The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date

Transcription

Author(s): Hortense J. Spillers
Reviewed work(s):
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 65-116
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303601 .
Accessed: 03/03/2013 14:57
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to boundary 2.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded on Sun, 3 Mar 2013 14:57:10 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Hortense J. Spillers
1
The silver anniversaryof HaroldCruse's Crisis of the Negro Intellectual1 has passed without remark.The occasion of the lapse, as well as a
few notes on the situation of the black creative intellectualtoday, provides
the impetus for this writing.From the distance of twenty-seven years, the
"crisis"that Cruse explores appears infinitelymore complex than it might
have been in 1967, when the workwas published to controversialhue and
cry. One's impression is that the project did not win the writervery many
friends or influence the rightpeople,2but that it was as necessary a reading
1. Recentlyreissued, TheCrisisof the Negro Intellectualbears the subtitleFromIts Origins to the Present (New York:WilliamMorrowand Company,Inc., 1967). Allcitations
fromthe text come fromthe 1967 edition,withpage numbersparenthetically
noted.
2. RobertL.Allen'sBlackAwakeningin CapitalistAmerica:AnAnalyticHistory(Garden
City,N.Y.:AnchorBooks, 1970) examines The Crisisagainstthe backdropof the Black
Powermovement.See "BlackPowerand BourgeoisBlackNationalism,"
171-80.
Contemporaneousreviews of Cruse'sworkare too numerousto list here, even partially,but I would call briefattentionto two of them fromthe period:MichaelThelwell,
Press.CCC0190-3659/94/$1.50.
boundary2 21:3,1994.Copyright
? 1994byDukeUniversity
66 boundary2 / Fall1994
and calling out as we had had in quite awhile, and, I would go so far as to
say, have not quite matched since that time, even though we have been
treated to a few celebrated "licks"on the theme by prominentblack intellectuals along the way. I recallwithsome nostalgic yearning, related both to my
youth and to what must have seemed to many of us then a period of great
optimism, reading The Crisis, a couple of years after its publication,in great
excitement and agitationof feeling. First,here was an explicitstatement, at
length, concerning the vocation of the black intellectualfor the firsttime, as
far as I could tell, since W. E. B. DuBois's autobiographicalprojects, beginning with The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that blended the strategies of the
with those of culturaland politicalcritique. Inother words,
"self-life-writing"
"WhatIs to Be Done?"PartisanReview35, no. 4 (Fall1968):619-22; and ErnestKaiser,
"Review,"Freedomways9, no. 1 (Winter1969):24-41. Thelwellfinds abundantironies
riddlingCruse's posture towardthe intellectuals,among them, that Cruse, while lambasting others for their pursuitof integrationistsocial practices,had had himselfto go
for the publicationof his book. Furthermore,
"downtown"
just as Cruse had held black
intellectualsculpable to charges of intellectualtimidityand self-ostracism,he himself,
Thelwellimplies,had reenforcedsuch a stance by appealingto them as a separate and
distinctclass interestor formation:"Eventhe titleof this bookconstitutesa kindof heresy
in thatliberaltraditionwhichmaintainsthatthe communityof 'intellectuals'is raceless and
shares onlywork-relatedproblemsof methodology,analysis,craftsmanship,foritsets up
a 'class' of black intellectualswith common problemsnot shared by nonblacks"(619).
and its readingof
Thelwellfinds the intentof The Crisis"obscure,"its focus "blur[red],"
the role of communistideology overdeterminedin Cruse'sassessment of integrationist
distortions.(I wouldpointout anothersmall ironyof ironies:that Thelwellhimselfwould
appearas one of the essayists in a collectionof responses to WilliamStyron'scontroversial novel of 1968, TheConfessionsof Nat Turner.TenBlack WritersRespond published
pieces on Styron'sworkthat rangedin view fromoutrageto subtlercriticalsignatures.
The pointis that ifThelwellhimselfdoes not mean the openingsentence of his reviewas
tongue-in-cheek,then he willhave missed the politicalimplicationsof boththe collection
of essays and manyof the essayists' angerat whatthey feltto be aggressive presumptuousness on Styron'spart.Need we pointout thatblackintellectualsas a social formation
sproutteeth precisely because the liberalview, itselfa politicalposition,sutures power
differencesthat conceal the moves it performsas a natural"innocence"?)
Ernest Kaiserreviews The Crisisof the Negro Intellectualagainst the perspectiveof
AfricanAmericanintellectualhistory,notingthat several of its early reviewers,many of
them Anglo-Americanreviewersformainstreamjournalsand newspapers,had produced
a hodgepodge of incoherencein addressingthis work,preciselybecause they were ignorantof its predecessor texts. Kaiser'sreviewis valuable,because it examines several
positions on The Crisis and the ways in which they are flawed.The Journalof Ethnic
Studies devoted a thirdof its contents to a reappraisalof Cruse'sworkin vol. 5, no. 2
(Summer1977): 1-69.
A Post-Date67
Spillers/ Crisis:
werethemselvesa demonstration
DuBois'sautobiographies
of the project
that the blackcreativeintellectualmightengage when he or she defines
his/herauto-bios-graphein the perspectiveof historicaltime and agency.
BetweenDuBoisandCruse,withthe possibleexceptionsof RichardWright
and RalphEllison,who had bothfocused on the fictionalwriter'scommitmentandvocation,we hadhadto waitawhile,as thoughpoised,itseemed,
for an apposite interpretive
gesture at the close of an era of cataclysmic
events between Brown versus Board (Topeka) (1954) and the 1964 Civil
thatframeone of the mostfateful
Rightslegislation-the two punctualities
decades of AfricanAmericanculturaland historicalapprenticeshipin the
UnitedStates. Second, Cruseappearsto havebeen upto the job,notmincing wordsaboutthe intellectualfailuresof the dominantculture,not biting
his tongue,either,aboutthe abysmalconceptuallapses of the minorityone
in question,specifically,the ill-preparedness
of my generationof political
activiststo take on the strenuoustask of sustainedanalyticallabor.Now it
seems that we have not only notyet articulateda systematicresponse to
Cruse's "crisis"but that the problemsthat he was courageous enough
to confronthavenotbeen betterformulated,
despiteourimprovedaccess to
certainculturalinstitutions
andconceptualapparati.TakingCruse,then, as
one of ourchiefcartographers,
can we beginto mapthe terrainanew?Can
we say moreclearlynow,afterhis example,perhapsbecause of it, what
the problemis thatconstitutesa "crisis"forthe AfricanAmericancreative
intellectualat the moment?
Ourcrisistoday is confoundednotonlybecause so muchtime has
passed between one systematicarticulationand the next (stillslumberbecause the peculiarconjunction
of historical
ingsomewhere)butprimarily
forces has broughtus to an uncannysite of contradictions:
when Cruse
wrote his work,the impulseof the revolutionary-atleast the spiritof revolt-was everywhereinchoate,althoughtherehad notyet been massive
inVietnam.Studentrebellion
publicreactionagainstAmericaninvolvement
at the time was largelycenteredin the southernUnitedStates, takingits
majorimpetusfromMartinLutherKing'snonviolentprotocols-voterregistrationcampaigningand grass-rootsorganizingin ruraland urbancenters
across the South,andthe wholerangeof acts of civildisobedience,fromsitins, pray-ins,and wade-insat pools, restaurants,moviehouses, and other
places of publicaccommodation,to the economictool of the boycott.But
StokeleyCarmichael's
(KwameToure)cryof "BlackPower"on a Mississippi
roadone day (whichevent Crusehistoricizesinthe closingchapterof The
Crisis), the assassination of MartinLutherKing,Jr., the inspiredwitness of
Malcolm X, and the dramatic rise of the national Black Panther Party were
driven like a wedge through black psyche, an occurrence that had been
prepared by the Watts rebellionof 1965 and the assassination of Malcolm
El-Hazz MalikEl Shabazz that same year. But it seems that something so
awful crystallized in 1968, on either side of the Atlantic,that in my own
autobiographical sense, at least, the year irrevocablysplit time around it
into a "before"and "after,"findingclosure only duringthe fall of 1969. It is
as if one day the familiarworld spun out of control, as, for instance, two
culturalicons fell over withinsix weeks of each other in the raw display of
a national pathology. That incredibleyear, which markedthe assassination
of both Kingand Robert Kennedy,which witnessed the most brutalnational
Democratic Party Convention in livingmemory, and which, by its end, saw
the instaurationof Republican rule that would run unbroken in the nation
from 1968-1993, with a four-yearrespite duringthe Carterpresidentialera,
would inscribe as well the inaugurationof changes that we could absolutely
not have foreseen in their broaderscope and meaning.
The period 1968-1970 meant, at last, the fruitionof a radical and
pluralistic democracy, or so it seemed, with, for example, comparatively
larger numbers of AfricanAmerican students admitted to the mainstream
academy and agitation for the movements in black studies and women's
studies, and theirfar-reachingimplicationsfor a radicallyaltered curriculum,
especially in the humanities. These initiativesconstituted the vanguard of
an attitudinalsea change, which, coterminous with the Continental movements in structuralistcriticism, linguistics, feminist theory, and philosophy,
would so reconfigurethe leading assumptions of the traditionalhumanistic
order, that within twenty years of the American withdrawalfrom Vietnam,
the "Englishdepartment,"for example, as an institutionaldisciplinarysite,
would be virtuallyevacuated as a unifiedcourse of study, grounded in an
indisputable canon of "great"literaryworkand supplemented by a more or
less homogeneous criticalestablishment.
In brief, as turbulentas the 1960s were for those of us who lived
the era, as crisis-ridden as the situation was for the black creative intellectual, as Cruse understood it, nothing within his lights or our own could
have sufficientlyprepared us for what Iwould regardas the central paradox
of this social formation nearly thirtyyears later: Although African American intellectuals as a class have gained greater access to organs of public
opinion and dissemination, although its criticalenterprise has opened communication onto a repertoireof stresses that traverse the newly organized
humanistic field, and although we can boast today a considerably larger
Spillers/ Crisis:A Post-Date 69
black middle and upper-middleclass, with its avenues intothe professions,
includingelective office, some corporate affiliation,virtuallyall of the NBA,
and the NFL, and a fast break into the nation's multimilliondollar "image"
industries, the news concerning the AfricanAmerican life-worldgenerally
is quite grim. In fact, it is chillingnews, as we learn fromcertain observers,
that the black prison population in the United States, for example, is substantial enough to "outfit"a good-sized city-some six hundred thousand
subjects, most of them male. And, indeed, there seems very little reason
to believe that certain undiminishedsymptoms of social dysfunction willdo
anything but exacerbate what is, for all intents and purposes, a genocidal
circumstance: the unabated availabilitynot only of drugs but of the social
and economic networkof relations that have engendered a veritable drug
culture; the ravages of povertyand illiteracy;a vital internationalarms market that directlyfeeds a nation in love withthe idea and practice of violence;
and race hatred/"tribalism,"
restitutedby an entrenched and immoralpolitical reactionism, whose targets are the city-its poor, its young mothers,
and their children.
To call attention to these vital details is to indulge the litany of responses that is by now customaryforthe blackcreative intellectual.3Though
3. Pastor of Dorchester,Massachusetts'sAzuza ChristianCommunity,the Reverend
Eugene Riversaddressed an open letterto Boston'sblackintellectualsentitled"Onthe
Responsibilityof Intellectualsin the Age of Crack,"publishedin the Boston Review 17,
no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1992):3-4. The letterelaboratesits concernsagainstthe backgroundof
Noam Chomsky'sessay, "TheResponsibilityof Intellectuals,"
whichappearedin a 1967
issue of the New YorkReviewof Books. Chomsky,in turn,had been inspiredby a series
of articleswrittenby DwightMacDonald,appearingin the journalPolitics.The question
was whetherintellectualshave any special moralresponsibility,
and Riversquotes from
have a 'responsibility
... to speak the truthandto expose
Chomsky'spiece: "Intellectuals
lies' and a duty 'to see events in theirhistoricalperspective'" (3). Callingdirectlyon the
Boston/Cambridgeintellectualsby name, Riversremindshis readersthat a black elite
is "notexempt"fromthe currentcrises facingAfricanAmericancommunitiesacross the
country.Rivers'scall was answeredon two separate occasions, at fora sponsored both
times by the Boston Review.The firstexchange tookplace on 30 November1992, at the
ArcoForumat HarvardUniversity'sKennedySchool of Government;hosted by Anthony
Appiahof Harvard,speakers includedRivershimself,CornelWest, bell hooks, Henry
LouisGates, Jr., Glenn Loury,and MargaretBurnham.The transactionsfromthe initial
symposiumwere publishedin the Boston Review 18, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1993):22-28.
The second roundof talkswas convenedat MIT,againunderthe auspices of the Boston Review, withcomplementarysponsorshipprovidedby MIT'sDepartmentof Politics;
hosted by MargaretBurnhamof the Departmentof Politics,speakers includedReverend
Rivers, Regina Austin, RandallKennedy,Selwyn Cudjoe,and bell hooks. This second
70
boundary 2 / Fall 1994
no one ever quitesays it this way,it is as if the intellectualhimself/herself
is culpable,both as a social formationwithinthe largerensemble and in
Because Cruseis workperson, forthis precisestructureof contradictions.
the
traditional
The
refracts
of the
off
Crisis,
too,
emplotment,
ing
culpability
blackcreativeintellectual;in fact, we mighteven say thatdisparagement
of the intellectualingeneralandof the AfricanAmericanintellectualin particularinscribesitselfas a rhetorical
formof utterance.Butifthe intellectual
I
as
see
can
no
credit
forwhatevergainsblackAmericans
it,
accept
subject,
have madeoverthe pastthirtyyears,exceptthathe/she has been a beneficiary,then one is hardputto imputeblameat his doorstepforthe failures.
Itseems to me that a moreusefulway of analyticaland declamatoryprocedurewouldbe the attemptto establisha totalperspectiveagainstwhich
the workof the intellectualunfolds.Inotherwords,the plightof the Ameriforthe social landscapemustbe examinedas
can city and its implications
one of the primarystructuralgivens to whichsocial formationsvariously
respond.I attemptsuch a sketchbelow.
Whilethe desegregationof the nation'spublicschool systems was
intendedto address and ameliorateinferioreducationalfacilitiesprovided
forAmerica'sblackpopulation,itappearsto have induced,by the way, the
collapseof a homogeneousstructureof feelingandvaluethathadconsolidatednotionsof self-esteemandsteeledthe soulofthe blackyoungagainst
of a traditionalprogramof
the assaults that awaitedit. Butthe liquidation
is
it
relates
to
African
as
Americans, only a single featureof the
values,
radicalswervethatworriesone's perspective;infact,we mighteven go so
faras to say thatthe dispersalof blackintellectual
talent,and its deflection
is
a
of certainglobalforces
social
its
from
symptom
target,
customary
away
that have had a negativeimpacton the lifeof Americansociety in general,
ratherthanthe primarycause of devastation:the entirearrayof postmodernist sociality,whose chief engine is fueled by late-capitaleconomies,4
has homed in on blacklife withlaser-likeprecision.Veryspecifically,the
Freudwhereone never
condensationand displacementof labor(intruding
well-educated
social
favor
the
find
to
subjectwhocan dance
him)
expected
forumoccurrednearlya year lateron 17 November1993. The Boston Review published
the transactionsin volume 19, no. 1 (Feb./Mar.1994):3-9. Glenn Loury,whose illness
preventedhim fromattendingthe second meeting,publisheda companionpiece, "The
Povertyof Reason,"10-11, in the same issue of the journal.
4. I broadlyallude to one of the definitiveworkson the postmodernistencounter provided by FredricJameson, in Postmodernism,or, The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism
(Durham,N.C.:Duke UniversityPress, 1991).
A Post-Date71
Spillers/ Crisis:
the new technologiesof automatedwork,movingthe society towardless
and less physical labor,alteringnotionsof liberalpropertyin the process,
and towardthose subjectswho can interpretthe social organismbackto
itselfas readers,writersand managersof highlyconsolidatedsocial propThe actualflightof labor,whichone had not
erties, bothrealandsymbolic.5
realized
until
was
quite
"flight" the dramaticclosingof the GeneralMotors
plantat WillowRun, Michigan,for example,duringthe nationalpolitical
campaignsof 1992, quitelikelyoriginatedwhenone was simplybeing annoyed ratherthan watchful-duringthe era of whatwe have come to call
the oil crisis of 1973, withits attendantmanipulation
of the globalmoney
the
of PetroleumExsupply, increasingpoliticalcloutof the Organization
dominanceofthe
portingCountries(OPEC),andthe comingto international
Asianmarket,particularly
the awesomecompetitivemachineryof Japan's.
(Those of us who grew up in strong,blacknuclearfamiliesquite simply
