14 years ago
Friday, September 7, 2018
Specters of Berlin: "The World That Stands As One" Speech
Originally posted July 24, 2008. Reprised September 7, 2018.
President(ial hopeful) Barack Obama has decentered the West. Now the world comes into view. It is a world in which can be seen in the words of Dr. King, an “inescapable network of mutuality.” Senator/President Barak Obama expressed today, to the world what Baha'u'llah suggested mid-nineteenth century that the problems facing global society could not be effictively addressed so long as nations and their peoples remain ensconced behind barriers of prejudice, fear and intolerance:
“The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established. This unity can never be achieved,” Baha’u’lah moreover asserts, “so long as the counsels which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed are suffered to pass unheeded."
Imagine: all the people listening today in Tiergarten park to Obama's speech entitled "The World that Stands as One," addressing Berlin, Germany, Europe, the people of the world as "a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world."
One thing that I must say about this black man - aside from the fact that from the podium today his words resounded not far from the mark hit by that X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz whose own journey had taken him to speak before the peoples of the world on the need to unite in solidarity against oppression and tyrrany is that this man's understanding of history is such that it allows him to proceed along the guidelines of Marx's maxim in Theses on Feurbac that the point is not just to understand history, but to change it.
So, it was in recognition of this auspicious calling that with candorous wit and stately levity, Mr. Obama referred to an unofficial precedent in his greeting the people of Berlin: "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city." Neither did Obama speak through the mouthpieces of history's fragments nor did he appear in spirit or in deed as an extension of the Bush legacy - though rumors circulate about Obama being George W's 11th cousin. Maybe the proof is on youtube.
But with regard to the question of genealogy and family relations, Obama had much spirited insight to offer. Troping on that city's emblematic significance in the history of world politics and reining in late President Regan's words to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," Obama pled before a crowd of over 200,000 to to the people of the world to eliminate the barriers between national, ethnic, racial, class, gender, and all such identities.
"We cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats or escape responsibility in meeting them," he said. The greatest danger, Obama said, "is to allow new walls to divide us from one another."
Obama decentered the west from its own vision of the world today by suggesting that of vital importance to the survival of each, is the survival of all. Our interconnectedness has not been emphasized this brilliantly since the days in which Martin Luther King, Jr breathed and spoke and marched and opened mail and encountered would-be enemies as promised friends amongst us. I, as "a proud citizen of the United states and fellow citizen of the world" am able to be such, today, because of the bravery, intelligence, and, I believe humility that it takes to raise one's head above the morass of competing political identities and agendas and speak the truth - whether obvious and welcome or, simultaneously, onerous and strange - that, as in the words of Baha'u'llah "the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."
"That is why America cannot afford to turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward." Though, together they can be the best of friends, yet, the allegiance to mutual benefit that Obama envisions and proposes across the Atlantic, he clearly identifies as the primary exigency of global security, prosperity and equality. Such a fraternity as can be experience between the United States and Europe must also be realized between Europe and 'the rest of the world' as it were.
This is truly, I believe, the crux of his message today, and its most salient truth, which was only reinforced, for me, at the moment when robust tears of astonishment, gratitude and joy streamed down my face. I was not witnessing simply the moving and timely, if not overdue perspectives brought to the worldstage by Obama plain eloquence, but more so by the facial of an invigorated and adoring audience who rushed to greet Mr. Obama at his exit. These countenances expressed such belief and recognition in the principles expounded, told of such deep and dear spiritual relief; with thirsts so quenched, eyes so grateful, eager and joyous to embrace the call to reason and altruism, hope and deliberateness, to participate in the praxis of principles that alone can hasten a new day for the people of this world, and change the course of human history from one of destruction, division and discord to one of peace, harmony and communion.
It was, as if, America had birthed a new spiritual leader for the world, and many a hearer was found, and spoken to today, and, i hope in the case of this listener, transformed if not, brought a little closer to that day, once visible only from a lofty mountain top. Have the seas truly risen? Or has the horizon drawn some brighter tomorrow nearer, raised some restless dream anew?
At last world events have conspired reminded me of one my favorite sentiments in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, who penned in the blazing introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth;"And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs."
This is, to be sure, a critical juncture at which human history has arrived to pause and evaluate, which our friend Obama helps us to herald.
"The well-being of mankind, its peace and security," are greatly in question today, but are they not also in view?
How do we heed those counsels that will firmly establish unity? Or descend that city to earth?
How do we transfer the lofty dream to the plains of reality?
I'm glad somebody is contemplating these questions.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
“Europe Is No Longer the World’s Center of Gravity”: An Interview with Achille Mbembe
For those who are invested in the renovation of critical thinking outside the West, the biggest intellectual event of this (re)turn is unquestionably the publication, by La Découverte, in Paris , of Critique de la raison nègre, by the Cameroonian, Achille Mbembe. Announced in recent years and following the success of Sortir de la grande nuit (2010), this new book is the most complex and daring from the author who has emerged as the preeminent and most internationally renowned African thinker of his generation, judging from the number of translations of his texts in foreign languages and the impact of their public and academic reception.
This new work opens with a powerful statement that resembles a Manifesto. “Europe is no longer the world’s center of gravity,” he writes, and "this demotion opens up new possibilities – but also poses dangers - to critical thinking." Such are the possibilities and dangers Mbembe explores. The other strong thesis of the work deals with what the author calls the “becoming-black of the world." From his point of view, the “designation ‘Negro’ no longer refers only to the condition assigned to people of African origin during the time of the first capitalism." Today, the word “black” [i.e., “nègre,” or “negro”] designates all subaltern humans no longer necessitated by capital at this moment, which is defined more than ever by the model of an animist religion: neoliberalism. He explores the theme of racial difference to its ultimate consequences.
In this new book, Mbembe remains true to form, that is, as an atypical thinker and writer of the French language of the highest order. The power of the writing, the incandescence of ideas, historical depth, decidedly provocative aesthetic, originality of argument and enormous erudition; all this balances to make of this work a fireworks display of ideas.
---
With On the Postcolony in 2001; Sortir de la grande nuit [2010]; and now, Critique de la raison nègre: we are facing the contours of a true oeuvre. Can you delineate in a few words, at this moment of the publication of the new book, the main course of his intellectual project?
My concern is to contribute, from the Africa where I live and work, toward a political, cultural and aesthetic critique of the time that is our time in the world. It is a time marked, among other things, by a crisis of relations between democracy, memory, and the idea of a future that humanity as a whole could share. This crisis is compounded by the confluence of capitalism with animism and the ongoing recodification of the intersecting fields of our lives in and through the language of economics and neuroscience. This recoding has come to call into question our production of the idea of the human subject and the conditions of its emancipation since at least the eighteenth century.
One of the strong theses of your new book is that one of the effects of neoliberalism is to "universalize” the black condition. What do you understand 'neoliberalism' to mean?
Contemporary thought forgotten that, for its operation, capitalism has always had since its origin, the need for racial supports. To be sure, its function has always been not only to produce commodities, but also races and species. By neoliberalism, I understand the age during which capital wants to dictate every relationship of filiation. It seeks to multiply in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts. There ceases to be a difference between fact and fiction. Capitalism and animism are nothing but one and the same.
Thus, the systemic risks to which only the black slaves were exposed at the height of the first capitalism constitutes hereafter the norm, at least the situation of all subaltern humanities. There thus exists a universalizing tendency of the black condition. This goes hand in hand with the emergence of unprecedented imperialist practices; a re-Balkanization of the world and the intensification of practices of the delimitation of zones. These practices are, in essence, a way of producing new human subspecies condemned to abandonment, indifference, if not destruction.
