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Abstract
This article examines conceptual obstacles to emancipation which have emerged historically within Left theory on both sides of the Atlantic, concerned primarily with “class versus race” debates spanning from the post-war Hegelian moment to the post-structural present. While the “cultural turn” promised to give voice against structuralist silencing, the critical subject of emancipation has been defaced, eradicated such that we currently have no theoretical place from where to build an emancipatory project. We must clear an analytical space through which a renewed subject of liberation can be founded. In drawing out theoretical continuity and change across varied temporal and spatial locations—Fanon/Sartre and the French-Algerian encounter; Gilroy/Miles and British urban unrest—the article explores how the Left imaginary has lost its theoretical integrity, especially in its Foucauldian gaze, and is currently unable to provide a robust vision, beyond self-other interplay, of emancipatory change.
Notes
1 The televised Chomsky–Foucault Debate, 1971, can be watched on YouTube: < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = WveIvgmPz8>. See also Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault with Foreword by John Rajchman, The Chomsky–Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006).
4 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 226–227.
2 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 123.
3 See Edward P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors (Suffolk, UK: Merlin Press, 1978).
5 Christopher Arthur, “Stalinism and Dialectics,” Critique 20:1 (1993), p. 114.
6 Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Penguin Press, 1969), p. 200, n. 41.
7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 167.
8 Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (New York: French & European Publications, 1948).
9 Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967).
10 Azzedine Haddour, “Sartre and Fanon: On Negritude and Political Participation,” Sartre Studies International 11:1–2 (2005), pp. 286–301.
11 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 14.
12 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 8.
13 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 24–25.
14 Moulard-Leonard Valentine, “Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude's Anti-Humanist Humanism,” Human Studies 28:3 (2005), pp. 231–249.
15 James Heartfield, The “Death of the Subject” Explained (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Hallam Press, 2002).
16 Slavoj Žižek, “What Can Lenin Tell Us about Freedom Today?,” Rethinking Marxism 13:2 (2001), p. 7.
19 Stokely Carmichael, speech given at OLAS Conference 1967, cited in James, “Black Power.”
20 Angela Davis, “Marcuse's Legacies,” preface to Douglas Kellner (ed.), The New Left and the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2005), p. xi.
17 Cyril Lionel Robert James, “Black Power,” Talk given in London, 1967, < http://www.marxists.org>.
18 Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 51.
21 See Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998).
22 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964).
23 Kellner, The New Left and the 1960s.
25 Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1988), p. 61.
24 Kevin L. Yuill, Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
26 Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City 11:3 (2007), pp. 313–356.
27 Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City 11:3 (2007), 314.
28 Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City 11:3 (2007), 322.
29 Michael Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Publishers, 1983), p. 44. While Foucault credited a debt to Kant, a charge of anti-universalism is, we believe, correct, even if an anti-modernist tag has been challenged as unworthy in part (Nancy Fraser, “Michael Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative?,’” Ethics 96:1 (1985), pp. 165–184). In this respect Richard Bernstein has countered Foucauldian counter-accusation of “Enlightenment blackmail”: “Foucault's rhetoric, even the attraction of a distinctive type of skeptical freedom he adumbrates, the appeal of ‘the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, think’ is itself dependent or parasitic upon an ethical-political valorisation. What does it even mean to say that some possibilities are desirable? Without thematising this question it is difficult to discern what precisely is critical about his genre of critique. It is not Foucault's critics that have imposed this problem on him—it emerges from Foucault's own insistence that there are changes that are desirable, and that critique enables us ‘to determine the precise form this change should take.’ A sceptical freedom that limits itself to talk of new possibilities for thinking and acting but heroically or ironically refuses to provide any evaluative orientation as to which possibilities and changes are desirable is in danger of becoming merely empty – or even worse, it withholds judgement from the catastrophic possibilities which have erupted or can erupt.” See Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 162–163. See also Fraser, “Michael Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?”
30 Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” p. 337.
31 Michael Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8:4 (1982), p. 781.
32 Michael Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8:4 (1982), p. 781
33 Michel Foucault, Power and Knowledge (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1980), p. 93.
34 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p. 94.
35 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 94–95.
36 Michel Foucault, Power and Knowledge, p. 104.
37 Mark Philp, “Foucault on Power: A Problem in Radical Translation?,” Political Theory 11:1 (1983), pp. 29–52.
38 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), p. 188.
39 Philp, “Foucault on Power,” p. 45.
40 David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), p. 7.
41 David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 90.
42 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), p. 106.
43 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002)
44 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 52.
45 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 57.
46 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 68.
47 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 52.
48 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 98.
49 Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 136.
