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Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
01:02:09
An interview with Mark Christian Thompson
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the African American Studies Channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brittany Edmonds and I'm very happy to be joined today by Dr. Mark Christian Thompson. Dr. Thompson will be talking to us today about his new book, Phenomenal Blackness, Black Power, philosophy and theory. Dr. Thompson is a Krieger Eisenhower professor and professor of English at John Hopkins University. His research and teaching concentrate in African American literature and philosophy, 20th century German philosophy, Kafka, the Philosophy of Race and Jazz Studies. He is the author of five books, Black Fascisms, African American Literature and Culture between the Wars, Kafka's Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic Anti Music, Jazz and Racial Blackness in German between the Wars, Phenomenal Blackness, which we'll be talking about today, and the forthcoming the Critique of Martin Luther King Jr. And philosophy. Thank you for being here today, Dr. Thompson.
- [02:14]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [02:16]
B
Yeah. So why don't we get started with you telling us a bit about the title Phenomenal Blackness and maybe just giving us a kind of general introduction to the monograph.
- [02:25]
C
Sure. The title actually was sort of late edit, and it just came to me after I was looking at the book in its entirety and trying to think of it as a whole. And really what it refers to is the use of phenomenology. In approaching blackness and how to understand blackness, not just from a constructivist point of view, as that is, as a social construction, but as these authors in the 60s and early 70s were thinking about blackness, which was as something not necessarily biologically inherent, but something spiritual, that. That had an essence to it. An essentialism that is an unpopular term today, but was one that didn't necessarily bring derision at the time, at least for the authors under consideration. That was sort of my in into the book to think about what essentialism, racial essentialism, meant to some of the major figures of black power, at least the major writers, major intellectual figures, and to look at how they inform themselves and what it means not just to be black from a social perspective, but from a philosophical perspective. What. What is race and what is its claim to shaping human beings outside of their social conditions? If, in fact, there is any claim to be made there? My own opinion is, no, there isn't. But that was probably a more difficult position to maintain at the time. And so what I wanted to do was think about each author's philosophical training and how they thought about thinking of being. Because black being is a term that comes up actually quite a bit these days in criticism. And to look back and try and sort of rebuild or reconstruct the intellectual history that leads actually to this moment where we start to think about black being. And what does it mean from a poetic sense, from an aesthetic sense, and from a critical sense to be black? And do we, in fact, begin to import something like that essentialism from that time into the current moment?
- [04:47]
B
You know, it's so interesting that you said that you don't share the views of many of the writers that you include in your monograph. And that gloss that you just gave of, you know, the difference between our current moment and maybe the moment that you're writing about in your monograph. Just because I was so sort of struck in the introduction by your sort of careful delineation of all these sort of different movements in black philosophical thought, in black literary thought, and sort of black sort of theorizing and criticism. And I was. I don't know, I was struck by your ability to sort of say, look, there was one mode that was sort of anthropological and sociological, and then we've shifted to this other mode that's now sort of aesthetic and ontological. And in your introduction, how you cover that history, it was so fascinating because you say, like, basically what emerges is a kind of logic problem where there are theorists who want to insist on a singular blackness, but also don't Want that sort of theorization to fall into the scientific racism that they're obviously going to be arguing and positioning themselves against. And I just found that, like, such a sort of smart way to think about this, kind of turn to the ontological and to the aesthetic. And it's interesting to just hear you now say that. Well, you're not quite buying into all of these arguments because it's not apparent as you read your monograph. And I was thinking throughout it, like, wow, I wonder what Dr. Thompson is thinking about these ideas before we dig a little bit deeper into that. I was curious as I was reading your introduction first, but also throughout the volume, like, you don't use the word intellectual history and you also don't use the word, excuse me, genealogy. And I was just. Is that intentional? Is there a reason why. Do you understand yourself to be undertaking a different kind of intellectual project in this book, or. Yeah, if you could speak to that, that would be great.
- [06:47]
C
Right. I'll take the use of genealogy, which is actually a term that I just use now, but sort of refused to use in the book. I wanted to avoid being sort of pinned in a Foucaultian corner or a Nietzschean corner, where I could simply be not accused, but at least identified as reproducing a type of critical approach that I really didn't think was appropriate for the material I was looking at. Because genealogy somehow suggests that these authors would have been situated in a traditional. That they. That they weren't necessarily. But I should rephrase that. It was a tradition that they were fluent in, but not necessarily originally situated in. And so genealogy would have only gone so far. It could only go back to a certain point. And then I would need to say, but how was the leap made from one set of philosophical concerns, even if they weren't necessarily identified as such, to another set of philosophical concerns? And genealogies didn't sort of give that type of breathing room that I was looking for intellectual history. My relationship with that term is a little more fraught because I never really. I didn't start off or start out as an intellectual historian, at least I didn't think of myself as that. But it kind of turns out that I am. So, you know, it's something that I'm just coming to terms with now. Well, okay, I guess this is what I do. But I didn't want it to make it seem somehow theoretically dry. So the idea is that one can do intellectual history or a form of historicism that still has this sort of edge to it, that Say the current or the contemporary theoretical interventions in African American studies make. I almost felt like, well, if I call it intellectual history, does that somehow neuter it in a way that maybe I don't want? And so I avoided the term. But I think that there is a way to recuperate that term without necessarily de emphasizing some of the more radical aspects of what was going on at the time and what might be going on in the argument I'm making.
