Introduction to Cultural Studies
Dr. Avishek Parui
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras
Lecture - 11
The Post Modern Condition ( Lyotard ) – Part III
Hi. So hello and welcome to this NPTEL lecture on this course entitled Introduction to Cultural
Studies. So at the moment we are doing Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition, A Report on
Knowledge and we are looking at certain selected sections in the essay, in the work which are
quite relevant to this particular course. Now I will just start off with what we ended last time and
this is page 10 of the handout that we are using, it should be on your screen.
(Refer Slide Time: 00:44)
So on page 10 Lyotard talks about language games and language games become a very important
criterion of the postmodern condition and Lyotard obviously borrows the term language games
from Wittgenstein whom he identifies as one of the first postmodern philosophers of the
postmodern tradition really and the language games as Wittgenstein uses it the term is later
appropriated by Lyotard.
And then he uses the particular term language games to talk about discourse formation, discourse
reformation, discourse production and discourse reproduction. So what are language games
because it is a very crucial category of postmodernism according to Lyotard and this is page 10
on the version that we are using and this is obviously highlighted in yellow where Lyotard talks
about the Wittgensteinian idea of language games.
And he defines it as Wittgenstein taking up the study of language games from scratch focuses his
attention on the effects of different modes of discourse. He calls the various types of utterances
he identifies along the way, language games. So language games are different kinds of utterances
within a particular discursive framework. So within a particular discursive framework we have
certain rules. So every discourse, every discursive framework is defined by certain rules.
So within that certain rules every utterance that he can make by you know by combining the
rules doing permutation and combination of different rules is a language game. So language
games basically are utterances within a particular discursive framework, right and that is very
crucial in terms of the postmodern condition because what Lyotard will go on to say from this
point is the entire idea of postmodernity is basically a series of language games.
So essentially it is a citations, utterances, iterations within certain kind of a discourse
frameworks. So within certain discursive fields the utterances you can make as an individual as
an agentic individual would be defined as a language game and postmodernity or the postmodern
condition instead of having grand narratives or you know metanarratives what you know what
we have in place of metanarratives is a series of language games.
So language games become very important for Lyotard. So he classifies language games as a sort
of key criterion for the postmodern condition. So language games are the various kinds of
utterances you know within a particular discursive frameworks, within a set of rules, preestablished set of rules the kind of utterances he can make within that particular discursive field
would be defined as a language games or language game.
What he means by this term is that each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in
terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put, in exactly the
same way as the game of chess is defined by a set of rules determining the properties of each of
the pieces, in other words the proper way to move them. So the analogy to chess would be very
useful in terms of understanding what language games are.
For instance if we sit down to play a game of chess you know the set of rules which are
predetermined. So each piece moves in a particular way. You know the rules. So you would not
have a game of chess unless you acknowledge and accept and agree on the rules which are preestablished. Now while you begin to play the game of chess it is perfectly possible for you to you
know combine the different rules you know to make utterances to make moves within the
particular discursive frame.
So in other words a game of chess would enable you to be creative in terms of how you use the
rules without breaking the rules, right. So language games too can be understood as a series of
utterances, series of iterations within a particular discursive field and each discursive field
obviously comes with preconditions with a preset you know conditional rule.
So that rule or that series of rules, that set of rules is predetermined is preconditioned and within
that particular field you can make moves, you can make utterances, you can make iterations etc.
So the game of chess would be a very good analogy in terms of understanding what language
games what language game is as Lyotard understands with borrowing or drawing on
Wittgenstein. So this is you know these are various categories of utterance.
So you know these are utterances and of course utterance can be discursive. It can be citational
utterance, it can be rhetorical utterance, it can be scriptural utterance. So all kinds of utterances
within a particular discursive field would be classified as a language game according to Lyotard
and this obviously he borrows from Wittgenstein. Now this is a key condition in terms of
understanding what the postmodern condition is because the postmodern condition is a condition
where the grand narrative is replaced by language games.
(Refer Slide Time: 05:33)
Now if you come to page this is page 12 in the in the version that we are using and it talks about
the difference, a very important difference that it makes between traditional theory and critical
theory. So in many ways I find this particular book require prophetic in terms of how we look at
culture today and I think this is one of the key text in cultural studies and one must look at it in
terms of sophisticated understanding of culture as we inhabit and consume today.
Now he makes a very important distinction between traditional theory and critical theory over
here in terms of looking at how critical theory is more allied or more aligned to the postmodern
condition as a commentary in the postmodern condition. So what is the difference as Lyotard
understands it and this is where he delineates the difference. It is page 12 in the version that we
are using.
So traditional theory is always in danger of being incorporated into the programming of the
social whole as a simple tool for the optimization of its performance. This is because its desire
for a unitary and totalizing truth lends itself to the unitary and totalizing practice of the system’s
managers. Critical theory based on the principle of dualism and wary of syntheses and
reconciliations should be in a position to avoid this fate.
So traditional theory despite you know its revolutionary potential, despite its subversive potential
it always aspires for totalizing whole, always aspires for totalizing unified whole. So in that
sense it has the risk of being incorporated or being consumed by the entire the organic system
which controls it. Whereas critical theory which is very wary of any kind of synthesis, very
guarded against any kind of synthesis is something which celebrates incommensurability.
It is something which celebrates incompatibility and in this celebration in this kind of an attitude
or alliance with incommensurability or incompatibility is something which is more of a friend of
the postmodern condition. So critical theory is more allied to the postmodern condition rather
than traditional theory and this difference between traditional theory and critical theory is
something that Lyotard keeps coming back to throughout this particular discourse, right.
So so what you are seeing essentially is postmodernism is a condition which is suspicious of
totalizing tendencies which is suspicious of any kind of nostalgia for an organic whole for an
organic origin etc., which does not make much sense for the postmodern condition because the
postmodern condition would move away by default from any kind of an organic entity, any kind
of a grand narrative which will offer a totalizing picture of an organic origin, organic entity etc.
In its place what we get is language games, a series of language games within certain discursive
frameworks and the discursive frameworks and micro frameworks. So instead of grand
narratives we have micro local narratives and inside the local narratives we have language
games, utterances, citations, you know different kinds of scriptures or scriptural writings,
different kinds of you know language utterances, discursive utterances, performative utterances,
embodied utterances which are within that particular discursive field.
But the point is there is no the discursive field. We have a series of local, micro discursive fields
within which these language games operate. So therein lies the subversive potential of language
games. Therein lies the basic or fundamental difference between the postmodern condition and
the modern condition.
Whilst in the postmodern condition you know in other words does not have any nostalgia, does
not have any aspiration to recover a totalizing narrative, to recover an organic narrative which
has been lost forever. There is no nostalgia, there is no mourning to recover something which has
been lost. Rather what we have in the postmodern condition is the celebration of
incommensurability, a celebration of incompatibility, a celebration of factious you know which
basically lend themselves to different language games at different points of time.
(Refer Slide Time: 09:15)
Now in page 15 Lyotard offers a really interesting definition of the self as it evolves in the
postmodern condition. So what happens to the sense of self? What happens to the idea of the
self? What happens to the experiential self, the self as you experience it in ourselves as an
organic, biological, ideological, discursive entity. So what happens to a self when it is sort of
bombarded by language games at different points of time in a postmodern condition?
So this is page 15 in the version that we are using and it should be on the screen highlighted in
yellow where he says, a self does not amount to much, but no self is an island. Each exists in a
fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. So the idea of the self
moves away from an idea of a totalizing, organic, isolated entity while rather the self is always in
intersections or interaction with different kinds of discursive frameworks, right.
So in another words a self is a producer as well as a consumer of different sets of language
games. So it cannot be otherwise. The self cannot be an island. The self cannot be, so the entire
movement away from this idea of this pure, organic, isolated, alienated self which is romantic in
quality, which is nostalgic in quality it just goes away, that idea of self goes away in
postmodernity.
And what we have instead is a self which is in a nodal relation to information, in a nodal relation
to the different intersections of information and knowledge and language games. So a self
becomes essentially a sight where different language games crisscross with each other. A sight
for ideation exchanges for discursive exchanges etc., right and in that sense a self becomes quite
postmodern according to Lyotard.
So the self exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and more mobile than ever
before. A young or old man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at nodal points
and nodal points is very important for Lyotard. It is a very crucial term this nodal point because
what nodal points mean is that, that point that sight of intersection where informations crisscross
each other, where ideas crisscross each other.
And where basic different discursive fields crisscross each other. So a self becomes a product, a
process as well as a product of these kind of exchanges. So a self is essentially a product a
process of exchanges, a process of information crossover right rather than an autonomous you
know organic self. So that kind of an old idea of the self which is modernist, romantic gives
away to a more postmodernist idea of the self which is essentially a nodal category, a nodal
point, a nodal process, okay.
So a person is obviously located at nodal points of specific communication circuits. So the
communication circuit becomes very important in postmodernity. So essentially all of us are
inhabiting different intersections of communication circuits, right. So different kinds of media,
different technologies of communication are being consumed, are determining who we are, are
determining how we speak, are determining what our language games would be etc.
So we are essentially a product or as well as the process of the different communication circuits
that we inhabit today in the postmodern condition. So however tiny these may be or better one is
always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. So a self is essentially a
process. The self is essentially a site where different kinds of processes, different kinds of
messages pass.
So a self becomes a bit of a journey, the self becomes a bit of a space. So the specialty of self is
something which is highlighted in this kind of definition that Lyotard offers. No one, not even
the least privileged among us is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and
position him at the post of sender, addressee or referent. So it does not matter how agentic you
are or how less agentic you are, how privileged you are or how under privileged you are he is
always consuming he is always you know at a site where different kinds of messages are passing
you, right.
And those messages could be of great importance, of profound significance, discursive
significance. Or those messages can be very local in quality or very trivial in quality. But the
point is you are always located at an epistemic exchange. The self emerges as an epistemic
exchange, as a process through which different kinds of knowledge systems crisscross each
other, right.
So and you take on the role of a sender, addressee or referent depending on your location, right.
So you can be some sender as well as a referent as well as the addressee. So again this makes the
self quite plural and quite plastic in quality and quite performative in quality as well, right. So we
are moving away obviously from an idea of the self as some kind of a totalizing, organic one
entity which is autonomous in quality which is romantically removed from the different material
exchanges that take place.
So that idea of the self is completely done away with in postmodernism. What we have instead is
a very mundane idea of the self which is located you know as an epistemic exchange, as a nodal
point through which different kinds of messages and information crisscross each other. So self
becomes a consumer as well as a producer as well as a manipulator of information, right.
So information becomes the key thing over here, the key category over here and if you extend
the definition a little bit it sort of becomes a product as well as a process that lends itself to
language games, right and we just saw what language games is or what language games are in
postmodern condition. So self becomes a process through which language games are formed.
The self becomes informed by language games as well as in itself lends itself to language games
in different historical points, in different discursive points that self inhabits at any given point of
time.
So one’s mobility in relation to these language game effects; language games, of course are what
this is all about, is tolerable at least within certain limits and the limits are vague. It is even
solicited by regulatory mechanisms and in particular by the self-adjustments the system
undertakes in order to improve its performance. So you know this goes back to the old definition
that we just saw a little while ago that self basically becomes a product of language games.
So self becomes a self-regulatory mechanism through which it moves away from its autonomous
idea of being isolated or romantically removed but rather it becomes you know a material
process through which language games emerge at different points of time. Now, so and then
Lyotard goes on to say how this entire idea of language games is an over determining factor. So
we are all born into certain language games whether we acknowledge that or not, whether we
realize that or not, right. And this is what he says you know to corroborate his point.
