Review: Achille Mbembe,trans. Lauren Dubois,Critique of Black Reason

Critique of Black Reason, trans. Lauren Dubois

Achille Mbembe

Durham: Duke University Press, 2017

ISBN: 9-7808223-63323

Kant’s first critique may be described as an attempt to hoist reason up from the contamination and impurities of subjectivity and relativity onto a transcendental level where alone it can possess objectivity and universality. This is pure reason, whose critique lays down the basis for human knowledge, its limits and the possibility of metaphysics. But Kant’s universality turns out not to be universal after all since it excludes or does not admit of certain groups, in particular black people, on the basis that they lack reason. But can there still be such a thing as black reason, and if so, what kind of reason would that be? Also, if black reason is possible, or if reason does come in different colours, could it ever be objective? These are some of the questions that Achille Mbembe sets out to explore in his new six-chapter book The Critique of Black Reason (2017). Mbembe not only believes there is such a thing as black reason but he thinks he knows what it is and what stuff it is made of.

So what is black reason? According to Mbembe ‘Black reason consists of a collection of voices, pronouncements, discourses, forms of knowledge, commentary and nonsense, whose object is things or people of “African origin”’ (p. 27). He goes on to say that ‘Black reason names not only a collection of discourses but also practices’ (p. 28). But this will not do since this definition can equally apply to any other group. Replace the words ‘black’ and ‘African origin’ in his statement with ‘white’ and ‘European origin’ and you end up with virtually the same sentiment with nothing to distinguish between the two statements except difference in cultures. But hold that thought for a moment because that is precisely Mbembe’s point. The western idea of reason is different from the black or African idea of reason, but only because both are products of different experiences – ‘collections of voices, pronouncements, discourses’. Mbembe then suggests that it is contact between both worlds that has produced two narratives: the western consciousness of blackness and the black consciousness of blackness.

With regard to white consciousness of blackness, Mbembe takes us on an historical journey, through the vicissitudes of the black experience that have shaped black consciousness and culminated in the three most important epoch-making events in black history: slavery, colonialism and apartheid. It is the familiar story of conquest, oppression, subjugation, persecution, and so on. Western consciousness of blackness is a category construct much like a prison with quartered cellars and doors through which the black man or woman passes or is let through, at the will of the white master guards, into rooms from which they are shifted from time to time, as though on a production line where he or she is shaped, boxed, stamped and eventually produced, as blackness. Like the slaves in Plato’s cave, blackness is shackled against a wall where it sees only images and never reality, and is denied not only freedom, but also the light of reason. It cannot attain knowledge of pure forms but only copies of reality, hence it cannot be admitted into Kant’s kingdom of ends. It has no access to the realms above because, as already mentioned, it lacks reason. As Mbembe points out, ‘Reason in particular confers on the human a generic identity, a universal essence, from which flows a collection of rights and values. It unites all humans… The question… was whether blacks were human beings like all others’ (p. 85). The answer for many was no. Indeed, Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative that exhorts us to treat humanity not as a means but as an end in itself did not apply to black people. The idea of absolute or intrinsic value, of a ‘supreme limiting condition’ that Kant thought is the very measure of humanity, did not apply to black people for the same reasons as stated above. Hence we see the justification for using them as instrumental value. Thus, the category of blackness is never transcended, never surpassed and even when, with luck, blackness emerges out of this category cage, it is never into the pure light of total freedom but into an open prison of partial freedom where rights are only half granted, like a tagged criminal under licence.

But much of this is not new – we are familiar with the experiences of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and the historical narrative through which each has unfolded. What Mbembe has done is to tie them all together in a bundle, under the rubric of black reason, that now serves as the genealogy of much of contemporary black experience and the history that has shaped black people’s view of themselves.

With regard to black consciousness of blackness, Mbembe points out that

Black – we must not forget – aspires also to be a color. The color of obscurity. In this view Black is what lives in the night. Night is its original envelope, the tissue out of which its flesh is made. It is a coat of arms, its uniform. (p. 152)

In other words, black reason is the consciousness of the conglomeration of the experiences of being black in a world conditioned or determined by white ideology where that consciousness, from the black perspective, feels like the consciousness of a victim of locked-in syndrome, stuck in a state in which he or she is aware of what is happening to him or her but remains powerless to express thoughts and feelings. Here two options are open to the black man or woman: either to acquiesce and die or struggle and survive. Out of the second option to fight for survival, ‘the struggle to the death’, emerges the narrative of black consciousness.