- [09:04]
B
Okay. Okay, great. Well, if we turn to your book, you know, you're examining the intersections of black and German thought after the 1960s, and you note how literary language comes to be understood as the primary, primary social expression of blackness. Can you tell us a bit about how that happens?
- [09:23]
C
Yeah. So it may seem both a given and in some way counterintuitive, because in thinking about expressive modes, the types of literary interventions that at least Barako was talking about in early 60s weren't necessarily. They were avant garde. They were avant garde interventions that wouldn't have been thought of as something of a common reading or something for a general reader, but nevertheless became that. So in shifting away from, say, emphasizing something like music, which may have been how we might have viewed this mid century sort of jazz moment or the Jazz Age as the new Negro movement is often situated in. To something like a much more purely, or I'll put in quote, purely literary sensibility is actually not entirely what would be what they would have meant by the term, which was literariness, or what Baraka called literary Negroness, captures all of that. It captures the visual or captures musical and so on, and the plasticity of just this type of artistic creation. But what he seemed, or why he seems to designate it in a literary vein has to do with its mode of presentation, mode of consumption in a popular vein, but also the way in which it is produced, which for him, language is essential in pushing back against a type of discursive public sphere in which African American intellectuals are weighing into and in which these arguments are taking place. So the role of language, literature, and the way that language and literature can build community and African Americanness in the sense that Baraka, Mike, Nina, at the time, becomes crucial and is doing something that a certain visual nomenclature won't do, because that has to be in some way new, known in advance before the viewer can start to participate in that discourse, he's looking more something like common language that literature builds on, that anyone can have access to and engage with wherever one might come from.
- [11:45]
B
Yeah, no, that's interesting. So still thinking about this Shift, which you're identifying as sort of happening in the late 60s and the 70s. And you identify a lot of different sort of writers and thinkers. So Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. You know, across each of your chapters, I was kind of struck by the variety of ways that these writers and thinkers are relating to sort of literariness or to language or to sort of English as a mode that can intervene in different ways in social and political sort of fields. And so I'm curious about whether or not you think that this. Gosh, this variety of approaches, of conceptualizations, whether you think that's engendered by the flight away from the sociological and anthropological, or if you think it's really related to a broader set of sort of social and political changes that are taking place at the time, or if those things are kind of sort of related in ways that we can't disentangle.
- [12:47]
C
I think they're related. I'm not. It is difficult to disentangle. Part of what I hope to do is to try to at least begin some of that work. But I think what we find is that the different approaches, I sort of saw them developmentally, that there was a history, an intellectual history, to use the term, that was manifesting itself with each chapter where we would begin with the move away from that anthropological, sociological mode which Baldwin sort of represents. Whereas Ellison was already leaning out of that. Baldwin really embraces that move. And in the next chapter with Baraka, where he starts to try and formulate how exactly what will be the new sort of methodological paradigm for understanding these types of moves, what we start to find is that in the search for a mode of articulation for speaking a type of blackness that maybe either wasn't critically conceived of before this moment or couldn't have been articulated in any way before this moment, we start to see this movement into the aesthetic where truly hesitant and in fact, rejecting any notion of an essential biological difference, one is left really with culture. And how. How is this going to manifest itself, this essential difference and the aesthetics of blackness start to come to the fore. How they're expressed and. And what they do in the public sphere is something that Malcolm X thinks about. I don't really take Malcolm X to be. To be considering this in the same way that any of the others thinkers do, or even Cleaver to be thinking about it in the same way that Baraka does, or that Davis does, but that his contribution still moves that history along to the point where we do End with Davis, who really is a trained philosopher in the Frankfurt Main, who studies at the Frankfurt School and is able to express what I would consider to be a fully articulated black critical theory that just as quickly as it appears, sort of starts to disappear as well. So it's more of a development or an evolution that I was looking at through the 60s and into the 70s that led to each individual chapter. And looking at the specific text, body of text that I looked at.