Your book opens with a resounding statement that is almost a manifesto. That Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. However, it still draws from its archives. Why?
We are obligated to confront this archive. It contains a part of ourselves and, therefore, is also our own. When it comes to Euro-American worlds, we cannot afford the luxury of indifference or permit our ignorance. Ignorance and indifference are the privileges of the powerful.
Why this inflection by the West when, in your opinion, its hegemony is totally destroyed?
This is not a detour. It is more an inhabitation of the tradition in ways which, in one way or another, do not estrange us, and in which we are not strangers. We are an essential part in the process of its formation. It would therefore be a loss if we were to separate ourselves from that we helped to bring into being. I think of African-Americans, for example, or Afro-Europeans. They are, by every right, Western.
With regard to Africa, the challenge is to inhabit different worlds and forms of intelligibility at the same time, not in a gesture of gratuitous distance, but by shuttling, which authorizes the articulation of a thought of the crossing, of circulation. This kind of thinking runs enormous risk. However, these risks would be even more serious if we class ourselves within the cult of difference.
What do you object to in European thought?
There are people who object to its solipsism, its attachment to the fiction according to which the Other is our reverse. Or even its inability to recognize that there are plural timelines of the world we inhabit and that the task of thinking is to go through all these textual loops. In this gesture, which implies movement, translation, conflict and also misunderstanding, there are issues that dissolve of their own and this dissolution gives rise, with relative clarity, to common exigencies; requirements of a possible universality, and this possibility of movement and encounter of different intelligibilities required by thinking the world.
Is there a European thought?
There is no 'one' European thought. There are, however, power relations at the heart of a tradition, which, incidentally, have not stopped reinventing themselves. And in the ongoing effort, especially in the [global] South, to develop a true reflection on a world scale, our job is to play with these power relations and reflect on these internal frictions, not to dig the gap between Africa and Europe or to "provincialize” the latter, but to widen avenues that facilitate resistance to the forces of racism that are, at bottom, forces of violence, closure and exclusion.
Should we call it a theory of post-colonialism?
To introduce me as a theorist of post -colonialism it is necessary not to have read me.
But, France is included in this turn. And, incidentally, this is also the case in Africa.
Those who do rarely know what they are speaking about. Many pundits of postcolonial studies in Africa utilize ideological arguments in place of a disciplined and rigorous critical analysis of the works that they claim to oppose. In effect, there is no better critique of the postcolonial turn than the post -colonial turn. In France, there are many who liked what we were mute, people who did not speak and especially amongst themselves. They could thus construct our discourse instead of continuing to address us. Post-colonial thought has interrupted this exclusive power of address. And that's why it bothers them.
Until now, you have worked with relatively brief historical periods. With Critique de la raison nègre, you become something of the historiographer. How do you explain this inflection?
The very nature of the subject demanded a return to a longer period. The Negro is an invention of that which, in the book, I call "the first capitalism." The time of the first capitalism - at least as I conceive it is dominated by the Atlantic. The modern era proper begins with European expansion, the dispersion of peoples and the formation of large diasporas, an accelerated exchange goods, religions and cultures. Black slave labor plays an important role in this process. It was therefore necessary to dwell on this long dureé without which one perceives nothing of contemporary reality.
The 'Negro' is nothing but an invention of Atlantic capitalism? What significance do you attribute to the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian and Sub-Continent in its construction?
Atlantic Slavery is the only multi-hemispheric slavery complex that transforms people of African origin into commodities. It is, therefore, the only one to have invented the Negro, that is, a kind of human-thing, metal-human, human-money, plastic human. It is in the Americas and the Caribbean that humans are transformed for the first time in universal history into living graves of capital. The Negro is the prototype of this process.
I assign quite a central place to the history of diaspora and, in particular, African-American, insisting, in particular, on the ambiguity of the relations between African-Americans and Africa.
The history of people of African descent in the United States, in particular, is a story that has always fascinated me. The African American is, to a large extent, the ghost of modernity. The history of Blacks in the United States should be taught in all schools, particularly in Africa.
You devote lengthy discussion to the concept of ' race ' and ' racism.' In your view, how, does one recognize racism?
Beyond the consecration of a structural inequality in social relations, racism is a figure of phobic, obsessive, and even hysterical neurosis. The racist is one who is reassured by hatred, constituting the Other not as his semblance, but as a threatening object against which to defend itself, to dispose itself, or quite simply, one which would be necessary to destroy, if not fully master. In large measure, the racist is a sick man, lacking in himself, and dissipating.
The most poetic chapter but also the most confusing of the book is entitled “Requiem pour l' esclave” [Requiem for the Slave].
This chapter constitutes the underground of the book. Here, I try to show the manner in which, in Africa and in black things, many saw two obfuscating forces: a clay gently molded by the statue, or a shadowed animal, and always a mystical, metaphoric figure, capable of explosive flow. It also seeks to show how the black slave was, at bottom, a plastic subject, that is, an individual who has undergone a transformational process of destruction.
Your writing is one of the most beautiful on the part of a contemporary African thinker. To what do you attribute this gift?
In order to enunciate Africa in a way that is not mere repetition, I am forced to resort to a figural writing, a writing that ranges from the vertiginous to dissolution and dispersion. And a writing made of interlocking rings and whose edges and lines joining the vanishing point.
At this stage, what is the object of your investigations and what will be the theme of your next book?
My research focus is on what I have called “Afropolitanism.”
---
Interview conducted by Arlette Fargeau published in Le Messager October 3, 2013
Translation from French to Portuguese by Maria José Cartaxo.
Translation from Portuguese to English by Damien-Adia Marassa.
Sourced online in Portuguese at:
Cara a cara | October 21, 2013 | capitalismo, Europa, negro, razão negra
http://www.buala.org/pt/cara-a-cara/a-europa-ja-nao-e-o-centro-de-gravidade-do-mundo
(last accessed November 20, 2013)
and
Raíz Africana | November 18, 2013 |
http://raizafricana.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/a-europa-ja-nao-e-o-centro-de-gravidade-do-mundo/
(last accessed November 20, 2013)
This new work opens with a powerful statement that resembles a Manifesto. “Europe is no longer the world’s center of gravity,” he writes, and "this demotion opens up new possibilities – but also poses dangers - to critical thinking." Such are the possibilities and dangers Mbembe explores. The other strong thesis of the work deals with what the author calls the “becoming-black of the world." From his point of view, the “designation ‘Negro’ no longer refers only to the condition assigned to people of African origin during the time of the first capitalism." Today, the word “black” [i.e., “nègre,” or “negro”] designates all subaltern humans no longer necessitated by capital at this moment, which is defined more than ever by the model of an animist religion: neoliberalism. He explores the theme of racial difference to its ultimate consequences.
In this new book, Mbembe remains true to form, that is, as an atypical thinker and writer of the French language of the highest order. The power of the writing, the incandescence of ideas, historical depth, decidedly provocative aesthetic, originality of argument and enormous erudition; all this balances to make of this work a fireworks display of ideas.
---
With On the Postcolony in 2001; Sortir de la grande nuit [2010]; and now, Critique de la raison nègre: we are facing the contours of a true oeuvre. Can you delineate in a few words, at this moment of the publication of the new book, the main course of his intellectual project?