This is also where Hegel’s master/slave dialect comes into play in the sense that the master himself sooner or later has come to depend heavily on the slave for many of his needs. This then is Mbembe’s idea of two forms of consciousness where the master and slave are in a co-dependent relationship in which each holds up a mirror to the other and from the ensuing reflection both become conscious of each other and of themselves. As Hegel (1976[1807]: 111) puts it: ‘primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other.’ We find a similar idea in Fanon (1967) – from whom Mbembe also draws – in relation to black consciousness, a self-reflection or a psychopathology now occasioned by the experience of victimhood. Whatever the black man or woman does is never pure, never objective, even if excellently done, because his or her work is tainted by his blackness, the indelible ink that stains his being and that he cannot rub off: the black writer, sportsman, academic, and even beauty becomes conditioned by blackness. Or as Barbara Fields (1990: 98) puts it, ‘in the United States there are scholars and black scholars, women and black women. Saul Bellow and John Updike are writers; Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison are black writers.’

The western intellectual framework has traditionally subsumed the emotions, the body and other aspects of the self under the sovereignty of reason, which is a space that western man supposedly occupies and which he believes is his natural dwelling place. This high chamber is furnished by the categories of thought and reason (pure, untainted), where only whiteness resides. The black man and woman on the other hand occupy, as previously said, the lower chamber of unreason, where they remain under the grip of their animalistic tendencies. Those in the upper chamber are superior and by virtue of their superiority dominate the feckless occupants of the lower chamber. This analogy also reflects the Cartesian binary distinction between the mind and the body – the top represented by the mind, the home of reason, while the bottom half, the body, is the site of shame, corruption and decay, out of which impurities issue – defecation, urination, blood, and so on.

The point is that black reason, or at least its African expressionist model, does not function in this dichotomous way. Africans do not subscribe to a Cartesian mind/body or reason/emotion or nature/culture type distinction. The African thought-world proceeds largely on the basis of a single ontology through which it understands the world, and reason, either pure or impure, is not the only way of apprehending the world, as Ahmed (2004) points out, suggesting that there is such a thing as ‘emotional epistemology’.

So there is not just ‘epistemic emotion’ but there is also the epistemology of the body, the kind that we find in Merleau Ponty, Heidegger and others. In which case, there are not just two narratives – western consciousness of blackness and black consciousness of blackness as Mbembe describes it – but a third, which is the consciousness of reality from the perspective of blackness. This third narrative is not the same as the second, with its perpetual Sisyphean struggle against white domination, but a completely different narrative. It is a world in which what counts as reason is a completely different notion from this top-heavy rationalism versus the bottom-leaded irrationalities. It is the social construction of reality, to apply Berger and Luckman, but from a black perspective. This reality has regard for black positive ontology, about which I will say more shortly. But for now, the first two kinds of consciousness appear to see blackness as a fault, a sin for which punishment has been exerted and for which salvation must be sought, which can only be achieved through the repudiation of the associated forms of blackness, ‘a process of conversion to Christianity, the introduction of market economy… and the adoption of rational, enlightened forms of government’ (pp. 87–88). In other words, blackness must wash itself with the soap of whiteness (reason) by adopting the practices of whiteness where alone it can attain something close to reason, pure reason.

But this paradox of western reason is often lost in the discourse on civilization, modernity and capitalism, all of which mean something different to most black people. The problem is that western ideals and values are encapsulated in reason’s enlightenment products, such as rights, freedom, equality, rule of law and the entire civilization project, which Trevor Roper (1965: 11) describes as ‘ideas that have shaken the non-European world out of Barbarism in Africa’. This is what Gilroy (1993) refers to as the ‘complicity of reason’ where this lovely and benign ideal of pure, holy and benevolent reason has produced barbarism and wanton, uncivilized acts of inhumanity. We need only recall the horrors of slavery and the misery and death of the Middle Passage to remind ourselves of a dangerous path down which western reason has taken mankind – like Hegel’s the ‘cunning of reason’ that cons the subject into believing in the rightness of its actions, and where reason’s sovereignty cleverly avoids being implicated in the mess that is created under its direction. But reason cannot avoid the terrible things that have been done in its name and its cunningness cannot absolve it from its complicity in this dangerous myth and mess-making. The knife that cuts the bread also has blood dripping from its serrated edges.