- [15:24]
B
Yeah, I was really struck by your sort of coverage. Right. I mean, through each of your chapters, not only do you hit all of these different sort of writers, thinkers, orators, but you also cover a great, I mean, kind of a great deal of black culture, like a bunch of different forms of media. And so we're definitely going to sort of dig into that. I wanted to start by thinking about your Baldwin chapter. You position Baldwin as a kind of integral transitional figure between these sort of two modes. And I wanted to hear a little bit more about that, about why sort of Baldwin is so important as a kind of transitional figure and what work you see his writing doing.
- [16:06]
C
So from just from a critical perspective, I. Baldwin, James Baldwin, at the moment occupies an odd position in Canada because on the one hand, there's a sort of understoodness to. When you say, well, Baldwin can be used for almost anything, you find a Baldwin quote and you've established something, your argument, or at least an avenue into your argument. On the other hand, actually getting into the specifics of the text, we start to find someone who's perhaps much more difficult to characterize and to situate within the types or the ways or the types of frames and in the conversations we might want to have right now or have in Baldwin's name. And so in reading Baldwin, particularly the works in the 60s, some. Some lesser known, the essays are well known, but they're not, as they don't get as much coverage sometimes as some of the more major works. I wanted to think about how difficult Baldwin can make today's discussions that are often held in. In his name. And so what I started to find was that there was a type of essentialism there at a preferential treatment of subjects that can be a little uncomfortable at times, but is always productive and is always well intentioned or with the best intention. So in writing the Baldwin chapter, I actually had both the best time, but also the hardest time because I linked his work to Gautamer, because I needed a type of philosophical and also religious frame for thinking about how. How language is creating community and friendship and how that might have racial undertones or be explicitly racial in Baldwin. And once I started to think about these two together, they're actually working at the same time, parallel, different countries, of course, but there are works that could be thought of as intersecting. I started to realize that, well, we had a type of phenomenology that was starting to take shape. It's key, key moment. For me, it wasn't just something like an aesthetical critical theory that one might find in Adorno and then carry over into Baraka, but an actual philosophy of blackness taking shape that had to do with language and the positionality of language as it shapes a community and how being born into a language, or what Baldwin considered to be being born into a language, shaped one's character and thought and how one approached certain issues and felt a sense of belonging or alienation. And for this reason, BRCA couldn't really imagine what Baldwin was. Was able to do even earlier, but he could only transform it and aestheticize it in some way. And I found that some simply breathtaking. And I still want to think more about it.
- [19:16]
B
Yeah, wow. Well, just sort of moving to thinking about your inclusion of Malcolm X, especially your comment just now prior to this question about sort of perhaps the Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver chapters working a bit differently than do the others. You know, one of the things that I was really sort of pleased to see was your inclusion of Malcolm X. And you're sort of treating his facility with language and his intentionality with language in a sort of theoretical and philosophical register. And so in that chapter, you talk about Malcolm X as sort of rejecting sort of essentialist elements in his view of language. And that seems to rub up against what you've just said about Baldwin. And so I'm curious if you can say something about how Malcolm X's use of language fits into this sort of broader idea of language as a social expression of blackness, of sort of language as being theorized as sort of central to articulations of blackness that are removed from the biological. I wonder if you could just say a bit about that.
- [20:23]
C
So you just put pressure on probably one of the theoretical issues in constructing a book that I had some of the most difficulty with because there's no way I didn't wasn't going to include Malcolm X. There's just too much, too much going on there. And the amount of work, that philosophical work that remains to be done on Malcolm X is probably enormous. I should say a couple things that struck me first about reading the Autobiography once again was that the extent to which Malcolm X names texts that he read while in prison and does, says directly. I read Kant, I read all the great philosophers. I don't, I don't have anything of value. They're not valuable to me in any way, at least in this. But I've read them, I know them, and I can talk about them. This is an important move because. And coming back to your question about language, because he isn't taking an essentialist view in any sense about, about language or, or even race, but sees it in a purely constructivist way that's used ideologically in order to advance the goals of white supremacy. That said, he does take a sort of if it walks like the duck, talks like a duck, ontology. And. But what I mean by that is, even if it's not coming from some essential point of view, it's being treated as if it does in, in society. And so we have to be able to address it in the way, in the way that it is taken seriously by those who seek to oppress us. If we do not, if we don't, then the subversion or the counter discursive move to laxivate Foucaultian, again, the counter discursive move that's made won't really have the type of traction that it needs to have in order to undermine the racist arguments that are being made at their philosophical core, at their ontological core. He wasn't, at least in my reading of him, he wasn't necessarily in favor of a claim that there would be something like a separate linguistic discourse that takes place in black America that requires some form of cultural translation. It's not that he rejected that there would be something like this, but he understood the public sphere as being monologic, monolingual in the good Habermasian sense. Right. Which is of course, the bad Habermasian sense. And so with that understanding in tow, the only way in was against. But it was something that had to be done through stealth and absolute confidence in what one was doing and saying. So to just try and put a bow on it, or to put in a nutshell, the response, he rejected essentialism, but understood that his opponents didn't. And so in approaching his linguistic arguments or arguing in a discursive register in the public sphere, he understood that he had to accept certain arguments that his opponents were making in order to destroy them. He was in this sense a deconstructionist without really caring at all for whatever may have been going on in French theory in the 60s. At the time, yeah, you had A.
