than what is assumed to be attainable or even desired – indeed as a tradition that calls into question normative assumptions around what liberation even entails – the Black Radical tradition emanates from thought that is “unthinkable.”¹⁰

What is “thinkable” is that which is reasonable. The meaning of time as “measurable movement” in western civilization is a product of the conceptual architecture of Enlightenment, premised as it was on knowledge as the preserve of Man.¹¹ Though borrowing from such “classical” sources as Aristotle and St Augustine, much of what enters the western intellectual tradition owes its birth to the need to develop a form of measuring time that is ultimately about how patterns of human relationships with the natural environment can be understood. After all, if knowing through reason is a specifically human practice, then any attempt to naturalize humanity would have to also naturalize the environment in which such reasoning occurs. It is through a conception of human nature as naturally occurring that time as mathematical precision is assumed. But none of this is actually natural; it, too, is a conceit. Time’s meaning is not given in nature, it is given in the human understanding of nature. It is a social affair. The attempt to naturalize time is the practice of “temporalizing,” which requires also that human relationships to the past be imagined and narrated. And thus came the emergence of history as a conception for measuring and living with change.¹²

In order to understand what made human experiences significant, conceptions of change that had existed prior to the elevation of reason as the foundation of knowing had to be extinguished. Cedric’s work shows how incomplete this transition was, while also revealing that western thought attempted to achieve such a hegemonic disruption by imposing a logic of time, a historiographical tradition that imposed order on imagination, on the fantastic. The result was not only a theory of history but a theory of politics – a theory of reality that rendered the temporal scope of western civilization as the very meaning of what it is to be on and in time. From such distillations, notions of progress, momentum, and potential emanated to mark the physics and state of being. And it was this very arrangement of consciousness that could not incorporate “others” and their various accounts of what it means to live.¹³

This conception of time was also spatialized. Beyond the shifting time zones that mark different geographical locations, there also exist presumptions that “time is slower there,” or “time is frozen there,” which describe encounters with those who exist outside of “normal” time. These are, of course, premised upon colonial confrontations that gave birth to time-bound accounts of non-western life that sought to make their notions of life legible by presenting their ways of relating to each other as exotic or primitive. Much of this knowledge enters our consciousness through the domain of the social sciences, fabricated in often naive ways upon the philosophical assumptions of the natural sciences. Western time reads differences and imposes certain arrangements of other times and spaces, not necessarily to produce an account of universality or sameness, but to erect a knowledge useful for containing a threatening otherness. Time constructs a cartography of control.¹⁴

Part of what makes Cedric’s work significant is that it is premised on not only understanding these arrangements but excavating the existence of these other arrangements – or even ways of being against arrangement – that characterize the lived histories of western thought’s assumed others. It is work that covered an array of disciplines and deployed “what Michel Foucault called the ‘counter-sciences,’” but it was not interdisciplinary as much as it was an attempt to think beyond discipline, toward the ways in which the disciplines of knowledge were in fact responsible for establishing order, establishing time.¹⁵ Two of Cedric’s collaborators in England, A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, capture the relationship precisely when they write that it was Cedric who asked a “question that scarcely even occurs within the academy.” He questioned how our understandings of social “transformation” and “social justice” change when we acknowledge that the assumed foundations of knowledge of the world found in western thought – history, philosophy, and rhetoric – are themselves “stunted at birth, diminished in their capacities, crammed into spaces too small to contain them?”¹⁶ Perhaps an answer lies in Black Study, a practice within Black Studies, a tradition Cedric would acknowledge as a “critique of western civilization.”¹⁷ But it was not an internal critique, one that sought to rescue that tradition. For it was not about its improvement as much as it was about “subverting” its particular ways “of realizing ourselves” – those ways practiced not only in the domains of the academy, but tantamount to the nature of western thought itself.¹⁸ Such is one conception of Black Study, the practice of denaturalizing western disciplinary knowledges so that knowledges – ways of thinking and being – necessarily obscured by those projects can operate in spaces cleared of this debris. Though it was the original intent in many ways of the Black Studies movement, the existence of this approach to knowledge was never guaranteed, even in those spaces. In that sense, Cedric’s work speaks to the ongoing crisis of Black Studies.¹⁹

In Cedric’s practice of Black Study, we are offered the gift of seeing how those peoples who were excluded from history, and thus excluded from time, found ways to realize themselves. All time is not closure or management, reducible to spatial logics of colonialism and exploitation – all time is not order. As Sojoyner writes, time can be full of life, a shared construct of communal possibility; it is the collapse of the relationship to measurement as heard in the sounds of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler or Tyshawn Sorey and Esperanza Spalding, in the dance and play of Black girls around the diaspora, in the spaces created in the aisles of sanctuaries and the middle of the cipher – in the movements of cycles of life where we relate to each other, in, out, and around each other.²⁰ This is the Black Radical tradition, living beyond the order of time, finding ways to live again.