My concern is to contribute, from the Africa where I live and work, toward a political, cultural and aesthetic critique of the time that is our time in the world. It is a time marked, among other things, by a crisis of relations between democracy, memory, and the idea of a future that humanity as a whole could share. This crisis is compounded by the confluence of capitalism with animism and the ongoing recodification of the intersecting fields of our lives in and through the language of economics and neuroscience. This recoding has come to call into question our production of the idea of the human subject and the conditions of its emancipation since at least the eighteenth century.
One of the strong theses of your new book is that one of the effects of neoliberalism is to "universalize” the black condition. What do you understand 'neoliberalism' to mean?
Contemporary thought forgotten that, for its operation, capitalism has always had since its origin, the need for racial supports. To be sure, its function has always been not only to produce commodities, but also races and species. By neoliberalism, I understand the age during which capital wants to dictate every relationship of filiation. It seeks to multiply in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts. There ceases to be a difference between fact and fiction. Capitalism and animism are nothing but one and the same.
Thus, the systemic risks to which only the black slaves were exposed at the height of the first capitalism constitutes hereafter the norm, at least the situation of all subaltern humanities. There thus exists a universalizing tendency of the black condition. This goes hand in hand with the emergence of unprecedented imperialist practices; a re-Balkanization of the world and the intensification of practices of the delimitation of zones. These practices are, in essence, a way of producing new human subspecies condemned to abandonment, indifference, if not destruction.
Your book opens with a resounding statement that is almost a manifesto. That Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. However, it still draws from its archives. Why?
We are obligated to confront this archive. It contains a part of ourselves and, therefore, is also our own. When it comes to Euro-American worlds, we cannot afford the luxury of indifference or permit our ignorance. Ignorance and indifference are the privileges of the powerful.
Why this inflection by the West when, in your opinion, its hegemony is totally destroyed?
This is not a detour. It is more an inhabitation of the tradition in ways which, in one way or another, do not estrange us, and in which we are not strangers. We are an essential part in the process of its formation. It would therefore be a loss if we were to separate ourselves from that we helped to bring into being. I think of African-Americans, for example, or Afro-Europeans. They are, by every right, Western.
With regard to Africa, the challenge is to inhabit different worlds and forms of intelligibility at the same time, not in a gesture of gratuitous distance, but by shuttling, which authorizes the articulation of a thought of the crossing, of circulation. This kind of thinking runs enormous risk. However, these risks would be even more serious if we class ourselves within the cult of difference.
What do you object to in European thought?
There are people who object to its solipsism, its attachment to the fiction according to which the Other is our reverse. Or even its inability to recognize that there are plural timelines of the world we inhabit and that the task of thinking is to go through all these textual loops. In this gesture, which implies movement, translation, conflict and also misunderstanding, there are issues that dissolve of their own and this dissolution gives rise, with relative clarity, to common exigencies; requirements of a possible universality, and this possibility of movement and encounter of different intelligibilities required by thinking the world.
Is there a European thought?
There is no 'one' European thought. There are, however, power relations at the heart of a tradition, which, incidentally, have not stopped reinventing themselves. And in the ongoing effort, especially in the [global] South, to develop a true reflection on a world scale, our job is to play with these power relations and reflect on these internal frictions, not to dig the gap between Africa and Europe or to "provincialize” the latter, but to widen avenues that facilitate resistance to the forces of racism that are, at bottom, forces of violence, closure and exclusion.
Should we call it a theory of post-colonialism?
To introduce me as a theorist of post -colonialism it is necessary not to have read me.
But, France is included in this turn. And, incidentally, this is also the case in Africa.
Those who do rarely know what they are speaking about. Many pundits of postcolonial studies in Africa utilize ideological arguments in place of a disciplined and rigorous critical analysis of the works that they claim to oppose. In effect, there is no better critique of the postcolonial turn than the post -colonial turn. In France, there are many who liked what we were mute, people who did not speak and especially amongst themselves. They could thus construct our discourse instead of continuing to address us. Post-colonial thought has interrupted this exclusive power of address. And that's why it bothers them.
Until now, you have worked with relatively brief historical periods. With Critique de la raison nègre, you become something of the historiographer. How do you explain this inflection?
The very nature of the subject demanded a return to a longer period. The Negro is an invention of that which, in the book, I call "the first capitalism." The time of the first capitalism - at least as I conceive it is dominated by the Atlantic. The modern era proper begins with European expansion, the dispersion of peoples and the formation of large diasporas, an accelerated exchange goods, religions and cultures. Black slave labor plays an important role in this process. It was therefore necessary to dwell on this long dureé without which one perceives nothing of contemporary reality.
The 'Negro' is nothing but an invention of Atlantic capitalism? What significance do you attribute to the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian and Sub-Continent in its construction?
Atlantic Slavery is the only multi-hemispheric slavery complex that transforms people of African origin into commodities. It is, therefore, the only one to have invented the Negro, that is, a kind of human-thing, metal-human, human-money, plastic human. It is in the Americas and the Caribbean that humans are transformed for the first time in universal history into living graves of capital. The Negro is the prototype of this process.
I assign quite a central place to the history of diaspora and, in particular, African-American, insisting, in particular, on the ambiguity of the relations between African-Americans and Africa.
The history of people of African descent in the United States, in particular, is a story that has always fascinated me. The African American is, to a large extent, the ghost of modernity. The history of Blacks in the United States should be taught in all schools, particularly in Africa.
You devote lengthy discussion to the concept of ' race ' and ' racism.' In your view, how, does one recognize racism?
Beyond the consecration of a structural inequality in social relations, racism is a figure of phobic, obsessive, and even hysterical neurosis. The racist is one who is reassured by hatred, constituting the Other not as his semblance, but as a threatening object against which to defend itself, to dispose itself, or quite simply, one which would be necessary to destroy, if not fully master. In large measure, the racist is a sick man, lacking in himself, and dissipating.
The most poetic chapter but also the most confusing of the book is entitled “Requiem pour l' esclave” [Requiem for the Slave].
This chapter constitutes the underground of the book. Here, I try to show the manner in which, in Africa and in black things, many saw two obfuscating forces: a clay gently molded by the statue, or a shadowed animal, and always a mystical, metaphoric figure, capable of explosive flow. It also seeks to show how the black slave was, at bottom, a plastic subject, that is, an individual who has undergone a transformational process of destruction.
Your writing is one of the most beautiful on the part of a contemporary African thinker. To what do you attribute this gift?
In order to enunciate Africa in a way that is not mere repetition, I am forced to resort to a figural writing, a writing that ranges from the vertiginous to dissolution and dispersion. And a writing made of interlocking rings and whose edges and lines joining the vanishing point.
At this stage, what is the object of your investigations and what will be the theme of your next book?
My research focus is on what I have called “Afropolitanism.”
---
Interview conducted by Arlette Fargeau published in Le Messager October 3, 2013
Translation from French to Portuguese by Maria José Cartaxo.
Translation from Portuguese to English by Damien-Adia Marassa.
Sourced online in Portuguese at:
Cara a cara | October 21, 2013 | capitalismo, Europa, negro, razão negra
http://www.buala.org/pt/cara-a-cara/a-europa-ja-nao-e-o-centro-de-gravidade-do-mundo
(last accessed November 20, 2013)
and
Raíz Africana | November 18, 2013 |
http://raizafricana.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/a-europa-ja-nao-e-o-centro-de-gravidade-do-mundo/
(last accessed November 20, 2013)
Saturday, January 9, 2010
King of Dreams
King of Dreams:
Utopia, History and the Temporality of King’s Two Bodies
Final Paper: Cultures of the Future
Achille Mbembe & Sarah Nuttall
December 5, 2009
Damien-Adia Marassa
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind.