- [23:45]
B
Great line in your book, and I'm not going to remember it, but I'm going to try to paraphrase it where you said something like Malcolm X didn't believe that deconstruction could solve, couldn't sort of rid us of race. And so it's like he was willing to sort of wield it, but sort of didn't believe in it, so to say, so to speak. I'm paraphrasing you wrong, but it's a line that I really love because it was like clever and pithy and it shows up and then you just move on. All right, so, you know, turning to Baraka, right? By the time we get to Baraka in your book, that's the chapter that follows the Malcolm X one, you're really seeing Baraka as sort of just, you know, sort of blazing a kind of new trail on the scene. I mean, he is. You describe him in the introduction as sort of joining these two modes, the socio, sort of anthropological or excuse me, not the socioanthropological, as sort of joining Baldwin's sort of literariness, but also sort of having in effect, some of Malcolm X, some of Malcolm X's sort of willingness to have a looser relationship to race and relationship to language. And so I'm just curious if you could speak about Baraka, his contributions, how he influenced sort of black theorizing about black life and aesthetics sort of moving forward.
- [25:01]
C
So the influence is profound. And it's always, of course, difficult to have a conversation about this is what Barak. Because you never know or it's difficult. This is what Davis did. And you're like, oh my God. The next thing you know, you get an email. If you're lucky, you'll get email. So I'll try and forgive me, anyone out there if I just get it painfully wrong, but I. I honestly do see Broca as some. As inaugurating African American theory as we sort of do it today. Because that, that moment, Bruce people moment and text surrounding it directly calls for the philosophical understanding of African American literary studies and culture and a movement away from a much more sociological and anthropological based form of criticism. How he does it is of course, fascinating because what do you do at this point if you want to say, well, we need to move away from sort of empirical views, biological views, we want to move away from the data collection of the anthropological view and the sociological view and think about what it means to be black as something that is more than a constructed identity. But we don't really want to get into a type of reverse racism situation where just because we say, well, blackness is a biological trait, let's say, you certainly now run the risk of doing the thing that you're fighting against. There was a ready made model for that, for articulating that at the time. And it had to do with art, aesthetics, jazz poetry, novel writing and so on. And a tradition of thinking about this form of production in African America has something uniquely African American as the unique African American contribution to American society and so on. We do things different than at least two forms of aesthetic production that are different. That, that was something that was an argument that he didn't necessarily need to make originally. What he, what he then needed to do was though, talk about how that hasn't been corrupted or co opted or commodified by a culture industry that had already sort of invaded and taken jazz over and was producing its form of it, which is to say a white form or something that was palatable for a middle class audience to consume en. And there you sort of need something like an autonomous art form that can't be commodified. And that's where the contribution turns to something like a form of blackness that can't be touched, which is expressed one way or the other in African American aesthetic production, both in poetry and in music and in visual art and so on. Otherwise it's something that's open to co optation, to commodification and to destruction, and just can't really ever be verified as something authentically black because how we would consume it or encounter it would always be mediated by some form of interference. There has to be something there that can't be touched, that survives this process and can be communicated to the world. Now, how is that communicated? And here to go back to your early question about language and why language is of a part opposed to say, music or so is that that translation of this core of blackness has to occur not necessarily in the poem, but in the critique of the poem, the critical theory of the poem, the writing about the poem, or the writing about the jazz piece, or the writing about the painting and so on. That's where the racial core, or the autonomous racial core of the work of art speaks in some form of cultural and social specificity that allows for use, political use, activism, whatever is needed at the time. In that 60s moment though, it comes later. But in that 60s moment though, the thought isn't really for what happens when critical theory becomes co opted, commodified and so on, and is collusive with a cultural industry in its approach to examining and expressing whatever that autonomous racial core is. That is a later question which I believe we're still grappling with today.
- [29:57]
B
Oh, great. Well, I'm going to ask you about that at the end of the interview. So keep that in the back of your mind, because I'm actually very curious about that. But how do you just explain the Baraka chapter? I'm actually curious about, you know, the communication thing. You said it's not simply the sort of music or the poem, but it's also the sort of critic making what's sort of untouchable in the music or the poem sort of available. You're saying to a. And so I'm curious about what that encounter is. Right. If that's not like. I'm curious about the mode of giving access to what is untouchable in the art form through language. Like, is it because language is sort of mediating it that it remains untouched? I'm still. I'm just curious. It seems to me like that's a tension that I'm a little interested in. And then I'm also interested, sort of related to that question about, you know, the role of the critic vis a vis the artist. Right. You know what I mean? Because that also raises super uncomfortable questions. Here I am, I've just made something beautiful, and nobody will really know it unless the right critical comes along and. And tells folks what's sort of untouchable and beautiful in it, you know?