(Refer Slide Time: 15:39)
So even before he is born, he is talking about he is talking about his self in terms of his over
determination of language games. Even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is
given, the human child is already positioned as a referent in the story recounted by those around
him in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course. Or more simply it is still the question
of the social bond, insofar as it is a question, is itself a language game, a game of inquiry.
It immediately positions the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked
about: it is already the social bond. So this is actually a very interesting definition. He talks about
social bond and a social contract rather the very Rousseauian idea of the social contract becomes
a language game in a postmodern condition.
So he says and even before he had born you are born into a particular language game, you are
born into a particular series of language games and your existence as a social self depends on the
negotiation, depends on how you navigate with the different language games at any given point
of time. So this entire nodal navigation that happens is what makes a self a self in postmodern
condition, right.
So it is a contract, it is an epistemic contract, it is a linguistic contract, it is a discursive contract
into which he had born and it depends on how yourself, your sense of self depends on how you
navigate through this contract, across this contracts at any given point of time, okay. Now, we
make a little leap from here and we move on to page 37 in this particular version. But the point is
what Lyotard is offering us over here are micro games.
So he is moving away from the idea of the grand narrative, the grand idea of the self, the grand
idea of society, the grand idea of the social contract. So he is moving away from the
understanding of the self as if a social contract which is finistic in quality, which is sort of divine,
quasi-divine in quality and rather he is offering a definition of self which is sort of micro in
quality, it is local in quality and which is essentially a series of language games at any given
point of time.
So the point is he is focusing more on the condition of, the postmodern condition as a micro
condition, as a condition which comes after the grand narratives go away, right and obviously
how the grand narratives go away.
(Refer Slide Time: 17:52)
I mean the entire process of disappearance of the grand narratives happens through a process
delegitimization, right. So certain grand narratives which have been legitimized through a
discursive process, through you know ideological process are done away with a delegitimized in
different kinds of social situations and it is a process of delegitimization that gives rise to the
language games in micro conditions.
And these micro conditions lend themselves to the postmodernity the postmodern condition that
we know today. So this is page 37 on the version that we are using and this is highlighted in
yellow and the session is called delegitimization and he goes on to say, Lyotard over here, in the
contemporary society and culture postindustrial society, postmodern culture, so this is the
definition of culture that he uses.
So when he says culture or current culture he talks about he mentions or he means postindustrial
culture or postmodern culture. The question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in
different terms. The grand narrative has lost its credibility regardless of what mode of unification
it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation. So there
is no grand narrative left in a postmodern condition according to Lyotard.
So whether it is an emancipated narrative or narrative of freedom or narrative of liberation or a
narrative of speculation so it does not matter whether it is speculative narrative or emancipatory
narrative, there is no grand narrative left in the postmodern condition and this is not essentially
or necessarily a bad thing according to Lyotard. So this attitudinal difference between
postmodernism and modernism is what is mapped out by Lyotard over here.
Because in modernism this loss of grand narrative is more. There is a nostalgia for the grand
narrative which is now gone forever. But by the time he come to postmodernism that nostalgia
itself goes away. So there is no nostalgia left as well for the grand narrative. So not only is the
grand narrative gone or not only other grand narratives gone but the nostalgia for the grand
narrative is gone as well.
And what we have instead is language games which celebrate the loss of the grand narrative and
which offers instead different micro narratives which places individual at different nodal points
at different points of time, right and this is something which we just saw a little while ago and
the idea of the self in a postmodern condition.
So and then he goes on to give you so a very quick summary of the reasons which may have
contributed and which may have caused so this loss of the grand narrative in a postmodern
condition, this idea of delegitimization and how do this happen? What were the reasons that may
have contributed to this demise of the grand narrative. And then he goes on to say and I quote,
the decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies
since the Second World War which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means.
(Refer Slide Time: 20:30)
It can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat
under the protection of the Keynesianism during the period 1930-1960, a renewal that has
eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and
services. So he gives you some scientific technological and comic reasons which may have
contributed to the loss of grand narratives and it characterizes postmodernism.
So it could be the rise of capitalism, it could be the rise of you know technology, it could be the
rise of the massive idea of micro technology since the Second World War. So all these material
definitions, material conditions which may have governed which may have contributed to the
loss of grand narratives in the postmodern condition. However, he is very quick to add that if you
go on looking for material, historical reasons alone that will emerge to satisfy.
You know these conditions alone could not have contributed to the loss of grand narratives.
There may have been some other reason, some more philosophical reason, some more abstract
reason which may have contributed to the demise of grand narratives and again this brings us
back to a very very old argument that we have been using since the very inception of this course
and that is the idea of culture as an entanglement, an asymmetric entanglement between material
and abstract conditions. Material and abstract attributes.
You cannot have material attributes alone. You cannot have abstract attributes alone. So every
material attribute comes with its abstract associations and vice versa, right. So he says if we go
on looking for reasons in technology, if we go on looking for reasons and economics and
economic policies then that would not be sufficient, that would not be adequate.
We need to look beyond and we need to look at the philosophy which may have contributed
towards the demise of the grand narrative in a postmodern condition and what could have been a
philosophical condition this is something he goes on to say. So he says and I quote over here,
anytime we go searching for causes in this way we are bound to be disappointed.
Even if we adopted one or the other of these hypothesis we would still have to detail the
correlation between the tendencies mentioned and the decline of the unifying and legitimating
power of the grand narratives of speculation and emancipation. It is of course understandable
that both capitalist renewal and prosperity and the disorienting upsurge of technology would
have an impact on the status of knowledge.
So he says I am not denying that the rise of capitalism of the Second World War or rise of this
massive upsurge of technology after Second World War may have contributed to the demise of
grand narratives or may have changed the ontology the nature of knowledge that is absolutely
undeniable. However, there must have been other reasons as well which have contributed to the
demise of the grand narratives in the world we inhabit today.
But he says over here, but in order to understand how contemporary science could have been
susceptible to those effects long before they took place we must first locate the seeds of
delegitimization or delegitimation and nihilism that were inherent in the grand narratives of the
19th century. So he says and this is a very important term which he uses, nihilism.
So nihilism essentially is a philosophy of negation, the philosophy of annihilation, the
philosophy of you know doing away with the sense of self etc., in a way a philosophy of
destruction, right. So nihilism, so he says there was always a nihilistic tendency in the grand
narratives of 19th century. So that nihilistic tendency blossomed in the Second World War, after
Second World War with the rise of capitalism, rise of technology etc.
So that nihilism in the philosophical and the current of the grand narratives of 19th century that
lent itself to the rise of technology. That lent itself to the rise of the capitalist consumerist culture
and together they brought around, they brought about the demise of the grand narrative. So the
grand narrative’s demise is a combination of the inherent nihilism of 19th century philosophy
that were dominant as well as the rise of technology, the rise of capitalism etc.
So again we are looking at the combination of abstract and material conditions, right. So the
material conditions with the rise of technology, the rise of massive upsurge of science and
technology and micro communication systems after Second World War that was one and of
course the rise of capitalism as an economic policy, the rise of consumerism as an economic
policy, as a market policy.
But along with that there is also a degree of nihilism which is always there in a grand narrative of
19th century. So that lent itself to this material conditions and together it was basically you know
an entanglement as I mentioned which you know lent itself to the fall of or demise of the grand
narratives as we experience it today. So this is a very interesting definition of a fall. A very
interesting definition of how the grand narratives you know experience a demise in a postmodern
condition you know due to some historical conditions, due to some material conditions etc.
(Refer Slide Time: 25:17)
Okay, now if you come to page 41 this is interesting and this is something which Lyotard should
be really credited with and he says this loss of grand narratives is something which does not
necessarily mean a bad thing, does not necessarily mean a loss of civilization, does not
necessarily mean a loss of meaningful exchanges and he gives a reference of Vienna over here.
He gives a reference to a very Western, European condition which change fundamentally with
the fall of the grand narratives which happen with the rise of postmodernism. And again he goes
back to Wittgenstein and says Wittgenstein was one of the first philosophers who accepted,
theorized and then celebrated the loss of grand narratives by offering the idea of language games
and this is what he goes on to say and this is the highlighted section on your screen at the
moment.
This is page 41 on your screen. And this is the reference of Wittgenstein. This is you know an
acknowledgement, a tribute to Wittgenstein in some sense. So he says over here, we can say
today that the mourning process has been completed. So the entire idea of mourning for the loss
of grand narrative, nostalgia for the loss of grand narrative, that too has gone; that has been
completed, right. So it is a finished project.
There is no need to start all over again. Wittgenstein’s strength is that he did not opt for the
positivism that was being developed by the Vienna Circle but outlined in his investigation of
language games a kind of legitimation not based on performativity. So the genius of
Wittgenstein according to Lyotard over here is that he moves away from positivism, from a very
empirical understanding of knowledge, from a very causal understanding of knowledge and you
know he moved away from that.
And also he did away with the performative understanding of knowledge performative way
means authoritative. So he moved away from the authoritative understanding of knowledge. He
moved away from an empirical understanding of knowledge and rather what he offered was an
understanding of a random nature of knowledge; a randomly produced knowledge for language
games.
And this idea of language games which Wittgenstein offered is something which is a big massive
philosophical investment into understanding of postmodernism as we understand it today. And
this is what Lyotard goes on to say and he credits Wittgenstein for that. That is what the
postmodern world is all about. Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative.
So you know that not only is grand narrative gone but also the nostalgia for the grand narrative is
gone and this marks a massive departure for modernism, right because in modernism we still
have a sort of residual nostalgia, residual remembrance for the grand narrative which is still
lingering as the romantic residual presence. But when he comes to postmodernism you know that
kind of a nostalgia is gone. That kind of a mourning is gone forever.
Rather people move on with local narratives with little language games which you know offer
themselves as you know plays which inform the postmodern condition. So that is what the
postmodern world is all about. Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative. It in no
way follows that they are reduced to barbarity and this is a very crucial time. He says it does not
necessarily mean you know that because people have forgotten the grand narratives, people have
forgotten the nostalgia for the grand narrative.
It does not necessarily mean or it does not necessarily follow that they have become barbarians
that they become uncivilized. So this easy cohesion between grand narrative and civilization is
done away with in postmodernism and this is a really crucial and subversive statement that
Lyotard is making that having a grand narrative, having a series of grand narrative does not make
you civilized by default and a converse is also true that losing grand narratives or doing away
with grand narratives or losing nostalgia for grand narratives does not necessarily make you
barbaric by default, right.
So he say it does not it’s faulty to understand, it’s faulty to assume or presume that people are
reduced to barbarity just because they move away from grand narratives. So what saves them
from it is the knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and
communicational interaction. So this is a very important statement. So he says the modern idea
of legitimation, the modern definition of legitimation arises from language games, arises from
people’s interaction with language games.
So not only it no longer can we seek legitimation from some pre-established grand narrative. So
what we have in its place is language games and we must seek legitimation, we must seek you
know we must solicit authority. We must solicit legitimation from our interaction with language
games, from being nodal points through which messages pass, through which interactions pass,
through which communication exchanges pass and only then can we have meaningful
exchanges, right. So meaning itself becomes micro in quality.
So meaning itself moves away from any grand quality, any grand definition of culture, any grand
definition of emancipation, liberation, subversions, speculation. So all that grand definitions give
away to local definitions which arises which emerge rather from interactions with little language
games that we experience in our day to day lives. So the idea of language game becomes very
important as you know I hope to have established by this particular lecture in postmodernity.