- Romans 12:2
A man without a dream/Is like a ship without a stern/
No matter how you scheme/You can never make a turn
- Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra
The true is what he can; the false is what he wants.
- Claire de Duras
In this vexed moment in the triumphant life of global capitalism, an ironic counter-image is coming into view. Though to some extent having put behind us the Cold War vista of the potential annihilation of the human species through the vicissitudes of nuclear war, developments in modern science have given way to an almost greater technological certainty in the probability of the demise of the human race by its own hand in the form of profound, ongoing and increasing environmental degradation. Just over a half-century ago, Althusser paraphrased the words of Malraux: “’At the end of the last century, Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. Now it is for us to ask ourselves whether, today, man is not dead’”(Althusser, Matheron and Goshgarian 21) This dreadful vision does not merely signal the death of the author, the death of the subject or a newfangled theoretical difficulty in defining the human but the very real and visceral possibility of a global civilization laying eclipse to itself. Althusser insists that “Malraux’s pathos lay not in the death whose imminence he proclaimed, but in this desperate consciousness of imminent death haunting someone still alive” (21). It is this “imminent death” haunting the still living body of humanity under the sign and temporality of globalization which is at issue for us here, and which we contemplate in the reflecting pool of Martin Luther King’s life and words.
It is well known that both Martin Luther King and his contemporary Malcolm X lived their lives and left their mark on American and indeed world history in the midst of great personal, national and global tribulation. His life and the safety of his family constantly at risk in the latter years of his life, Malcolm X once spoke of himself as “a dead man already,” as if foreseeing months in advance his own assassination. Martin Luther King, Jr. also lived with the knowledge that the threats against his life and the lives of his wife and children might materialize his own demise. Indeed from the very beginning of his participation in the Montgomery Bus Boycott which initiated his active role in the Civil Rights Movement, King lived bravely with the specter of death. When asked by an interviewer if the death threats and bricks through the window he received in response to his participation in the bus boycott had daunted, him, King, head of the Montgomery Improvement Association in his mid-twenties replied with characteristic poise:
No, I am not [afraid]. My attitude is that this is a great cause. It is a great issue that we are confronted with. And that the consequences for my person life are not particularly important. It is a triumph of a cause that I am concerned about. And I have always felt that, ultimately, along the way of life, an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are. And if he is filled with fear, he cannot do it (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/about/pt_101.html).
In his last speeches and sermons, especially, when the violence which ultimately overtook his life had reached its height, one can discern most clearly the content of that for which he felt his life was worth giving and can perceive the practical power of his famous maxim that “a man who has not found something worth dying for is not fit to live.”
In his famous sermon “The Drum Major Instinct,” King took a moment, toward the end of his remarks that morning, to reflect on this very question, and shared with the congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church only months before his assassination, the manner in which he would like to be remembered:
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk very long. Every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize, that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards, that’s not important. Tell him not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to live his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King Jr., tried to love somebody. …I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity (King and Washington 267).
King goes on to return to the key theme of his sermon, “the drum major instinct,” what he identifies as the natural inborn desire in human beings to be recognized, to be successful, to be important. In the sermon he has discussed the darker sides of human ambition and their effects in the world at large, and then continues with the spiritual message of his talk, urging the congregation to harness this inherent human instinct for the good it can bring to the world:
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind (267).
From here King’s comments continue in a sort of rhetorical flourish that reminds us more of literature or poetry than the tones and cadences of public speech, and his sermon takes on a language at once playful, intertextual and literary:
And that’s all I want to say…if I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or a song, if I can show somebody that he’s travelling wrong, then my living will not be in vain (267).
These, in fact, are the lyrics to the hymn “If I Can Help Somebody” recorded by Mahalia Jackson. The rhyme and the meter of his words, I argue, lends the meaning, significance, and import of his speech supplemental valences that carry our understanding of his presence and contribution to new levels. Now it is not only the ordinary speech of daily life coming out of his mouth, but the language of music – song, poetry, literature – which King iterates:
If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, if I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain (267).
It is notable the contrast King makes here between worldly accomplishments and altruistic strivings. He prefers not to have mentioned that he has an astounding number of personal awards, honors and recognitions – historical accomplishments – but chooses instead to be remembered for things he may not even have accomplished at all because of their incommensurability: “Martin Luther King, Jr., ., tried to live his life serving others …tried to love somebody. … I tried to …serve humanity” (267). This sense of the meaning and merit of life as found in the interstices between life and death is something we will return to, but it brings to mind the testimony of one of the active participants in the civil rights movement, Harry Belafonte, who attests that "what Dr. King gave us, what Stokely Carmichael gave or Malcolm X gave, what everybody gave us, whether you agreed with them or not, the energy of that time and the goals we were all aspiring to, I think, is what it was all about at its best. At its worst was when we did nothing." Belafonte here too identifies “goals,” and aspirations – dreams – with action, in contrasting such striving with doing “nothing.” Such reflections bring me to meditation on the epigraph above, lifted from Walter Benjamin’s second version of the technology essay which he takes from Claire de Duras: “The true is what he can, the false is what he wants.” Not to complicate matters by referencing such an oblique phrasing, but to seek out in the subtlety of this maxim its simple truth. One that, in time, we will return to as well. Holding fast to dreams means not that life as it is is not worth living, but that life as it is is worth living only with dreams. If the domain of the true is held entirely under the aegis of the possible, of “what he can,” then to hold fast to dreams would be to want what is not, as such, entirely possible. If what is possible is all that is true, we must desire the false. There is no truth in a courage that can only choose what is possible.
Focusing on King’s life, his last words, and his consistent vision of and for the future, then, allows us to ask what political efficacy might be taken from the message of a man who is remembered, above all, perhaps, for the dream he had for America and the world, and for the fearlessness with which he pursued, propagated and defended it. It is significant to note here, however, that King saw his own personal vision and hope for the future of American society as “deeply rooted” in a transhistorical and intertextual articulation of designs for the American nation (219). What might King’s example teach us of how to live and to dream with forbearers, ancestors and heritages, at this portentous hour in the life of humanity, when so much fear, despair and terror seem the attributes of the zeitgeist? By looking at some of King’s key sermons and speeches I argue that more important than any particular form of organizing or any cause of political mobilization which his legacy might inspire, one of the most important things we must take from the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is his ability to dream in the presence of danger and in the face of death to hold out hope for life. Indeed at a time when it has perhaps never been more difficult to conceive of an alternative to the current world system, it has also never been important or more radical as it is now to dream, to imagine, to desire differently.
So much of the discourse which critically evaluates the complex and multiple strivings through time for a radically different social order as so many instances of utopian aspiration seems by the very nature of the term “Utopia” to implicate such endeavors in the vanity and fruitlessness of fantasy. The reduction of dreaming, aspiring and imagining to utopian production, not least because of the etymology and western literary cannon associated with the word, serves to reconcile us to a plight of domination, reconciles us to the death of man whereof Althusser spoke. Thus when Fredric Jameson suggests that “at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment … and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively” (Jameson xiii)(xiii), the entire dreamworld characterized as utopian is discredited not only as impossible, but valued only in its impossibility, valued in its absence of value.