- [31:06]
C
Right. So again, this is that sort of phenomenological aspect of this argument, which is it's won't. Of course, it couldn't be just any critic. It would have to be one who shares the same life world as the artist in some way. And here we again, we get into that for some queasy area of type of racial or sexualism you have that we're finding in these texts at this moment, where it's really the black critic, as opposed to the whiteness, the black critic, white critic. These are hermeneutic terms that are used in the 60s in order to approach not just say, jazz, but jazz criticism of the time. And what is legitimate jazz criticism, what is not legitimate jazz criticism? And so there are terms that Barack himself uses. So that's the first part of this. The reception of the work, the critical reception of the work has to be done. There is an immediacy to it, an unmediated aspect to it, a type of phenomenological understanding of it that attracts. That allows for entry, or a type of intersubjectivity between work and criticism. Now, from that point of view, there are two possible, at least two possible ways of being receptive to the work. And this is the second part of the question. As the artist, I can put the work out, and I will have an audience that will have a reaction to an affective reaction to the work, which will be determined by a shared life world which is. Exists before us and around us. It can stop there, right? And one can experience the work of art. And I'm doing the scare quotes again, authentically in this way. Or it could be experienced first in this way by the critic and then elaborated by the critic to specific ends. These ends will never be instrumental because as member of the community, I would simply be working against myself in that way in order to. If I were to do that. But they can be directed towards more to larger projects. Political resistance, for instance, activism of some kind or representation or gaining office or who knows, whatever one needs to do in order to help myself, which in turn helps the community or the life world to which both work, artist and critic belong. Or artist, critic world, so to speak.
- [33:46]
B
No, that makes a lot of sense. But as you were speaking right now, I'm teaching the Harlem Renaissance. And so I'm thinking about, I'm sure, you know, this essay, it's very popular essay, but Zora Neale Hurston's How It Feels to Be Colored. Me, right? And in that essay, one of the times where she feels most colored is when she's in a jazz cabaret and she's sitting beside, you know, sort of a white patron. And, you know, she, you know, in this. In Zora Neale Hurston sort of style, she. She describes herself in the jazz cabaret as hearing the music and immediately being released into the jungle, right? I mean, that's Zora Neale Hurston, right? Just very much over the top paragraph, Long description of her being in the jungle as the music plays, right? She has her tom toms in hand and she's shaking her spear. I mean, the thing is, it's intense. But then she says after the song is over, you know, she always likes to look at, you know, the white patron, and they're just, you know, sort of sitting there, you know, smoking their cigar, whatever, and they'll say something like, oh, that's a nice tune, wasn't it? And her point is that, you know, she got to experience that performance sort of bodily, right? She got to experience sort of immediately, to put. To return to your scare quotes, she got to experience it authentically. And so I'm curious because, you know, Zora Neale Hurston, who's more anthropological than that, right? She kind of revels in it with a deep irony. And so I'm curious, sort of thinking about these two ways of sort of accessing that which cannot be touched and sort of putting it in service of the life world where it's sort of instantiated and sort of us thinking about all of this as a move away from the sociological and the anthropological. I'm just curious, right? Because to me, you know, and it might be just because I'm teaching it, but it seems like such a repeat of this moment that's written about in a ton of Harlem Renaissance novels, right? Like, most of them feature a moment where there's a black person out in Harlem. They're surrounded by white people who either can't dance, who don't recognize music, and just. Who just are sort of racially unable to partake of the scene that they're exploiting. You know what I mean? And so I'm just curious, you know, what, you know, what would be the difference to, like, an unwitting reader, if they're coming to Barak and seeing this theory and saying, well, you know, what's phenomenological about that? This just looks like the Harlem Renaissance redux, you know.