shudderto thinkwhat mighthave happenedto ourselves in the absence
of, say, a MemphisInternational
Harvester,the companyfromwhichmy
fatherretiredin the earlyseventies. A manufacturer
of farmimplements,
based in Illinois,MemphisInternational
Harvestermovedaway fromthis
majorsoutherncityshortlythereafter,phasingouta fewthousandjobs with
its departure.One of the city'sothermajorindustries-FirestoneTireand
Rubber-closed at aboutthe same time,as it,andotherpost-WorldWarII
enterprises,whose workershadeducateda good numberof the earlyand
late "boomer"crop,eitherdisappearedaltogetheror convertedto greater
automation.It is not by errorthat a phenomenonnamed"theconsumer,"
the originand end of mass distribution
and production,was "born"to us
with vividpresence at the close of the sixties. Automatedmachinery,of
consolidateslabor'squantity,as it altersworktype
course, "automatically"
and content, and as PresidentClintonalludesto the pointby encouragingthe nationalbusiness communityto practiceand elaborateprotocolsof
He predictsthatAmerica'scurrentcollege population,for
job "retraining."
instance,willchangejobtype at least a halfdozentimesbeforeretirement.)
The decline of the Americanmarket,then, whichReagan's"Good
Morning,America"low-taxprogramdidnotquiteforestall,has joinedforces
withlate-capitalschemes of globalreorganization
in a dizzyingvelocityof
5. A useful collectionof essays on positionson property,beginningwiththe seventeenthcenturydoctrine of liberalpropertyespoused by John Locke, is providedin Property:
Mainstreamand CriticalPositions,ed C. B. MacPherson(Toronto:Universityof Toronto
Press, 1978).
change that has shifted the very imaginaryobject on which the black creative intellectualhad workedat one time-a stake in the soil, actually bound
by coordinates on the map of the innercity: the old "community"is neither
what nor where it used to be, as the tax base could not but have followed
the wealth-both in and of itself and of labor's potentials-to the city's rim
and well beyond.' Even though it seems to me that this latest version of
urban flight might be traced back ratherpointedlyto a month and a day in
1954 and the famous (or infamous,depending on one's viewpoint)Supreme
Court mandate to public school districtsto desegregate "withall deliberate
speed," such movement, along the riftof America's sharply drawn binary
markers--"black" and "white"-was underscored by voting patterns that
brought massive gains to a new, post-Goldwater Republican Party. At the
very moment, however, that the new studies movements and widespread
student protests were makingtheirwitness felt on college campuses across
the United States, a mature political"backlash"--whichthe Clinton"Third
Way" interrupted,three decades later, by interpolatinga different political
strategy between a strictlyurban,predominantlyminority,and poor electorate, on the one hand, and a basically suburban, predominantlywhite and
middle-class electorate, on the other-had been preparing itself for well
over a decade.
Within this maelstrom of forces, the black, upwardlymobile, welleducated subject has not only "fled"the old neighborhood(in some cases,
the old neighborhood isn't even there anymore!) but, just as importantly,
has been dispersed across the social terrainto unwontedsites of work and
calling. From my pointof view, this marksthe ace development that today's
black creative intellectual neither grasps in its awful sufficiency nor wants
to bear up under inasmuch as he/she is sorely implicatedin its stark ramifications. (We chase, instead, afterfantastic notions, quite an easier pastime
than looking at what has happened to community.)It would be an errorto
assume that he/she has had the choice to do other than go out, just as our
current social and politicalanalyses are spectacularly "hung up" on a too
literal and simpleminded idea of what community might mean, in the first
place, and in addition to a location called home. I believe that an under6. MikeDavis offers a stunningreadingof the nation'ssocioeconomiccrisis by way of
one of its majorinner-cityformations-South CentralLos Angeles-in "WhoKilledLA?
A PoliticalAutopsy,"The New LeftReview 197 (Jan./Feb. 1993):3-29. Davis trailsthe
tax base to the suburbancontext and discusses its implicationsfor presidentialpolitics
1992. But against his broadstrokes, we espy the largerfate of the Americanpeople in
lightof post-Cold Warlaborshortages.
A Post-Date73
Spillers/ Crisis:
standingof this internaldiasporawouldbringthe blackcreativeintellectual
to a moresatisfactoryview of the thematicsof flight,a rathercontrastive
nuance, afterall, to that of dispersal.Andit wouldcertainlyredirecthis/
her wasted energy,moaningover a monomythof a versionof community
that only needs enterprisezones in orderto be whole again.This paralysis of understanding,broughton by guiltover one's relativesuccess and
profounddelusionaboutone's capacityto lead the masses (of which,one
supposes, it is certainthat she is not one!) out of theirBabylon,disables
the intellectualon the very materialgroundwherehe/she now stands:on
the site of the mainstreamacademyand its variousideologicalapparati,
for the most part,as the assumptionsof the progressivemovementsthat
propelledhim/herto such statusinthe firstplacearequietly,thoughwidely,
threatenednow by a well-heeled,highlyefficientcoordination
of right-wing
like
the
forces,7
hegemonic
spreading myceliumthrough bodypolitic.The
conservativeagitationthatCrusemusthave sorely,urgentlyfeltduringthe
writingof Crisisis fullyunfoldedin our midsttoday,and the pictureis not
assertivedomesticenemy since
pretty.As I see it, the most significantly
the ravagesand excesses of the McCarthy
eradrovea punishingoffensive
the
heart
of
an
older
cadre
of
through
left-wingintellectuals,this new imof
tricked
in
out
the
discourses
of politicaland economic
morality power,
rationalismand bindinga nationalarrayof appallingly
ignorantmediain its
thrall(to wit,the canardof "political
correctness,"virtually
unquestionedby
nearlyall printmediain the UnitedStates)goes basicallyunchallengedby
today's comfortableleft-wingintellectualsubjects,of whichsocial formationthe blackcreativeintellectualoughtto be not onlya memberin good
standingbutperhapsamongthe firststanding.Distracted,instead,by false
or secondaryissues, yieldingapparentlylittleresistanceto the sound intrusion of marketimperativeson the entireintellectual
object,includingthatof
AfricanAmericanstudies,today'sblackcreativeintellectuallends herself/
himself-like candybeingtakenfroma child-to the mightyseductionsof
ratherlikewhatan editorof LinguaFrancaonly
publicityand the "pinup,"
Americandu jour."
dubbed,once upon a time, the "African
half-jokingly
it
be
to
that
before
the
black
creativeintellectual
useful,
then,
Might
suggest
can "heal"her people, she mustconsiderto whatextentshe must "heal"
herself,and that before the blackcreativeintellectualcan offera salvific
7. A piece of workthat I wouldconsiderrequiredreadingfora fullerunderstandingof the
the Attackon Libpoliticalconjuncturein whichwe are currentlylocated,"Manufacturing
eralizedEducation,"by EllenMesser-Davidow,
Social Text36 (Fall,1993):40-81, unfolds
the sources and the stage of right-wingU.S. politicalformationin the Reagan/Bushera.
74
programagainst crackand crack-up,she is calleduponto considerwhat
immediateconversionshe must herselfundergo?And is it too much to
is wrongwithoneself?
imaginethat what is wrongwith"thecommunity"
Andfurthermore,
couldone submitthatthe blackcreativeintellectual,like
the blackmusicianwhomshe so admires,has an "object"in fact, butthat
she is not alwaysinterestedinwhatit is?
One shouldnot be at all surprised,then, thatthe post-Cruseintellectual"throwsdown,"inthe midstof coeval pressuresandforces, looking
and feeling,at least some of the time,likea lost ballin highweeds. Infact,
Cruse now appearsto have been farbettersituatedthanwe, in our "lateness," in our ratherstartlingethicallaxityon occasion. In the wake of a
powerfulspectacle of painand loss, the old vocabulariesof moralsuasion
and consensualconscience-and we feel iteverywhere,fromourrelations
withAfricanAmericanstudentsand colleagues,alike,and theirswithourto anythingoutsidecareer-seem
selves, to ourconsiderableindifference
and
moribund
now.
Not
peculiarlyimpotent
onlyhavewe losta considerable
percentageof our natalpopulationto the arts and stratagemsof destruction-and realizethat we willlose quitea few morebeforethis massive
ceases-but also ourcustomarydiscoursesof the moraland
hemorrhaging
ethical quickening,withits evocativelament,its visionof the redemptive
possibility,the old faithsthatcouldmove a mountain,or so one believed,
all markthe lost love-objectnow.
Butcertainfatalismneed notbe the outcome;instead,we are called
to
upon restitutethe centralityof Cruse'sinterrogation-whatis the workof
the blackcreativeintellectual?-forall we knownow?
2
Whilethe fundamentalchargethatCruselaidout is notdifferent,by
harderto graspbedefinition,inthe contemporary
period,itseems infinitely
some of whichIhavebrieflyattempted
on the ground,"
cause of "conditions
to explore. In short,the apparenthomogeneityof the mass, whichblack
life offeredto the imaginationin the late sixties, is moreor less revealed
now as the necessaryfictionthathas come unraveledat the seams. Cruse
workedhis two majorpremisesagainstthe notionof an ethnicgroupconsciousness in place; this economyof motivesdefinedforhimthe realityof
black persons, as a homogeneous social formation,in America: (1) on the
and economicindeone hand,the impulseto collectiveself-determination
Power,"in
pendence, or an AfricanAmericanculturalnationalism--"Black
short (after Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.), and (2) the impulse
A Post-Date75
Spillers/ Crisis:
to assimilationof the ideals and promisesof Americandemocracy,on the
other.ForCruse,the nationaliststrainwas "strikingly
cogent"across lines
of whatmightbe calledthe
of class and couldbe thoughtof as a "residuum
ethnicgroupconsciousnessina societywhose legalConstiAfro-American
but
tutionrecognizesthe rights,privileges,andaspirationsof the individual,
whose politicalinstitutions
recognizethe realityof ethnicgroupsonlyduring
strainopposes the nationalistin
electioncontests"(4, 6). The integrationist
Cruse'sscheme, whilebothhavetheirrootsinthe nineteenthcentury.Even
was notavailableas a conceptto FrederickDougthough"integrationism"
lass, the latterembodiesneverthelessCruse'sprototypical
representative
of the integrationist
as
R. Delany,
Martin
urge, Douglass'scontemporary,
forexample,standsforthe "rejectedstrain,"orthe nationalistimpulse.The
dilemmafor Cruse was the capitulation
of blackintellectualleadershipto
formulasthatessentiallydepletedthe energiesof the commuintegrationist
nity,as they robbedthe latterof its crucialhumanand symboliccapital.In
DuBois,the twostrains"nearlymergedintoa newsynthesis,"inasmuchas
DuBoiswas "aleadingexponentof the Pan-Africanism
thathad its origins
withMartinR. Delany,"as well as one of the key moversof the Niagara
Movement(1905) and whatCruse calls the "NAACP
[growingout of the
trend"
latter]integrationist
(6).
The thrustof TheCrisis,then, is to demonstratesystematicallythe
defaultof blackintellectualleadershipin relinquishing
its agenda to mainstreamapparatiand personalities,focusingon the fate of the Harlemcominthe post-WorldWarII
munityas a quintessentialinstanceof the life-world
era. However,Cruse is carefulto providea backdropto Harlemin the
fiftiesand sixties by examiningthe politicalpressuresbroughtto bear on
it duringthe twenties and the periodof the HarlemRenaissance. Pushing the analysis back in the earlychaptersto the teens and to PhilipA.
Payton'sAfro-American
RealtyCompany,a movementin whichblackeconomicindependencewas principally
responsibleforthe Africaninfluxinto
Harlem,Cruse rehearsesthe impactof the BolshevikRevolutionof 1917
Russia on the conceptualweave of ideas availableto black intellectuals
along an evolvingpoliticalspectrum.Infact, Harlem'spoliticallandscape
was groundedinthe antipodaloppositionsthatreflectCruse'sprimarybinarism-nationalismversusintegration:
movement
Garvey's"Back-to-Africa"
and its attendantblacknationalism,on the one hand,and the radicalhistoricalmaterialists,on the other,and theiralliancewithMarxistthinkers,
who refractedthe politicalimperativesof the Communistmovementintheir
theory and practice.
As these considerably antagonistic forces warred over time for the
2 / Fall1994
76 boundary
soul of Harlem,as it were, in the pages of TheMessenger, TheMasses/
The New Masses, and The Partisan Review, among other organs of public
opinion,Harlemitself lost its resourcesin blacktheater,for example-to
occasionto hammer
wit,the AmericanNegroTheater-and a paradigmatic
of institutional
outan infrastructure
supportthatwouldgenerateandsustain
AfricanAmericanculturallife.Whilethe powerfuldeclamatoryand polemical ambitionsof Cruse'sworkare centralto his project,he lays out, early
on, a ten-pointplan not onlyto correctthe errorsof the past (whichconandits leadershipon a
tinueintothe present)butalso to set the community
economicin
differentfuturecourse. ForCruse,the "answer"was primarily
the pursuitof a cooperativeeconomicideaagainstthe ideologyof competitive marketeconomics.Under"basicorganizational
objectives"spelledout
in the thirdchapterof Part1, Cruseelaboratesthe followingaims for the
forthe entirelife-world:
Harlemcommunityand,by metonymicsubstitution,
citizens'planning
1. The immediate"[f]ormation
of community-wide
Harlem's
of
political,
groups for a completeoverhauland reorganization
economic,and culturallife... .8
2. Blackpeoplewithbusinesscompetenceshouldformcooperatives
and sellingof all
"whichwilltake over completelythe buying,distributing,
in
such
as
and
used
consumed
commodities
basic
food, clothing,
Harlem,
luxuries,services, etc."
of small,privatelyownedblackbusinesses
3. Harlem'sproliferation
should give way to consolidatedcooperativesthat "wouldeliminatethis
overlapping,lowerprices, and improvequality.Cooperativeswouldalso
intonurseries,
createjobs. Manyof the excess storescouldbe transformed
medicaldispensariesfordrugaddicts,etc."
4. "[C]itizens'
committeesto combatcrimeanddrugpeddling.These
committeesshouldseek legalpermissionto be armedto fightthe dangerous
networkof drug-selling."
5. "[A]new,all-Negro,community-wide
politicalpartyto add bargainingforceto social, culturaland economicreforms."
6. "Extensivefederalandstate aid... to financecompleteeconomic,
politicaland culturalreformsin Harlem.Withoutpoliticalpowerthese social
changes cannotbe won."
7. Tenants'cooperativeownershipof housing,"or,at least, municipallycontrolledhousing."
8. Cruse felt that such groups should aim beyond "thegoals of mere anti-povertywelfare state programssuch as HARYOU-ACT"
Program(The HarlemYouthRehabilitation
HarlemYouthUnlimited).
A Post-Date77
Spillers/ Crisis:
8. "Citizens'planninggroupson the reorganization
of Harlem'spolitical, economic,and culturallifeshouldaimto establishdirectlines of comfromthe community
to appropriate
munication
departmentsandagencies of
the federalgovernment.., .wheneveritis deemednecessaryand politically
apropos,and in the interestof expeditingcommunitydecisions, municipal
and state echelons shouldbe by-passed."
9. "Citizens'planninggroupsmustdevisea newschoolof economics
based on class andcommunity
Sucha schoolshouldbe prediorganization.
cated on the need to create a new black middleclass organizedon the
principleof cooperativeeconomicownershipandtechnicaladministration."
10. "Citizens'planninggroupsshouldpetitionthe FederalCommunicationsCommissionon the social need to allocatetelevisionand radio
facilitiesto communitygroupcorporationsratherthanonlyto privateinterests." (88-89; Cruse'semphases)
The Crusecooperativemodel,withits egalitarianattitudesand roots
in the indigenouslocale, wouldhave had to situate itself in perspective
withwidernationaland international
interests-in effect,wouldhave hadto
compete againstsuch interestformulas-but Cruserecognizedthe latent
capitalistdesire inthe AfricanAmericanmiddle-classsubject,at least,that
wouldchallengehis model,ifnotwreckit,so thata gooddealof the urgency
of TheCrisisis directedtowardits contradictions.
Itshouldbe pointedout
thatthe fracturedscene of ideologicalbeliefhas notbeen healed,inasmuch
as the AfricanAmericancommunityremainsmuddledabout capitalistic
practices,orso itseems, tendingto believethatonlywhiteracistsupremacy
has preventeditfromsharingin,from,infact,helpingto generate,the fruits
of "business,"whata Steinbecknarratoronce called a "curiousritualized
thievery."Whatthis beliefmeans is that blackAmericanswouldbe capiwish is quitea differentthing
talistic,except for;this ratherunarticulated
frombelief in a systemicand radicaluprootingof the dominantparadigm
of Americaneconomism.Atany rate,Cruse'sten-pointplanshares a resonancewithclassicalblackmodelsof economicandculturalindependencein
its appealto a materialist
deep reading,at the same timethatit anticipates
schemes of collectivewealthand accountability.
Crusedevelops his interrogation
aroundthe Harlemscene because
of its criticalblackmass, its concentration
of symboliccapital,and its sensitivelocationinwhatwas, at the timeof the writing,the preeminentworldclass city. Harlem,as the culturalcapitalof blackAmerica,had held this
positionfor at least a century,and probablya bit longer,when we recall
the sites of beneficentand cooperativesocieties, churchactivities,and
women's support networks, lifelines which are detailed in Dorothy Ster-
78
ling's We Are YourSisters.9 New YorkCity,if not Harlem,per se, along with
Philadelphia, offered early black self-help programs through clerical organizations, particularlythe African-MethodistEpiscopal Church,as early as,