According to the OED utopia, derives from two root words in ancient Greek meaning “no” and “place,” but the term enters the modern vernacular, significantly, through the coinage of Sir Thomas More in his strange work of literature, read for its influence on latter forms of speculative fiction, satire and political theory. In More’s utopianism, in his creation of a fantasy land apart from the real world, “closure is achieved by that great trench the founder causes to be dug between the island and the mainland and which alone allows it to become Utopia” (Jameson, 5). For Jameson, since things cannot be (as) radically different (as the revolutionary dreamer or utopian wish might desire), the real world aspirations (condescendingly) referred to as utopian become missed chances one need not mourn but rather celebrate insofar as the death of such dreams signals the unmasking of the true conditions of our enslavement, “making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment” (xiii).
Yet in order for King’s dream of a peaceful world of race unity, religious tolerance, and economic justice to be considered utopian, the preciousness of these ideological or spiritual resources have to be considered as lacking and apart from the world as it currently is. That is to say, in order to respond to the call for the presencing of such spiritual resources in the world, a world of their absence must be affirmed and a new world set apart must be offered – in the utopian schema – as the negation of the current or the “old” world to be replaced by the “new yle called Utopia.” The world thus negated is the world “of our mental and ideological imprisonment,” of which Jameson would have us become increasingly aware. Yet King’s call for consciousness is of a different sort, and the world to which he invokes us is not the world of “no-place,” it is not the land of elsewhere or the “new yle called Utopia” of Thomas More. If anything, the island King saw separate and apart was the “lonely island of poverty in a midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” on which African Americans were stranded by institutional racism. If there was an “elsewhere” to be located it was the inhabited “corners of American society” to which the black American had been relegated by white supremacy, “in exile in his own land” (217). That is to say that, if there was a “no place,” that was not the place of Martin Luther King Jr.’s wishful thinking, the “no place” was the reality of American segregation, discrimination and inequality – the land of “no,” the fantasy of white supremacy, the citadel of negation.
Indeed, for King, the so-called “real world,” the world of currently existing social relations and political effects, was the world to be rejected out of hand as impossible, impracticable, unfeasible, not the dreamworld. This sentiment is so beautifully registered in his speech on the American Dream given as the commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvanian on 6 June 1961 in which he critiques a current paradigm travelling the marketplace of the academy in the form of a popular buzzword. Although the particular term in question may have lost its novelty and the urgency of its critical value may have passed, the tone of his institutional critique is perhaps more apposite than ever in a world where social inequalities are multiplying and state universities are privatizing as tuitions rise preventatively. “Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature,” he says “and modern psychology has a word that is used, probably, more than any other. The word is maladjusted. …But I say to you, there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted…If you will allow the preacher in me to come out now,” he continues:
let me say to you that I never did intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and discrimination. I never did intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never did intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never did intend to adjust myself the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. And I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted because it may well be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted (215-6).
If utopian aspirations never materialize the worlds they wish to constitute and inhabit – or, indeed, as Jameson claims, if their desires are so far-fetched as to, for example, envision the equitable distribution of wealth, universal education, basic human rights for all humanity – only a detractor of King’s dream, or the most faithless of supporters would dare to characterize his vision as utopian.
Yet at the same time, if the best utopias are the ones that fail the most drastically, by some accounts, King’s dream may well provide a quintessential example. A half-century after Martin Luther King’s death, the world conditions he fought so hard to remedy have in many respects only worsened. Degradation of the planetary environment both preponderating and unprecedented, rampant poverty afflicting billions of the world’s inhabitants, failed states and unjust wars the world over signal a host of destructive forces that, threaten the quality, and indeed the very future of life on this planet. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida has exclaimed of our current age “it must be cried out at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity”(Derrida 106) as we witness in the world today. On one hand the current world economic crisis is discussed by the liberal media as crack in the edifice of a system whose triumph has been vociferously proclaimed. Yet, as Derrida insists “no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth” (106).
Such dire circumstances cause the "global village" in the midst of a global economic crisis to reflect on the destiny of its collective endeavors and urge us to raise the question as to whether this can indeed be referred to as a crisis which has only recently taken place, or as an opportunity to recognize the ongoing crisis of the system within which humanity has passed the last century with seemingly increasing unawareness. Indeed, as formulated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s last Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” the crisis of modern man has been of a different kind:
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet … we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers. Or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be (269).
If in this world of divisiveness, greed and bloodshed we stand facing certain annihilation “together as fools,” the question arises as to what alternatives exist to the vision of an ineluctable death of the species.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of 10 December 1964, Martin Luther King opened with dreamed of an America, and of a global society in which the basic human rights of every human being would be guaranteed. “I have the audacity to believe,” he said in his address, “that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits” (226). One of the difficulties that obtains with the audacity of such belief, or in any critique of the status quo, as a critique of any number of forms of economic and political injustice – whether in the critique of capital or liberal democracy, whether in extremisms of Left or Right – is that the resulting and conflicting proposals that arise in conflict with the current world system, as we have seen, are often placed under the sign of the utopian. Indeed, Jameson contends that “[t]he more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable” (xv). Yet, analysis of King’s weltanschauung turns this thinking on its head by suggesting that radical difference can only itself realized by the fact of its being imagined. The speeches, life and death of Martin Luther King all suggest, I argue, that it is imagination itself in its creativity, expressivity and communicability which produces the very ground of difference, and animates the very existence of the radix of thought.
For Jameson, since things cannot be (as) radically different (as the revolutionary dreamer or utopian wish might desire), the real world aspirations derisively referred to as utopian become missed chances one not to mourn but rather to celebrate insofar as the death of such dreams signals the unmasking of the true conditions of our enslavement, “making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment” (xiii). It would not even help to try to make a distinction between what he refers to as the “systemic” manifestation of the Utopian program which realizes its energies in political struggle and social movement – whether revolutionary or secessionist – and the “more obscure and various” forms of Utopian striving which cleave more to “piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reform” (3), for neither of these form of “pipedream” (3) can account for the creative and revolutionary energy proper to either King’s dream or the deep spiritual movement of the people which was responsible for the actions of the civil rights movement. Content with only that which has been in the senses (narrowly defined) , and thus, trapped within the prison of a materialist phenomenology Jameson contents himself with a Sartrian consolation prize to mend the gap between an unworkable Left and a dysfunctional Right: “anti-anti-Utopianism,” (xvi). This “technical nomenclature” of the academy amounts, in other words, the negation of a negation (of a double-negation).
This is to say that MLK’s dream of an American and a global society in which peace and justice would reign was neither a utopia in the sense of a programmatic “[en]closure” (5) of a new world sealed off from the old world of the past, or a liberal reformist aspiration to gloss the existing order. Either of these are understandable viewpoints, and what I would like to view as subtle misconceptions of the reality of King’s vision. Rather it was a commitment to living in the temporality neither ahistorical nor fantastic, of a dream whose reality was both present in the mind and body and thereby contingent upon personal belief and individual action. The alchemy of this double movement, of a faith linked to expressivity formed the basis of King’s platform of personal and rhetorical power. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a very illuminating phrase emerges to shed light on this dual valence of his relation to the dream. “I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept the idea,” he continues “that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him” (225). A very crucial moment emerges here in the juxtaposition of two conditions and two related temporalities relevant to human existence.