- [36:05]
C
So I also, I think of that the Hurston essay, I'll get to butcher the title probably slightly here, but what white publishers won't publish. It just has to sort of, here's how you get something. Here's what you need to include if you're going to do some black literature and get it published and it's good, something that'll get you some money. I think the difference. It's actually, this is. This is a fabulous question because the difference would be in. In Hurston's. Hurston's essential or phenomenological view is still ultimately understood or characterized by anthropology, right? It's. I've got a spear. I mean, I've become primitive once more. These are distinctions that only an anthropologist really would make or a primitivist at the time. And so I think what Baraka might respond would be with something like, well, that image that you. You just took yourself to, as you try to, you know, expand on what it feels like, was already one that's been. Was programmed for you, right? That doesn't belong to you and isn't part of your life world except in an instrumental way or something that was encoded upon a life world. It does beg the question of to what extent does blackness later become A type of negative theology. Right. Well, what will you say about it that isn't already some form of instrumental image that's being used for oppression? And here there doesn't seem to be a good answer. Right. It seems to be a kind of, well, you just know it. It just grew. Right. You can't really say what it was. You just have it and it's there and you feel it. And it's the critic's job to try and be true to. To that unspeakability, but at the same time say something. And that what he then, in doing so does, is authorizes forms of criticism in the name of a work without anything to verify the actual legitimacy of that criticism with anything other than, well, it's part of the life world. So Hurston's description, the spear, the jungle, and so on, would be removed entirely. What you would then get instead would be a philosophical criticism about the work that was just listened to, which would then be used to look at differences within the audience and what that exchange is between white patron and black patron. But it would be done in the name of something, a type of inclusion exclusion that really has no. No mode of articulation other than I feel it and you don't. But the. It really can't be explained because once I start to explain it, I run the risk of letting you commodify it in some way or just repeating some commodified argument to begin with.
- [39:05]
B
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- [39:09]
C
I don't even know my size.
- [39:11]
B
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- [39:23]
C
That was easy.
- [39:25]
B
Stitch Fix online. Personal styling for everyone. Free ship, shipping and returns. No subscription required. Get started today@stitchfix.com yeah, so I have one more question about this, and then I do think we should move to different parts of the book. And this could just be my own misunderstanding of the Gadamer chapter, but sort of what you're saying about how Baraka might respond to a question about, well, isn't this just like what Zora Neale Hurston describes in the 20s and the 30s, maybe 30s? Your response seems to me to sound a lot like how Habermas characterizes sort of Gadamer's view of the world, where it's like sort of everything is secured by a tradition. And whenever there's any kind of sort of conflict in. Of values of ideas. They're sort of resolved in this sort of fallback to tradition. And sort of. That seems to me how you've just explained sort of Baraka's sort of idea about the sort of what's untouchable in black art. It just. It falls back on this idea of racial essentialism that really doesn't kind of answer to anything except itself, which is always being sort of conceptualized by someone who has the power to insist upon their own sort of understanding of it. And so I'm just. I'm curious, you know, I know these are different parts of your book, but as you were speaking, I just. I heard sort of echoes of what seemed to me how Habermas, you know, characterized Gadamer. And I don't know if that's right, but I just wonder if you have thoughts about it.
- [40:59]
C
Well, that's absolutely correct. And it's part of the developmental model that I was trying to lay out in the book, which was. You're absolutely right to point to that in Baraka, if in fact, that's there in Baraka. And again, I await that email. It's a Santa Barak as that fallback on tradition and some of the work that Gadamer does which goes understated or unstated in the text itself. And that was really just strategic or strategic on my part. I didn't really want to say that, but it's necessary. But it is true. That is what is happening in Baraka. That changes, though, as we start to move into the more Marxist and critical, theoretical, in quotes, proper view of the very problem or the methodological approach that Barak introduces, where this idea of, well, we're all part of that life world, and we share this tradition, so we understand it without really needing or being able to articulate that understanding. It's just what we are. That itself is seen as a form of ideology by, to some extent, Cleaver, but certainly by Davis, where then the question becomes, well, how do. How we grapple with this and the answers that we come up with as we debunk not just white supremacist ideology, but our own burgeoning sort of ideology of blackness, starts to define how we might approach racial ontology and move forward without falling into some of these traps. Yeah, all right.
- [42:52]
B
Well, yeah, I think that that provides a kind of perfect transition to talking about Eldridge Cleaver in your book. You write that he sort of interrogates. And you just sort of said this. He interrogates the Marxist Leninist orientation of radical black political thought through Literary self fashioning. And so I'm curious about how Eldridge Cleaver's sort of hermeneutical explanation of black life and aesthetics, how it differs from Baraka's, since that's what we're talking about now, but even from Baldwin's or Malcolm X's. And you started that answer a bit, but maybe you could elaborate, you know, what, how he's sort of doing something that's a bit different than what Baraka outlines.