In the postmodern condition according to Lyotard is a series of language games which are you
know citational in quality, which are discursive in quality, which are rhetorical in quality, which
are linguistic in quality and so all the different language games that we establish in our day to
day lives that is the point, that is the section, that is the site from which we draw or you know
sustain or legitimation or legitimacy.
Because no longer should we look for the older grand narratives which are now gone because the
postmodern condition is characterized by not only a loss of grand narratives but also a loss of
nostalgia for the grand narratives. And that loss of nostalgia that loss of grand narratives does not
necessarily make the postmodern condition a barbaric condition, right. So again I just go back to
what I said a little while ago it’s an easy cohesion between civilization and grand narrative is a
very Eurocentric idea of civilization.
It is a very Eurocentric enlightenment idea of grand narrative and civilization. That has been
fractured in postmodern condition and the reason for the fracture as Lyotard just said that it is not
just material. I mean of course there are material factors such as the rise of technology, the rise of
science, the rise of capitalist consumerist society etc. But also and equally it is also because of
the inherent nihilism which is always there in a grand narrative of 19th century.
So that nihilism combined with technology, combined with capitalism, combined with
consumerism has brought about the demise of grand narratives and has offered in its place a
play, a proliferation of local narratives which can be defined as language games in the
postmodern condition. So thank you for listening and this concludes the lecture, this particular
lecture. I am going to wind up on Lyotard with one more lecture in the next session. So thank
you for listening and you know I will see you in the next lecture. Thank you.
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Dr. Avishek Parui
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras
Lecture - 12
The Post Modern Condition ( Lyotard ) – Part IV
So hello and welcome to this lecture on this NPTEL course entitled Introduction to Cultural
Studies. We are currently doing Lyotard’s Post Modern Condition, A Report on Knowledge and
this will be the last lecture on that particular book. I will finish with Lyotard today in this
particular session.
So in the last lecture, in the previous lecture we had seen how Lyotard looks at language games
as offered by Wittgenstein as that site the potential site for which meaning can be derived,
meaning can be produced, meaning can be configured in a postmodern condition and move away
from the old idea of grand narratives. We are now looking at a local idea of meaning production
through language games in a postmodern condition.
And so if you go to page 60 in the handout in the version that we are using and this should be on
your screen in a moment you know the yellow section, the highlighted section over here is basic
repetition of what he just said. But also very quickly he would now offer understanding of what
we call paralogy. So he talks about paralogy as having more importance on the postmodern
condition. So paralogy is parallel logic, alternative logical systems.
Again the whole idea is to move away from a unifying totalizing idea of logic in the postmodern
condition and looking at parallel logical systems which are micro in quality, which are local in
quality and which often offer more meaningful combinations in the postmodern situation.
(Refer Slide Time: 01:38)
So this is page 60 on your screen, the highlighted section where he says we no longer have
recourse to the grand narratives. We can resort neither to the dialectic of spirit nor even to the
emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse. So he moves into
the Hegelian understanding of dialectic, right. So the entire Hegelian idea of understanding of the
dialectic which is thesis, synthesis, antithesis and the entire spirit which is very Hegelian in
quality but it has been done away within postmodern condition.
So we cannot look at grand narratives from that kind of a site anymore. So he moves away from
the dialectical spirit which is Hegelian in quality but as we have just seen the little narrative or
petit recit remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention most particularly in science.
In addition the principle of consensus as a criterion of validation seems to be inadequate. So the
last bit is very interesting over here and he says consensus no longer becomes a criterion in
postmodern condition. So no longer we need to have an agreement on certain things.
So agreements become secondary, tertiary, peripheral and important in a postmodern condition
and this is a basic different that Lyotard has with someone called Jurgen Habermas and he
already mentioned Habermas and he will finish again with Habermas and we will look at his
disagreement with Habermas in a bit. But the whole idea of his disagreement with Habermas is
precisely this.
It no longer should look at consensus as a criterion. So we should not look at agreement that
collective agreement, that should not be the criterion for any kind of a grand narrative, any kind
of a narrative at all rather. So we shall look at disagreement, we shall look at incompatibility, we
shall look at incommensurability. So those become important conditions in a postmodern times,
this Lyotard understands it. So again the idea of paralogy becomes important.
So no longer do we have one logical consensual or consensus of discursive frameworks. We
rather have different discursive frameworks which may not agree with each other at all. So again
the whole idea of incommensurability, incompatibility become very important over here. So
consensus should not be a criterion for validation you know so that idea of validating certain
things to a consensus so that criterion becomes inadequate, that criterion becomes secondary,
that criterion becomes unimportant in a postmodern condition.
So his problem with consensus is very important, Lyotard’s problem with consensus and therein
lies this basic fundamental disagreement with Jurgen Habermas because with Habermas we have
the idea of the public sphere and a public sphere is where consensus is produced through
intellectual exchanges right and Lyotard says you know the whole idea of having a public sphere
where we arrive at a consensus through exchanges, through ideas, through interactions that itself
will very quickly become a grand narrative.
So if we are moving away from grand narratives we are looking at local narratives, micro
narratives. So the whole idea of public sphere becomes unimportant in postmodernity, in the
postmodern condition right. And equally the whole idea of consensus becomes unimportant in a
postmodern condition, right okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 04:43)
So so the dialectical spirit, the idea of consensus, the idea of agreement, the idea of a holistic
understanding of totality, so these become secondary, these become unimportant in a postmodern
condition. Rather what we have is a series of disagreements, incommensurability and
incompatibility which become revolutionary in potential for the postmodern condition, okay.
Now he comes to the idea of paralogy. This is page 61 on your screen.
So what is paralogy and how is paralogy an important criterion in postmodernity. So paralogy
must be distinguished from innovation. The latter is under the command of the system or at least
used by it to improve its efficiency. The former is a move played in the pragmatics of
knowledge. So innovation and paralogy they are so fundamentally different and it is a very
important difference that Lyotard talks about and it is very important that we have a conceptual
clarity about this difference.
So innovation is an experimentation, is a form of betterment which makes the system better,
which makes the system more efficient. So innovation is aimed to a sufficiency. Innovation is
aimed towards preservation. Innovation is aimed towards extension of the already established
system. Now the whole idea of Lyotard over here as you know a postmodernist is to break away
from the system altogether, right.
So in that sense paralogy is a more important than innovations. Paralogy he says is a move
played in a pragmatics of knowledge. So paralogy in one hand gives you a different kind of
language game. Paralogy will offer you a fresh perspective into a language game which will
move away from the old established knowledge that you know the system uses. So innovation is
an extension of the epistemic structure, is making the epistemic structure more efficient, is a
betterment of the epistemic structure.
Whereas paralogy is essentially a move away from the epistemic structure, is move away into a
better epistemic structure, a more micro epistemic structure which is you know full of
disagreements, which is more postmodern in quality, okay. The fact that it is in reality frequently
but not necessarily the case that one is transformed into the other presents no difficulties for the
hypothesis, right. And now he moves on to the idea of you know dissension.
So dissension becomes a more important criterion rather than consent, right. And he says it is
now dissension that must be emphasized. Consensus is a horizon that is never reached. Research
that takes place under the aegis of a paradigm tends to stabilize. It is like the exploitation of a
technological, economic, or artistic idea. So the entire idea of stabilizing you know becomes
problem in postmodernity in the postmodern condition.
So he says dissent or dissension becomes more important in a postmodern condition because we
need to destabilize, we need to delegitimize knowledge. So the whole idea of stabilizing
knowledge becomes hegemonic in quality very quickly. So the whole idea of a stabilized
knowledge means essentially that you capture and consume certain artistic idea and make that
into a grand narrative so you know and that comes to an agreement, that comes to an innovation,
that comes to efficiency etc.
So instead of innovation, efficiency, consensus, stabilization what we have is paralogy, what we
have is local narratives, what we have is dissent or dissension and what we have is
incommensurability or incompatibility which is designed to destabilize, which is designed to
delegitimize any kind of a knowledge structure, right, any kind of a grand knowledge structure.
And therein lies the subversive potential for the postmodern nodes of knowledge, right that is
essentially based on dissent.
It is essentially designed with dissent and dissension rather than consensus, right. So consent
becomes secondary. Any kind of a public sphere where consent is produced or manufactured
becomes problematic in a postmodern condition. Consensus is something which is you know
done away with, which is subverted in a postmodern condition because consensus is a horizon
which is never reached. It rather becomes a paradigm to protect, to control and to exploit certain
artistic ideas, right.
So this idea of consuming and exploiting an artistic idea becomes a very systematic structure and
postmodernism is designed to direct it against that kind of a systematic structure, right. So
postmodernism becomes a subversive movement through which this systematic structures are
done away with, with the use of dissent, with the use of local knowledge, with the use of
language games etc., right.
So this is a very important definition that Lyotard has between you know consensus and dissent,
between systematic structure and paralogy, between innovation and paralogy. So innovation and
paralogy this difference is something that we must be very aware of when we are looking at
Lyotard’s understanding of language games especially how it relates to postmodernism, okay. So
now we come to the final bit of the essay which is you know where he talks about what is
essentially postmodernism.
So what do we mean by postmodernism and how is postmodernism different, how is
postmodernism designed to be different from modernism, designed to be different as an artistic
condition from its you know predecessors you know how is the revolution in quality how is it
more micro in quality how is it more subversive in quality.
So postmodernism becomes a very important category of knowledge because it changes
knowledge as an ontological you know structure. So it changes the very nature of knowledge
with the rise of technology, with the rise of science, with the rise of nihilism, with the rise of
consumerism etc., right.
(Refer Slide Time: 10:03)
So this is page 72 on your screen. Okay, so on page Lyotard talks about Habermas. So we come
to page 72 which is on your screen at the moment you know he talks about Jurgen Habermas and
he mentions Habermas and of course he disagrees with Habermas massively because he is very
means so problematic. He finds the idea of, the Habermas idea of the public sphere as a sphere
of agreement, as a sphere of consensus quite problematic as a postmodernist.
And he goes on to say Jurgen Habermas thinks that if modernity has failed it is in allowing the
totality of life to be splintered into independent specialities which are left to the narrow
competence of experts while the concrete individual experiences the desublimated meaning and
destructured form not as a liberation but in the mode of that immense ennui which Baudelaire
described over a century ago.
So obviously the idea of Habermas’ idea of modernity is completely different from Lyotard’s
idea of postmodernity because according to Habermas he mourns the loss of totality. He laments
the loss of totality. So he says the totality has been splintered, has been fractured away. Now
what we have is a very Baudelairean idea of the ennui.
So Baudelaire of course is a French symbolist poet and you know if we go back to his writings of
Fleurs du mal or the flowers of evil that he wrote as a collection of poetry so that is essentially
what is the modernist ennui, the modernist tiredness, the modernist inertia which he laments and
Habermas interestingly you know takes up that kind of a mood, that sentiment that Baudelaire
you know poeticizes and says that sentiment emerges as an epiphenomenon, as a product of the
splintered selves in modernity.
So the modernity has failed as a project because it has failed to remain a totalizing project. So he
is completely against, he is completely opposite to what Lyotard has been talking about so far.
So there is no wonder that Lyotard and Habermas disagree on this fundamental position. So
Habermas, according to Habermas modernity must recover its unfinished project. It must recover
its consensus. It must recover its public sphere.
It must recover its totalizing tendencies and only then can we do away with according to
Habermas the idea of ennui, the sentiment of ennui, the sentiment of tiredness, the sentiment of
decadence which he finds in Baudelaire’s poetry, Fleurs du mal or the flowers of evil.