Cedric arrived onto the scene at perhaps one of the most critical junctures of western time: the mid-twentieth century. It was a moment where the hegemonic grip of western world order – the order that he would come to understand as constructed on a myth – was loosening thanks to the combined pressures of anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements across the globe. It was a freedom dream arrayed differently than the liberal model of political representation and economic ascendancy. And against an unsustainable market system underpinned by the violence of war and capitalist accumulation. In other words, it was a moment that saw revolution as a distinct possibility, even imperative to disrupting the time of western civilization permanently. In the wake of this moment in Black Marxism, Cedric wrote: “Everywhere one turns or cares to look, the signs of a collapsing world are evident; at the center, at its extremities, the systems of western power are fragmenting … the characteristic tendency of capitalist societies to amass violence for domination and exploitation [created] a diminishing return, a dialectic, in its use. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’”²¹

Cedric’s sojourn through the conceptual worlds of Black Study began in earnest in the early 1960s in the Bay Area, continued through the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, and into the United Kingdom, before finding settlement in Santa Barbara, California, where he served as the director of the Center of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was here where he and his partner Elizabeth, and daughter Najda, made their home, where all five of his books were released, and where the communities of struggle that would significantly mark their lives – both on and off campus – were based.

It would be impossible, however, to understand this intellectual journey by solely focusing upon the academic contexts of the work. This is a journey that must also take into account what it meant to be raised by Black folks from Alabama. It has to think through the meaning of the organizing tradition of 1960s Oakland and the larger momentum of Black revolutionary work that spawned networks of activists, thinkers, and artists in places like Detroit and New York. It has to search for meaning in the African-diasporic connections that were forged in travels to Mexico, southern Africa, and the United Kingdom. Black Study occurred here as well. And Cedric saw in real, Black space and in communal time the ways in which structures of thought that sought to understand and make realizable certain outcomes for Black peoples were deeply, even fatally, flawed. It was a form of study that was with rather than simply of Black peoples, a way of realizing that managed to offer more than the scientific veneer of objectivity in favor of a sort of rigor and deep thinking that was grounded in solidarity.²² That mode of being with and for was necessarily a mode of being against the very structure of domination in even its most welcoming forms, and it inculcated a deep suspicion that Black people might be better off living, dying, and obtaining “freedom on their terms.”²³

This may indeed be a model for us in these ever dark times – this normal time of darkness. Thinking with Cedric and the contexts of his life then would reveal the particular sites of his epistemic rupture with western time and the premise of his quite prescient view that, at its heart, the Black Radical tradition was ultimately grounded in preserving the ontological totality of peoples whose lives were interdicted by the political and material requirements of the modern world and whose understanding of how to be free must now be our point of departure for thinking freedom. This is a text that exists to call attention to a life, and not merely narrate its details, in order that we do more than find in Cedric’s work a subject to study. For, in calling attention to a life, we call attention to ourselves.²⁴

Some believe now that western time is late, that capitalism is late. This idea of late capitalism is an attempt to name a moment where time had reached a moment of completion, a natural evolution toward an end – a teleological “end of history.” Yet what actually attended late capitalism was a further deepening, an entrenchment of a violent logic of othering and weaponized difference-making that has produced an assault on the commons, a sensibility that renders everyone and everything in and as a market relation, as the new common sense of how to be in the world.²⁵ Cedric’s intellectual work appeared at perhaps a critical inflection point in the making of this neoliberal set of arrangements, as the 1980s saw the coming together of both the discursive and political logic that attempted to stabilize order through the twinned tactics described by Edwards as “incorporate and incarcerate; co-opt and incapacitate; represent and destroy.”²⁶

Those signs of the collapsing world that occasioned the words and vantage point in 1983 have been exacerbated, as the “racial regimes” that Cedric wrote of in 2007 are constantly updating themselves, as they must if they are to continue.²⁷ Globally, the racist foundations of capitalism are evident; these “native racisms,” responsible for death on a massive scale, have produced a moment where simply saying “Black lives matter” becomes an attempt to stave off the disavowal of Black humanity. And even such declarations are met with further utterances of contempt. Underneath those utterances are affirmations of the modes of living and the temporal and spatial constructs that have generated a newly energized racial capitalism that is supported and reified by a white nationalist consciousness where everyone is vulnerable, every day. One could easily identify the election of the forty-fifth US president and the subsequent right-wing and fascist efflorescence, the turmoil in Europe, Africa, South and Central America around migration, permanent war, the global pandemic, and the increasing fears around human planetary existence as realities that make the current moment a prime one for an initial engagement or reassessment of Cedric’s work. And they would be correct. But western time has always produced the urgency we feel. It has never not been this late, this dark.

Black people, as Christina Sharpe has written, live in the wake of immanent and imminent death, which in the conception of western time is the erasure of life. We need Cedric Robinson’s work, then, for it reminds us that there are ways of inhabiting these conditions and finding ways not to be reduced to them; or, in Sharpe’s words, we need to find solace in “tracking the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence.”²⁸ We need Cedric Robinson’s work because what we need in this moment are better ways of seeing and marking the limits of a conceptual project that renders so many of those who have been marked for death as having no rhythms of human action to speak of, who have been prevented from offering what they know about (an)other time.

It was Cedric, again in 2013, who reminded us that Black modes of living in the forms of spirituals were often dismissed as “noise,” and that what was assumed as “noise” had evoked and invoked life. He told us to find that noise, to see the ways that this noise has been, at root, what we are.²⁹ For beyond these ideas of death is the mode for the very reproduction of Life, which is, after all, a cycle.