On the one hand we have the facticity, or historical truth content of “the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature” – which amounts to nothing more than the historical being of man in the world. On the other hand, man, in his peculiar, and to some extent arbitrary state of being, his ‘isness,’ his existential quality in the process of being-in-the-world historically, is confronted by another force than merely the aggregate qualities of his historical being. This “eternal ‘oughtness’” which “forever literary “the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever “confronts” man’s historical being takes the shape not so much of “the future” as understood as the inexhaustible fountain of present-time, the certainty that each moment follows the next or that each day is succeeded by a night and so on. Rather, the eternality of that force which forever confronts man’s historical being – and which does so not as a coercion or a compulsion, but as an incessant calling, a vocation, a request is the temporality of Martin Luther King’s dream, the very real some place of what Jacques Derrida has referred to as l’avenir, which appears as equivalent for our purposes to what Antonio Negri has termed the to-come. In the documentary Derrida (2002), he speaks about this distinction between the future and l’avenir (which in French simply means “to come”):
The future is that which - tomorrow, later, next century - will be. There's a future which is predictable - programs, prescriptions, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (yet to come), which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me that is the real future - that which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it's l'avenir in that it's the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival (http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2006/11/22/2518036.html).
L’avenir is then differentiated from the certain temporality of “the future” by appearing in the figure or conception of the Other, the as yet unknown and therefore unknowable as such, which is to-come, which is to become-known from beyond the horizon of finitude. A reading of Negri on the topic of the eternal and the to-come can usefully situate King’s notion of the “eternal ‘oughtness’ which forever confronts” man in a relation to a temporality of human, and thus, historical experience and action. For Negri, “the eternal is the common name of the materialist experience of time,” (Negri 170) and time, more importantly than place, is the stage, ultimately of our contestations over the prescience of dreamworld vs. utopia. Negri writes:
The eternity of matter reveals itself as temporal intensity, as innovative presence; and the full present of eternal time is singularity. 'Singular' and 'eternal' are interchangeable terms; their relationship is tautological. Whatever has happened is eternal; it is eternal here and now. The eternal is the singular present. In materialism ethical experience is the responsibility for the present (171).
Here, Negri’s comments might shed some light on how the eternal oughtness, that is, the call of the singular possibility of the to-come weighs upon and confronts, one might even say, haunts the be-ing, the is-ness of man’s historical being. For King refuses to believe that the spatio-temporal reality of human/historical isness exists to the exclusion of the presencing of the eternal manifest in the force and being of the “to come.” “In materialism,” Negri insists, “ethical experience,” functions precisely in this way, in this structure of relation, for it “is always faced with the immeasurable and the opening of the eternal to the to-come” (171).
The question at hand becomes, for me, how the “to come” becomes represented, and we return to Jameson’s identification of Utopia as a literary form not without regard for the insight contained therein. For indeed, though King’s dream may at base prove not to be utopian in the structure implied by the frivolousness of impotent idealizations or moribund impulses of wish-fulfillment, there is indeed something quite literary about the language in which, and therefore the material substance of which the dream is concocted, transmitted, augmented and performed. For on the one hand, if we are to accept the doctrine of “nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses” (Jameson, xiii) we must also concede nothing in experience that was not first in history, in other words, we must concede that both “eternity” and its “oughtness” are indeed far beyond the “isness” of man’s mortal and indeed moral reach. Yet, even if we are tempted to accept this proposal, which at base might prove tempting to consider as a primary heuristic for historical experience and future-orientation, to what extent do we speak of the senses outside of the sensorium of dreams? In other words, even the acceptance of “the great empiricist maxim” raises questions as to the nature of sensorial experience and the life of the mind. And it is no accident the discourse of King might prove a quintessential challenge to this phenomenological rubric, as evidenced by his last public words ever spoken: “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord” (286).
King’s final utterance, his last act invokes and animates a body of prophecy, a collective assemblage of future-orientated striving which aggregates complex histories of (African) American resistance, hinging both on the to-be of (African) American “isness” and the eternal to come of (African) American “oughtness” in the literary intertextuality of his address (both speech and writing, both oratory and improvisatory). The last line of his sermon delivered on April 3 1968 at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, the largest African American Pentecostal denomination in the United States” (ed. 279) happens to be the first line of The Battle Hymn of the Republic by the prominent abolitionist Julia Ward Howe. It is a dream indeed “deeply rooted in the American dream,” it is a vision not only of l’avenir, but of a to-come that has been “a long time coming,” whose “truth is marching on.”
The necessary intertextuality of King’s utterance, in his last act, gives us
the quality of his dream in the reality of both a historical dreamtime and a literary space of realization, not merely an imaginary region or fantasy realm, but a real(izing) relationship to history, to time, and to eternity. Indeed in King’s final sermon on that day, the dream he announced in “the symbolic shadow” of the Lincoln Memorial appeared more real before his eyes than ever. Not only had he “seen the coming of the glory of the Lord,” he had done so with his own eyes. So much for the maxim “nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses,” this dream, however imaginal, had already been experienced by him when he took the time to share his parting words with the congregation in Memphis. To be sure, King had no death wish, as he often declared, he wished to live a long life. But he spoke of being happy he “didn’t sneeze,” when the tip of the letter-opener which was plunged into his chest in the failed assassination attempt which grazed the tip of his aorta. “If I had sneezed,” he said, in his stoic tragic-comic hope, “I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters…I wouldn’t have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten up their backs…, in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill…”etc. (268). “But,” he continued, hesitating on the precipice of his own foreshadowed death, it doesn’t matter with me now” (286). And comes his famous, incandescent tribute to l’avenir of the dream, “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind” (268). The experiential claim is of the utmost significance: “And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land” (268). Nothing in the mind that was not first in the transhistorical, transgenerational, transcorporeal, transtextual memory, expectation, imagination. And now the caveat, the distinction between the then of the eternal, of the to-come – a sacred distinction – and the now of the finitude of singularity – “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight,” he wanted them to know right then and there, “that we, as a people” (as man in the “isness” of his being, perhaps?) “will get to the promised land” (268). It was for this reason that he was “happy” that, his last night on earth, because of the communion he had achieved with the to-come. It was not a knowledge of the future such as a certainty one might have about the outcome of a sports game, the weather pattern of a particular month, the vicissitudes of a particular nation – it was beyond that, a profound, deep conviction, in not only the power, but in the veracity, the truth content of dreams: “we as a people will get to the promised land,” because, in a sense, in l’avenir, it already exists.
Indeed, this conviction, the intimacy of his communion with this temporality alone can explain the type of composure he and so many thousands of Americans expressed during the tribulations of the civil rights movement’s steady campaign. This conviction harkens back to and can be detected in his speech before the Washington monument, an occasion King auspiciously heralded as a day that would “go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation” (217). I would submit here, that the greatness of this day was constituted not solely by the sheer number of activist participants who thronged the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, but, provocatively perhaps, I would submit that the greatness of this day was found and founded precisely in the excellence of speech, the profundity and sublimity of utterance which marked the occasion in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. Significantly to this argument one should note that in his ode to Marx, Derrida describes the Communist Manifesto not just as a revolutionary document but as a “real event” interpolated in history “between the legendary specter [of Communism’ …and its absolute incarnation” in the figure of the “universal Communist Party, the Communist International,” this specter’s ultimate realization and materialization (128-9). The notion of a human labor to make material the spirit of a reality which is to come, a specter which begins only by coming back, bears striking parallel to the structure of what emerged in the unfolding of historical events in Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech.”