in the case of Philadelphia's"MotherBethel"A.M.E.Church,the late eighteenth century. The reign of New YorkCity as one of two or three urban
centers that focused the liberationalenergies of America'sfree black population remained unchallenged through the period of post-Reconstruction
and gained reenforcement in the post-WorldWarI period as an outcome of
massive black flightfromthe South. The year 1918, with its record lynchings
across the southern United States, as black soldiers returned home from
the killingfields of Europe, effecting common cause with labor recruitment
efforts and the trials of the peonage-sharecropping system, delivered unprecedented numbers of black people to the New Yorkscene of Harlemand
what Cruse tracks of Phil Payton's real-estate organization. Its culmination
is expressed as a cultural/artsmovement in the Harlem Renaissance, but
Cruse would attributethe failure of this arts movement to sustain itself to
that complex of forces that remained knottedand leftover fromthe tensions
between Garveyism and black radicalism,a la Marxistthought.
The official home of the NAACP,the National Urban League, and
their respective organs of publicaddress, Crisis magazine and Opportunity,
Harlemwas poised, at the close of the war,to begin to exploit its proximityto
the publishinghouses, the majorpresses, the salon cultureof the Big Apple
(for example, Mabel Dodge Luhan as chief hostess of the 1912 renaissance), and those agencies of culturaland artisticbrokeringthat would offer
key access to figures like James WeldonJohnson and Claude McKay,who
both figure prominentlyin Cruse's readingof early Harlemculture. Harlem's
wealth of symbolic capital, includingthe Schomburg Collection of the New
YorkPublic Libraryand powerfullocal organizationssuch as the Abyssinian
Missionary Baptist Church-pastored by the Clayton Powells and WyattT.
Walker, among others-offers additional reasons why its appeal seemed
only naturalto Cruse, who had spent a good partof his young manhood in
the community.At one time the home of Sugar Hill,with its substantial bourgeois and professional-class black subjects, Harlemis today the shattered
"dream-deferred"of one of its finest poets-Langston Hughes, who, in the
heyday of his Harlem,sang its democraticpossibilities, its mezclada of Afri9. DorothySterling,WeAre YourSisters:Black Womenin the NineteenthCentury(New
York:W.W. Norton,1984). See especially Part2, "FreeWomen,1800-1861" (85-235),
on the earlyworkby AfricanAmericanwomen'scommunity.
A Post-Date79
Spillers/ Crisis:
elements.Hughesdied the year that
can Americanand African-diasporic
The Crisiswas published,as thoughmarkingthe collapse of a particular
culturalsynthesis.
It seems fairto observe, then, that Harlem'scentralityas cultural
capitalof blackAmericahas been effectivelyerodedbyforcestoo complex
to exhausthere;some of them,however,are immediately
explicablein Republicanpoliticalschemes of the earlyeightiesand beyond,if notthe late,
difficult
yearsof the Carterpresidency,whose policiesof "benignneglect"of
America'sgreatcitiesinthe East,andchieflyof NewYorkCity,aidedintheir
of the country's
depopulationtrendsandthe subsequenteconomicmaturity
Sun Belt,certainmajorsoutherncities,especiallyMiamiandAtlanta-both
fabulousRoute 1,
capitalsnow of the new New South-and California's
the gateway to the PacificRimand CentralAmerica.Whenone speaks
today about a culturaland intellectualcapitalof blackAmerica,the mind
scatters in differentdirections,as it is at least clearthat "it"is no longera
place. ButcertainlyAtlanta,withitsfavorableclimate,its blackcriticalmass
and manageablehumanscale, its affordablereal estate, and its efficient
infrastructure
andhospitabledispositionto high-yieldinvestmentcapitalhas
since
the publication
of TheCrisis,a majorplayerforsuch honors.
become,
DuBois's"hymn"
to "Atlantis"-animaginativetourde force on the principal stop alongthe old "BlackBelt"nearlya centuryago-seems, fromour
currentperspective,appropriately
Buthoweverone might
forward-looking.
this
to
for
the
the
respond
question
pollsters, contradictory
impulsethat
African
American
life
and
ambivalence
stamps
thoughtas an unmistakable
is supplementednow by the subject'sneed to workout a new poetics of
traveland exile, a new sort of relationto homethat is no longerboundto
the specificityof place butthatthe subjectmustnowlearnto remember.In
otherwords,because Harlemis no longerquitein vogue, noryet the City
on a Hillin Cruse'scentralvision,one mustdecideanewwhathe/she now
thinksaboutMemphisand Birmingham.
ThoughCrusedoes nottouchon DuBoisand travelas a significant
theme in the life of blackcreativeintellectuals,it is nonetheless imperativethatDuBois'sand Cruse'ssuccessors do so, inasmuchas its attendant
anxieties bear on a subjectthat AfricanAmericanculturecriticismdoes
makeexplicit:DuBoishad calleditthe "doubleconsciousness."Andwhile
the DuBoisianparadigmis not exactlythe same idea as Cruse's"nationbothconcepts resembleeach otherin the
alism"versus "integrationism,"
that
each
emphaticsplit
they
positat the centerof blacklife.
The distanceandthe differencebetweenDuBoisand Cruseare not
80
contextualalone, butsignalan epistemicshiftof terms,the differingcritical
postulatesand instrumentsthatbringnew objectson the social landscape
intoview,or ones thatshow new facets of relationship
betweenone object
and another.DuBoiswas writinginthe earlydecades-he livedso longof the appearanceof the disciplinesof the social sciences in the United
States: sociology,economics,andpsychology,inparticular.
Cruse,by conwas
in
at
come
the
in
of
the
era
trast,
work,having
1940s,
age
triumphant
of the objectof the socialscience: "man"inhis milieu,as the Marxian
homo
economicus, as the primarytargetof elements of the socius (workand
laborrelations,familylife,leisuretime,sickness, aging,and dying),and as
the majorfeaturesof "human"
wereatomizedinthe particular
protocolsof
a specificdisciplinary
object.These rathersharpcontextualand epistemic
contrastsdo notjust describebutforeshadowone of the centralconcerns
of this writing-the matterwas not entirelylost on Cruse-and that is the
extentto whichthe intellectualis chosen andformedforhis/hertask by the
prevailingcritico-theoretical
paradigms,ratherthan simplychoosing and
gettingdownto work;as I hopeto suggest shortly(andin short),following
the lead of ThomasKuhn'10
and LouisAlthusser"on constitutingthe cog10. One of the most importantworkson paradigmformationand its impacton scientific
research is providedby Thomas S. Kuhn,TheStructureof ScientificRevolutions,InternationalEncyclopediaof UnifiedScience, vol. 2, no. 2 (Chicago:Universityof Chicago
Press, 1970).
11. LouisAlthusserand EtienneBalibar,Reading Capital(London:Verso Books, 1986);
see especially Part 1, LouisAlthusser,"FromCapitalto Marx'sPhilosophy,"11-71. All
in my text as RC.
quotationsare fromthis editionand are cited parenthetically
I obtained a copy of Althusser'sposthumouslypublishedautobiography,The Future
dure longtemps),ed. OlivierCorpetand YannMoulierBoutang,
Lasts Forever(L'Avenir
trans. RichardVeasey, with an intro.by DouglasJohnson (New York:The New Press,
1993), too late to examine forthis writing.Its revelationswillinevitablyalterour reading
as DouglasJohnson calls it, though I wouldnot attemptto predict
of "Althusserianism,"
in what ways. If, as Johnson suggests, the autobiography"is filledwith details which
one can read, irrespectiveof the destinyof the Althussers,"then I wouldconjecturethat
adventure"thatwe mightpursue,as well as the
offersan "intellectual
"Althusserianism"
"histoirea sensation"(Introduction,
xvii).Inany case, I am not shy to press a pointborrowedfromhis theoreticalscaffoldingin orderto advancethe buildingat hand.Althusser
died in 1990, of a heartattack,at seventy-twoyears of age, aftera long regimenof psychiatrictreatmentand sporadicconfinementin various Frenchhospitals.One of them
was Paris'sSainte-Anne,a site whichprovidedthe occasionforMichelFoucault'sstudies
in madness-which wouldlead himto Madness and Civilization-whenFoucault,along
withJohnson and Althusser,was an agrege candidateat the E?colenormalesuperieure.
The autobiographyfeatures two pieces, "TheFacts"("LesFaits,"1976) and the longer
A Post-Date81
Spillers/ Crisis:
nitiveapparatus,the "crisis"of Cruse's"Negrointellectual,"
andthe rather
serious mess thattoday'sAfricanAmericancreativeintellectualfindshim-/
herselfsituatedin, arises partiallyfromthe ill-fitbetweenourperceptionof
the "realobject"and just how it is "mimicked"
by, yet distinctfrom,what
Inotherwords,today's
of
Althussercalledthe "cognitive
object knowledge."
blackcreativeintellectualtends to continueto see the same old problem
in the same old way (an activitythat UmbertoEco nameda "perceptual
cramp")so that solvingthis problem(andto that extentthe fixed idea of
is a symptomof whatis to be relieved)willconsist notonly in
"community"
the objectof the search,butin rethinking,
as well,one's own
reformulating
the
involvement-wherehe/she is situatedregarding conceptualapparatus-in identifying
justwhatthe objectis.
Itis preciselythatshiftinthe waythatcommunityis formulatedas an
idea-object,this monolithicsameness thatthreadsthroughthe discourse
fromCruse,to now;itis thatmomentouschange,infact,infigurativevalue,
in materialistanalysisand implications,
thatthe culturetheoristhas barely
as
approached.So far as Crusewas concerned,the "Negrointellectual,"
he was calledthen, was isolated,in the main,fromthe prevailingtheoretical positionsof Cruse'stime:his absence, for instance,fromthe national
debate concerningleft-wingliberalpractices,andthe requirements
of a responsive politicalculturethat came to focus on two majorcombatantsof
the era, C. WrightMillsand DanielBell. By Cruse'stime, long beforethe
collapse of the Soviet state, communisttheoreticalpositionswere notorian adequateresponsebothto the problemsof a
ously disabledin providing
the nationalblack
pluralisticdemocracyand to the exigenciesconfronting
elides this point-had
community,as RalphEllison-and Crusebafflingly
alreadyso well capturedthe momentin his novelInvisibleManmorethan
a fulldecade beforeThe Crisis.Inshort,orthodoxMarxistpositionswere
confessional discoursethat names the book. Ittells the storythat Althusserdid not pass
on to the Frenchcourtsforreasons of insanity-euphemisticallycalled,we mightguess,
the "non-lieu,"the "nogrounds,"or the magistrate's"refusalto orderprosecution":On
16 November 1980, Althusser,apparentlyoverwhelmedby severe confusion and derangement,strangledhis wife/companionof some thirtyyears, Helene Legotien/Rytman,
in theirapartmenton the groundsof the Ecole. Immediately
consignedto doctors'care at
Sainte-Anne,Althusserwas internedthere forthree years. Released afterthat time, he
livedalone in northernParisuntilhis death seven years later.Althussernever stood trial
for what was designated a "voluntaryhomicide,"as the publicvariouslyattributedthis
outcome to a French"oleboy"networkand/orthe Frenchgovernment'svauntedrespect
for left intellectuals.
82
insensitive to the nationalist element in black culture,were, in fact, hostile
to it, as one intellectualand writerafter another ended their careers disillusioned over this peculiar lapse. Others besides Cruse have asked why the
radicals could make room for, or accommodate, every other nationalistic
interest, except the black one. Cruse said as much, offering,as a result, an
incisive critiqueof entrenched Marxistdogma.
Though Cruse mighthave gone even furtherhimselftowardexposing
the fault lines of his own theoretical moment, of his own distinct contribution
to precisely the Mills-Belldebate that he valorizes in the finalchapter of The
Crisis, no one, I believe, has spoken more forcefullyof what must be done;
particularparagraphsfrom the perorationof The Crisis still lacerate:
The special function of the Negro intellectual is a culturalone. He
should take to the rostrum and assail the stultifying blight of the
commercially depraved white middle class who has poisoned the
structuralroots of the Americanethos and transformedthe American
people into a nation of intellectualdolts. He should explain the economic and institutionalcauses of this American culturaldepravity.
He should tell black America how and why Negroes are trapped in
this culturaldegeneracy, and how it has dehumanized their essential
identity,squeezed the lifebloodof their inheritedculturalingredients
out of them, and then relegated them to the culturalslums. They
should tell this brain-washed white America, this "nationof sheep,"
this overfed, overdeveloped, over privileged (but culturallypauperized) federation of unassimilated European remnants that their days
of grace are numbered. (455-56)
Cruse goes on, butwe see rightaway in this paragraph'sunmitigated
commitment to the declamatory word, to the polemical address, marked by
anaphora and a virtuallyvisionaryappeal, what was drivingCruse and how
right he was; the passage ratherreminds me of the rhythmicaland performative steam behind particularclusters of sentences by Cornel West, from
Breaking Bread,12 in his dialogue with bell hooks. Though I have decided
12. CornelWest and bell hooks, BreakingBread:InsurgentBlack IntellectualLife(Boston: South End Press, 1991), see especially "The Dilemmaof the Black Intellectual,"
137-47. One of the clearest, and most compassionate,voices of our time, CornelWest
wouldsupplementthe Marxistand Foucaultianparadigmsof knowledgewiththe habitof
insurgencyas the requiredrepositioningof the blackcreativeintellectual.WhileI agree
withhimthatthe insurgentfeatureof blackintellectuallifemustbe recoveredin its criticotheoreticalefficacy,Itake fairlystrongobjectionto the routethathis conclusiontraverses:
to quarrel with aspects of the West/hooks text, I nevertheless recognize
the role that rhetoricalinspirationis called upon to play in intellectualwork.
For West, the dilemma of the black intellectualwill not heal itself untilthis
social formationof thinkers articulates a new, Foucault-inspired"regimeof
truth"that is "linkedto, yet not confined by, indigenous institutionalpractices permeated by kinetic oralityand emotional physicality,the rhythmic
syncopation, the protean improvisation,and the religious, rhetorical, and
antiphonal elements of Afro-Americanlife."'13One spies the black preacher
in the heart of this model, and while such transformationmight help (and
I rather doubt that it will), one can guess that it would be as easy to turn
the preacher into an intellectual, as it would to turn an intellectual into a
preacher. At any rate, both Cruse and West capturein the writingthe heartfelt passion that I believe has compelled the black creative intellectual all
along. For Cruse, the AfricanAmericancultureworkerwas a man (Lorraine
Hansberry is one of the few women whose work makes an appearance in
The Crisis, and not very flatteringly),a man bent upon a mission, apocaFirmlyrooted in the romanticgroundof organicity,this argumentconduces towardthe
two most powerful(and predictable)motifsof AfricanAmericanculturallife:"theblack
Christiantraditionof preachingand the Blackmusicaltraditionof performance"(West's
emphasis 136). Comparedto the "richness,diversity,and vitality"of these great forces,
"blackliterateintellectualproduction"
is impoverished,etc. Notonlyis "blackliterateintellectual production"anotherorder of cases, withwhichthe currentgenerationof black
creative intellectualsis not consistentlyengaged, but the analogy itself, which actually
collapses those differenceson the bottomline, induces invidiousdistinction.One could
say, on the one hand, that black preachingshows no commensurateachievement to
John Coltrane'sdiscography,while, on the other,no musicalartist,one mightcontend,
can claiman accomplishmentequalto the ReverendMartinLutherKing's-in actualand
pragmaticoutcome (i.e., CivilRightslegislation,etc.). Eitherway, such an interpretation
would be absurd,wrongheaded,and incapableof providingthe subject the means by
which to justly gauge either black preachingor black musical performance.Just so, I
wouldsuggest thatthe way to intellectual"greatness,"if we must putfortha cattle show
and histrionicmodes of production,butin
here, willnot consist inthe oral,improvisational,
the risks,in writing,inthe systematicwagerto expose the gaps inWesternwritingeconomies. I wouldsubmitthatthe historicconceptual/enunciatingimpoverishment
of African
and diasporicsocial formationsis equal, at every step, to their "concreteoppression"
and, in fact, names its twinefficacy.What,then, is blackcreativeintellectualproduction
when not oral, improvisational,
and histrionic?We alreadyknow what it is as the latter,
if the real legacy that we fashionedduringthe late sixties tells us anythingand signals
exactlywherewe have landedtoday.We mightsay, finally,thatthe workof the intellectual
is to make her reader/hearerdiscomfitted,unorientedand, therefore,self-critical.She is
not, in fact, a "Dr.Feelgood,"or "Mr.Goodbar."
13. West and hooks, BreakingBread, 144.
2 / Fall1994
84 boundary
lypticin character,uponwhose effectivenessthe verysurvivalof not only
the communitybut the very nationitselfdepended.Cruseconcludes the
paragraph:
The job has hardlybegun. Americais an unfinishednation-the
productof a badly-bungledprocess of inter-groupculturalfusion.
Americais a nationthat lies to itselfaboutwho and what it is. It is
a nationof minoritiesruledby a majorityof one-it thinksand acts
as if it were a nationof whiteAnglo-SaxonProtestants.This white
Anglo-Saxonideal, this loftydreamof a minorityat the summitof
its economicand politicalpowerand the heightof its historicalselfdelusions, has led this nationto the brinkof self-destruction.And