(Refer Slide Time: 12:29)
Now, obviously Lyotard takes the issue, Lyotard has massive issues with this and he goes on to
say my question is and this is on your screen. My question is to determine what sort of unity
Habermas has in mind. So you know the whole idea of unity is problematic in quality according
to Lyotard. So he says what is this unity that Habermas is talking about. So is not that unity a
very Eurocentric idea of unity. Is it not the idea of consent or consensus a very Eurocentric idea,
right.
So it is the aim of the project of modernity the constitution of sociocultural unity within which
all the elements of daily life and of thought would take their place as an organic whole. Or does
the passage that has to be charted between heterogeneous language games those of cognition, of
ethics, of politics belong to a different, this is page 73, a different order from that. And if so
would it be capable of effecting a real synthesis between them.
So he makes a very clear distinction between unity as a modernist quality and this unity of you
know loss of unity as a very healthy condition because that makes allowance that gives
allowance for different kinds of cognitic, ethical, political possibilities, right and that is what
postmodernism is all about according to Lyotard. So postmodernism is about plural possibilities
so that entire idea of plurality of postmodernism is directed against the idea of unity that
Habermas wants to recover.
So again we have a very interesting disagreement between two major philosophers and that
disagreement is something that I would like you to focus on little bit while reading this particular
book. So why does Lyotard disagree with Habermas? So what is discursive differences between
Lyotard and Habermas in terms of looking at totality, in terms of looking at unity, in terms of
looking at modernity, right. So this is something that Lyotard talks about quite interestingly.
(Refer Slide Time: 14:11)
And then if you come to page 74 of this particular book where you know he talks about the
whole idea of unity being a problem and if you move on to page 75 then he talks about realism.
Now this is a very key thing and realism according to Lyotard is a very problematic form of
representation. So this should be on your screen at the moment realism. This is the paragraph
beginning with realism.
Realism, whose only definition is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that
of art always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch. So realism is a form of
representation which aims towards totalizing you know orders of reality. So it is something
which is removed from reality because it aims to totalize it, right and therein lies his problem.
Therein lies Lyotard’s problem with realism.
So he talks about realism as essentially anti-postmodernist kind of a representation, right. So he
locates realism between academicism and kitsch. So kitsch of course is popular culture and
academicism is a reified kind of a culture and he says realism is somewhat between the two and
in the process realism becomes a problematic form of representation, okay. So and then he
moves on this is very right towards the end where he talks about the difference between realism
or realist kind of a writing and non-realist kind of a writing.
(Refer Slide Time: 15:39)
And this is page 77 where he says modernity and this is sort of underlined on your screen.
Modernity in whatever age it appears cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without
discovery of lack of reality of reality together with invention of other realities, right. So you
know this is of course modernity as a contemporary condition that Lyotard you know defines
realism. This is not modernity as a discursive condition. This is modernity as a real condition.
So modernity can only appear, modernity can only emerge as an acknowledgment of loss of
totality, as an acknowledgement of fractures and this is something that Lyotard celebrates in a
true postmodernist spirit, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 16:17)
So, right so now he comes to this is page 79 on your screen. It is the section called the
postmodern and this is the definition of the postmodern. So this is the basic definition of
postmodern that he offers at the end of the book after having talked about the loss of grand
narratives, after having talked about the emergence of language games, after having talked about
the different micro narratives which come up after the end of modernism.
So what then is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work
of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the
modern. All that has been received if only yesterday must be suspected. So suspicion becomes a
very important sentiment in postmodernism. So again we are talking about the very interesting
entanglement between sentiment, effect and material conditions.
So suspicion becomes a very important material condition as well as an effective condition in
postmodernism. So and he goes on to say how the postmodern essentially emerges as diachronic
kind of a movement, a historical movement which replaces the earlier movement and then
becomes something else. So what space does Cezanne challenge the impressionists. So Cezanne,
Paul Cezanne was a post-impressionist painter and you know Lyotard says that Cezanne
challenges the impressionist.
So Cezanne is postmodern because he challenges the impressionists as predecessors and offers a
new language game when he comes painting. What object do Picasso and Braque attack
Cezanne’s? What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must
make a painting be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes
had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp.
The place of presentation of the work in an amazing acceleration the generations precipitate
themselves. A world can only become modern if it is only at first postmodern. Postmodernism
thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state and this state is constant. And
this is a very important definition of postmodernism. He says postmodernism is actually
premodern. So what does he mean by this?
And this takes a little bit of conceptual clarity where he says that a work which is modern, a
work can only be modern or current or contemporary only if it is first postmodern. So
postmodern is its formative phase. The phase in which the rules are being changed. The phase in
which the rules are being made, being produced and reproduced and you know deproduced,
right.
And only after that can we have the modern stage which is the current stage and then of course
the modern stage will be replaced by another postmodern stage and then we have a new modern
stage. Is that completely clear because this is very important. So he talks about postmodern as a
temporal as well as a discursive phase you know the phase which comes before the modern. So
in that sense the postmodern this change is constant you know it will never end.
So the postmodern is a permanent phase because the postmodern is always that which is
formative. That phase, that temporal, that spatial temporal phase where rules are being formed
you know before it freezes into a construct, before it freezes into a form, right. So that sense is
formative and that sense is preformed, right. It is something which is nascent. It is a nascent state
and this state is constant. So a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern, right.
So this idea of postmodernism as something which is actually premodern is an extremely
interesting idea, is a really rich idea because what it says over here it really captures the stylistic
conditions of postmodernism. So it is something which is always being formed. So in that sense
it is never really a settled state. It is a pre-settled state and that sense is always permanent
because any idea of art which is changing, any phase of literature, any phase of cinema, any
phase of art which is changing, which is mutable, which is plastic that is postmodern by default,
right.
And a work can only be modern if it is first postmodern. So we have a very interesting dialectic
of the temporal idea of postmodernism and a stylistic idea of postmodernism. So it is something
before modern because it predates the modern. It is something which forms the modern,
something which informs the modern. A phase where rules are changed and rules are made and
constructed and reconstructed.
The phase of deconstruction in other words and that is a postmodern condition okay and it is a
very interesting definition that Lyotard offers us over here and he gives a series of examples of
how one artist comes and replaces the art of the previous artist and becomes postmodern quality.
And then someone else comes and replaces his work and becomes postmodern. So the idea of
postmodern is always changing. So change is permanent in postmodern, right.
So he says that Picasso comes and replaces his predecessors work. Someone comes and replaces
Picasso’s works. So the idea of postmodern keeps changing all the time, right. So
postmodernism will never really end and because postmodern is always a change of flux, a state
of flux as a permanent flux as a permanent play between 2 different kinds of categories. So it is a
liminal state, it is a playful state, it is a playful productive state.
It is a state of preproduction, deproduction, legitimation, relegitimation, and delegitimation,
right. So it is a state which happens before the current state, before the modern state, okay right.
So this change is constant as Lyotard tells us.
(Refer Slide Time: 21:19)
Okay, now he comes to the end where he gives 2 examples of writers who can be classified as
sort of postmodern and non-postmodern and he mentions the work of Proust and Joyce and this
is page 80 on your screen and the paragraph begins with the work of Proust and that of Joyce
both allude to something which does not allow itself to be made present.
Allusion to which Paolo Fabbri recently called my attention is perhaps a form of expression
indispensable to the works which belong to an aesthetic of the sublime. In Proust what is being
alluded as the price to pay for this solution is the identity of consciousness, a victim to the excess
of time. But in Joyce it is the identity of writing which is the victim of an excess of the book of
literature.
(Refer Slide Time: 22:08)
Proust calls for the unpresentable by means of a language unaltered in its syntax and vocabulary
and of writing which in many of its operators still belongs to the genre of novelistic tradition.
The literary institution as Proust inherits it from Balzac and Flaubert is admittedly subverted in
that the hero is no longer a character but the inner consciousness of time and in that in a diegetic
diachrony already damaged by Flaubert is here put in question because of the narrative voice.
Nevertheless, the unity of the book, the odyssey of the consciousness even if it is deferred from
chapter to chapter is not seriously challenged. The identity of the writing with itself throughout
the labyrinth of the interminable narration is enough to connote such unity which has been
compared to that of The Phenomenology of Mind. So he talks about Proust. He praises Proust
from breaking with Flaubert, from breaking with Balzac.
And he says he offers a new kind of hero. The hero is no longer out there, the hero is in there, the
inner consciousness that becomes the hero. So temporarily it is very complex. Diachronically it
is very complex. It is a movement away from the earlier traditional writing. However, it still
establishes a tradition. It does not do away with tradition entirely. So writing is not decentered in
Proust.
Writing is still centered although it now becomes more and more inward looking rather than
outward looking. So in that sense it is quite subversive etc. But it does not do away with the
syntax of writing. So this is what he says in the beginning you know it is the syntax and
vocabulary of a writing which in many of its operators still belongs to the genre of novelistic
narration. So it is still a part of novelistic narration, right.
So it is still a part of the novel writing tradition, right. So it revolutionizes it. It makes different
things, it gives you different things but it still retains the basic structure of the novelistic
narration. Now when he comes to Joyce he says you know that narration itself is done away
with. That novelistic structure itself is being done away with because he gives you a decentered
kind of writing.
So the very idea, the very activity of writing changes with Joyce and therein makes and that is
what makes Joyce a truly postmodern writer compared to Proust and this is what he goes on to
say you know about Joyce. So Joyce allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in his
writing itself in its signifier. And signifier, the very nature of signifier, the very quality of the
signifier changes in Joyce’s writing.
(Refer Slide Time: 24:31)
The whole range of available narrative and even stylistic operators is put into play without
concern for the unity of the whole. So in Proust he says there is still an underlying unity. There is
still a nostalgia for unity recovering that unity to a play of time through a you know going back
in time etc. And the novel itself you know, The Search of Lost Time, the novel itself does not do
away with the unity of the novelistic tradition.
So the novelistic traditions unity is maintained, is retained in Proust’s writing. But when he
comes to Joyce that that unity itself is done away with. So it no longer is a novel. It becomes a
anti-novel in some sense and obviously the reference in Joyce over here is reference to
Finnegans Wake that you know Lyotard is talking about. The writing is basically anti-writing
which is completely decentered kind of a writing, okay.
So the whole range of available narrative and even stylistic operators is put into play. So it
becomes a playful, becomes a profoundly poststructuralist kind of writing where the relationship
between signifier and signified is no longer linear, is no longer neat, is no longer causal in
quality. But rather it becomes playful in quality. So signifier can mean several signifieds and
vice versa, right. So without concern for the unity of the whole and new operators are tried.
The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer accepted as given. So it does
reveal any kind of givenness. So it does not really remain in the literary tradition at all, right. So
that that becomes a very revolution. That becomes a very postmodern kind of performance in
Joyce’s writing according to Lyotard. Rather they appear as academic forms, as rituals
originating in piety which prevent the unpresentable from being put forward, right.
(Refer Slide Time: 26:19)
So this is the fundamental definition of postmodernism and this is what Lyotard goes on to say,
here then lies the different, modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime though a nostalgic
one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as a missing contents. But the form
because of its recognizable consistency continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for
solace and pleasure.
Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an intrinsic
combination of pleasure and pain. The pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the
pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.
(Refer Slide Time: 26:55)
The postmodern would be that which in the modern puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself. That which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste
which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable. That which
searches for new presentations not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense
of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher.
The text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules
and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment by applying familiar categories
to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for.