So objective reason rises above the peculiarities of personal opinions, irrational beliefs and relative cultural practices and functions like a beacon on a hill, which everyone can see regardless of the perspective from which they are looking at it; whether they are white, black, a man or woman, everyone can see the same things through the prism of objective reason. This beacon of light is the light of truth that also enables us to see our way through this dark, mysterious world instead of resorting to constructing false or irrational beliefs like witchcraft or superstition. Therefore if objective reason enables us to see pretty much the same thing (truth) from whatever the perspective or standpoint, then there can be no such thing as black reason or feminist reason or any other kind of particularized reason. This is where pure reason, or western reason, to be precise, believes it has the conditions for knowledge of the world sewn up under the framework of objective reason. The problem is that this light of reason, whatever its claim to objectivity, only shines in one direction at any given time (i.e. it is not universal), much like when it is daytime in one part of the world and night-time in another, but never daylight across the world at the same time. For example, Isaiah Berlin in The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), compares the way the hedgehog knows with the way the fox knows: the hedgehog knows one big thing while the fox knows many small things, meaning that there are many different ways of knowing. Reason does not come down to us from heaven ready-made; human beings are themselves shapers of reason, as it emerges out of particular social or cultural experiences. So there can be a child’s way of knowing, an elderly person’s way of knowing, a man or a woman’s way knowing and perhaps a white and black person’s way of knowing. Certain experiences are not vouchsafed to particular groups that inhabit particular social spaces, such as the marginalized, who alone can tell us what the experience is like. For example, the top cannot really know what it is like to occupy the bottom while the bottom cannot really know what it is like to occupy the top (imagination will not do) and a coherence of knowledge cannot be achieved by a single perspective but from a diverse perspective.

This is where Mbembe’s idea is not unlike standpoint theory, the kind that we find in some feminist thought now associated with thinkers like Haraway (1988), Hartsock (2004), Harding (1993) and others. Standpoint theory posits that a particular standpoint or perspective offers a unique insight into the world and that no particular standpoint is privileged over another since they all possess unique epistemic merits offered by those perspectives. Harding calls this ‘socially situated knowledge’, which in the end provides ‘strong objectivity’ that offers a balanced (tightened objectivity) to the sum of human knowledge. Strong objectivity therefore can only be achieved through a consideration of different perspectives. From particular experiences each can contribute something different to our knowledge of the world and, in doing so, also enrich it.

The danger here is that, like standpoint theory, Mbembe’s black reason risks essentializing blackness. It particularizes reason by turning it into a concrete form of black essence, thus invoking the very category difference in terms of race as a fixed and naturally determined phenomenon. Blackness becomes a unique intrinsic property that all black people share, like a blood type that runs through the veins of every black person and acts like cordage that binds them all together. But is this not the very idea of race as essence against which the likes of Anthony Appiah, Naomi Zack, Paul Gilroy and a host of authorities have devoted so much time and intellectual effort to dismissing? Is this not the very narrative against which centuries of struggle have been waged and wars fought and freedom partially won? The race sceptics – Appiah and others – argue that race does not exist since it refers to no meaningful object in the world. There is only one race and that is the human race, to which we all belong. But does this idea of common humanity (one humanity) not take us back to objective reason? If race does not exist, then blackness does not exist and, if blackness does not exist, then black reason does not exist. This is where Mbembe’s thesis finds itself on the horns of a dilemma.