We all know the content of this dream, or we think we do, and thus I can leave this alone for the moment. But to talk about the “how” and “when” of this dream, this has not been done so precisely often enough as to unveil the power of that moment of speech (en)act(ment) that day in Washington, D.C. Of course, the common refrain of the speech was the famous, “I have a dream,” which Americans repeat and rehearse in mention of King without giving much thought to what it means to dream – but this is at this point, beside the point – what is far more interesting is his temporal emphasis on the variation: “I have a dream today!” Its importance cannot be overstressed not because the discrepancy between “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia,” and “I have a dream today!” are so great. Obviously, one might easily make the argument that is dream is for a future – whether we call it a to-come or l’avenir or whatever fancy philosophical jargon we prefer. But the fact of the matter is, that King did not simply emphasize this future date of expectant hope. This is why many misrecognize his power as feebleness. Indeed King’s assertion was such that “today” was the emphasis of enunciation, with himself as the subject of a “possession,” a having of a dream which took place not only as a personal, imaginal or spiritual resource obtained but as a process of imaginal creation, creative expressivity, generative imagination. “I have a dream today!” This dream, which is an inheritance of the past, foretells in the present, a day of promise. This, then is not dissimilar to Marx’s movement in the opening statement of the Communist Manifesto. At the moment at which Marx can speak of “a spectre … haunting Europe,” the “spectre of Communism” is already his inheritance. He has a dream. Or would it be more appropriate, in either case, of Marx or of King, to speak of a dream having him? From the moment Marx pens these words, his speech act introduces a movement, and event, a dream into the workings of human history and experiential reality. What Derrida asserts for Marx, then here, holds true in our account for and of King on August 28, 1963, when he speaks of his “dream today!” “This future is not described,” writes Derrida, “it is not foreseen in the constative mode; it is announced, promised, called for in a performative mode” (128). The dream thus announced as a real event, in the performative mode of speech helps us to take seriously what a close reading of some of MLK’s public utterances can produce in history between life (as beginning) and death (as consummation). For if “learning to live – remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone,” writes Derrida (xvii). What happens between two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits” (xvii). If living remains to be done, it remains to be done with dreams.
Yet it is plain that (African) American literature has not required critical theory to come and tap it on the shoulder and remind it of its spirits, of its roots, its indexes, its ancestors. Indeed Langston Hughes has put it so aptly: “Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die/life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams for when dreams go/Life is a barren field frozen with snow. ” This dreaming is conceived not as a respite from life on some isle of utopia, but of the very process by which life takes flight, finds fecundity, flourishes, has feeling. One need not, then read Sartre only in the reactionary space of an echo chamber of negations, but rather read the hope, affirmation, and productivity of dream and imagination:
It is therefore enough to be able to posit reality as a synthetic whole in order to posit oneself as free from it and this going-beyond is freedom itself since it could not happen if consciousness were not free. Thus to posit the world as world or to negate it is one and the same thing … For an image is not purely and simply the world-negated, it is always the world negated from a certain point of view (Sartre and Baskin 16).
To negate the world as it really is we have to apprehend it as such, in its reality, and its plenitude, and to thereby surpass it with, or as, or in an image, a dream, a vision. This is very important because in the “I Have A Dream” speech, and in the “I still have a dream,” and furthermore, in “The Promised Land” speech, King clearly articulates a relationship to the present, to the now-time of historical unfoldment, an almost eschatological temporality of the present vantage point from which to negate, to imagine, to dream.
It seems as though there are two Kings we might call to memory, then. Two modes of living with his legacy that might continue appear to us both from his own reflections on how he would like to be remembered and from two general trends in the work of remembering King. The King of (historical) actions, and the King of (literary) dreams. On the one hand is that typified by, one might say, the dominant discourse, the official record, major history, and the state. That is, on the national holiday, we remember a particular King; the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and hundreds of other awards, the orator and civil rights activist, champion of non-violence, etc. We think of the herculean efforts he participated in for the rights of African Americans to vote, to participate equally in enjoyment of public spaces, to receive equal and adequate housing, jobs and pay. The veracity of these items constituting and characterizing the life and figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,. is by no means in doubt here. This figure celebrated and commemorated in statues, monuments, the names of public schools and city streets, postage stamps, t-shirts and postcards corresponds accurately to the historical reality of a man who once lived and breathed on this planet. This is the historical, empirical King. Yet this is, perhaps, not the Martin Luther
The question, I argue is not how far we have yet to go in realizing the dream, or even in recalling the significance of its content, but rather, indeed, of how far we have to go in ourselves remembering how to dream. If the question of what to dream of becomes implicit in the call to dreaming, and the nature and status of dreams is called into question, this can only fill with a certain philosophical fecundity or consequent reflection on what, indeed, was the nature and status of Martin Luther King’s dreaming – not only it’s content, but its existential form. The claim here is that we will never "realize" King's dream by relying solely on the historical king, we need to look at the literary king – not the (constituted) being of isness, but the constituting power (adynamia) of oughtness. One of the most useful effects that the technology of the novels about King’s life present to us is that they defamiliarize the iconographic figure in subtle ways an allow the dynamic legacy and language of the man to enter into contact with the imagination and with the desires within every human being for the expression of their own agency in the creation of new and different life. The best thing they help us do is to decouple the physical person(ality) of King from the legacy of King which he would have wanted to signify – a legacy not only of service, or morality, but of a certain sort of conviction. This bifurcation is not meant to valorize one over the other in any undue way, but only to trace the movement which King himself felt was so essential in the possibility of his remembrance, and indeed in the possibility of the continuity of the dream, of dreaming itself.
Now, with Hughes’ poem, with Marx’s Manifesto, with King’s dream, we are living with spirits, learning from specters, haunted by dreams – life is a bird soaring in the firmament. Now we are living with spirits, we are learning between life and death. Here we are in the space of literature insofar as “literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (Blanchot 300). Why don’t we allow this following question, following Martin Luther King’s own final question which he posed in “The Promised Land” speech: when would I most like to live? And if we, like King, would survey the course of the past, could visit mythical, historical, and religious temporalities of the vast annals of human history and still choose to stop here, in the gift of the present, to stop here and live, between life and death, among spirits, to live with dreams: what dream would we make our own? A question not simply of what we “can,” but of what we “want.”
And indeed the question thus posed, of what we want, even if it be “false,” even if it be only of literature or of dreams, is a question of the writer, the singer, and the dreamer. It is the question of literature. But perhaps unlike Jameson’s figuration of utopia as a literary genre, we might invest in Blanchot’s notion, insofar as it illuminates the rigor and perspicacity of King’s vision, of the relation between writing – that is language – and social change:
Revolutionary action explodes with the same force and the same facility as the writer who has only to set down a few words side by side in order to change the world. Revolutionary action also has the same demand for purity, and the certainty that everything it does has absolute value, that it is not just any action performed to bring about some desirable and respectable goal, but that it is itself the ultimate goal, the Last Act. This last act is freedom, and the only choice left is between freedom and nothing” (319).