- [43:38]
C
So it would be hard to maintain an essentialist position in Cleaver's work. Not because it isn't there or it's rejected outright, but probably more because self fashioning serves the purpose of a type of race man, extension to what. What the race is in and of itself. So if Cleaver is this and the race exists, he becomes representative in almost 19th century fashion, right, here comes the race man. The problem was, is that he had very few stable qualities to present in order to. To make that argument and say, well, here's a definite structure. So Cleaver starts to look to forward far more postmodern and of that moment than Malcolm X would and even than Baraka himself, because Baraka is still ultimately concerned with the work of art, whereas Cleaver has no concern about this. It's not his interest. In a way, it's just a category difference of the type of writing that these two are doing. But there's a deeper difference in their approaches and how Cleaver envisions his intervention and his understanding of black culture, which is ultimately looking for a form of black Marxism that would not be necessarily beholden to these sort of white civilists in the history of Marxism, including Marx himself, but would also be specific enough to address local concerns while being global in scope and bring together the black world in a common struggle. But in doing so, the platform was not specific enough as we read through his sort of scattered writings that we receive in order to fully articulate a stable position. And so what we get is something much more protean, where blackness starts to take the form of something that can be anything at any given time. If it is effective in a way, it pushes against precisely what Malcolm X was trying to suggest. Because what he was saying is that the public sphere is monolingual and there has to be an adaptation to it in order to subvert it. Whereas Cleaver is now coming to the point where he might start to suggest something like, well, it might not be so monolingual and I can kind of fit in without subverting It. I want. I don't really want to subvert it. I want to take it over and adapt it to myself and make it mine. And this is not. This is new. This is something new that we're finding. It's not necessarily separatist or nationalist in any recognizable sense, but something that is much more separate, selfish in its interest and harder to pin down.
- [46:42]
B
Yeah. So interesting that you sort of characterize him as sort of. I mean, the word postmodern, you know, using that to describe Cleaver. I don't know if you have something more to say about that, about. Because it's always hard for me to sort of think about sort of what black postmodernism is. Right. And where we sort of locate that and how sort of black thought shifts, especially across the. The seventies. And I think it's interesting to hear, you know, the first time you mentioned that word in relationship to Cleaver. And I don't know if you have more ideas about that or we should just.
- [47:15]
C
I might simply just quickly say in comparing his time, his. His intellectual development incarcerated to Malcolm X is. Malcolm X comes out of this experience fully focused and fully formed as the singularity that is going to intervene with great repercussions in the world, whereas Cleaver comes out more. More of a protean self, that is of the. Of the impression that everything's in play and it just. What matters is how we arrange the details at any given moment in order to express will to power, in order to get who you want. And that's not Malcolm X at all, but that is Cleaver. And so that makes him somewhat of a postmodern figure, even though we probably wouldn't think of him that way, generally.
- [48:10]
B
No. That's interesting. Yeah. All right, well, let's move on to thinking about Angela Davis, who you say, of all the theorists you engage, provides the most complete vision, a black hermeneutic reading. So I wonder if you can tell us a bit about how you understand her and her contributions and her influence.
- [48:29]
C
So first, I should say, and it comes out in a conclusion, that there's. The chapter deals with just the early thought. Right. So there is a development there. Although it's a recognizable development, it's not a radical break with the later work, it's not a radical break with the earlier work, at least as I read it. And when I say it's the most complete picture articulation we have of black critical theory, one could also say it's the most academic version that we have, and that has to do. There are clearly identifiable influences, philosophers in play. There's a history there that one who knows at least the facts about as they been presented to the public sphere that indicate a pattern and a course of study with specific figures who engage in a tradition. And so her work is actually embedded in a tradition. It's not necessarily the same tradition that Baraka would have professed, even though Baraka's clearly done all kinds of reading in Adorno at the time. And it might not be the same tradition that Baldwin was necessarily thinking about. Even though Baldwin himself is currently quite an ad at Western philosophy here. Davis wears it on. On her sleeve. She's quite. Especially in the lectures on Frederick Douglass. It's clear where what. Where this is coming from and what she's saying. And that could be held against her or at least could have been possibly. But it's actually the great strength of the work because what it's saying is whereas we've been thinking about how to subvert or to deploy a counter discourse in Western philosophy and the views, the philosophical and ontological views that ground in sub 10 white supremacy. We haven't actually been able to come out and say how we're going to do that and what that looks like. It's always been. We think back to the conversation we had about parakas. There's been sort of a tiger hun sp spoken or it's protean and we can't really fix it or. But here Davis is actually saying this is how we do it. These are the texts we look at. This is where they went wrong. She engaged in imminent criticism and a destruction of Western metaphysics more complete than anything Heidegger ever imagined. And how she did it was simply by saying the black subject is the differin that unravels, whatever. To use the dirty in terms, but not Davis's terms. Metaphysics of presence. White supremacy has claim to. So I don't. I see this sort of as the zenith of this type of thought. And what happens after is something that starts to take place much more firmly in academic halls as opposed to streets and pulpits of various kinds. There is a definite transition that takes place with.
- [51:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, leaving off there. I'm curious about that set of arguments that I guess sort of Davis sets off that now do seem like they are. That's what's at the center of Black Studies, especially black critical thought right now. I'm curious if we could circle back for just a second to this question question of, you know, sort of. Baraka was incredibly concerned with Concerned about sort of black art being commodified and sort of resisting that. Right. Saying there's something that can be. There's something that cannot be touched. But then you made that kind of brief comment about. But then, you know, he wasn't really necessarily thinking about sort of black criticism itself sort of being able to be taken up as a commodity. And so I wonder if you could kind of speak to that. To that question. And also if you could. Yeah. If you could say something about the current moment, if that's what you see happening, or how sort of the arguments that Angela Davis make, how they've evolved in our current sort of field of black studies. I wonder if you could speak to both of those things.