But that is not the only problem that Mbembe’s thesis faces since other authorities believe that race may not be biologically real but socially real. Mbembe can claim the social reality of race while rejecting its natural determinism project and then bring black reason under the social constructionist framework, as a form of ‘situational’ or ‘social epistemology’. The other problem, however, is that if black reason does exist, this idea homogenizes, generalizes or universalizes blackness as a common experience shared by all black people across the black world. But can we say that black reason is the same in the USA, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and all the way to Zimbabwe? To be black in America is not quite the same thing as to be black in South Africa or to be black even in Saudi Arabia, and so allowance must be made for the different ways that blackness has evolved in these different parts of the world. As Mbembe himself acknowledges, ‘not all Africans are blacks and not all blacks are Africans’, so what kind of reason draws all black people of Africa and the diaspora into one pool? Blackness is a fragmented notion that is now difficult to piece together into one single homogeneous experience. Languages, habit and customs are different, and with that come different conceptual thought-worlds. Brazilian blacks speak Portuguese, Columbian blacks speak Spanish, African Americans speak English and hardly any of these speak or can understand any African languages, all of which informs the way that each sees the world. As Paul Robeson once said in an interview, ‘I am an American but I see my roots in Africa’ and, having been transplanted from African roots into a different soil and climate, it makes a whole world of difference to the way that blackness evolves. Thus, the experience of a black British Member of Parliament is not the same as the experience of an unemployed African American living in a Chicago ghetto. Nationality, environment, culture, politics, religion and other factors may trump, or at least dilute, experiences of blackness beyond the superficiality of skin colour. Blackness is not a universal phenomenon, however much it is homogenized or equalized: some black people are just a little blacker than others. For example, writing about the slave experience, Ira Berlin (1998) has pointed out that ‘the reality of a slave’s life was different depending upon time and place. No slave experience was the same.’ Since membership of this putative black community is constantly changing, partly through miscegenation, new members are being admitted while others of ambiguous shades are being excluded.

So how do we reconcile the binary opposites of subjectivity and objectivity, of universality and particularity, where black essence is both denied and also affirmed as a significant phenomenon that is worth pursuing? Mbembe has already provided the answer, which does not necessarily imply essentialism but a kind of fellow-feeling, a brotherhood or sisterhood that black people appear to share. Mbembe’s black reason is the consciousness of the conglomeration of experiences of being black in a world conditioned largely by white thought, imagination and actions, and the struggle that has ensued against those negative acts that white reason has fashioned. These are the acts that have shaped black experiences in one way or another, which is to say that all black men and women alive today have to some extent been products of slavery or colonialism or apartheid.

One other criticism of this book is that it appears to take a masculine line where reason is seen not only through the trope of colour but also through the trope of gender. If black reason is tainted by blackness then black reason is also tainted by maleness, further perpetuating the distinction between reason and emotion, where reason is male and emotion is female. Almost every pronoun refers to ‘he’, which could be a linguistic device but, in the context of a discourse on reason, reason becomes embodied in a masculine persona. This again was the opportunity for Mbembe to distance himself from the narrative that sees reason in masculine terms. Sara Ahmed (2004) has criticized the way that reason is seen as male while emotions are seen as female. But there is also a sense in which emotions are seen as black. If the centre of the world is gradually shifting from Europe to elsewhere, as Dasgupta (2006) tells us, then the centre of the world as dominantly male is also shifting. Indeed, many of the voices now leading the charge are those of black women.

There is beauty in Mbembe’s prose, where certain passages take off in a flight of poetic fancy. But with streams of pretty sentences come the problem in which passages begin to read like what Isaiah Berlin once described as a stream of ‘metaphysical free associations’, which is to say they begin to lose critical nous. This is partly because Mbembe has the tendency to make free-flowing assertions that are left hanging in the air, sometimes dense and cryptic, where the reader itches for them to be pricked with his critical pin and let their meanings pour out.

Finally, I think Mbembe should have found more space for a positive black ontology that does not revolve around themes of victimhood and white oppression. I am aware that this is the book he chose to write and not the one I wish he had written. But more can be said for black reason as shaped by a consciousness that rises above these experiences. Before white contact with Africa, there was no blackness since blackness is a social classification or an invention of western obsession with categories. But at one time there was a world where black reason did not exist because there was no such a thing as black people, just people who thought and felt and tried to understand the world and their place in it. That world still exists in cultures so rich and dynamic that white domination and oppression have not erased a world that has not completely disappeared into the dark nights of racial discrimination. That culture is alive and well in literature, music, art, entertainment, intellectuality, politics, economics, science, religion, sports, and so on, and is not one that is weighed down by the constant refrain of oppression. As Eugene Genovese (1972) tells us, even during the dark and punishing days of slavery, slaves still carved out a positive world for themselves, as human beings and not just as slaves. As EP Thompson also once wrote, ‘The working class…was present at its own making’ and ‘the working class made itself as much as it was made.’ This sentiment applies equally to the slave, as Ira Berlin (1998: 2) also noted: ‘The slaves’ history – like all human history – was made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did for themselves.’ This rich, positive black ontology forms a significant part of black reason and is a story that is also worth telling, not simply as an adjunct to the story of woes. ‘Still, I rise’, writes Maya Angelou (1978), and to rise is to find optimism in the face of these negative experiences. That too, is black reason.