The artist and the writer then are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what
will have been done.
So this is basically the concluding argument in Lyotard’s book and this is a very clear mapping
out of differences between the modern and the postmodern. So he says the modern aspires for
the sublime but it aspires for the sublime by retaining the form. So the content changes, the
content may become revolutionary. The content may become missing. It might include missing
content but it still has a nostalgia for the sublime.
It still has the memory of the sublime and that memory plays itself out of the modernist
narrative; whether it is an art form, whether it is a painting, whether it is a cinema, whether it is
literature etc. However, when he comes to postmodernism it actually presents the unpresentable.
It actually gives you a new kind of form. It does not really look for a solace of meaning. It does
not really look for agreement. It does not really look for consensus.
Rather it celebrates and dramatizes disagreement. It celebrates that which is completely new,
right. So a postmodern work is something which is looking for rules and again this goes back to
things which are before that postmodern could actually come before the modern because in some
sense the postmodern is actually in that phase when you are actually looking for rules, when you
are actually making the rules when the rules are being formative, when the rules are being
formed and reformed and deformed etc., right.
So it is a presettled kind of a phase therein lies the revolutionary quality, the revolutionary
potential for the postmodern, right. So it is something which basically you know sets out to do
new things altogether. It breaks away the relationship between signifier and signified and it gives
you a new fresh set of signifiers which are actually subversive in quality.
Now this idea of the postmodern writer or artist being the philosopher is again a very interesting
idea and this is what Lyotard offers at the end where he says the text he writes the work he
produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rule. So he is a philosopher because he
is a seer of truth.
He is you know he is someone who looks for new kinds of truth which are not totalizing in
quality, which are not grand in quality, which are local in quality, which are micro in quality and
which you know do away with you know pre-established ideas of grand truths, right and that
cannot be judged according to pre-established norms because that this is exactly what the
postmodern work is aspiring to become and is aspiring to become a new kind of norm right.
So it is always breaking away from old norms and is always moving towards new kinds of norms
and therein lies the revolutionary potential of postmodernism or the postmodern writer or artist
and therein lies the connection between the postmodern writer or the postmodern producer who
are a literature and a philosopher, right. so both are looking for new kinds of roles which do
away with the older forms of rules which are you know done away with and more importantly
there is no nostalgia, there is no memory, there is no mourning for the loss of meaning, for the
loss of the older rules in postmodernism and therein lies the fundamental difference between the
modernist and the postmodernist, okay. So this is basically the conclusion you know of the essay
and you know he goes on to say what the postmodern philosopher should aspire to do.
(Refer Slide Time: 30:45)
And he says, finally it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent
allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented, right. So basically it is to try and present
the unpresentable, right. Unpresentable in the sense that which has not been presented yet. So if
you present that which has not been presented yet it makes it postmodern. So it is something
completely new , something which is completely paralogical.
So it is not really part of the mainstream logic. It is not part of the mainstream logical system.
You offer a paralogical system, an alternate reality and through the alternate reality you produce
a work of art, you produce a work of painting, you produce a work of literature and that will
make it postmodern, right. So it is not really designed to supply reality. So that again, it breaks
away from the very productive model of our productive model of literature.
But rather looks at the nonproductive model of literature and art which is essentially innovative
in quality in a paralogical sense. So again that goes back to the idea of the difference between
innovation and paralogy. Innovation is something which is designed to extend the efficiency of
the already established system. Whereas the paralogy is something which breaks away from the
system and offers an alternative system, offers an alternative reality through which we can find
out, through which we can find new instruments of main production and representation, okay. So
that is something that Lyotard talks about in the end.
(Refer Slide Time: 32:11)
And the final bit, the final sentence of the book is quite interesting and it sort of is almost a
clarion call for postmodernist. He says the answer is let us wage war on totality. Let us be
witnesses to the unpresentable you know let us activate the differences and save the honor of the
name. So he can replace the word name away with signifier and says let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the signifier. In other words make the signifier more plural in
quality.
Let us not make the signifier constructive in quality, open it up to plural possibilities of meaning
etc., right. So the war in totality is the fundamental condition of postmodernism and now you can
go back and again look at Lyotard’s war with Habermas because according to Habermas the idea
of modernity can only emerge out of totality. Totality can come from consensus in a public
sphere etc. And Lyotard is obviously ideologically and ontologically you know against that kind
of a consensus production in a public sphere.
Rather he wants fractures, rather he wants micronarratives, rather he wants anti-totality etc. And
obviously related to that anti-totality related to that idea of local narratives is the idea to present
the unpresentable. To aspire to present the unpresentable, to find a new instruments of meaning
production and in the process restore the honor of the signifier making more plural, making more
plastic, making more performative in quality in a sense opening it up for newer possibilities of
meaning which is basically the business of postmodernism.
So this concludes the book what is postmodernism you know A Report on Knowledge The
Postmodern Condition you know obviously it is a report on knowledge because it spends a great
deal of time talking about the nature of knowledge, how knowledge changes ontologically,
epistemologically, qualitatively, functionally, ideologically, discursively with the rise of
postmodernism. And again just to summarize very quickly, Lyotard does not look at this
breaking down of knowledge as necessarily a barbaric condition.
He does not look at this as a condition which should be mourned but rather he accepts it
theorizes it and then he goes on celebrate it in his anti-totality, anti-totalitarian quality and this
anti-totalitarian quality it is what is the main criterion of postmodernity according to Lyotard and
something which should be celebrated according to his discourse. So this is the conclusion of this
particular text. I hope you enjoyed reading it.
So do go through the sections we read closely because that section you will be tested on in your
examinations and hopefully you will have a bigger knowledge about, a very interesting
knowledge about the idea of culture as it emerges in the postmodern condition. Because it is very
important as a profoundly significant book in terms of looking at how we look at culture today.
So as I mentioned this is quite prophetic in quality because this is written way back many
decades ago but it seems to be more true to us today the world we live in today than perhaps
what it did appear to the people who lived during Lyotard’s times. So thank you for this
particular session. Thank you for attending this session and I will see you in the next lecture. We
will begin with a new text. Thank you.
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Dr. Avishek Parui
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras
Lecture - 13
Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks (Part - I)
Hello and welcome to this lecture, Introduction to Cultural Studies NPTEL Course. We just
finished with Lyotard. We looked at the postmodern condition and looked at the ways in which
postmodern condition creates some unique cultural identities, cultural formations, and cultural
situations. So we will do today in this lecture we will start with a new text which is Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks which is a profoundly political text.
As the very title suggests Black Skin, White Masks is about the colonial condition, is about how
identity is produced in colonial conditions. How identity is subjugated in colonial conditions and
more importantly how identities almost always is a product of violence, right. So how violence is
very much a part of is embedded in the entire politics of production of identities in a colonial
condition.
And the reason why we choose Fanon is that apart from being a philosopher, apart from being a
you know a really profound critic or cultural commentator, he is someone who believes in or his
writing reveals his belief in praxis, in real activity, in real actions. One of the things you notice
immediately about Fanon is that this directness about his writing, his direct engagement with a
real political situation in his writing.
It is not rhetorical, it is not jargon heavy and he speaks from a position of an insider, inside an
activity as someone which is something which is already happening, certain cultural activity, as a
colonial activity, as a political activity. So that is one of the first things which we know about
Fanon and that characteristic that feature is revealed immediately in his writing; the directness,
the clarity, the urgency for action, the urgency for activity, a sense of immediacy which are the
characteristic features of Frantz Fanon’s works.
Now this particular book Black Skin, White Masks as the very title suggests is about
performative identities. It is how you can have black skin and put on a white mask and you
become some different identity which is obviously a product of violence. It is a violent process
of identity formation because what happens in the entire process is that you subjugate your skin
identity your epidermal identity.
So epidermalization is a process that Fanon talks about quite sort of deeply in this particular
book and we will talk about that later as we move on from that section but just to give you an
idea a flavor of what this book is all about and the reason why we are looking at this book in
particular in cultural studies because it is something which engages directly with the idea of
anxiety of activities, anxiety of the activities which produce identities.
The anxiety to produce a privileged identity, a hegemonic identity and obviously along with that
anxiety associated with the anxiety is a paranoia of being found out as a non-hegemonic identity,
a non-dominant identity. So quite clearly there is a hierarchy in identities in the colonial
condition. We saw that in power, we saw that in Orwell’s Shooting the Elephant how this
particular hierarchy also is associated with a sense of ambivalence, right.
So the hegemonic identity is also ambivalent because it has been hegemonic all the time whereas
the ambivalence operates in some other way as well in terms of looking at how the colonized
native wants to be like the colonizer. That is the aspirational activity, the aspirational identity by
the process of becoming the colonizer he is obviously not the complete colonizer because he
does not really have the real political power.
So he sort of half leaves behind his own identity, his original identity. So he ends up becoming a
sort of half chopped identity and therein lies the violence. Therein lies the metonymic quality of
identity production in the colonial condition which is what this book is all about, Black Skin
White Masks and obviously one of the reasons why we go to Fanon along with the fact that he is
a profound commentator on the cultural condition.
He is a profound activist who is really actively engaged with a real political and colonial
condition is that he was also a psychiatrist by training. Now he is one of the real philosophers,
one of the first real philosophers who brings in psychiatry and political condition in a really
fascinating study of identity production and anxiety of identity production and the
psychopathology related to anxiety production identity production in a colonial space.
So psychiatry in in Fanon’s work becomes an instrument to look at the way in which identities
are produced, subjugated, reproduced violated etc. and how this constant violence which is part
of the identity production process becomes an endemic condition, becomes a pathological
condition. So he is sort of someone who looks at the medical, medical extensions of this anxiety
which is political in quality.
So this collusion between medicine and politics is something that Fanon studies and examines
quite deeply and profoundly in his works and obviously a part of the psychiatry training that
Fanon has is also used to critique the Eurocentric psychiatric, the Eurocentric you know
psychological studies which were heavily racialized before Fanon.
So he exposes a racial character of European psychology or Eurocentric psychology and he talks
about you know European trained psychologists and he mentions quite a few of them you know
who talks about the Africans in terms of a very racist kind of rhetoric. He talks about the low
intelligence of African as the innate murderers, violence in Africans. All these are very racist
connotations that sort of published in quite sophisticated journals and European medicine,
European psychology etc.
And Fanon is one of the first philosophers from the first people really to critique the tradition, to
critique the biomedical or biopolitical branding of a certain race in terms of essentializing it as a
murderers, violent kind of a race. So Black Skin, White Masks does a lot of things. It reveals the
violence of identity production. It reveals a very complex and almost evil collusion between
medicine and politics in terms of branding a certain race, in terms of branding a certain ethnicity
and more importantly it also talks about the aspirational activity in the part of the colonized.
So what can the colonizer do in this kind of an identity production why he is branded as a noble
savage, benevolent savage or an anarchic and murderer savage or violent savage. So what can a
colonizer do in these conditions? So Black Skin, White Masks is a profound commentary on the
culture of production of identities in a particular colonial condition where identities are
extremely inequal and this inequality of identities is what creates the violence in the first place.
So before we begin with Fanon’s works before we begin with Fanon words directly into his
language let us first take a look at 2 introductions which we use in this particular book. So this
book has a couple of introductions.
(Refer Slide Time: 07:08)
The first is by Ziauddin Sardar and the second is by Homi Bhabha. So we will take a look at both
these introductions and we probably spend this first lecture on Fanon examining these
introductions and how the introductions set out really to describe what Fanon does later on in this
particular book.
