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CHAPTER 1
Not In Between
1.
Remembering the Present — the lyrical, ethno-historio-graphic, painterly encounter between Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Johannes Fabian, retrieves Patrice Lumumba and the postcolonial future he desired and symbolizes. The narrative lyricism that is given by way of technological mediation in the radio addresses of Lumumba, a lyricism whose supplemental force cuts and augments the authoritarian danger of the radiophonic voice and the neocolonial recapitulations of historical recitation, is part of what Tshibumba attempts to reproduce in his art. Moreover, this lyricism is embedded in their visual registers by way of the mediation of their own voices and the voice, if you will, of a general phonography. In this sense Tshibumba — by way of and, to an extent, against Fabian — reinstantiates the lyric singularity, manifest always and everywhere as surplus, which is the material spirit of the postcolonial future. This frayed singularity moves through the opposition of Afro-diasporic particularities and the universality that the West has mistakenly called its own. In order to understand this spirit of the postcolonial future as revolutionary, intellectual force we must make a detour through the work of C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson.
2.
The writing of history becomes ever more difficult. The power of God or the weakness of man, Christianity or the divine right of kings to govern wrong, can easily be made responsible for the downfall of states and the birth of new societies. Such elementary conceptions lend themselves willingly to narrative treatment and from Tacitus to Macaulay, from Thucydides to Green, the traditionally famous historians have been more artist than scientist: they wrote so well because they saw so little. Today by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hand of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realisation, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.
In The Black Jacobins, the Caribbean, the not in between, emerges narratively, in resistant aural performances, as the function of a materialist aesthetics and an aestheticized political economy of appositional collision. And so James will speak of a broken dialectic, ditch jumping, a spare serial logic disrupted by something missing. But how does the appeal he will amplify through concepts of Africa, of the African, work in this emergent self-consciousness of the Caribbean, in particular, and new world blackness in general, this postcollisive performance, this cut dialectic and not in-between submergence? What does the African bring to the "rendezvous of victory"?
The theory and practice of revolution is bound to the way the individual emerges as a theoretical possibility and phenomenological actuality in and out of the revolutionary ensemble. James is interested and implicated in this relation and operates in a translinguistic, Antillean harmonic unison. He is interested and implicated in the way that the truth of (such) relation lies not in between its elements. Therefore, James reopens the Afro-diasporic traditions' long, meditative, and practical concern with spacing, incommensurability, and rupture. He works in relation to, at some distance from, and not in between that concern and a Euro-philosophical theorization of aporia. James indicates that the question of comportment toward such issues, toward the form and content of the cut, is tied to another opposition — that between lyric and narrative — that in turn shapes yet another fundamental disjunction between the science and the art of history. The question, whose answer inhabits the not-in-between that both marks and is James's phrasing, concerns the irruptive placement — manifest in the practice of his writing and activism, his historical movement and research — of the outside in James's work; it concerns the way the literary achievement of exteriority embodies a theoretical achievement that is nothing less than a complex recasting of the dialectic.
The recasting of the dialectic that James's phrasing embodies and is directed toward disrupts the convergence of literary meaning and bourgeois production that comes into its own with that reification of the sentence that animates and is animated by the rise of novelistic techniques of narration. Such disruption is noisy; and such unruly and ongoing reemergence of sound in literature is crucial because the lyrical interruption of narrative marks a different mode, within the same mode, of literary production, one that might be said to stem from something like what James might have called a socialism already in place in the factory, something like what Louis Althusser, after Karl Marx and by way of Frantz Fanon and Peter Brooks, would call a communism in the occult interstices of the market, in the cut outside of market relations and market aesthetics. This different mode is shaped by resistances. Transferences structure that mode of organization out of which comes another (mode of) aesthetic content. So a phrasal disruption of the sentence is crucial; so poetry remains to be seen and heard so to speak, and in excess of the sentence because it breaks up meaning's conditions of production. But how do we address that privileging of narrative that might rightly be seen to emerge from a certain politics, a certain theory of history, a certain desire? Not by opposition; by augmentation. This means an attention to the lyric, to the lyric's auto-explosion, to the auto-explosion the lyric gives to narrative. This means paying attention to the thing (to what endures of the object's disruptive anticipation of itself, to the commodity that screams its fetish character and the whole of its secret against the [deafness of the] proper) that notes the presence of that desire, that takes into account the lyric's infusion with narrative, that sees the historicity and political desire of the lyric precisely as the refusal that animates and is one possibility of the fetish character, the possibility of free association and total representation that emerges from a transference that is only possible in the form of the open secret, by thinking the rhythm of world and thing.