50 David Theo Goldberg, ‘Multicultural Conditions’, in D.T. Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997), p. 2. The adoption of the Althusserian concept of interpellation is highly problematic. By this theory, one can never think outside of the interpellating ideology, only within an alternative ideology if available. The shift from ideology to discourse, that is, from Althusser to Foucault does not remedy the passivity assigned to the subject in this regard, for force is not choice when the ability to choose is merely an effect of the ideology/discourse. In both positions consciousness is decidedly absent. The theory does however make a space for the “critical intellectual” who no longer centralizes a universal subject of historical transformation. The Althusser/Foucault shift has been elaborated by Heartfield in The “Death of the Subject” Explained, and subsequently developed to a comparison between Stuart Hall and D.T. Goldberg in Christopher Kyriakides, The Anti-Racist State (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2005). It is on each of the latter two studies that we build our argument in this article.
51 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p. 264.
52 Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 6.
56 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 126.
53 Goldberg, Racist Culture, p. 212.
54 Goldberg, Racist Culture, p. 212
55 Alcoff, Visible Identities, p. 114.
57 Goldberg, Racial State, p. 264. See also David Theo Goldberg, “In/Visibility and Super/Vision: Fanon on Race, Veils, and Discourses of Resistance,” in L.R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and R.T. White (eds), Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 179–200.
58 Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 245.
59 Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (eds), A Companion to African American Studies (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006); Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (eds), Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005); Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995); Lewis R. Gordon, “Sociality and Community in Black: A Phenomenological Essay,” in Robert E. Birt (ed.), The Quest for Community and Identity: Critical Essays in Africana Social Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 105–123.
60 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 1.
61 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I-Part I: The Process of Capitalist Production (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 217. Original work published 1867.
62 Alcoff, Visible Identities, p. 6.
66 Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity?,’” in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Question of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 3.
69 Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” New Left Review 209 (1995), p. 8.
63 Franz Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory (New York: The Free Press, 1957), p. 4.
64 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 83.
65 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (London: Routledge, 1994), 86–87.
67 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), p. 225.
68 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222.
70 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 17.
71 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987), 23.
72 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987), 25.
73 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987), 233.
78 Stuart Hall, “The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in G. Bridges and R. Brunt (eds), Silver Linings (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), p. 31.
79 Robert Miles, Racism and Migrant Labour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 96.
74 “Outflank” quote cited in Gilroy, Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987), 22. For an example of Milesian outflanking see Robert Miles, “Marxism Versus the Sociology of ‘Race Relations?,’” Ethnic and Racial Studies 7:2 (1984), pp. 217–237.
75 See Michael Banton and Robert Miles “Racism,” in E. Cashmore (ed.), Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (London: Routledge,1996), pp. 308–312.
76 See Simon Clarke, “Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas' Theory of the State,” Capital and Class 2 (1977), pp. 1–31.
77 For an earlier analysis which discusses Miles see John Solomos and Les Back, “Conceptualizing Racisms: Social Theory, Politics and Research,” in E. Cashmore and J. Jennings (eds), Racism: Essential Readings (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 346–356, and more recently, Bob Carter and Satnam Virdee, “Racism and the Sociological Imagination,” British Journal of Sociology 59:4 (2008), pp. 661–679.
80 Robert Miles, Racism and Migrant Labour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 176.
81 Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 87.
82 Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989)
83 See Miles, Racism and Migrant Labour, p. 103, and Miles, Racism, p. 80.
84 Miles, Racism and Migrant Labour, p. 96.
85 Robert Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? (London: Tavistock, 1987), p. 221.
86 Robert Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? (London: Tavistock, 1987), 23.
87 Robert Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? (London: Tavistock, 1987), 195 and 221.
89 Gilroy, Ain't No Black, 24–25.
88 Gilroy, Ain't No Black, p. 23.
90 Gilroy, Ain't No Black, 27.
91 Gilroy, Ain't No Black, 23.
92 Miles, “Marxism Versus the Sociology of ‘Race Relations?,’” p. 221.
93 Paul Gilroy, “The End of Anti-Racism,” New Community 17 (1990), pp. 71–84.
95 David Theo Goldberg, “The Semantics of Race,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15:4 (1992), p. 563.
94 Goldberg, Racist Culture, p. 93.
96 Robert Miles, “Exploitation,” in E. Cashmore (ed.), Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 129–131.
97 Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea, The TUC, Black Workers and New Commonwealth Immigration, 1954–1973 (Bristol: S.S.R.C. Research Unit on Ethnic Relations, 1977).
99 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 12–13.
98 Gilroy, Ain't No Black, p. 247.
100 Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2010).
101 Stuart Hall, “Brave New World,” Marxism Today, October 1988, p. 24.
103 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. xii–xv.
102 Stuart Hall, “Brave New World,” Marxism Today, October 1988, 27.
104 This paper draws from, abridges, and expands on material included in our forthcoming book, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).