So how do these introductions talk about situating Fanon as a cultural critic, situate Fanon as a
political commentator and how they sort of look at the significance of Fanon’s works especially
the relation to the world we live in today because the manner in which Fanon was living he was
not really studied extensively. He was not really considered to be a profound philosopher or a
profound cultural critic.
It is only after his death and he died very early, very young. It is only after his death that his
importance as a cultural commentator was truly emphasized and resurrected and not least with
the help of Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote this really fabulous introduction to, The Wretched of The
Earth, another of Fanon’s books where he talks about the importance of Fanon as the philosopher
of the colonial condition, a work we learn from Fanon both as people who colonizes versus
people who were colonized, right.
So he gives you a direct commentary on the colonial condition and the direct directness and the
clarity of expression that Fanon has makes him almost a universal philosopher as someone who
speaks of times which are universally valid for humanity across spaces, across times, across
cultural conditions. So though he speaks specifically on the French-Algerian condition, that is
the condition he talks about, the French-Algerian colonial condition.
But you know the directness of his expression, the clarity of his expression, the sophistication of
his expression they find you know relevance in almost all conditions where colonialism was
operative as instrument of torture, instrument of you know discrimination, instrument of
domination, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 09:05)
So let us first take a look at you know Sardar’s book, Sardar’s introduction, Ziauddin Sardar’s
introduction to this particular book Black Skin, White Masks where he gives you sort of
introduces to what this book is all about. What is Black Skin, White Mask all about. Now first of
all he says Black Skin, White Masks and I have highlighted the sections which are important for
us, Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular definition of dignity.
So dignity becomes a very important category in Fanon. It becomes a discursive category, it
becomes an existential category, it becomes a psychological category. So what does Fanon mean
by dignity. So dignity is ability of particular self, a particular human being to live with agency,
to live with freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of you know speech, freedom of
movement and freedom of identity more importantly.
So dignity is that kind of condition which does not make you anxious or aspirational to assume a
certain kind of identity just because it is a privilege, just because it is hegemonic and it is that
kind of a condition which does away with any kind of subjugation to knowledge, subjugation of
identity etc. So Black Skin, White Masks offers a very particular definition of dignity. Dignity is
not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilization.
It is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat with at his
table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one’s
own ways of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one’s self. Black Skin, White
Masks charts the author’s own journey of discovering his dignity through an interrogation of his
own self; a journey that will not be unfamiliar to all those who have been forced to endure
western civilization.
So dignity in Fanon becomes a very important category. It becomes an ontological,
psychological as well as a political category as I mentioned and the discursive quality of dignity
has to be highlighted over here because dignity you know is that condition which is not marked
by any anxiety to emulate the colonizer. It is not marked by any anxiety to or any aspiration to
mimic the colonizer.
It is that condition which allows you the freedom to be what you are as an ethnic self as a
cultural self as a racial self as a political self and as an existential self. So your race, your
ethnicity, your language, your politics, your gender, your body belongs to you. And that sense of
belonging, that sense of ownership over who we are, over yourself really is what constitutes
dignity in Fanon’s work and that is something that Sardar highlights very beautifully I think in
the very beginning of this particular introduction.
(Refer Slide Time: 11:33)
Now, as I mentioned and this is what Sardar goes on to describe later on that you know Fanon
also began to use psychoanalysis to study the effects of racism on individuals particularly its
impact on the self-perception of blacks themselves. During the 1950s metropolitan France was a
center of revolutionary philosophy and a magnet for writers, thinkers and activists from Africa.
Fanon imbibed the ideas of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and became friends with Octave
Mannoni, French psychologist and author of Psychology of Colonization.
A young man searching for his own identity in a racist society, Fanon identified with the African
freedom fighters who cane to France seeking allies against European colonialism. He began to
define a new black identity and became actively involved in the anti-colonialist struggle. So
when in 1953 he was offered a job as the head of the psychiatry department in the you know
Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algiers he jumped at the opportunity.
So as you can see in the very beginning what Sardar tells you quite interestingly is that how
Fanon was profoundly influenced by philosophy and of course he was a psychiatrist by training
and he was living at a time when psychoanalysis was heavily was beginning to get racialized,
right and this is something which we need to understand in cultural studies.
Because part of the cultural studies, a large part of cultural studies as I hope to have established
by now is about identity formation and identity formation is of course a discursive process and
this discursive process includes a lot of material apparatus which includes medicine. So medicine
becomes a very important instrument in classification in cultural studies especially in colonial
conditions where identities are inequally distributed, right.
So psychoanalysis, psychiatry these become very handy instruments of discrimination, very
handy instruments of classification, racist classifications in colonial times. So what Fanon does,
he uses psychoanalysis to study the effects of racism. So what can, what effects does racism have
on subjects who suffer racism in the sense of you know being discriminated, the sense of being
tortured, the sense of being left out, the sense of being subjugated.
So these become almost pathological conditions after a point of time and this constant replication
of discrimination, the constant replication of domination so this generates a sense of inferiority, a
sense of alienation if you will. And alienation becomes a very important category in Fanon’s
works but this alienation is not just a Marxist alienation where the producer is removed from the
product but also a profound existential elimination.
And we saw when we read Orwell’s Shooting the Elephant how alienation can be a compound of
the Marxist category which is materialistic as well as a more existential category which is more
psychological. So psychoanalysis for Fanon becomes a very interesting instrument with which he
studies or examines the effects of alienation in colonial conditions.
And of course so he was someone who was profoundly influenced by philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre as you know was a philosopher in the existentialist tradition and existentialism of course is
about you know does examine the selfhood of man, the sense of selfhood of man especially the
way it navigates with his material surroundings, especially the way it navigates with his
ideological discursive surroundings.
So Sartre becomes a very important figure in any study of Fanon and as I mentioned Sartre wrote
a really famous preface to Fanon’s Wretched of The Earth where he talks about how this
particular book Wretched of The Earth is a profound book in exposing the hollowness of
European civilization, exposing the hollowness of European imperialism and talking about how
you know identity, self, agency these are subjugated systematically in colonial conditions.
So the sense of subjugation, the sense of being subjugated becomes subjugated becomes a
pathological condition and that is something that Fanon studies with his psychoanalysis, with his
training in psychiatry, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 15:31)
So that gives you a very interesting idea of the location of this particular book. So when was this
book written. What stage in Fanon’s life was this book you know sort of produced and what were
the what were the cultural climate which produced this particular book. So what was the culture
throughout that Fanon was consuming, that Fanon was a part of and Fanon was critiquing.
So again like I said I mean this is something I keep saying throughout this particular course that
any text is produced out of context. You cannot possible divorce the text from its context, right.
So the context determine the text to a great extent. So what kind of book is being written is
largely determined by the cultural conditions, the political and discursive conditions of that
particular time and that is a bit of a cliche in cultural studies, is something which we assume
automatically.
Now for this particular book Black Skin, White Masks, obviously this was written at a time
where you know French imperialism was at its hideous peak and Algeria was a French colony.
So it is largely this interaction in Algerian condition and the French condition or Algerian-French
condition or French-Algerian condition which obviously was characterized by discrimination,
characterized by racism, characterized by hierarchy which is you know one of the grand
narratives of colonialism as we known it.
So Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks when he was 27. So he was quite young when he
wrote it. Published in 1952 it was his first and perhaps most enduring book and it was ignored
unsurprisingly. So it was a book which was written at a time where you know the mainstream
publishing society, the mainstream British, the mainstream European clientele was not ready for
this book at all.
Because this was a book which was written from the other side, right. It was a book written you
know by someone who actually suffered colonialism, someone who actually suffered the
discrimination of imperialism and someone who actually spoke back in a way that was
sophisticated and erudite and compelling. So it was something which was conveniently ignored
by the White mainstream hegemonic press or the White mainstream hegemonic leadership at that
time in 1952.
So it was ignored. Its significance was recognized only after the death of the author particularly
after the publication of the English translation a decade and a half later in 1967. So again the
politics of translation becomes a very important you know very important method in making
someone famous, in making a writer sort of visible to the White audience because the original
book is from the French of course and it was sort of relatively ignored or relatively sort of not
given an important setoff.
But only after this English translation a decade and a half later, 15 years later in 1967 was the it
was resurrected in terms of its significance. It was the year when anti-war campaigning was at its
height and student strikes and protests that began at Columbia University in New York started to
spread like wildfire across the United States and Europe.
So again why this is a very important and a very interesting study, why certain books become
important suddenly at certain points of time; so what are the cultural conditions which sort of
condense together as it were to invest importance to a particular book which was relatively
forgotten previously. So this particular book, Black Skin, White Masks is a classic case in point
because when it was originally published in 1952 it was ignored.
It was not really paid importance, paid attention to at all. But it is only after 1967 when student
protests were at the height when there was general agreement about the evils in imperialism and
general agreement about the evils of the grand narratives of European power, European
hegemony, European control etc. Where there was student protest in the streets of Paris when
and this entire idea of the independence of Algeria became you know an almost national you
know cry among the young people across France.
It is only then at that particular cultural climate this particular book was resurrected. So this
became a very important book at that point of time because it was the time which was ready to
relate to this particular book. So this idea of being ready to relate is very important when when it
comes to assigning importance to certain books. So when certain books become important at
certain points of time it is just about being in sync with the contemporary or with that kind of
cultural climate which is around at that point of time.
So 1967 was the time generally of protest, generally of student unrest, generally of cries against
you know evils of imperialism and it was also the birth of post-structuralism you know of poststructuralism as a phenomenon was coming to being was really shaping up in a sort of massive
way at that time. So it is not a surprise to us that it was that time which is ready to sort
of read and resurrect and relate to this particular book which is published half a decade, one-anda-half decades earlier.
So Martin Luther King at that time was leading the civil rights movement and was to be
assassinated a year later. Advocates of black power were criticizing attempts to assimilate and
integrate black people. So this was the time where black intellectuals, the black protestors were
really sort of coming together in a massive way, in a profound way, in a very instrumental way,
in a compelling way and critiquing the evils of imperialism, critiquing the evils of racism,
critiquing the evils of you know looking at black people as some kind of an essentialized
category.
And Martin Luther King was obviously one of the you know forefronts of this particular
struggle. So he was assassinated a year later in 1968 as you know. So this was the time when this
kind of debates were at the hike at the peak. So it is unsurprising that Fanon’s book Black Skin,
White Masks was massively popular at that point of time. So the book caught the imagination of
all who argued for and promoted the idea of black consciousness.
It became the bible of radical students in Paris and London, outraged the exploitation, outraged
at the exploitation of the Third World. So even the metropolitan white students in Paris and
London were outraged when they read the book Black Skin, White Masks because as I
mentioned in the very beginning, this is a book which is a very compelling revelation of the
evils, the torture, the assassinations, not just assassination as physical but also identity
assassination which happens during colonialism.
So it obviously becomes a very revealing text which tells you what really takes place during
imperialism. What really takes place in colonialism. So it is bit of an insider’s account if you will
of the evils of colonialism as seen by Fanon and as described by Fanon.
(Refer Slide Time: 22:01)
And the reason why and I come back to the point again, the reason why this becomes a really
revelatory book, a really compelling argument is because Fanon looks at colonialism, looks at
the effect of colonialism from a medical perspective as well. So it is not just a political text. It is
not just a text which is sort of politically important.
It is also a text which is medically important or bi-politically important because he is using
psychology, he is a trained psychiatrist and he is using the psychological training, his training in
psychiatry to look at the effect of colonialism as a systematic process of exploitation, as a
systematic process of other formation, a systematic process of you know projecting inferiority or
you know inventing inferiority of a certain population of people.