New grammar can emerge from conventional writing as another writing infused with another sensuality, where the visual might expand toward hieroglyphic, from purely phonetic, meaning and where aurality further serves to disrupt and trouble meaning toward content. David Walker, for instance, understood this, as it were, before Jacques Derrida who, in Of Grammatology, initiates a critique of the valorization of speech over writing that is always driven not only to infuse speech with writing but to infuse writing with speech and, deeper still, with what Amiri Baraka calls, under the rubric of poetry, "musicked speech." The complex interplay between speech and writing (rather than the simple reversal of the valorization of speech over writing to which that interplay is often reduced) that animates OfGrammatology touches on issues fundamental to the black radical tradition that James explores and embodies. I want to address the constructed, nonoppositional, material interplay between writing and speech, narrative and lyric, the European and the African — or, to invoke James's phrasing, Enlightenment and Darkness. It provides the framework for new revolutionary theory, practice, and identity that is marked in the form and content of Jamesian phrasing as the location and time of the not-in-between, where phonography rewrites the relation between writing and the unfinished work of man. This is to say that I want to address the nature of the address.
Toussaint L'Ouverture's failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.
If he was convinced that San Domingo would decay without the benefits of the French connection, [Toussaint] was equally certain that slavery could never be restored. Between these two certainties he, in whom penetrating vision and prompt decision had become second nature, became the embodiment of oscillation. His allegiance to the French Revolution and all it opened out for mankind in general and the people of San Domingo in particular, this had made him what he was. But this in the end ruined him.
Perhaps for him to have expected more than the bare freedom was too much for the time. With that alone Dessalines was satisfied, and perhaps the proof that freedom alone was possible lies in the fact that to ensure it Dessalines, that faithful adjutant, had to see that Toussaint was removed from the scene. Toussaint was attempting the impossible — the impossible that was for him the only reality that mattered. The realities to which the historian is condemned will at times simplify the tragic alternatives with which he was faced. But these factual statements and the judgments they demand must not be allowed to obscure or minimize the truly tragic character of his dilemma, one of the most remarkable of which there is an authentic historical record.
But in a deeper sense the life and death are not truly tragic. Prometheus, Hamlet, Lear, Phèdre, Ahab, assert what may be the permanent impulses of the human condition against the claims of organised society. They do this in the face of imminent or even certain destruction, and their defiance propels them to heights which make of their defeat a sacrifice which adds to our conception of human grandeur.
Toussaint is in a lesser category. His splendid powers do not rise but decline. Where formerly he was distinguished above all for his prompt and fearless estimate of whatever faced him, we shall see him, we have already seen him, misjudging events and people, vacillating in principle, and losing both the fear of his enemies and the confidence of his own supporters.
The hamartia, the tragic flaw, which we have constructed from Aristotle, was in Toussaint not a moral weakness. It was a specific error, a total miscalculation of the constituent events. Yet what is lost by the imaginative freedom and creative logic of great dramatists is to some degree atoned for by the historical actuality of his dilemma. It would therefore be a mistake to see him merely as a political figure in a remote West Indian island. If his story does not approach the greater dramatic creations, in its social significance and human appeal it far exceeds the last days at St. Helena and that apotheosis of accumulation and degradation, the suicide in the Wilhelmstrasse. The Greek tragedians could always go to their gods for a dramatic embodiment of fate, the dike which rules over a world neither they nor we ever made. But not Shakespeare himself could have found such a dramatic embodiment of fate as Toussaint struggled against, Bonaparte himself; nor could the furthest imagination have envisaged the entry of the chorus, of the ex-slaves themselves, as the arbiters of their own fate. Toussaint's certainty of this as the ultimate and irresistible resolution of the problem to which he refused to limit himself, that explains his mistakes and atones for them.