on its way, it has effectivelydissuaded,crippledand smotheredthe
cultivationof a democraticculturalpluralismin America.(456)
I thinkthat Cruse here is callingupon his intellectualJohn the Baptistto
step intothe frayand lead the chargethat RandolphBournehad daredto
imaginein the 1920s. Tropingon Bourne,Crusesuggests, "ForAmerican
at this pointis a completedemocratisociety,the mostcrucialrequirement
zationof the nationalculturalethos. Thisrequiresa thorough,democratic
overhaulingof the social functionsof the entireAmericanculturalapparatus"(457).
Forall his pricklinessof style and certitudeof convictionin his own
superiorityto the task-and in some ways, that only Cruse appears to
understandwhat is needed offersa needless distractionfor the readerHaroldCrusebetrays,in TheCrisis,his linkto the times:He was its childin
language,as we recallthatthe latesixtieswereone of America'sgreateras
of blackpreaching,inKing,in MalcolmX,inBaldwin's
writings,even though
we do not customarilythinkof James Baldwinas preachingin his written
work,and Cruse was his time'schildin the sure beautyof hopefulness,
of lookingforward,and he was most certainlyits childin the evocationof
a scene of confrontational
hostilitybetweendualand distinctiveagonists,
or opponents.WhileCrusehadquiteforcefullyand persuasivelyurgedthe
blackcreativeintellectualof his audienceto looktowardhis numerousaffiliationswitha criticaleye, indeed,to seek to forgestrategicalliancesand
politicallyappropriatefriendships,he falls back in the press of closureon
the time-honoredliterarydevice knownas "BlackAmerica"and "White
America.Whilethereis nevera doubtthat"Black"
Anglo-SaxonProtestant"
and "Wasp"are sign-vehiclesthatsignifyrealpoliticalconstituenciesand
concreteculturalallegiances,it is also truethatthereis enoughoverlapbe-
A Post-Date85
Spillers/ Crisis:
tween these intersubjectivities-forgood or ill-on the culturaland social
plane thata strictdivisionbetweenthemis messed up everywherebut on
paper; in otherwords,the blackcreativeintellectualof Cruse'stime,with
his increasingly"integrated"
social status,was beingimportuned
to assail
some of his friends. And benefits.
If livingin the time afterCrusehas taughtus anything,it has been
virtuallyknee-jerkdoubt, unease, and suspicionof what we have come
to recognize as binaryclaims.Thatold Americanmine field, wiredwith
updatedboobytraps,staked out the terrainthat Cruse had to cross. He
negotiatedit fairlywell, in my view-our age, as I suggested at the beginningof this essay, has notyet producedan even remotelycomparable
readingin imitationof its patientand skillfulexegesis. Nevertheless,that
was then, and here we are now,in the aftermathof notonlyhis writingbut
also a derangedglobalorderand a decentered,if notjettisoned,subjectof
history.Because Crusecouldnot have anticipatedthe massive projectof
deconstruction-andhere Ido notmeanspecifictexts but,rather,an entire
repertoireof gestures thathave dismantledmanyof the veryassumptions
of humanisticinquiry-Crusebecomes forus, fromthis distance,a closed
mastery,dated by its era yet usefulin its incisivedaring.Thathe spoke to
his time in the nameof the blackcreativeintellectualis sufficient.
3. Do You Know What They Call You Behind Your Back?
Even thoughstartingfroma differentpoint,the intellectualis situated in AfricanAmericanculturein preciselythe same mannerthatCruse
was-poised towardthe historythathurts,to echo Jameson.14Butthe link
betweenthis hurtinghistoryandthe step beyondmarksthe immeasurable
distance that separates us fromCruse'scertaintiesand those of the late
sixties.The intellectual,then,installedin his/herownautobiographical
mois
with
a
tale
of
the
same
two
ment, always wrestling
cities; one of them
goes this way: The Autobiography of Malcolm X recounts a tale in which
the hero/protagonist
is confrontedin an open forumby a Negrowho asks
a realquestion.The settingis the university,
and the audience,of course,
is predominantly
white(as itgallinglyshows the tendencyto be, and as the
14. As the "experienceof Necessity,"FredricJameson argues, as the refusalof masterfulencodation to be dismantled,"Historyis what hurts."See "OnInterpretation,"
in
The PoliticalUnconscious: Narrativeas a Socially SymbolicAct (Ithaca,N.Y.:Cornell
UniversityPress, 1981), 102.
question itself impliedcriticismof Malcolm'sposition). For all of his significant beauty, a dogmatist, nevertheless, the public Malcolmassumed that
his fellow and brotherwas "tryingto get house," as we used to say in the
neighborhood, by posing that kind of query, in that kind of space. When
one attempts "toget house," he wishes to make points at his interlocutor's
expense, to win the crowd and its approbation.The man may or may not
have been "up to" this game of signifying,15but it felt so to Malcolm, who
delivered, in turn, the withering "answer"that stops black blood cold: Do
you know what they call you behind your back? And by the age of six, if not
before, every black child knows that it is "nigger."
Malcolm, himself signifying, was illegitimately silencing debate,
which marks the difference, at the same time that his interlocutor,in case
he'd "forgotten,"was being reminded of his positionality, despite. In other
words, the tacit agreement that prevailed among parties-to submit the
behavior and the desire to the rules of the moment-was disrupted by its
sudden returnto the moment's diegesis. (Itgoes withoutsaying that to do
so is ratherlike strikinga tear throughthe fabricof filmstock at the moment
that it rolls through the projector.)The black creative intellectual, then, is
rarelyaffordedthe occasion of the moment clean; either he/she willremind
him-/herself, or someone else will,of the "bigpicture,"let's say, the material
scene throughwhich he/she is moving.The very abilityto differentiateoneself as an intellectual worker under the historicizingconditions of African
American culture, long constituted in and by dominance as a mute facticity
and tactility, has barely been achieved by AfricanAmericans across the
life-world.In fact, as one speaks, he/she does so against the background
that MalcolmX (and, Idare say, any figureof publicstanding) exploited with
considerable cunning.
So it is that the "homegrown"intellectualis addressing her hermeneutic demand not only to the culturaldominantbut to her natal community
as well. Furthermore,it is by sectors of both that she is, in effect, interpellated, or summoned, as a responsible subject and subjectivity.And how
15. The "signifying"process comprises one of the rich semiotic practices of the lifeworldand has been the subjectof seminal investigationin Geneva Smitherman'sTalkin
and Testifyin:The Language of Black America(Detroit:WayneState UniversityPress,
1977); see especially chap. 5, "'The Formsof Things Unknown':Black Modes of DisLiteraryCriticism
course,"101-67. InTheSignifyingMonkey:A Theoryof Afro-American
(New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1988), HenryLouisGates, Jr., magisteriallybridges
and literarytheory'ssignificationto construct
Smitherman'svernacular"signifyin/siggin"
a contemporaryinterpretivemodelof blacktraditiontheorizing"aboutitself."
could it be otherwise? How could it not be double troublethat her very vocation is itself a space not yet entirely cleared out, as it were, by a culture
that maintains no obligation at all to believe her, especially; to treat her, to
imagine her, as a credible discursive subject, workingon an intellectually
identifiableobject, at the same time that she encounters it as contradictory,
if not adversarial, that she moves on in a "negative capability"?The other
tale, then, that the black creative intellectualconfronts marks the weave of
contradictionas a fruitfulone, but only if ... Itis, perhaps, too soon here to
speak of bravery, but Isuspect that that must be our destination throughthe
reversals of assumption that now make it difficult,if not impossible, to (1) reconstitute a "talentedtenth,"which is itself the culminativeposition of the
myth of representation (as both DuBois and Cruse embraced it from their
common historic past); (2) sustain the idea of the intellectualas a leading
and heroic personality ratherthan a local point of oscillation among contending conceptual claims; and (3) continue to pursue a theory and practice
of intellectualor culturalworkthat is performativeratherthan, for lack of a
better word, unfortunately,"scientific,"or responsible to a "cognitiveapparatus,"or a "thought-idea."These "impossibles,"we ought to add, began to
take shape long before The Crisis of the Negro Intellectualwas published,
if we push the reel back to the generation of Randolph Bourne, Kenneth
Burke, and "The Fugitives,"on the one hand, and of W. E. B. DuBois, "The
Niagara Movement"/NAACP,and early Pan-Africanism,on the other. But
if our predicationof cataclysmic change on a geopolitical scale has led us
to imagine an earthquake in one direction, then we could sketch a dismantling, equally as powerful,from another and overlappingone that more
directly bore down on Cruse's era; in short, 1968 was engendered by an
additionalcontext that broughtmovement, indeed, crisis, across the field of
signification.16
I would track its more or less arbitrarymoment of origin to 1966,
when a series of seminars and colloquia,convened by the HumanitiesCenter at Johns Hopkins University,resulted in the publicationof a gathering
of essays entitled The StructuralistControversy:The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio
16. JonathanCuller'sworkincludestwo indispensabletexts thatintroduceda wideraudience to the propositionsand methodologiesof linguistic/structuralist
literaryprocedure:
StructuralistPoetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics,and the Studyof Literature(Ithaca,N.Y.:
CornellUniversityPress, 1975);ThePursuitof Signs: Semiotics,Literature,
Deconstruction (Ithaca,N.Y.:CornellUniversityPress, 1981).
88
The parentsessions had been convokedduringa week in OctoDonato.17
ber, 1966, at an international
symposiumcalled "TheLanguagesof Criticism and the Sciences of Man"("LesLangagesCritiqueset Les Sciences
withsupportfromthe FordFoundation.
de I'Homme"),
Humanistsandsocial
scientistsfromacross the UnitedStates andeightothercountrieshad convergedon Baltimoreat the time.Thissymposiumseries led to a two-year
'structuralprotocol,"whichsoughtto explorethe impactof contemporary
ist'thoughton criticalmethodsin humanisticand social studies"(SC, xv).
Seminarparticipantsincluded,amongothers, Rene Girard,LucienGoldmann, TzvetanTodorov,RolandBarthes,Jacques Lacan,and Jacques
Derrida.Whilethe choice of this date may be somewhatquestionable,it
serves a purposeneverthelessforsituatingthe argumentsandpropositions
andsystematicexaminationofthe
of structuralism
18-the cross-disciplinary
to a wideraudienceof
conditionsof discursivity-to the foreinrelationship
Controacademicsin the UnitedStates. As the editorsof TheStructuralist
the
behind
the
and
the
both
volume,
symposium
versy explained impetus
structuralistmethoditself had come to redefinea pluralityof disciplinary
procedures:
As thiswas the firsttimeinthe UnitedStatesthatstructuralist
thought
hadbeen consideredas a cross-disciplinary
phenomenon,the organizersof the programsoughtto identifycertainbasic problemsand
concerns commonto every field of study:the status of the subject, the general theoryof signs and languagesystems, the use
as analytic
and abuse of models, homologiesand transformations
of
the
diachronic
question
(vs.)
descriptions,
techniques,synchronic
the
and
and
between
subjectivejudgments,
objective
"mediations"
betweenmicrocosmicand macrocosmicsocial
possiblerelationship
or symbolicdimensions.(SC, "Prefaceto FirstEdition,"
xvi)
I did not become familiarwiththis work,however,untilthe followassistant professorof English
ing decade, when, as a first-appointment
and blackstudies, and an NEHpost-doctoral
fellow,I attendedthe open17. TheStructuralistControversy:TheLanguagesof Criticismand the Sciences of Man,
ed. RichardMackseyand EugenioDonato(Baltimore:Johns HopkinsUniversityPress,
1972). This workis hereaftercited in my text as SC.
18. One of the earlier anthologies of cross-disciplinaryreadings in linguisticmethod
starts its chronologywith excerpts from Marx,throughthe canons of MichelFoucault
and Jacques Lacan.See The StructuralistsfromMarxto Levi-Strauss,ed. Richardand
FernandedeGeorge (New York:AnchorBooks, 1972).
Spillers/ Crisis:A Post-Date89
ing of the School of Criticismand Theory,convenedJune/July,1976, on
Irvine.Havingbeen captivated
the campus of the Universityof California,
a couple of years beforeby the corpusof KennethBurke,whichsuddenly
made clearerto me exactlywhat I had been attemptingto achieve in my
doctoraldissertationand the undifferentiated
restlessness to change and
informmyownconceptuallanguage,I hadbeen prepared,withoutknowing
of HaydenWhite,beforeTheTropicsof Discourse;
it,forthe tonicinstruction
of FredricJameson, beforeThePoliticalUnconscious;of Rene Girard,just
after Violence and the Sacred; of EdwardSaid, shortly before Orientalism,
a topicthat he introducedto the studentbodythatsummerin an evening
lecture;of HazardAdams;and of FrankKermode,the wry,authoritative
figurein the mix.WhenI returnedon an occasion of the next generation
of the School, as an instructor,
duringthe summerof 1990, at the current
homeof SCTon the campusof Dartmouth
College,whathadbeen news to
fifteen
before
had
become
myselfnearly
years
by then standard(perhaps
even glib) operatingprocedure.
Tomy mind,at least-and thisimaginednexusseems worthyof extended investigation-the new proceduralmethodsof reading"naturally"
belongedto theirhistoricmomentas the iconoclasticblastfromthe teachers of studentsin rebellion.As buildingswere beingseized and occupied
by studentson college campusesacrossthe UnitedStates, inoppositionto
the VietnamWar,insupportof blackstudiesandwomen'slib,itseems that
certainteachers,on the otherside of the Atlantic,were preparingthe epistemologicalfoundationsof profoundchange:(1) a rereadingof the Marxist theoreticalrevolution;(2) the unconsciousas (if) a linguisticstructure;
semiotic;(4)the ruptureof the tran(3) mythicsystems as the paradigmatic
scendentalsignifierand the undividedsubjectof presence;(5) the deploymentof a naturalhistoricalsequence, reconfigured
as a discursiveseries
of relations;(6) the conversionof the women'smovementintoa theoretical
and curricular
object-to name a few of the moreobviousdevelopments.
Lookingacross the disciplinesrevisedand correctedby radicalprocedure,
Mackseyand Donatoperceiveda "horizonof a conceptualsystem"that
hadgivenwayto "philosophical
metaphorsof defeat-'supplement,''trace,'
'simulacrum,'
'series,' 'archive,''errancy,'and the like"(SC, xii). Such an
outcomehad indeedinduceda "climate"
of opinioninwhich
today's task for thinkers .
.
. resides in the possibility of develop-
inga criticaldiscoursewithoutidentitiesto sustainconcepts,without
to guaranteethe
privilegedorigins,orwithoutan orderedtemporality
mimetic possibilities of representation. The fundamental entities of
90
such systems, adriftin radicaldiscontinuity,
areEventswhichcannot
be accountedforby transcendentalidealities.(SC, "TheSpace Between-1971," xii)
A shaken academy,by 1971, wouldcertainlybe able to attestto "Events"
no longerexplicable,inthe main,bythe "transcendental
idealities"thathad
subtendeda "dividedhouse."
Itis preciselythe asymmetricalpoise of the period-students in rebutthe mostinnovativeinstruction
bellion"everywhere,"
coming,often,from
the other side-that lends the era its haze of conceptualorigins,which
Paul Bove's work,Intellectualsin Power,goes far to clarifyin the figure
of ErichAuerbach.19
Itshouldbe noted,however,thatthe "NewCriticism"
movementthat had capturedthe imaginationof America'sliterary/critical
establishmentfromthe 1920s on had alreadysucceeded in divorcingan
20 fromits sociopolitical
context.Itwas notnecesobject,the "heterocosm,"
then,to transfera sensibility,trainedon the academy's"close
sarilydifficult,
to the worldof text and
reading"and the conventionsof irony/ambiguity,
in certainof
In
it
that
"New
would
the
fact,
Criticism,"
appear
discursivity.
its criticaldispositions,at least, had anticipatedthe Continentaldrift.Moving out of its customaryorbit,EnglishandAmericanliterarystudies came,
increasingly,to demarcatethe vanishingcenterof a centrifugalmotion,as
literarycriticismgave way, in time,to literarytheory,and as the objectof
canon of litInsteadof a hierarchical
investigationwas itselfreconfigured:
and
anxieties
of
eminent
influence,
erature,definedbyperiods,
practitioners
theirderivatives,the literaryobjectwas knockedoverandflattenedout into
a sea of discursivepossibilitiesthatswamunfamiliar
currents-philosophy,
and theory,black
film
discourse
feminist
studies,
linguistics,anthropology,
studies and AfricanAmericanexpressiveculture,and, lately,neweroccasions in postcolonial,multicultural,
lesbian/bisexual/gay,cultural,popular
studies, and "minority
discourse(s)."Fromthat pointof view,the ensuing
fifteenyears have been headywitha progressiveunfolding,instigatedby a
handfulof enablingpostulatesthatwe have alreadyidentified.
19. Paul Bove, Intellectualsin Power:A Genealogy of CriticalHumanism(New York:
ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1986).
20. Inhis germinalworkon romanticism,M.H. Abrams,as one of the school of late New
Criticismcritics,discusses the poem "as heterocosm."Markingone of the stages of litthat Abramsevolves fromthe mimetic,to the objective,traditionsof
eraryhistoriography
the literaryart,the heterocosmicreplaces"thespeculativemetaphorof poem as mirror."
See The Mirrorand the Lamp:RomanticTheoryand the CriticalTradition(New York:
OxfordUniversityPress, 1953), 272.