And what happens if you keep consuming this idea of inferiority? What happens if you keep
suffering this subjugation of dominant power. So you know it is that kind of a book where the
medical and the political coexists as instruments of study, instruments of examination. So Sardar
says over here Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate the psychology of
colonialism. It examines how colonialism is internalized by the colonized.
How an inferiority complex is inculcated and how through the mechanism of racism, black
people end up emulating their oppressors. So you know racism works in surreptitious ways. So I
mean obviously it can work as a blunt way of torture, discrimination, exploitation etc. But racism
can also work more effectively as a means of consent; how if you manage to create consent, if
you manage to inculcate the idea of inferiority on the colonized population then you get willing
subjects.
You basically you know end up aspiring for the colonizer’s position because the colonizer’s
position becomes a privileged position in their imagination, right. So that becomes more of a
psychological condition then. So that is the second level of imperialism, the second level of
racism, right. Because you know racism would excel would triumph completely when it manages
to become a psychological condition where you consume it without questioning.
You consume the superiority of the white man without questioning it. You consume the
superiority, you presuppose the superiority of the you presuppose the privilege of the colonizer
without questioning it and therein lies the greatest triumph of imperialism or racism, okay. So
you know then we have black people emulating unquestioningly emulating the oppressors.
So it is due to the sensitivities of Fanon as Ashis Nandy says that we know something about the
interpersonal patterns which constituted the colonial situation particularly in Africa, right. So
Fanon talks about the interpersonal patterns, how this kind of an activity of emulation, aspiration,
anxiety becomes an interpersonal category, an interpersonal narrative which marks the colonial
condition you know in a very solid kind of a way, in a very regimented kind of a way.
So Fanon began the process of psychoanalytic deconstruction that was developed further by
Nandy in The Intimate Enemy. So Ashis Nandy has this really interesting book called Intimate
Enemy where he talks about where he sort of draws in Fanon to a large extent and then extends
the argument further by looking at the way in which the entire idea of other-ing, the entire idea
of being an other, being this inferior other the exotic other becomes a profoundly psychological
condition.
And it can be read sort of psychoanalytically through prism of inferiority complex. How
inferiority complex becomes a narrative which is sort of created and consolidated by the different
vectors,
the various vectors of imperialism and racism. So Fanon began a process of psychoanalytic
deconstruction.
So again we are talking about 2 different categories coming together, psychoanalysis and
deconstruction coming together to produce psychoanalytic deconstruction which basically
reveals the constructed quality of this you know the artificial quality of the artefact of the white
man’s supremacy and so the white man’s supremacy, the white man’s superiority becomes an
artefact of the highest order which obviously creates the other artefact which is the non-white
man’s inferiority, right.
And the whole point of this success of colonialism, the success of racism is how these artefacts
began to pass off as givens began to pass of as unquestioned or unquestionable givens which are
just presupposed in the colonial conditions. So, Fanon was one of the first people really to begin
a sophisticated study of this collusion between you know medicine and politics and that is
something which is deconstructed later by Ngugi wa Thiong in Decolonising The Mind 1968,
right.
The other theorists of colonial subjectivity have followed in their footsteps. Okay, so what makes
Fanon an important person in cultural studies. Why we are interested in Fanon at all in terms of
looking at the identity production, the violence of identity production, the violence of cultural
identity productions etc. And the reason is not far to see as Ziauddin Sardar tells you
immediately.
(Refer Slide Time: 27:25)
Fanon writes from the perspective of the colonized subject and this is up in your screen. Fanon
writes from the perspective of the colonized subject. He is a subject with a direct experience of
racism who has developed natural and intense hatred of racism. So he is someone who has a
first-hand experience of suffering racism, right. So and racism is something which is not just a
dry, discursive thing for Fanon. It is a lived experience, it is an experiential category for Fanon.
And from this experientiality of racism he offers an active engagement which deconstructs
racism. So we have to understand that when we read Fanon he is not really a cold, dry, a clever
intellectual who is passing off lovely theories to examine racism, to examine discrimination, to
examine you know biases in colonial conditions. No, but he is someone who actually experiences
it and he speaks from his position of experience.
This is what I mean when I say he gives you insider’s account of how racism works. He gives an
insider’s account of how discrimination works and that is why he is so important for us today.
This insidedness the clarity or the directness of his experience so you know racism or
colonialism become experiential conditions to Fanon. No just dry, discursive conditions, okay.
So and then of course this whole idea of deconstruction this idea of opening up the grand
narratives, exposing the grand narratives of imperialism and racist is written away which is
deliberately discontinuous; deliberately fragmented. So there is a change in style of Fanon. He
lives across registers of resentment. So there is direct resentment of discursive resentment and all
these different registers of resentment become very important in Fanon because that is part of the
process which is deconstructing the old grand narrative of racism where which operates
primarily on the presumed supremacy of one race and the presumed inferiority of the other race,
okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 29:18)
So and hence we have the text is full of discontinuities, changes in style, merging of genres,
dramatic movement from analysis to pronouncements, switches from objective scientific
discussion to deep subjectivity, transfers from theory to journalism, complex use of extended
metaphors and not least, a number of apparent contradictions. So you know all these different
categories come together in Fanon’s writing.
So it is a fragmented text with which basically deals with discontinuities because it talks about
discontinuities and identity. So it is no wonder it is written in style which is discontinuous. So
there is a frequent change of style and merging of different genres it becomes very dramatic in
some ways. It becomes objective and scientific in some other ways. It becomes subjective and
actively involved in some other ways.
So it is somewhere it is that kind of text where emotions, passion, subjective passion, subjective
emotions emerge with objective analysis and that is what makes it a really important text for us
today because it is not just theorizing on the colonial condition. It is actually speaking from our
experience. It is speaking from our experiential position and that makes it such a vibrant and
plural text. He merges theory with journalism.
He merges metaphors, he merges contradictions, he merges objectivity with subjectivity, he
merges objective medical knowledge with first time subjective experience and all this merging
come together. All this sort of very confused mergers which are happening in this particular book
makes it actually a very important book for us today. It makes it a very poststructuralist kind of a
text.
And again I go back to what we were just saying about the post structuralism which is
simultaneous with the student protest, with this protest against the governments, with the protest
against racism which is happening across the metropolitan centers of Europe including but not
limited to London and Paris.
So the rise of post-structuralism the sort of spatio-temporal fragmentation, discontinuity so all
these different categories of post- structuralism are actually historically synchronous with the rise
of you know for instance the Algerian war of independence. So Fanon can be looked at as the
philosopher of post-structuralism, as someone who is actually practicing post-structuralism in a
real political space and his expressions his descriptions of colonial conditions are supremely
post-structuralist are profoundly post-structuralist.
Hence he brings in different metaphors, he brings in different disciplines together in order to
study the colonial condition in Algeria. And again as I mentioned although he is speaking
specifically on the French-Algerian colonial condition the clarity of his expression, the
humanness of his expression the humanity the universality of his expression gives it you know a
timeless character.
So you know Fanon’s descriptions could find resonance in almost all colonial conditions because
he talks about the heartbeat, the beat, the real pulse with which colonialism and colonial
oppression works. The real experience of being discriminated, there real experience of being
tortured, the real experience of being left out, the real experience of being alienated. So the
reality of his experience gives us the sense of universality which makes him a supreme
philosopher of colonialism, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 32:36)
And of course the most important chapter of this particular book is the chapter we will study in
great details when we read the book. It is called The Fact of Blackness where he talks about the
very idea of being black in a white space and how the fact of blackness becomes an ontological
factor an existential factor. It becomes a lived reality. It becomes a discursive reality. It becomes
a discursive condition as well.
And again how this sort of this merge between discursivity and reality becomes very important
in Fanon’s descriptions. So we see the injustices described being lived in front of our eyes. This
is most evident in the chapter on The Fact of Blackness. Here Fanon breaks out of all convention
and simply lets his stream of consciousness wash out on the paper. So it becomes a very
subjective description of blackness, very subjective description of you know subjugation.
Hence we have this expression stream of consciousness. So it becomes a very first-hand
narration of what he actually suffered as a human being who is racialised who is reified through
this racial
metaphor, through this racial rhetoric and what does this reification do at the level of alienation,
at the level of alienating him at a human level, right?
So that is described to us in first-hand in this chapter The Fact of Blackness which gives it a
vibrancy, a poignancy and which makes it profoundly human in quality. So all this whiteness
that burns me. I sit down at the fire and became aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is
indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is? This directness, this simmering
anger makes us uncomfortable because civilized society does not like uncomfortable truths and
naked honesty.
So again this idea of whiteness that Fanon talks about is obviously an artifice. The whiteness he
talks about is you know the black man speaking in a white man’s tongue. So that’s what makes a
black person white. So this whiteness burns me. I sit down as Fanon says, I sit down at the fire
and became aware of my uniform. So again uniform is something which you don. You don, undon, you put on and put off. So it has an artificiality to it.
It has an artificial quality to it, uniform and that is what makes it and also he uses the word
uniform quite carefully uniform comes from uniformity. So when you put on a uniform you are
actually standardizing yourself. So you are doing away with subjectivity, you are doing away
with your internal contradictions, you are doing away with who you are as a person and rather
you are putting on a standardized jacket, a straitjacket rather.
So uniform produces uniformity of you know appearance of embodiment which does away with
your sense of true self, what you are as a person, what you are as an Algerian, what you are as a
person who belongs to a particular community. That is being done away with and what we have
instead is a sense of uniformity which is standardized, which is sort of tragically you know levels
out all differences.
So he looks he becomes aware of his uniform, of his white uniform and then he goes on to say I
had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there for who can tell me what beauty is. So into this idea
of beauty and ugliness what becomes beauty notionally at a discursive level actually becomes
ugly because it takes away from what you are as a person, right.
So your sense of ownership on who you are, what you are as a person, the ownership of yourself
on yourself goes away you know dissolves away and what we have in its place is a discursive,
dominant discursive mode where uniform or the mask becomes more important than your face
than your biological body than your free human will. So this directness, this anger, so anger
again is a very important affect in Fanon. So he is a writer who makes you angry.
He is a writer who writes in a way which is designed to make you angry. So it is very you know
it is a very agitated kind of writing, it is very animated language that he uses and part of the
process of the anger is very sort of deliberate. It is a deliberately angry text which wants to do
away with any kind of dry rhetoric, which wants to do away with all kinds of dry discursive
theorizations.
But instead offers you, you know a very direct description of what it really means to be
exploited, what it really means to be subjugated, what it really means to be tortured by the
colonial condition. Tortured at an epistemic level, tortured at a physical level at a visceral level
and at a level of embodiment as well. So this makes us uncomfortable. This particular book
becomes a very uncomfortable text because civilized society does not like uncomfortable truths
and naked honesty, right.
So the naked honesty and again nakedness becomes a very important category in Fanon. It is the
directness of his expression, it is an explicit quality about his expression which makes it very
unsettling because he does not really use metaphors, he does not really use he does not hide
behind metaphors. So he does not hide beneath language. So he uses language to communicate,
to actually screen his anger, to vent out his anger and that becomes unsettling from a position of
the white colonizer’s perspective. However, that is the whole point of Fanon.
He wants to unsettle, he wants to make the colonizer embarrassed. He wants to make the
colonizer ashamed. So shame, anger, resentment, hostility so all these come together, all these
exist in Fanon’s writing quite deliberately and quite directly and that this existence, this sort of
this mixture of all these different attributes which is otherwise politically incorrect gives Fanon’s
writing a sense of clarity, a sense of sophistication, a sense of directness which makes it almost
universal in his skill. So we will stop here today. We will continue with the lecture on Fanon in
the subsequent session. Thank you for your attention.