Dessalines undertook the defence. He threw up a redoubt at some distance from Crête-à-Pierrot, left detachments to man them both, and went to meet Debelle who was coming south towards Verettes to make contact with Boudet. Dessalines would not give battle but retired toward Crête-à-Pierrot, keeping his forces just ahead of the hotly pursuing Debelle. As he reached the ditch which surrounded the fortress Dessalines jumped into it and all his men followed, leaving the French exposed. A withering fire from the fortress mowed them down. Four hundred fell and two generals were wounded. Hastily retreating, they took up position outside the fortress and sent to Leclerc for reinforcements. Dessalines entered the fortress and completed the preparations for the defence. But already his untutored mind had leapt forward to the only solution, and, unlike Toussaint, he was taking his men into his confidence. As they prepared the defence he talked to them.
"Take courage, I tell you, take courage. The French will not be able to remain long in San Domingo. They will do well at first, but soon they will fall ill and die like flies. Listen! If Dessalines surrenders to them a hundred times he will deceive them a hundred times. I repeat, take courage, and you will see that when the French are few we shall harass them, we shall beat them, we shall burn the harvests and retire to the mountains. They will not be able to guard the country and they will have to leave. Then I shall make you independent. There will be no more whites among us." Independence. It was the first time that a leader had put it before his men. Here was not only a programme, but tactics. The lying and treacherous Bonaparte and Leclerc had met their match.
These are some passages in The Black Jacobins that allow us to ground the not-in-between and also to disclose, by way of James's characteristic style, the impact of phrasing on the interinanimation of theory and history. And here I want explicitly to think about The Black Jacobins in two ways: 1) as the narrative description, on the one hand, of Toussaint's expansive vision and practical failure and, on the other hand, of his Lieutenant Dessalines's limited vision and practical success; and 2) as the irruption into that narrative of a radical energy, an exterior lyricism, whose implied victory has not been achieved or met (but which we are slowly working our way to in the name and spirit of Lumumba). I'm interested in the moments in James's texts in which he points to that energy, in which his phrasing records, is infused with or engraved by, that energy's phonographic weight. This is to say that I'm interested in those moments in James's historiography when meaning is cut and augmented by the very independent syntaxes and outer noises — conveying new and revolutionary content, mysterious and black magical politico-economic spells and spellings — that James would record. Those moments help to structure a collisive interplay in the work that is not in between but outside of the broad-edged narrative/historical trajectory of a familiar dialectical lineage now cut and augmented by the serrated lyricism of what Robinson calls the "black radical tradition." I intend to pay some brief attention to the mechanics of James's lyrical history in order to think what might appear only as a contradiction indicative of a failure. It would have been a failure on the part of the author that replicates the military/political failure of Toussaint, a failure that operates perhaps in spite of, perhaps because of, the author's mastery. I think it is, however, something more than failure, more than some static or unproductive contradiction; that it indicates something that remains to be discovered in black radicalism.
What I'm interested in at this juncture could be thought, more specifically, as the question of what Robinson reads in James as a problematic enchantment of/with Hegel, one, to use Nathaniel Mackey's terms, both premature and postexpectant. Here James is working in direct confrontation, working through the opposition of subjective and objective freedom, undermining Hegel's attachment to the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, in excess of that historical trajectory/dialectic for which Bonaparte is telic. And Toussaint, all hooked up and bound to the French, trapped in the no-man's-land between liberty (abstract-subjective-telic-white) and independence (national-objective-present-black: the position Dessalines seemingly naturally slips into) hips us, by way of James, to the need for something not in between these formulations. For James, the desire is for something not in between darkness and enlightenment, something not in between Dessalines and Toussaint. And we've got to think what it means not just for Dessalines to take the men into his confidence but to talk to them. We've got to think the form of that talk as well as its content, in untutored and broken dialect, unretouched, addressed to his followers and not to the French, sounded and not written and rewritten, seemingly unmediated by the graphic, and, finally, concerned not with liberty but with independence. The opposition between Toussaint and Dessalines, between (the desire for what is called) enlightenment and (the adherence to what is called) darkness, between direction to the French and direction to the slaves, is also between speech and writing. Dessalines leaps forward; he jumps into the ditch, sounding, descending. That jumping descent is coded as a jumping forward. Another dialectic. It's what James's phrasing does to the sentence. Oscillation, bridging over to leaping forward, jumping into. This is a question of music.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Black and Blur"
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