Whenever a thorough intellectualhistoriographyof the period is attempted, we imagine that it willflesh out these impression points that have
not only marked their objects but, in a very real sense, constituted them:
Sausserian linguistics and its aftermath; Freudian psychoanalytic work,
restituted in the writings of Jacques Lacan; Derridean philosophy and its
implications for an American school of deconstruction;21the strategies of
structuralistand poststructuralistculturalbehavior,the Foucaultianshift of
paradigm, from the delineation of objects to their relationship in the ensemble, contextualized by enunciative fields and their inscriptions in the
regimes of power and domination;the extensive Marxistcritiqueby Marxists
themselves, who sought to reinterprethistoricalmaterialismin light of late
capital and the pervasive force of marketthat furtherdisrupts our notions
of a sacrosanct privacy.These far-reachingchanges, carried through in a
number of disciplines, have altered our view of the historical, as well as
the literary,object, which now belongs to textual productionand discursive
positioning as the new rule.WithSpivak's Englishtranslationof De la Grammatologie,22the project of deconstruction, which dismantled the centrality
of a unified subject in logos, gained ground as the new technic of reading.
Between 1966 and 1976, then, the outline of the new academy was laid
down, or, more precisely, a revised and corrected curriculumof the humanities was inaugurated. Converging on this scene of displaced conceptual
objects were numbers of new academic players, from the late sixties on,
a consequence that has conduced toward a terminaldegree, for example,
and "full-timeequivalents" in the university'sdepartments of literaturethat
bear no exact semblance to degree and curricularprotocols as short a time
ago as The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
The implicationsof the paradigmshift for black creative intellectuals
have been fairlymassive, or, more exactly, have not been isolated in their
impact. Forone thing, the black intellectual,firmlyinstalled,duringDuBois's
era and overlappingonto Cruse's, in indigenous black institutions,as a rule,
have been repositioned in the mainstream academy. It is fair to say that
whatever spaces of creative autonomy were yielded by a more homoge21. For a "different"
Derridaand the PhiDerrida,RodolphGasch&'sTainof the Mirror:
losophy of Reflection(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress, 1986)takes the philosopher
askew the fieldof literarytheory,perse, and reads himagainstthe grainof post-Hegelian
discourse.
22. Jacques Derrida,Of Grammatologytrans.withintro.by GayatriChakravorty
Spivak
(Baltimore:Johns HopkinsUniversityPress, 1976). Originallypublishedas De la Grammatologie (Paris:Seuil, 1967).
92
neous culture and life-worldtended to dissipate by the late sixties. In other
words, it is raretoday that a blackwriteror criticfinds means of support outside the academy or some other institutionsituated in the culturaldominant
(e.g., mainstream publishers, etc.). One could even go so far as to say that
mainstream institutions appear to meet the intellectual'sdesire, however
he or she might "carryon" about the community.The "organicintellectual"
that we have imagined after AntonioGramsci locates a romantic,liberated
figure, then, who never reallyfructifiedand who remains a symptom of nostalgic yearning, looking back on a childhood perfected through the lens of
distance and distortion.The truth,more nearly, is that writers, in particular,
and certainly the critics/theorists, have been as compelled as any other
subject of economy to follow whatever fortunes, in this case, of the "prose
arts," into the contemplative sanctums, in an age dominated by communications technologies. The younger members of Cruse's initialaudience,
then, either leaving undergraduateschools or entering graduate programs,
at the time that The Crisis was published, were never wholly destined, by
very virtue of the aims of the Civil Rights movement itself, for the singularityof motive, of address, that Cruse's passionate invocationconjured up.
Many of those persons, like Cruse himself at the Universityof Michigan,
would be exactly positioned, in their future, between a putative community
on the one hand and the politics and discursivities of the predominantly
white academy on the other. We could say with a great deal of justification that the black creative intellectualhas been more hesitant than not to
acknowledge precisely where and how he or she "is coming from"and in
what ways location marks in fact a chunk of the historicalmaterial. A more
efficacious critique,or, I should say, one that is less loaded with pretenses
and pretentions, altogether depends on such acknowledgments.
Furthermore,if Steiner and Foucaultwere right,man is not only no
longer the linchpinof historicalmovement but history itself demonstrates a
minimal resiliency of meaning as a self-reflective tool in the current inventory of media-inspired, constructed punctualities.Certain idols of narrative
have lost their explanatory power for American culture in general and for
African American culture, in particular,if its contemporary music tells us
anything, so that the key question for the black creative intellectualnow is:
How does one grasp her membership in, or relatedness to, a culture that
defines itself by the very logics of the historical? Or, as I queried earlier,
What is the work of the black creative intellectual,for all we know now?
The short answer is that the black creative intellectualmust get busy
where he/she is. There is no other work,if he/she has defined an essential
aspect of his/her personhood as the commitmentto reading, writing,and
teaching. From HowardUniversityto Cornell;fromWilberforceto Berkeley;
from Tuskegee to Harvard;the relationalobject does not change, and that,
it seems to me, decides the main problemto be disposed of-how to take
hold, at last, of the intellectualobject of work in language. The black creative intellectual, from Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man,23to ImamuBaraka,
in Home,24to Toni Morrison,in interview,25
to name some of the most eminent culturalfigures, embraces the black musician and his music as the
most desirable model/object. While AfricanAmerican music, across long
centuries, offers the single formof culturalproductionthat the life-worldcan
"read"through thick and thin, and while so consistent a genius glimmers
throughthe music that it seems ordainedby divineauthorityits very self, the
intellectual rightlygrasps the figure of the musician for the wrong reasons:
not once do we get the impression that the musical performerpromotes his
own ego over the music, or that he prefers it to the requirements,conven23. One of the controllingmetaphorsby way of whichEllison'sprotagonistdescends into
a deep readingof the historicalnarrativeis suppliedby the figureof LouisArmstrongand
the Blues. See the Prologue,InvisibleMan(NewYork:The ModernLibrary,1992).
24. ImamuAmiriBaraka,Home:Social Essays (NewYork:WilliamMorrowand Co., Inc.,
105-15. A writerhimselfof con1966); see especially "TheMythof a Negro Literature,"
siderablepowerand range, ImamuBaraka/Leroi
Jones anguishesthe readeraboutwhat
he calls "Negroliterature."
One is afraidthat he meant nothingmuch more than that
the "Negro"writers-those of "impressivemediocrity,"
in his opinion-were quite simply
the ones who came before himand his generationof black/American
writers.The point,
however,is that, once again, literaryintellection/production
among AfricanAmericansis
abject before the toweringaccomplishmentsof the musicalartists:"Onlyin music, and
most notablyin blues, jazz, and spirituals,i.e., 'Negromusic,'has there been a significantly profoundcontributionby AmericanNegroes"(106). On prediction,we read that
the writers'quite "spectacularvapidity"is due, in large part,to theirmembershipin the
in the interest
"Negromiddleclass" thatgoes "outof its way to cultivateany mediocrity"
of showingthatit is notwhatit is-Negro. Thirtyyears downthe line,perhapsit is time for
the intellectualsto revise and correctthe questionof "middle-class"
status in/and black
music/art?
25. Inthis wonderfulinterviewwithRobertStepto,ToniMorrison,shortlybeforethe publicationof her thirdnovel, Song of Solomon(1977), can at least imaginean "enormous
space" of possibilityfor all the blackarts/creativity.Speakingof an "open,""freer"moment for literature,in the post-sixties'period,she observes, "Ithinkof it in terms of the
one other art formin whichblackpeople have always excelled and that is music, an art
formthat opens doors, ratherthan closes them, where there are more possibilities,not
fewer."See "'IntimateThingsin Place':A ConversationwithToniMorrison,"
in Chantof
Saints: A Gatheringof Afro-AmericanLiterature,Art,and Scholarship,ed. MichaelS.
Harperand RobertB. Stepto (Urbana,Ill.:Universityof IllinoisPress, 1979), 213-30.
94
tions, and history of practices that converge on the music; if that were not
so, then littlein this arena of activitywould exhibitthe staying power that our
arts of performance have shown over the long haul. Inother words, though
ego-consciousness is necessary, it is the performance that counts here,
apparently, as we know black musicians and remember them by the instruments of performance, and performancemarks exactly the standard of
work and evaluation that has not changed, fromthe Fisk UniversityJubilee
Singers, Bessie Smith, and Thomas Dorsey on one end of the spectrum,
to Charlie Mingus, Phineas Newburn,and MulgrewMilleron the other, with
Willie Mitchell and Booker T. and the MGs in between. Across nearly a
century of AfricanAmerican musical performance, impliedin the foregoing
figures, a variety of syntheses is at work,so that, for instance, BillieHoliday
and Leontyne Price are not judged by the same musical standards, do not
performthe same instrumentality,just as Theolonious Monkand KeithJarrett each demonstrates a respective brilliance.What they have in common
in their considerable divergence of time, location, and calling is performative excellence, and it seems to me that this is the page of music fromwhich
the black creative intellectual must learn to read. (One might also bear in
mindthat musical excellence historicallyrelates to the entertainmentneeds
of the dominantculture:at least one captivitynarrativeby an AfricanAmerican writer rehearses a horrifyingstory of the bonded, who were forced to
dance.26Inother words, music in black cultureachieved its superior degree
of development, in part, because its ancestral forces were occasioned, allowed. The culture's relationshipto language is the radicallydifferentstory
too familiarto repeat.) The black creative intellectualdoes not make music,
as it were, and should not try, but he/she can "play."What, then, is his/her
"instrument"?
Sharplyand flatly:it is the "productionprocess of the object of knowledge" (RC, 41). A seminar on Marx'sCapital,conducted by Louis Althusser
and Etienne Balibarat the Ecole NormaleSuperieure in early 1965, resulted
in a publicationthat was translated into English in 1970-Reading Capital
(Lire le Capital). In a complicated reformulationof the Marxistepistemological moment, Althusser, in the opening segment of the text, patiently
elaborates the problem that Marxexploited as that of reading itself, but a
reading no longer "innocent."In the course of that discussion, Althusser
witha preface by DavidWil26. "TwelveYears a Slave: Narrativeof SolomonNorthup,"
son, in:Puttin'On Ole Massa, ed. GilbertOsofsky(NewYork:HarperTorchbooks,1969),
324. Northuppenned his narrativein the 1850s.
concealedby a "readingat sight"(RC,
retrievesthe "objectof knowledge,"
of
the
and
16)
conception knowledge"(RC,35), as a distinction
"empiricist
to be made fromthe "realobject."Itseems to me that it is preciselythat
confusion,in one of its avatars,that persistentlydogs AfricanAmerican
socioculturalworkas the hiddencomponentof analysis.Bringingit out, I
courseandinthink,wouldset the workandthe cultureworkeron a different
duce a newset of demands.Whilewe can notexhaustivelyrereadAlthusser
observationsare inorder.
"readingMarx"here, a few contextualizing
Althusseris poised towardCapital-about a centuryafterthe first
volumewas written27--asa philosophermightbe, and Althusserdifferentiates such dispositionfromthat of the economist,the historian,and the
philologist,who notonlywouldhave addressedthe workin a differentway
fromthe philosopherbutwouldhaveassumedthe object,comparingit(and
here we mightconjecturethat Althussermeans effectinga commensurability)"withan object alreadydefinedoutside it, withoutquestioningthat
wouldbe to
object itself"(RC, 14). Butto read Capital"as philosophers"
interrogate"thespecificobjectof a specificdiscourse,andthe specificrelationshipbetweenthisdiscourseanditsobject"(RC,15).Onewouldgauge
the placeof Capitalinthe historyof knowledgeby puttingto the "discourseobject unity"that it presents "thequestionof the epistemologicalstatus
whichdistinguishesthisparticular
unityfromotherformsof discourse-object
unity"(RC, 15). Capital,as the objectof this sortof inquiry,is, withinitself,
a ratherremarkableoccurrence,inasmuchas the Marxistcanon, in general,is assumed by blackcreativeintellectuals-andthis was certainlythe
ruleof the past-to be a quintessentialby "privileged
modelof anchorage,"
an "expressivereading,the open and bare-faced"
witnessof the "essence
in existence"(RC, 35). But it is preciselythis "readingat sight,"Althusser contends,thatthe Marxistepistemedisrupted.Takinghis introduction
to the seminarat face value, we can inserthis move withinthe general
climateof criticalopinion-includinga priormomentin Frenchintellectual
"essence/existence"
historyby wayof a veiledreferenceto existentialism's
to
on
both
sides
of
the
Atlantic.
Inshort,it seems
debate-coming prevail
that the blindnessesand insights,the visionsand oversights,the "marks
of an omissionproducedby the 'fulness'of the utteranceitself"(RC,23)
were enabled, as a self-reflexiveproject,only at that moment."Seeing,
listening,speaking,reading,"those "simplestacts of existence"-in light
27. KarlMarx,Capital:A Critiqueof PoliticalEconomy,vol. 1, intro.by ErnestMandel,
trans. Ben Fowkes (New York:VintageBooks, 1977).
of Marx,Nietzsche, and Freud-were reopenedto unsettlingoscillation.
"Onlysince Freud,"Althusserclaims,"havewe begunto suspect whatlistening,and hence whatspeaking(and keepingsilent)means (veut dire);
thatthis 'meaning'... of speakingand listeningrevealsbeneaththe innocence of speech andhearingthe culpabledepthof a second, quitedifferent
discourse,the discourseof the unconscious"(RC,16).
Capitalis repositioned,then, as the readingtarget,whose transparency "in the dramas and dreams of our history . . . its disputes and
conflicts... its defeats and victoriesof the workers'movement"(RC, 14)
willbe renderedan instanceof the verythingthatAlthusseris callingfor
of an "opacity"
the "sighting"
in a readingthat has lost its "innocence":
andthatdemonstratesthe special
thataddresses another"thought-object"
domainof thatobjecton the historicalmaterialground.Takingthe "empiriwhichdefinesknowledgeas the functionof the
cist conceptof knowledge,"
realobject,to be the culminativemomentof ideology,Althussereffectively
"retroacts"Capitalas postmodernistcritique,insofaras Marxposed the
answerto the questionthatclassicalpoliticaleconomyhadn'teven asked.
Asking,instead,"Whatis the value
("Whatis the value of labour-power?"
of labour,"classical economistshad elidedterrainsof inquiry,"'bysubstituting for the value of labour ... the apparent object of its investigations,
the value of labourpower,a powerwhichonlyexists in the personalityof
the labourer,and is as differentfromits function,labour,as a machineis
Marxarfromits performance'
"28 [RC,20]. Not awareof the substitution,
"inextricable
road
to
down
the
was
led
classical
politicaleconomy
gued,
withlaborvalue and
that inducedexclusivepreoccupation
contradictions"
its prices, withthe relationof this value to the value of commodities,and
so forth.By inserting"thepersonalityof the labourer"intothe equation,
that classical politicaleconomy
Marxwas enabledto see the "oversight"
had made on its own answer: ". .. is equal to the value of the subsis-
of labour."
tence goods necessary for the maintenanceand reproduction
The questionthat Marxrestituted,then, had as its answer:"Thevalue of
labour-power is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for
the maintenance and reproductionof labour-power"[RC, 23]. Accordingto
Althusser'sreadingof thisoutcome,whatthe classicistsdidnot see is preof "sight"[RC,21ff].The oversight
cisely whatthey saw as the "invisibility"
was not performedon the objectbutin the sight--"anoversightthatconcerns vision: non-visionis thereforeinsidevision,it is a formof visionand
28. Althusserquotes this passage of Capital,vol. 1, fromthe EditionsSociales version.
hence has a necessary relationshipwith vision" [RC, 21]. Perhaps Ralph
Ellison's protagonistof InvisibleMan had alreadyanticipatedsuch a reading
as Althusser performs?) Althusser's demonstration of the disruptive syntax, which the unasked question provoked,induces this graphic equivalent:
"'The value of labour (
) is equal to the value of the subsistence goods
maintenance
and reproductionof labour (
for
the
)' " (RC,
necessary
22). Marx,in effect, he is claiming, indexes the silences, the aporias, in the
discourse of classical politicaleconomy.
Teasing out Marx's reading further,Althusser is led to the empiricist critique, which, he believes, will compel us to reorganize our idea of
knowledge as the "mirrormyths of immediate vision and reading"and to