The hope, then, is that we might be able to say one day that we not only quote Martin Luther King’s dream, or rely only on the force of his faith, courage and imagination, but that we too learn to live with spirits, to dream with him – productively, actively, creatively, courageously. That will be the day when we say, with him “I still have a dream,” and “I have a dream today.” And in the face of death, to live with dreams. This, indeed, was Althusser’s injunction, in meditating on the death of man, and might be our hope, our consolation, our adumbration of the future life of humanity against portents of its annihilation. In fact, this indeed might be our understanding of the inconstruable question of the dream today, in its spectral form, as it haunts us, warding and guiding simultaneously to the promised land when Althusser writes of a “new ‘International” [which] is in the making” (22): “But in this world that provides us shelter, it is becoming a little clearer every day that men are, in ever increasing numbers, breaking the ties which silently bound them to their fate, and cursing it” (20). This “’International’ of humane protest against destiny,” (23) reminds us of that eternal struggle of ‘oughtness’ against ‘isness’ which Martin Luther King might tell us is itself our inheritance of history, the very fiber of being. If we must strive against fate, it is the fate of the future of “dying together as fools,” so that we might realize the dream, and see the promised land as King did, of the dreamworld to-come. At no time in human history has it been more important to dream, more important to chose this very moment in which to be alive. And in the face of death, to live with dreams.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis, Franc ois Matheron, and G. M. Goshgarian. The Spectre of Hegel : Early Writings. London [England] ; New York: Verso, 1997.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Meridian. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future : The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London ; New York: Verso, 2005.
King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. A Testament of Hope : The Essential
Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986.
Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. New York: Continuum, 2003.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Wade Baskin. Of Human Freedom. New York,: Philosophical Library, 1967.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Specters of Haiti: Reflections on Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press
Our freedoms are meaningless if we do not exercise them. Perhaps more importantly, without action, our "freedoms" and "rights" become emblematic only of our unfreedom, and our bondage.
Do citizens of the United States truly live in a free country? A free state of being? of doing? of acting in the world?
Today I am inspired by the example of journalists such as Jean Dominique whose indefatigable spirit triumphed for years during his lifetime over the oppressive regimes of power-politics in Haiti, and promises to bear witness, with us, to the true calling of all people to be free from censorship, state and corporate aggression and surveillance in articulating their desires, their complaints, fears, and destinies. I could not recommend more highly the documentary The Agronomist which portrays the vivacious and steadfast character of Dominique and his struggle with the Haitian people for justice and equity.
As Brazilian poet, musician, activist and historian extraordinaire Caetano Veloso urges:
Pensa no Haiti, reza pelo Haiti. O Haiti é aqui, O Haiti não é aqui.
Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti. Haiti is here, Haiti is not here.
What does Caetano mean by singing "Haiti is here"? It seems we get a clue even in “Haiti is not here,” as we are reminded that “we” are all sorts of various collectives. We can refer to the us that is "our" country, "our" foreign policy. "We" also, is each of those, including ourselves, who stand in relation to Haiti. Certainly, Caetano's maxim is equally true for Haitians. Haiti is there, and not there, is here and not here for Aristide, or Dominique - this is the entire point of their lives and struggle. The Haiti that is vs the Haiti they want to be. The Haiti we pray for, and the Haiti we pray to (see). Yet, in the less mystical variation of the "we" as outsiders, witnessing the strife of Haiti's beleagered nation, the over“there”-ness of Haiti is penetrated by the influence of our lives, our thoughts, our foreign policy, our apathy, our care IS there in Haiti, just as Haiti’s strength, life, hope, pain, destitution is here; in our hearts, our greed, our flagging confidence in the possibility of our own freedoms.
In the last few days websites that were previously blocked in China - some websites - are now currently available in Beijing, Shanghai and perhaps other parts of the country.
Or, check out this headline:
Reporters Without Borders website accessible in China for first time since 2003
Port au Prince to Beijing, Portland to wherever you are reading this, there is a liberty at stake, one worth dying for, itself dying to be exercised. I write, today, to remember that right, and to grow closer, if this can be done, to understanding what, recently, Edwidge Danticat concluded in her Toni Morrison Lecture at Princeton University, that we have a responsibility to history to "write dangerously." I have been thinking about this, and more to come (perhaps on the speech, but certainly on the proposition of writing dangerously). For me, the premise is somewhat tricky. It may very well be dangerous to write, but this does not require that one write dangerously. It seems all the more likely that to truly write, under dangerous conditions, would be to write well. To write dangerously well - this is my motto, my aim for today. That I am writing at all, is, in fact, a marked improvement over the alternative which it seems, for some reason, I've practiced so long, and so well. And so fitfully, yet safely. I write in peace, today, knowing the storm is coming tonight to the homes of those whose freedoms have come at the price paid by Dominique, and X, and King, and so many other special friends.
Free Mumia! Yes. And, further, "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery..." and, further,
free our tongues to speak this freedom - or, better yet, to sing!....
Do citizens of the United States truly live in a free country? A free state of being? of doing? of acting in the world?
Today I am inspired by the example of journalists such as Jean Dominique whose indefatigable spirit triumphed for years during his lifetime over the oppressive regimes of power-politics in Haiti, and promises to bear witness, with us, to the true calling of all people to be free from censorship, state and corporate aggression and surveillance in articulating their desires, their complaints, fears, and destinies. I could not recommend more highly the documentary The Agronomist which portrays the vivacious and steadfast character of Dominique and his struggle with the Haitian people for justice and equity.
As Brazilian poet, musician, activist and historian extraordinaire Caetano Veloso urges:
Pensa no Haiti, reza pelo Haiti. O Haiti é aqui, O Haiti não é aqui.
Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti. Haiti is here, Haiti is not here.
What does Caetano mean by singing "Haiti is here"? It seems we get a clue even in “Haiti is not here,” as we are reminded that “we” are all sorts of various collectives. We can refer to the us that is "our" country, "our" foreign policy. "We" also, is each of those, including ourselves, who stand in relation to Haiti. Certainly, Caetano's maxim is equally true for Haitians. Haiti is there, and not there, is here and not here for Aristide, or Dominique - this is the entire point of their lives and struggle. The Haiti that is vs the Haiti they want to be. The Haiti we pray for, and the Haiti we pray to (see). Yet, in the less mystical variation of the "we" as outsiders, witnessing the strife of Haiti's beleagered nation, the over“there”-ness of Haiti is penetrated by the influence of our lives, our thoughts, our foreign policy, our apathy, our care IS there in Haiti, just as Haiti’s strength, life, hope, pain, destitution is here; in our hearts, our greed, our flagging confidence in the possibility of our own freedoms.
It has been fun to follow the news stories about China's preparation for the Olympic games as it ambles up to welcome the world so to speak. I'm interested in the auxiliary effects on the status of Chinese people's access to information and freedoms of expression.
In the last few days websites that were previously blocked in China - some websites - are now currently available in Beijing, Shanghai and perhaps other parts of the country.
Or, check out this headline:
Reporters Without Borders website accessible in China for first time since 2003
Port au Prince to Beijing, Portland to wherever you are reading this, there is a liberty at stake, one worth dying for, itself dying to be exercised. I write, today, to remember that right, and to grow closer, if this can be done, to understanding what, recently, Edwidge Danticat concluded in her Toni Morrison Lecture at Princeton University, that we have a responsibility to history to "write dangerously." I have been thinking about this, and more to come (perhaps on the speech, but certainly on the proposition of writing dangerously). For me, the premise is somewhat tricky. It may very well be dangerous to write, but this does not require that one write dangerously. It seems all the more likely that to truly write, under dangerous conditions, would be to write well. To write dangerously well - this is my motto, my aim for today. That I am writing at all, is, in fact, a marked improvement over the alternative which it seems, for some reason, I've practiced so long, and so well. And so fitfully, yet safely. I write in peace, today, knowing the storm is coming tonight to the homes of those whose freedoms have come at the price paid by Dominique, and X, and King, and so many other special friends.
Free Mumia! Yes. And, further, "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery..." and, further,
free our tongues to speak this freedom - or, better yet, to sing!....
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