- [52:37]
C
Well, I mean, Davis came back to something like. And this was, via Marcuse, something like an aesthetic dimension which would have been close to what Baraka thought of as aesthetic autonomy that allows for something like an uncommodifiable vision or critical vision of black life that is not necessarily itself aesthetic, but shares in this aesthetic or resides in this aesthetic dimension. So there's a much more, I would say, a closer link between criticism and poetic production than even Baraka allowed for. For Baraka, criticism tended to be separate and that the poetry itself, while critical, the poem itself, while critical, still remained the poem. I see for Davis, though, that these distinctions really start to break down where criticism, while not presenting itself as the poem or poetic in anyways, nevertheless still has a share in this aesthetic dimension. What this means is that for the present moment is that what we start to find is a much, especially in the past few years, a much higher degree of poeticization of criticism, where criticism becomes, in part the poetic object itself. There seems to be a union that is taking place in forming between the critical object and the aesthetic object. This is now the substance of theory, of African American theory, this type of work. The question is, whom does it serve? And is it in itself already commodified and in the service of ends that are not necessarily its own intentional ends? Or it's stated. Stated it. I don't know that I want to say that it is commodified or in the service of something it would not necessarily allow. I would simply say, though, that there are perhaps divided results that take place when presented with a text that becomes almost indecipherable or requires a certain type of. A certain type of sensibility and training just to. To maybe get through a paragraph, you know, a paragraph, to put it that way. This is not to. To speak against difficult writing. There are certain moments in my own book. They're hard, but it is to, to maybe say, to ask the question, who's, who's reading this? Right? Who's the audience? And for, for Davis, Davis's audience is not simply other academics. And the goal towards reading a popular audience isn't merely to advance a career to sales to some extent. It's to make a tangible political intervention through writing that will lead to further action. As I understand her, in other words, I understand her quite clearly, I believe, as saying there is no difference between philosophy or writing philosophy and taking political action. Or there must be no difference. Philosophy must lead to action. If the work that is written, be it theory, philosophy, whatever, does not lead to that or precludes that final outcome, it is not necessarily productive in that sense, and therefore it serves a different purpose. The question would be, what purpose does African American criticism, theory of philosophy serve if it does not lead to some form of action? This would be Davis's question. And it's the question that I ask. I don't believe necessarily that it has to, but I do question what it does, then if it doesn't, and what the goal is for myself as a critic, if I'm writing something that does it in some way at least illuminate through intellectual history, perhaps a corner of African American studies that did do that or did believe these types of things. And that's what unifies these authors at this moment. They, each and every one, believe that what they were doing would lead to a change not within theory itself, but in the world. And that's, you know, maybe naive and silly of them and of me for, for caring in that way. But I, when I write now, I think of, well, you know, this has to be able to extend outside of just this closed world.
- [57:31]
B
Yeah, I guess a follow up question I would have to. That is, do you think, you know, do you think the. I want to call it problem, but I don't know if that's the right word. But do you think the problem of essentialism that you're kind of, it's not a problem, but that you're tracing across each of these writers? Do you think that Davis sort of resolves it, you know, with her critique of, we'll just say Western metaphysics? Or do you think that that's, do you think that it sort of persists, persist in Davis and then persist into our current moment and how sort of African American theorists are engaging with philosophy?
- [58:06]
C
So in the text that I look at, the Douglas Lectures and her training as a philosopher, I believe she resolves it by evacuating that question and putting it into the negative or negation and say, well, it's always a construct anyway. And blackness is basically this opaque center and gravitational center, a type of black hole at the center of white supremacist discourse, holding it together in some artificial and in many ways idiotic way. She may have changed that, though, and especially in the 80s and in the Blues book, where it starts to feel more like the aesthetic dimension is a form of a centralist discourse. And so that would be a real difference in her work and something that comes up a bit in the conclusion. I'm hesitant to say it is because she announces and frames these moves through her study with and of Marcuse's works, which ostensibly would have rejected also a form of essentialism. But it remains to be seen. For me, I'll leave that the jury out on that one. But the earlier work does that does resolve that by simply saying it is constructivist. And here's why.
- [59:28]
B
All right, well, thank you so much for joining me today. We're at Time, but I really enjoyed our conversation, Dr. Thompson. And I hope that everyone goes out and buys his book, Phenomenal Blackness, Black Power, Philosophy and Theory. And again, thank you so much.
- [59:44]
C
Thank you. Thank you for having me.