conceive it, instead, "as a production"(RC, 24). By "production,"Althusser
refers to those "structuralconditions"that enable knowledge; "sighting,"
then, is no longer the peculiar perceptual endowment of an individualsubject, but is, rather,"the relationof immanent reflectionbetween the field of
[a] problematicand its objects and its problems"(RC, 25). Clearing ground
for "earthliness,"or the Marxian"absolute immanence" (RC, 131), Althusser wants to reconfigurethe relationbetween a knowing subject and how
he arrives at knowing-in other words, the latteris neithergiven in the thing
itself nor is it the transparenttranscendent:
Vision then loses the religious privileges of divine reading: it is no
more than a reflectionof the immanent necessity that ties an object
or problem to its conditions of existence, which lie in the conditions
of production. It is literallyno longer the eye (the mind's eye) of a
subject which sees what exists in the field defined by a theoretical
problematic: it is this field itself which sees itself in the objects or
problems it defines-sighting being merely the necessary reflection
of the field on its objects. (RC, 25)
The empiricist concept of knowledge, which implies the transparency of
reading, offers the "secular transcription"of a "religious phantasm,"
grounded in "the Logos and its Scriptures"(RC, 35). The empiricistfunction
of knowledge can be said to effect an occlusion, insofar as the knowledge
that it derives is revelatory-it is to be supposed-of a real object, or is
itself the space of such knowledge. Althusser represents this process of
derivation as an "abstraction,"a separating out of the thing itself from the
"dross,"or irrelevancy,that conceals it:
To know is to abstract fromthe real object its essence, the possession of which by the subject is then called knowledge. .
.
. Just as
gold, before its abstraction,exists as gold unseparated from its dross
in the dross itself, so the essence of the real exists as a real essence
in the real which contains it. (RC, 36)
Inthis case, the special vocation of knowledge is "toseparate, in the
object, the two parts which exist in it, the essential and the inessential-by
the special procedures whose aim is to eliminate the inessential real"(RC,
36). By way of a series of operations and probings-"sortings, sievings,
scrapings, and rubbings"-the subject who knows hits pay dirt,as it were,
the "second part of the real which is its essence, itself real"(RC, 36). The
object then stands revealed before us in all its pristineclarityof origin, purpose, motivation,no trace of hands touching it. Thus "the relationbetween
the visible and the invisible is therefore identical to the relation between
the outside and the inside, between the dross and the kernel"(RC, 37). A
variant on the conception of epiphanic vision, the empiricistconcept would
hold that transparency
is separated from itself precisely by the veil, the dross of impurities,
of the inessential which steal the essence from us, and which abstraction, by its techniques of separation and scouring, sets aside,
in order to give us the real presence of the pure naked essence,
knowledge of which is then merely sight. (RC, 37)
Althusser is then able to poise the empiricist concept against the
Marxianepisteme, which makes a distinction,say, between "the idea of the
circle" (after Spinoza)-which demarcates the space of the knowledge of
the object-and the circle itself, "whichis the real object" (RC, 40).
Two final citations of moves in Reading Capital should bring us to
the desired intersection; this seems to me the principallesson to be pondered: Althusser spends considerable time attempting to deconcatenate
(1) "the real-concrete"from the "thought-object,"a distinction, he tells us,
Marx defended. The "real-concrete,"or the "realtotality,""survives in its
independence, after as before, outside the head" (RC, 41). The object of
knowledgea product of the thought which produces it in itself as a thoughtconcrete ... as a thought-totality... as a thought-object,absolutely
distinctfromthe real object, the real-concrete,the realtotality,knowledge of which is obtained precisely by the thought-concrete, the
thought-totality
-does not simply describe a differentobject from the real, but a different
process of productionas well:
While the production process of a given real object, a given realconcrete totality(e.g., a given historicalnation)takes place entirelyin
the real and is carriedout accordingto the real order of real genesis
(the order of succession of the moments of historical genesis), the
productionprocess of the object of knowledge takes place entirelyin
knowledge and is carriedout accordingto a differentorder, in which
the thought categories which "reproduce"the real categories do not
occupy the same place as they do in the orderof real historicalgenesis, but quite differentplaces assigned them by their function in the
productionprocess of the object of knowledge. (RC, 41)
But this thought-object of knowledge is not an equivalent of what Simone
de Beauvoir said that the magical was-"spirit droopingdown in the midst
of things"-but is, rather,
the historically constituted system of an apparatus of thought,
founded on and articulatedto naturaland social reality.Itis defined
by the system of real conditions which make it, if I dare use the
phrase, a determinatemode of production of knowledges. As such, it
is constituted by a structurewhich combines ("Verbindung")the type
of object (raw material)on which it labours, the theoretical means of
productionavailable (its theory, its method and its technique, experimental and otherwise) and the historicalrelations (both theoretical,
ideological and social) in which it produces. (RC, 41)
This "system of conditions of theoretical practice,"then, "iswhat assigns any given thinkingsubject (individual)its place and function in the
productionof knowledges" (RC, 41-42; my emphasis). I italicize in order to
say that the central positionality of the black creative intellectualis constituted by systematic theoreticalpractice and that this is his/her "instrument,"
forever and anon. If, like Duke Ellington,he/she wants to be famous and
celebrated, then, perhaps, he/she has landed in the wrong orchestra pit.
Althusser does not say as much, and needn't have, insofar as the dilemma
before me is not the problematicthat concerned him in the least, but I emphaticallymarkthe point in orderto expose the primarynon-dit-not-saidof African American intellectual life, ironically,and that is its right to exist
not only within the "realtotality"of its natal life-worldbut withinthe "realconcrete" of knowledge production,of which one of its key sites in American
society is the academy, mainstream and otherwise. The "real-concrete"
question, then, that is posed to black creative intellectuals-What will you
do to save your people?-and its thousand and one knee-jerk variations,
is therefore misplaced. Itseems to me that the only question that the intellectual can actually use is: To what extent do the "conditionsof theoretical
practice" pass through him or her, as the living site of a significant intervention? In other words, as it passes through "1,"what alterations of its
properties does the "I/eye"perform?Quite obviously I mean to say that the
shifter in the formulationneed not refer,at all times, to an autobiographical
itinerarybut might inscribe an ensemble of efforts-the research center,
the think tank, the thematic fellowship, and so forth-defined along particular lines of stress. The journaland the periodicalalso come to mind as
an analogy on a single mode of collective intent, although, locked as we
are in our notions of heroic individualismand the allure of romantic aloneness, which the academy fosters daily,we can neither easily imagine it nor
always positively desire it. This seems to me the test of the theoretical para-
digmat any given momentandits-of necessity-hegemonic possibilities
in this here moment, especially, if we take "hegemonic"in the sense that
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moufferedefined it:an open and indeterminate
range of elements that "filla hiatus that ha[s] opened in the chain of necessity."29 From the beginning of Marxisttheoretical practice, they tell us,
hegemony and its logics had offered itself "as a complementary and contingent operation, requiredfor conjuncturalimbalances withinan evolutionary
paradigmwhose essential or 'morphological'validitywas not for a moment
placed in question."30 If that is so, then Laclau and Mouffe have danced
hegemony around to a user-friendly"socialiststrategy"that is open to new
democratic cunning, and this seems to me exactly the meaning of America
in the sixties-that American intellectuallife, with its rapid incursions and
cross-racial fusions since Cruse, has broughtus face-to-face with explosive
potential in the theoretical object. To fritterthe time away thumb-sucking
would give revitalizedmeaning to tragedy and farce.
Now, I do not intendto lightlydismiss the tireless, cross-generational
question that is put to black creative intellectuals,but I do mean, and want,
to displace it-to interrogate the question, as RandallKennedy only barely
began to do in a recent publicforumon this matter,"TheSpecial Responsi29. Ernesto Laclauand ChantalMouffe,Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy:Towardsa
Radical DemocraticPolitics(New York:VersoBooks, 1989), 7.
30. Laclauand Mouffe,Hegemonyand SocialistStrategy,3.
bilityof the Black Intellectualin the Age of Crack."31(Isn'tit also the "age"
of e-mail and the deadly "virus,"inscribedalong various fault lines, fromthe
immunodeficiency syndrome to computers? Isn't it also the age of armed
kids and the first open and dramatic signs of society's returnto the rule
and the law of the patronne, the pimp, as an intermediaryand prophylactic device against rape and hunger, and "sewered" through the nation's
undergroundof drugs and firearms?The sign of the Fatherthat is missing?
What does it mean to sum up the age under the rubricof crack? Why not
flight, or fantasy and the peculiar turn of the screw that black population
brings to it? And who said that the black creative intellectual could even
begin to know how to fix it?) One knows what the question says, but what
does it mean? As formulated,it means nothing,yet; in other words, it might
mean Everything, in which event it is unanswerable. In a differentway, it
means something entirelydifferentfrom the thing it is asking, demanding.
The black creative intellectual might evolve, instead, a whole catalog of
inquiries, deliberately left unstable in order to allow for self-revision-not
entirely unlike the Lutherantheses posted on that church door at Wittenberg so long ago-that would move the theoretical, if we could imagine the
thought-totalityand its discrete moments, moving in a mortalknower, as a
kind of torque. His/Hers is not the salvation "business," though if he/she
31. See note 3 above. Inan attemptto interpolate,on the spot, one of the layersof analysis that tends to be elided in publicdiscussion about the duties of black intellectuals,
Harvardlaw professor,RandallKennedy,in response to moderatorMargaretBurnham's
request, duringthe second Cambridgesymposium,that he clarifysome earlierremarks
that he had made, asked: "[D]oblackpeople have moreof a responsibilitytowardsblack
people who are in miserythan theirwhitecounterpartswho are sittingnext to them [my
emphasis]. Myanswer was: no [Kennedy'semphasis];we all have a very high responsibilitytowardsthose who are in misery"(BostonReview 19, no. 1 [Feb./Mar.1994]:5-6).
Inowsee thatthe italicizedportionof the
Readingthe questionagainforthistranscription,
sentence could just as well mean "whitecounterparts"
to the blackhelper-intellectuals,
as "whitecounterparts"
to misery'shelpees. Ifthe former,then the questionis worthasking, inasmuchas nonblacksoccasionallybelieve, it seems, that blacks can solve their
"Problem"all by themselves, since "It"is their"fault."
Atany rate,my questionwouldbe
ratherdifferentfromKennedy's(and wouldinclude,for example,who is going to "help"
the intellectuals?),though who is asking the question,as I had inferredthat Kennedy
of motives"-is droppedfrom
meant-when, where, how, why-the Burkean"grammar
the inquiry,as a rule, and should be restored.Further,one conjuresa question that is
never asked: Whatis the obligationof whiteintellectualsto theirpeople? Andwhy is the
question never posed in thatway, linkingthe whiteintellectualsubjectto "race"/ethnicity,
since there seems to be incredibleneed forsomeone to tend this field?Ordid 1968 take
care of that?
"saves," if so, he/she will do it in the only way he/she knows how-as a
reader/writer/thinker/teacher.
The "rawmaterial"that the black creative intellectualworks on, then,
is not the "real-concrete,"or "'pure'sensuous intuitionor mere representation," but, as Althusser contends about the conceptual apparatus, "an
ever-already complex rawmaterial,a structureof intuitionor 'representation'
which combines in a peculiar 'Verbindung'sensuous, technical and ideological elements" (RC, 43). Against the imperialdemands of the empiricist
concept, he goes on, knowledge does not confront
a pure object which is then identical to the real object of which
knowledge aimed to produce precisely ...
the knowledge
.... For
that raw material is ever-already . .. matteralready elaborated and
transformed, precisely by the impositionof the complex (sensuoustechnical-ideological) structurewhich constitutes it as an object of
knowledge. (RC, 43)
Perhaps the "purest"object that the black creative intellectualalways imagines as the unmediated "thereness" is situated in his/her concept of natal
community.But, in my view, the time has come for us to rethinkcommunity,
if we dare, precisely as an "objectof knowledge,"beginning with our false
relations to it as an "unchangingsame."32 Earlierin this essay, I attempted
to demonstrate how the black intellectual's currentview of community is
not only fictional-such status is not the problem-but that it describes an
inadequate fiction, precisely because it is not richenough either in content
or transitionalelements. Attempting,further,to understand how that is so,
against some of the ideas deployed here, should bring us to closure.
4
ForL. B.
Is Cruse's communitythe same as our own, as DuBois's? And what
might it have been for the past, which they have consistently represented
here? Perhaps one can back into a response: in order to thinkcommunity,
the title of one of her
32. Apologies to Professor DeborahMcDowellfor "misreading"
essays, "TheChangingSame,"on AfricanAmericanwomenwriters.See "TheChanging
New LiteraryHistory18, no. 2 (Winter1987):
Same: GenerationalNew LiteraryHistory,"
282-302. Inthis context, I mean the exact oppositefromMcDowell's"changingsame."
APost-Date 103
Spillers/ Crisis:
one must be, in some way, separated,or apart,fromit, for it marksthe
portion
complicatedviaticumof travel.Tothatextent,itis the differentiated
of consciousness fromwhichone splitsoffinthe inceptionof languageand
division.Itis unspeakablethatitis so, noteasilyborneas knowledgeabout
thatsome time,Iwillleave this house of
myselfand my premiere"others":
inorderto take myplace,
my father'ssupportand mymother'spacification
makemyway,inthe midstof strangerswho have unansweredneeds. ButI
am boundforthis alienationthatdemandsits reconciliations,
boundforthe
widervillageof worldlings,each "overhearing"
his owntale of the sorrowful
reportthat cannotbe uttered,all at once, and, perhaps,not at all, and to
whatotherend do I acquireand practicethe strategyof memory,unless it
is to allowmyselfthe occasionalrevisionsof my loss? ButI onlyknewthis
afterward.Thisis the personaleconomythatis notunfamiliar
to the black
creativeintellectual,or, let'ssay, to the serioussojourner:Infact, commuthe awfulgauge of my time.
nityis my primaryspeech, the genesis of "1,"
Is it true, then, that one leaves home to learnto remember?If it is true,
then we encounterthe truthof paradox,and thatis to say, thatbecause I
remember,I neverdeparted.
Butthis phenomenonthatwe grasp as an unbrokenfabricof relations is alreadyconstitutedand handedover to the subjectas a kindof
layered,inventedtrust-it is itselfan idea, materializedin a location,but
by no means limitedto the spaces identifiedas a topographical
specificity.
Infinitelyrepresentable,communityis botha sum totaland a not-entirely
thinkable,except by way of the metonymicdevice. As a sum total,it is all
and porousto catalog,but its subjects,
affect,too multiple,individualistic,
insertion,and agreementto playthe game, as it
by virtueof interpellation,
were,findcommongroundinthe narrativeemplotmentsthatconvergeon it;
thus,communityis also a positionin discourse.ForbothDuBoisandCruse,
communitystood in fora preeminentstability,exceptthat bothwritersleft
its bordersopen to expansion:Cruse,forexample,selects representative
figuresof West Indianoriginto portrayhis notionof Harlemas a cosmopolitan citywithina city.Butpreciselybecause his West Indiancharactersdid
not share an indigenousculturewithhis blackAmericanones, community,
in The Crisis,is troubledby the assumptionof sameness. Fromthat point
of view,communityhides the suturethatstitchestogethercertaindiscrete
elements of identity,especiallydifferencesof class. WhileDuBois'scommunityslightlyvariesoverthe courseof hisconsiderableproject,itoverlaps
featuresof Cruse'sown:(1) a commonality
of "suffering"
thatoverrunsdifference;(2) an easily isolatedsocialformationwithina largersociopolitical
2 / Fall1994
104 boundary
scheme; (3) or, to reversethe foregoing,a markedpositionthat defines
itselfagainstan unmarkedone. DuBoisiancommunityinscribesnotonly a
sameness butan allegoryon the same that DuBoiscalled"soulsof black
Inbothemplotments,one
folk"and their"dramaof a tremendousstriving."
can, ineffect,graspcommunityinthe palmof the handas a smoothedover,
globularcomplex.DuBoisand Cruseare notalone in perceivingthe problematicin this way, for it marksthe leadingfigurativeconstructin African
Americanwriting-sermons,poems,fiction,polemic,argument-over two
centuriesof endeavor.The youngsixties'intellectualsdid not intervenea
becamefortheman obsessive feature
differentidea,exceptthatcommunity
of speech, underscoredbycertainanxiety.Itdemarcatedthe placethatone
had abandoned,or had been abandonedby.Theculturalanalysishas not
movedbeyondthe benchmarksleftby DuBoisandCruse,andthe problem
seems to be howto converta negativeaffectintomeaningby negation?A
new culturalanalysisstartsthere-surmountingthe fearof culture/analysis
itself.
Since 1968, virtuallyall publicexchangeto whichI'vebeen an ear
concerningintellectualsand the communityhas been fraughtwithanxiety
and confusion,andindeeditwouldappearthatthe verypublicnatureof the
whichamplifyone's
addressgoes farto hamperincisiveness:microphones,
on the spot,definethe exchange
words,oftenspontaneousand improvised
of an
as ritualistic
display-an occasiontoposture;againstthe background
answernot
at
all
its
own
in
sends
its
demands,
silence,
which,
up
auditory,
able in the moment,the partipantshave "face"to save, to preserve, and
fromthat pointof view,the publicforumtends towardthe conservativeinstinct. Itwas preciselysuch circumstances,we imagine,that providedthe
framethroughwhichMalcolmX's "answer"rolledtowardhis interlocutor.
Addto the scene the imperialcameraand its magnificentarrayof lights,
and we have pure"theater,"
by definition,fantasticand deceptive. Ifanything,the participantsare transformed,in the flowof nervousenergy and
expectation,intoactors,of a borrowedshape, an amplifiedidentity,whose
text is now self-consciouslygearedtowardthe repertoireof signalsthatfix
and capturethem in a momentarystardom.Itwouldbe exact to say that
underthese conditions,the playis the thing,andnothingmore.Infact,one
mightgo so far as to say thatthe participantsare usingthe name of the
as an alibitoperformpersonalityratherthanusingthe latterto
interrogation
it mightnotbe by accidentthat,since the
execute the former.Furthermore,
late sixtiesandthe explosionof the imageindustries,ourpublicdiscourses
have been immeasurablyimpoverished-or so it seems-precisely
by way
APost-Date105
Spillers/ Crisis:
of cultureanalysisand the "objectof knowledge,"
of the theatricalization
frompresidentialpoliticsto the politicsof the blackcreativeintellectuals
and the community.Bothhave been redefinedby new regimesof domination thatdo not, in theircomprehensivepowersof attraction,alwaysallow
themselvesto be clearlyunderstoodinthatway.IfAfricanAmericanculture
has been transformedby internaldivisionsof flightanddispersal-and the
lattermustalso meanvariousrepositioningsinthe nationalcultureand not
alone-then the objectof analysis
simple,physicalmovement,or mobility,
mustbe graspedin lightof it.
Butthe intellectualhas imaginedflightonly in its negativeinstance
as a supposed rejection,when his verystatus,or standing,as an intellectualrequiresthathe take on a languageanddispositionthatare "foreign."
Inotherwords,the workof the academy,or morespecifically,the "cognitive
a "not-myapparatus,"is defined,symbolicallyspeaking,as "not-mother,"
own."I am referringless to the maternaland paternalobjectshere as gendered actantsof preciselydefinedsexual rolethanthe groundof intimacy
that the subjectassumes: the moreor less harmoniousensemble of impressionsthatboundme notonlyto mybody,butmybodyas it is reflected
backto me inthe eyes of othersthatI recognizeas likemyself.Whetheror
not this relationis troubledis less the pointthanthatits complexitiesconvey to one the sense of ease-the relayof constitutivecontinuitiesamong
kinetic,linguistic,sensual,andmaterialgestures-throughwhich
particular
one comes to experiencehome. Fromthis pointof view,communitydescribes boththe extentionof home as wellas its spatial/temporal
origins.
As Iunderstandit,community,
however,is alreadya cross-weave-its local
economismslinkedintoa largernetworkof sociopolitical/cultural
relations
and the messages that traverseit consequently-that preparesits subjects to receivethe supplemental.We cannotimaginelearning,acquisition,
the foreignlanguage,preciselyas the variouspainsof intrusionunless we
firstunderstandhowcommunityhas intimately
preparedthe groundas the
is measured.
apparentcontinuingunityagainstwhich"unhome"
Whileitis clearthatIam readingthe weaveof issues bywayof a differentnarrativeemplotment,borrowed,in part,frompsychoanalytic
theme
work,this interpretive
device,to mymind,has the advantageof allowingfor
a conceptualization
thatis opento contemporaneity
andwhatprecedesitan idea of the past. Because ourcurrentstate of culturalanalysiscan only
as the motionof crisis, as the urgent
imagine,in large part,the life-world
overwhelmed
the
"real,"it, therefore,has no theoryof the
immediacy,
by
past, even though it brims over with it as the coercive, unreflected principle,
or law, of our present. Because we have only managed to rethreada politics
of representation and its theoretical paradigms,based on a false idea of the
collective, we currentlyhave no theory of a "one"and cannot, consequently,
which
imagine the "many."Inother words, liberal,bourgeois "individualism,"
the intellectuals only claim to eschew, is a different proposition from the
individuatednominative propertywho locates herself/himself in historical/
culturalapprenticeship and is also located there. But hauling an uncritical
individualisminto the backdoorof the analysis (and practicingit quite rawly
and openly), the intellectualscan well imagine a representative hero whom
they, in turn, embody. But it seems to me that if communityis embedded in
each, so to speak, then its restitutionwillcommence with a theory of "one,"
in short, the capacity to perceive community as a layering of negotiable
differences. Doing so would allow us to understand how change, or altered
positioning, is itself an elaborationof community,ratherthan its foundering.
The model that I am proposing would be based on a theorization
that melds various aspects of the human sciences and a mode of culture
analysis for which we currentlyhave no name, but one might think of it
as a cultural demography; this new "science" would be alert to the cultural implications of movement, which is not only a primarymeaning of
the life-worldbut one of its most significantliterarytropes33--the "symbolic
geography" that would explain (1) diasporic movement, (2) internalmigration, and (3) the mechanisms of fantasy and ambition that contextualize
AfricanAmerican struggle. In short, we would seek a theoretical apparatus
that could measure deviance, not as deviance (or sociopathological dysfunction) but as the "markoff"from legacy, or the making use of what one
has been given.
Ifwe attempted to flesh out this model, we mightderive the following
topics:
1. Markingoverlaid by opportunity.If we concede to DuBois and
Cruse that there is an AfricanAmerican culture, distinct withinthe framework of American culture, then we will also concede that its subjects can
reflect on its status, as DuBois and Cruse are representative instances
of just such reflective powers. This marks the space of the hiatus-the
break fromdailiness, the distancingtime, which I addressed before. Inother
33. RobertStepto has created a stunninginterpretivedevice by way of a demographic
topos-ascent and immersionthematics-in his examinationof select narrativesfrom
AfricanAmericanwriting.He reads his "symbolicgeography"against several canonical
works, includingthat of DuBois,Ellison,and Hurston,in FromBehind the Veil:A Study
of Afro-AmericanNarrative(Urbana,Ill.:Universityof IllinoisPress, 1979).
A Post-Date107
Spillers/ Crisis:
means not onlyreactingbut also
words, being a subjectof "community"
it
within
the
context
of
is
reflectionthatthe workof culture
and
reflecting,
analysis proceeds. Quiteobviously,the pointis to imagineas manyin reflectionas possible-is thatnotone of thepoliticalaimsof "struggle"?-but
cannotbe embarrassedout of this
certainlythe cultureworker/intellectual
creative
intellectual
as
black
appearsto be too often.
advantage, today's
Concessionto the politicalimplications
of "race,"of racialisticideology,is
the thought-object
required,butthe questionfortheoryis whatcontribution
can maketo exposingand illuminating
it.
2. AfricanAmericanculture,as a distinctivesocial formation,disappears into a generaleconomyof practices,but it has been difficultfor
the intellectualsto followits trails;in fact, the analysistraditionally
frames
itself as a neatlyrectangularobject,whose "geometry"
mightbe read in
ratherprecisedimensionsof closure,whenitseems, moreexactly,thatthe
life-worldis nota planefigureat all.Inworkandlabor,propertyandthe judicial system, standardgrammarsand social behaviors,the school system
and taxation,medicalpracticeand healthcare, buyinghabitsand consumerism, susceptibilityto certaincommonnationalnarratives(i.e., "beauty,"
"success,""wealth,"etc.), the fantasyapparatusand the constitutionof
the sexed subjectivities,the ideologicalapparatusandthe devices of "selffashioning"-across this vast arrayof the social and materialnetwork,the
subjectof AfricanAmericancommunityis installedin processes of "social
contagion."Infact,we mightpickupthe trailof one of its keymanifestations
in the new institutional
practicesthatwe have been alludingto all along.
Forallintentsandpurposes,the yearsimmediately
followingthe publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual-1968-1969-marked
the
site withinthe maininauguralyears of blackstudiesas a new institutional
stream academy.At BrandeisUniversity,for instance,the studentoccupationof FordHall,duringeleven days in February1969, had elaborated
fourteendemands, one of whichcalled for the creationof blackstudies,
whose chief administrative
officerwouldbe chosen by the studentsthemselves. As I recall,the initialoutcomeof the rebellionvirtuallyfollowedthe
outlinedemandedby blackstudentleadership.Thispatternof instauration
proceededacross the countryso that by the mid-seventies,manyof the
whitecampuseseitherhada blackstudies program
leadingpredominantly
or departmentin place, or were puttingforthsome effortto establishone.
The 5 May1994 volumeof Black Issues in Higher Education34calls atten34. Mary-Christine
Phillip,"OfBlackStudies:PonderingStrategiesforthe Future,"Black
Issues in HigherEducation11, no. 5 (5 May1994):14-19.
2 / Fall1994
108 boundary
tionto the twenty-fifth
of thisinitiative.
Twoparadigmsobtained:
anniversary
in
an
black
as
some
of
the
studies,
(1) appointment
programsfashionedan
Afrocentric/Africanist
response to the traditional
disciplines,heavilyinfluenced by the Americansocial science paradigmsandtheirempiricistconinone of the traditional
or (2) an appointment
cept of "reading,"
disciplines
in the humanitiesor social sciences, witha complementary
appointment
in blackstudies. Insome instances,the institutionspursueda mixof procedures, withthe blackstudies protocolfilledin by both disciplinaryand
extra-disciplinary
appointments.Itwas notalwaysclear,however,underthe
circumstances,just how an FTEin literature,say, situatedin the English
department,woulddifferin herpedagogicaland "scientific"
practicesof the
of
for example,fromone situatedin
teaching AfricanAmericanliterature,
blackstudies, teachingthe same. Butthere was some vague sense that
as wellas a bodyof knowledge,would
the disciplineof literaryinstruction,
in
it
not
one
while
was
at all certainwhatits opposite,or concase,
prevail
from
the perspectiveof blackstudies. Itis
be
aim
or
trastive,
projectmight
fairto say that if the practicesof reading,criticism,and theoryin the field
is anyexample,then blackstudieshas either
of AfricanAmericanliterature
notyet definedits disciplinaryobject,apartfromthe itinerariesof the traditionaldisciplinesthatconverge-revised and corrected-on it, or has had
a very difficulttime clarifyingsuch an object.Whilethere doubtlesslyhas
been, and continuesto be, successful programsand departmentsin African Americanstudies(as itis calledtoday)-the tenuringand promotionof
personnel,the grantingof degrees and/orcertificates,even a few research
centers, scatteredacross the country-the visionarycompanyof African
Americaniststends to "do"the studiesfromthe vantageof the constitutive
disciplines.
Whatwe have, then, is an interesting,complicatedpicture-African
Americanstudies,as a discretebureaucraticunit,oftenseparatedfrom(by
choice) or peripheralto (by design)the maincentersof the ongoinglifeof
the institutionandAfricanAmericanstudies,as it is renamedand refracted
Personalities
throughthe opticof conceptualapparatilocated"elsewhere."
scholarsin
black
so
that
similar
fault
lines
the
field
many
split
along
working
whereverthey may be bureaucratithe humanitiesfieldsof the institution,
if not
to the "Keepers,"
belong,by implication,
callylocated in relationship
in
its
American
studies
the
African
dizzyingreplicaproject
by practice,to
is culturalstudies,withits
tionof the issues. (Oneof its latestreincarnations
nexusto AfricanAmericanliterarystudiesanditssixties'politicalformulas.)
Itwouldappear,then,thatwithinthiseconomyof waysandmeans,the most
Spillers/ Crisis:
APost-Date 109
innovativeand substantialworkhas come fromblackcreativeintellectuals
locatedwithinthe disciplinary
curricula,inasmuch
spaces of the traditional
as theirworkis directedtowardinterveningon a specific thought-object
(i.e., literature,philosophy,music,sociology,etc.).
We musttry,then,to sortouta disciplinary
objectfroma layeredand
understood,itturnsout, by different
differently
complexpoliticalmotivation,
on
To
actants,depending location. mymind,thatobjectmustmovethrough
a firststep-to become a disciplinary
object,or to undergotransformation
of AfricanAmericanstudies into an "objectof knowledge,"ratherthan a
moreor less elaboraterepertoryof performative
gestures and utterances.
At the end of the firsttwenty-fiveyears,the intellectualshave barelytaken
the firststep, thoughwe havehadimportant
workemergingfromindividuals
in the disciplines,particularly
in literarystudies,history,and sociology.
Today,the emergenceof suchan objectis blockedbytwodifficulties,
whichappearlinkedto the same regimeof powerthat blackstudies was
and the
originallythoughtto impingeupon,and that is the "pimpification"
colonizationof the (non)object,workedthroughthose attractivepractices
and proprietiesthatmoreor less "get"us all,one wayor another.The colonizingof the new institutional
spaces is ratherlikeits pimpification,
except
that the personalitiesin the formerrelationsare moreattractive,in some
cases, downrightcharmingand sanguine,and differently
configuredin relationshipto the regimeof knowledge.Inotherwords,today'scolonialistof
the new protocolsis quitea lot smarterthan his predecessorsand brings
to his/herwork.He himself,she
quite legitimateskillsof accomplishment
herself,is not a badfellow;in fact,one mighteven go so faras to say that
some of her best friendsare amongthem;butnone of that,of course, is
quitethe pointto be made:we wishto knowwhathappensto the investigation,whateversoul is mindingthe storeorwhenone leavesthe scene. Now,
whatfollowsmightbe readas blankparody,withgraveimplications
forour
commonfutureas cultureworkers,and if we imaginethatthis partof the
of ourhistorythat
essay is novel-like,we shallallhavefun:itis a misfortune
certainof ourblackstudiesprograms,forreasonsthatwillalreadybe apparent, were leftto the chargeof perfectlynice people,insome cases, and not
so nice at all, in some others,butwho, at any rate,were not scholarsand
writersinthe least sense, say nothingof scholarsandwritersof some stature. Inthe most offendinginstances,some of the blackpersonalitieswho
on predominantly
whitecampuses
convergedon blackstudentpopulations,
in the late sixties,were rathersinisterfigures,or of shadowycharacter,but
in the event that I am wrong about this interpretation,they had, as far as
one could tell, at least no interest in scholarship and inquiryof any sort
and no skills, actually, to engage them. The male figure, in almost every
instance I mean here, was put in place by the institution,with the endorsement of local student leadership, itself misinformed,often, about a proper
set of aims and objectives for a black studies protocoland even less about
an acceptable set of credentials for a college or university. I would call, in
the worst-case scenario, which is obviously not the only possible one, the
male figure of the old model the paradigmof the "pimp,"because all the resources earmarked for the local black populationpassed through him and,
quite literally,through his offices-personnel action, curriculadevelopment,
course requirements, and most particularly,the dreams and aspirations of
the black young, who were not, are not, the childrenof the "Keepers."With
their "man"on the job, the "Keepers"themselves could then look away,
as this has been the paradigmof the "overseer"and his "overseer" in the
life-worldsince time immemorial.
The next act of this development is even painfulto ponder, to say
nothing of to write about, and follows the initialdeeds like night the day:
Because we ourselves were not sufficientlyvigilant,or experienced, or were
guided, as well, by the practical objectives of career building, we could
not have clearly perceived how the groundworkwas laid then for our intellectual synthesis now, and that is the commercialization of black studies/
African American studies without deliberate speed. I think we must make
here a slight distinction between commercializationand commodification,
inasmuch as the latter is to effect, in cash nexus, an exchange of work for
a salary, or wage, from a corporation;it is the money of our bread. For lack
of a better word, commercialization is the "selling"of an "object,"however
we identify it, for purposes of self-aggrandizement and gain, even though
it is not always clearly the case and even though the outcome could well
benefit many others, and that is the subtlety of AfricanAmericanstudies as
a business, or an enterprise, today. We are, quite simply, not certain where
its commercial successes will take us, though it is a dead certainty right
now that some of us are personally benefiting from its journey along the
academic interstate. Because it was installed on the academic time line
when it was, even though "Negro History,"for example,35 was introduced
35. One of the century'searlyblackeminences, CarterG. Woodson,along withDuBois,
can arguablybe said to have established the disciplineof AfricanAmericanhistoriography,both as a professionand as a conceptualitinerary.WithGeorge ClevelandHall,
W.B. Hartgrove,AlexanderJackson, and J. E. Stamps,Woodsonfoundedthe Association forthe Study of Negro Lifeand Historyand establishedthe Journalof Negro History
A Post-Date 111
Spillers/ Crisis:
of higherlearningdecades
of traditional
blackinstitutions
to the curriculum
American
studies
African
became
mode
a
of analysissubjectto the
ago,
heighteningtensions of "latecapital"and its thoroughintrusionintoevery
creviceof dailylife.Onthe one hand,then,we couldsay thatthe commercializationof the objectof inquiryis nothingmorethana smartandstrategic
response to the occasion at hand.Itis to be enterprisingin lightof opporpatrioticparticipation
tunity;andgiventhe AmericanWay,this is downright
in the GNP.On the otherhand,however,we mustpointout whatseem to
be some of the dangersof commercialshocktreatment.
Because today'sacademymoves fartherand fartherawayfromits
educative aims and becomes an armof what CornelWest refers to as
it tends to be thoroughlycorruptin its measureof
"businesscivilization,"36
intellectualwork,whichslides, moreand more,onto an interfacewiththe
performancearts. Today'sblackcreativeintellectuals,then, in responding
to the provocation,are sometimes,as likelyto be made up in theirpublic
functionby the agent andthe ad manas not.The economicallyandpolitically weakest constituentgroupsamongthe college'sand the university's
clientelesufferthe gravestdamage in this case, thoughnone of that will
in 1916. Complementaryto this effort,Woodson also initiated"NegroHistoryWeek,"
which slowly evolved into"BlackHistoryMonth."Forthe academicyear 1919-1920, he
served as dean of the School of LiberalArtsand head of the graduatefacultyat Howard
University;from 1920-1922, Woodsonfunctionedas dean at what would later become
West VirginiaState College, retiringfromteachingat the end of this stint. Bornin 1875,
Woodson edited the Journaland directedthe Associationuntilhis death in 1950. His
prolificoutputincludesarchivalworkon educationand the church,his most well-known
texts, perhaps, The Negro in OurHistoryand The Miseducationof the Negro. Though
a difficultpersonality,apparently,Woodson seems to have cultivateda talent for what
Susan Sontag called "appreciation":
Fourvolumesof the ReverendFrancisK. Grimke's
sermons, speeches, and addresses were edited by Woodson,as well as a volume of
letterswrittenby enslaved persons.
36. See note 3 above. At the firstCambridgesymposium,CornelWest made an incisive
pointin observingthatone of the blackintellectual'sdifficultieswas the sustainingintellectual lifein a "businesscivilization."
The problemseems so severe thatone wondersifthe
entireproblemof the intellectualsubjectandethicalresponsibility
is itselfan anachronism,
if we have in fact entered the firststages of a postintellectualperiod,as the thoughtobject is packaged like the self-serve food item? In such a culture,West goes on, the
intellectuals"actuallysurfacepreciselywhenthey are experts ... butexpertsaren'tintellectuals.Some are. Butmostaren't"(BostonReview18, no. 1 [Jan./Feb.1993]:25). West
offers that ReverendRivers,perhaps,had invitedhis interlocutorsto be experts, rather
than intellectuals,a distinctionWest insisted upon. Mightwe add to his carefullystated
inwhichcase the subject-who-is-supposed-to-know
is
objectionthe "fallacyof authority,"
assumed to knoweverything?
2 / Fall1994
112 boundary
be apparent,since the aim, it seems, is to graduateconsumers,not literate, capable persons. We riskbanalityin sayingthattoday'sacademy,
by trivializingand degradingits criticalfunctionin the society, has shot
itselfinthe foot:administratively
top-heavy,boggeddowninthe "business"
of makingmoney,"busy"with"image,""name,""rep,""publicrelations,"
and how to keep its professoriatthe most impoverishedand demoralized
class of professionalworkersinthe nation'shistoryandconscience,today's
academy has brokenfaithwithits own mostsacredduty,ifwe mightcall it
entrustedto it.Whilewe cannot
that-to feed the mind-lifeof the civilization
definitivelyblamethe site for its variousand variedproducts,just as the
institution,at any given moment,must respondto a generaleconomy of
practices,I neverthelesssee it as the chiefcontextand system of values
throughwhichAmericancultureworkunfoldstoday.As forthe impactit is
havingon AfricanAmericanculturework,quitespecifically,I woulddare
say thatas a process inintellection,the lattervergeson a state of collapse.
Do we exaggerate?
scholarsand writersgoes on in a sucWhilethe workof individual
cessful, often admirable,way, there is not a campus, or a single black
academicperson,who remainsunaffectedbythe "morning
news,"let'scall
it. I do not wish to impose a "speed,"or rate of velocity,on the change
of the tune, nor am I suggestingthat anyone oughtto, but it does seem
to me that too rapidoscillations(1) preventcarefuland consideredwork
fromoccurring,since one is "bopping"
rightalongto the next latest "hit";
(2) identifyAfricanAmericanworkin cultureas a fashion,eminently,if not
displaceablebyotherfashionmodes;(3)feed the sole frenzyof
imminently,
to attractstudentanddollars,whichfurtherdebases the intelthe "Keepers"
lectualcurrency;and (4) "evacuate"graduateeducation,whereinlies the
object'sfuture,in the sense thatourstudentsquitesensiblyflockto wherever they perceive"it"is happening.AfricanAmericanstudies and those
disciplinesarrayedaroundit can least affordthis modalityof response,
since its aim is to take holdof an utterparadox,livedand conceptual,into
whose midstthe intellectualis hurledwithconsiderableforce, and that is
cultureas an African-descended
his/hersituatednessinAmerican/Western
on
his/her
workseems to be, at alltimes,
the
command
Therefore,
person.
of a modeof addressthatspeaks/writes/teaches
the powerfularticulation
this problematicin its varioustheoreticalinflections.Inbrief,it is the work
of synthesis and the consolidationof the collectivegain:at this late date in
the century,we cannotproperlygauge, have notproperlygauged,the work
of DuBois,Woodson,Cruse,andBlassingame,amongothers,againsttheir
social context, if we no longer have a good idea why we are here.
A Post-Date 113
Spillers/ Crisis:
Itseems to me thatwe mustfurtheraimtowardimproving
the quality
of AfricanAmericancultureworkand notsimplyproliferating
its numberof
items;inthe past,detractorsof the blackstudiesmodeldisbibliographical
paragedit because it was said to be an unresearchedfield.This criticism
was notas usefulas itmighthavebeen, thoughone got the point,inasmuch
as "fields"are not providedby nature.They are founded,processional,
and dynamic,and cannotbe researcheduntilthey are materiallysituated
in relationshipto a conceptuallandscape-to a repertoireof topicsand inquiries.Fieldsemergefromthe socius as collectiveengagements,butwe
verge on losingthis dimensionof the studiesbecause the timeto reflectin
readingand writingis truncated,notby shiftsin the paradigm,or improvements on the question,but by the need to soundthe next thing.But how
do we decide? Ifsuch determination
is simplymarket-driven,
then it seems
the obligationof the intellectualsto weighthe implications
of this outcome.
AfricanAmericanstudies,as a "supermarket"
of notions,certainlyinscribes
one of several possibilitiesof formand, in fact,faithfullymimicsthe public
relationsurgesof today'sacademy.Butwhatdoes suchformsecureforthe
object'slocation?
Tobuildinstitutional
legacies inAfricanAmericanstudies,withinthe
white
predominantly
academy,seems entirelyappropriateas one of the
of
American
goals
highereducationtoday.Butthis aim must be clarified
over and above the heroicpersonalityof individual
figures,and that identifiesone of the centralweaknesses of the academiccontextin whichthe
blackintellectualoperates. Forexample,morethanone institution,
to my
has
thrown
its
behind
a
in
whose
deknowledge,
weight
single individual,
the
site
of
African
Americanstudies,ifnot,infact,razed,is emptied
parture
out (likean abandonedbuilding)of gesture,civiland otherwise,forthose
whofollow.Inotherwords,the representative
figure,inthe absence of commitmentto a scene of instruction,in the absence of an informedpolitical
practice, exhausts whatevergoodwilltheremightbe-in the local casewithhis/herdeparture.Withoutputtingtoo finea pointon this,we couldsay
thatat least the politicallesson herecan be readon a sign board:thatuntil
the dominantcultureof academiclifeis preparedto receiveblackpersonsin
the momentof theirappearance,in the momentof theirperson, and notas
the diapasonreplayof "race"myth,thenthe decisionsof individualsmight
well reverberatein the livesof others.No one ever said thatthis was a fair
outcome,butI belivethatitis an accuratereading.
Quite in keeping with the thought-object-become-an-object-ofcapital, the institution,in some cases, has not only "domesticated"the dissent of African American studies but has moved it "uptown."This is very
114 boundary
2 / Fall1994
fine, exceptthatdoingso appearsto have inducedwhatIcalledearlierthe
formationof a now-colonizedstudies,squarelyinstalledwithinthe central
Butis thisa contradiction?
machineryof the liberalinstitution.
Today'sblack
creativeintellectualsin the academyare beingsortedout now as two decisive class interestswithinan alreadysmallminority
socialformation,and
its maindeterminantis inscribedalonglinesof gender.Headsof programs
and departments,of researchcentersandthe like,are male,by and large,
withconsiderablecooperationfromsome of their
and,justas interestingly,
female colleagues often enough. Even this is not entirelyobjectionable,
officials,or any otheragentifiexcept thatfundingagencies, administrative
cationof the resourcestendto bunchupthe workingcapital,let'ssay, at the
doorof the male head,justas inthe old blackstudiesmodel,the campus's
sphereof (black)influenceorbitedits path.Itneedn'tbe as sure as sunrise
that women intellectuals,in this orderof things,are goingto be declassed
and orientalized,but it is so, as a handfulof males ascend to the top and
females descend towardthe bottom.Wecannotassignfaultor blamehere,
as there wouldbe no justice,or accuracy,in attemptingto pinpointit. We
can certainlynotclaim,either,thatthe ascendantsphere,or class, has not
earned its status, deserved its variousmerits,butwe do mean to call attentionto the systemic andsystematicreplayof gesturesof empowerment
that,byverydefinitionandpractice,excludewomenas socialsubjectsfrom
whatevergroupingas a matterof reflex.At some time,the blackcreative
intellectualsmust respondto this aspect of the definitionof siting on the
conceptualobject.I mean, in otherwords,thatthe positionof the speaker
of his/herreport.
in discoursegoes farto decide the credibility
Quitepossiblya reflectionof the shadowy"laws"of cross-racialmale
bonding,thislatedevelopmentinAfricanAmericanstudies,enabledandrehas impacton the entire
wardedby college and universityadministrations,
the women"follow,"
fieldof inquiry:the women"teach,"the men "preach,"
the women "do
the men "posture,"
the men "lead,"the women"nurture,"
"rather
the
drive
as
men
the
men
"do
cars,"they
well,"
elegant
just
good,"
solid old
their
of
the
"unbearable
take
the
women
while
think,
ugliness"
airflow
of
a
new
for
the
installation
local
mechanic's
to
the
down
Volvos
than
the
all-too-human
meterand hopethatthatwilldo. Isthisnothingmore
cackleof envy? Ifthatis allthatthe complaintwere,thenwe coulddismiss
it as a minormisfortuneof the trivial,but one is not altogethersure that
we can dispatchit so easily,because the momentof the scene that I am
describingappearsto have become the staginggroundfor the repriseof
certain historic tensions that perenially surface across the life-world.Not
forcefullydrawn out by either feminist inquiryor AfricanAmerican theoretical work, this component of division offers one of the key reasons why an
intramuralaspect of culture analysis is both necessary and evaded, for it
would force us to confront what is suppressed in the public discourse of
the analysis, indeed, what the politics of "race"customarily require to be
censored here: the strong line of gender, as "race""within"runs a broken
line from one actant to another, as positioningin discourse overlaps a strategic class formation.AfricanAmerican "community"fractures against the
broad back of this paradigmaticsocial configuration,mapped according to
the demographies of largerculturalpatterns. Mediated, in this case, by the
American academy, this networkof social relations reveals-in small-the
incredible array of unarticulatedtensions that would describe movement
and mobility as decidedly internalfeatures of analysis.
Thus, the academy offers the blackcreative intellectualhis own, dear
laboratory. He brings the community with him to it, bears it between his
ears, so that, quite remarkably,his community must be rethought on the
site of the foreign, withthe learned tool. We are accustomed to hearing that
the intellectuals must go back to community,but the only communitythere
is goes forwardwith the objects already at hand. Infact, the "answers"that
he/she seeks are already there, at hand, if by that we mean the willingness to stake the inquiry. I have placed emphasis on "inquiry"throughout
this essay precisely because it is the refused device withina repertoireof
choices. I am quite franklypuzzled that this is so, except that it "tears"
one apart, insofar as he/she must now discriminatewithina field of objects
held in trust as his/her familiar.The ruptureof certaintyis exactly the stage
here so that the narrativeof the "sojourner"in a "strange land" is not entirely, or solely, the work of figuration.Or, we could say that, if it is, then
the uses to which it is put are not negligible. We have not yet quite seen,
even though some notable persons-Harold Cruse, among them-once
labored diligentlyfor the conceptual object of an AfricanAmerican studies.
Still called "victimstudies" by those who have no idea what its "architects"
were aiming for and who have no interest in knowing, it is, to their mind,
the sign of "Africanity"-the illegitimateissue of an unnamed and unnameable source. But that seems exactly the point-to now name the question
that ruptureevokes withinthe context of a specified loss-here, imagined.
But in the game of culture, there are ways by which loss is suspended in
gain. Is there a "science" in such a social text? At least one cultureworker
thought so.
Michel de Certeau highlights Freud's "Moses and Monotheism"as
just such an act of suspenseful engagement-on the oxymoron, we might
say. The studies in a culturaldemography that I have insisted upon would
at least lightout for new ground with a somewhat differentthought in mind.
I borrow it from de Certeau:
["Moses and Monotheism"]has much to do with suspicion, which is
rupture,doubt; and with filiation,which is both debt and law. Membership is expressed only throughdistance, throughtravelingfarther
and fartheraway from a ground of identity.A name still obliges, but
no longer provides the thing,this nurturingland.Thus Freudmust bet
his place withinwriting.He gambles it with his cards on the tablehe risks his relationwith the real-in the game organized by a loss.
The obligation to pay the debt, the refusal to abandon the name
and the people ("Jerusalem, I shall not forget thee.") and hence,
the impossibilityof not writing,are built over the dispossession of
all "genea-logical" language. The work has no hereditarysoil. It is
nomadic. Writingcannot forget the misfortunefromwhich its necessity springs; nor can it count on tacit, rich,and fostering "evidences"
that can providefor an "agrarian"speaker his intimacywith a mother
tongue. Writingbegins with an exodus. It proceeds in foreign languages. Its only recourse is the very elucidation of its travels in the
tongue of the other: it is analysis.37
Withinterrogationto the fore, in lieu of the transparencies of "reading,"perhaps we leave in place for Lois Brown,LyndonBarrett,and all their arriving
company a clearer space for work.
"... And so, I cleaned my house."
37. Michelde Certeau, The Writingof History,trans.TomConley (New York:Columbia
UniversityPress, 1988), 318-19.

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date

Transcription

Similar documents

Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative

Mark Twain the Tourist: The Form of The Innocents Abroad

Sadowski

Evil and Omnipotence

Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political

The Phylogenetic Study of Adaptive Zones: Has Phytophagy

The Faces of the Tri-Hexaflexagon

In the House of the Child

The Unreality of Time

Punk "Noir": Anarchy in Two Idioms