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Dr. Avishek Parui
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras
Lecture - 14
Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks (Part - II)
So hello and welcome to this Introduction to Cultural Studies NPTEL Course where we are
reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. We just started with the text in the last lecture.
We will continue with this in this lecture.
So we will read the introduction to Fanon written by Ziauddin Sardar which is a very compelling
introduction because it sort of gives you an idea of Fanon’s life as a sort of an activist, as a
psychiatrist. Somehow he combines the psychiatric training with his activism in order to expose
the torture, the subjugation of the colonial condition and the discrimination the colonial condition
sort of systematized through a process of control, right.
So as he goes on to say that when reading Black Skin, White Masks one ought to keep the time
and circumstances in which it was written firmly in mind. It is up in your screen right now. So
the time and circumstances of the production of the book is very important and he talked about
how when it was originally written in 1952, it was not really you know paid much attention to it.
But then in 1967 when the different student protest were happening in London and Paris 67 was
a big year where lots of protests were happening across Europe against racism, against
imperialism etc. So it was that time when this particular book was completely in sync with the
climate, in sync with the cultural condition and it became a very important book at that time. So
this is a dynamic text written in the heat of an intense and often bloody liberation struggle.
So the bloody quality of the book is very important. It is something which is so alive in a very
wounded kind of a way. So it is a book about a wounded subject. It is a book about a subject
which you know wants to be liberated from discrimination, wants to be liberated from racism,
wants to be liberated from all kinds of biases, all kinds of you know imprisonment. The imprison
can obviously mean different things at different points of time.
The imprison can be epistemic imprisonment. Imprisonment can mean linguistic imprisonment
can mean linguistic imprisonment. Imprisonment obviously can mean cultural imprisonment.
Now Sardar gives a very important term over here in terms of looking at how the black subject is
controlled and subjugated and you know made into inferior subject by the you know the white
subject by the colonizer through a system of racism.
And he calls this process epidermalization. So epidermalization is you know epidermal is
obviously related to skin so how the skin becomes an identity. So how the skin becomes the
process of identification and how the skin becomes the process through which identity is sort of
prioritized, identities are hegemonized, where identities become inferior and superior depending
on the skin color.
(Refer Slide Time: 03:00)
So epidermalization is a process which is used very effectively I think by Sardar in terms of
looking at how Fanon situates the black subject, okay. So you know he says Sardar says it is the
internalization or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, it is a term used by Fanon as well of
this inferiority that concerns him. So this inferiority is something which is accepted and
internalized and epidermalized by the black subject, right.
It is part of who he is, inferiority, right and that obviously means a triumph of colonialism, a
triumph of racism because that is exactly what racism wants. That is what racism is designed to
you know deliver, this idea of inferiority and this innate idea of inferiority. This idea of making
inferiority into some kind of an innate you know presupposition. It is not just internalization, it is
epidermalization.
So this is visceral quality about inferiority that Fanon resents and that is something that he
exposes as a hollow construct which is used very effectively and which has been a grand success
of racism this idea of you know the visceralization, the epidermalization, the internalization of
inferiority the part of the black man. So the black man comes into contact with you know the
white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego collapses.
His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated person. The entire purpose of his
behaviour is to emulate the white man, to become like him and thus hope to be accepted as a
man. It is the dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon and which ultimately he wishes to
eliminate. This is the declared you know intention of the study, to enable the man of color to
understand, the psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro.
So what Fanon really resents and wants to do away with and wants to deconstruct is the innate
inferiority of the black man you know and just collapse the ego. So his sense of self, his
ownership over his own body, his ownership over his own self, over his own identity you know
gives way to a predestined, a presupposed privilege which is located completely, almost
completely to the white man. So his the black man’s ego collapses.
His self-esteem evaporates and what happens subsequently is he ceases to be a self-motivated
person. So his entire life his entire activities are directed to emulate, to mimic, to aspire, to
approximate, to appropriate the white man’s metaphors, the white man’s markers whether it is
the way the white man speaks, whether it is the way the white man eats, the way white man
behaves etc.
So this process of emulation becomes quite problematic in Fanon, according to Fanon and Fanon
resents it. Fanon wants to do away with that completely. So he goes on to say that you know
Fanon is dynamic of inferiority that concerns Fanon and which he ultimately wishes to eliminate,
okay. So and obviously this idea of internalizations, idea of you know this visceral knowledge of
inferiority is a very psychological condition and it is a product of a long drawn out colonial
condition, a long drawn out colonial struggle okay.
The struggle which is, the struggle is part of the colonized of course but the whole point is to do
away with the struggle by creating or constructing you know consensual subjects, conforming
subjects. And subjects can be conforming, subjects can become consensual when they
completely epidermalize or internalize inferiority of their own selves. So if you think you are
inferior, if you think you are completely inferior in comparison to the white man then obviously
you would not resent the white man’s territorialization.
You would not resent the white man’s domination because you accept your inferiority and this
acceptance of inferiority goes through a very discursive process, is obviously a very material
process. But at some point the success of this material process is it becomes a psychological
process. It becomes psychological condition. It is so innate in a colonized that he does not
question it at all. And that is something that Fanon resents and wants to deconstruct, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 06:58)
And Fanon says whiteness, Fanon asserts has become a symbol of purity of justice, truth,
virginity. It defines what it means to be civilized, modern and human. So obviously this takes us
back to some extent to Edward Said’s Orientalism as you can understand because Said’s
Orientalism does exactly this. It talks about how the European created a constructed as other.
So the European becomes purity, the European becomes whiteness, European becomes justice,
truth, virginity then the non-European or the non-white becomes just the opposite injustice, lies,
contamination, sexual impurity, sexual contamination, etc. So contamination is pitted against
purity over here, right. So purity is the white man, contamination is the non-white man. So a
Negro of course you know becomes the site of vehicle of contamination, the metaphor of
contamination etc. and that is something that racism does quite effectively.
And the whole point of racism, the whole purpose of racism is to create this other of the white
person, the white race, right that the other which will consolidate the supremacy of the white race,
okay and that is something that Fanon wants to deconstruct. So it is a construct, this idea of white
man’s superiority, the white man’s supremacy and contamination carried by the black man. This
whole idea is a construct which Fanon wants to deconstruct and he does it quite effectively.
(Refer Slide Time: 08:15)
So on page 14 Sardar goes on to say the idealized negro is equally a construction of the white
man. So there are 2 kinds of black men, one obviously is the dangerous black man who is the
potential you know, he is violent, he is hyper sexualized, he is aggressive, he is someone who
can create anarchy at any point of time and it is the other kind of black man who is idealized,
who is benevolent, who is submissive, who conforms to the wishes and desires of the white man
etc.
So both are obviously essentialized categories. Both are actually reified categories of identity
production. So Fanon goes on to say you know and this is Sardar talking about Fanon’s idea of
the benevolent, idealized black man, the idealized Negro is equally a construction of the white
man. He represents the flip side of the enlightenment. He is constructed not as a real person with
a real history but an image.
The idealized Negro, the noble savage, the product of utopian thinkers such as Sir Thomas More,
who comes from no place and in the end no person is in the end no person. This Negro was born
out of the need of European humanism to rescue itself from its moral purgatory and project itself
and displace the original inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly,
Fanon does not look on lovers of Negros with favor.
So this whole idea becomes a project you know a purgatory project really. It is a project of you
know European humanism. So as you know there are 2 or 3 different kinds of narratives which is
used to legitimize imperialism and one dominant narrative of legitimization was a rescue mission
narrative. That you know the narrative is, the European goes to the non-European space.
The imperialist goes to the non-European imperialist space, the non-white space and
territorializes it and of course if he says territorialization alone then it make it bad and vulgar. So
you have to supplement it, you have to embellish it by you know using the rescue mission
narrative. So it is a act of civilizing, the act of rescuing and redeeming the people who have no
religion, who have no culture with no civilizations, giving them culture and in the process you
know it becomes the enlightenment project.
It becomes purgatory project etc. and in the process they create this mimetic idea of the noble the
noble Negro, the noble savage, right who is more of a mimetic construct and a real human being.
So this mimetic construct of course is you know is discursively done, is a process through which
you know is a process of different discursive formations which create it and which idealize it. So
idealization is also a form of essentialism. Idealization is also a form of reification and that is
something that Fanon resents.
So Fanon resents both people who you know look at the Negro, look at the black man as savage,
as a dangerous savage as well as the kind of idea which looks at the black man as some kind of a
noble, submissive, nice, Christian person with no sense of resentment, with no sense of you
know dissent etc. So this perfectly conforming this perfectly agreeing, this perfectly agreeable,
this perfectly nice and noble and submissive black man is another construct of racism which
Fanon deconstructs as well.
(Refer Slide Time: 11:37)
So what we can see over here is how Sardar is looking at the ways in which Fanon deconstructs
the different kinds of categories which form a colonial identity formation which basically inform
the hegemonic process through which colonial identities are produced and reproduced and
deproduced, right.
So we have this standard hegemonic identity of the white person of course who presumes the
dominant position and opposed to that we have the idea of the non-white person who is in nondominant position and of course this binary needs to be replicated and consolidated across the
entire colonial map, the colonial parameter. So it is done with the process of approximation, of
the process of standardization, the process of hierarchization, the process of racialization and
also medicalization. And this is the really original bit in Fanon’s work.
This collusion as I mentioned between racism and medicine how medicine sanctions racism to a
great extent, how medicine legitimates racism how medicine gives you the epistemic sanction
you know and tells you that yea we have this medical “knowledge” of the black man’s inferiority
or the black man’s innate violence or the black man’s innate dullness and stupidity, of the black
man’s innate hyper sexuality.
So if he can medically prove this with “empirical evidence” then obviously that completely
legitimizes your colonial program, right your imperial program, your racist rhetoric and this is
exactly what deconstruct is and this is what Fanon sets out to deconstruct, okay. and as I
mentioned at the very beginning of this introduction, Sardar gave us the idea of dignity. How
Fanon is someone who aspires dignity.
So dignity to be who you are, dignity to regain ownership over your body, over your self, over
your self-esteem, over your culture, over your ethnicity etc. And this idea of dignity carries a
universal quality according to Sardar and you know Fanon this is the way we look at Fanon as
something of a universal philosopher of the colonial condition. So because although he speaks
from a position this French-Algerian conditions specifically the directness and the clarity of his
expression they make it sort of universal in quality.
So Fanon’s idea of universalism is based on the notions of dignity, equality, and equity on a
concrete and ever new understanding of man. It is the universalism that does not exist as yet. It
cannot emerge from the dominant discourse, and it cannot be seen as a grand narrative that
privileges a particular culture and its representatives. So this is a very important point that this
universality is not to be mistaken as a grand narrative.
This universality is a basic condition, is a basic human condition which does not exist as yet you
know in Fanon’s times as Sardar is summarizing it. So it cannot be a dominant discourse. It
cannot be, so it cannot be, the tables have turned. Now we have the black man as the dominant
person and that would not be the idea of universality that Fanon aspires to sort of assume. So it is
the universality which is a common, a basic human condition which is which has not arrived as
yet.
So it cannot be seen as a grand narrative that privileges a particular culture and its
representatives. Its universalism we need to struggle for and build. That is why Fanon is not
content simply with the knowledge and criticism. He wants man and here he wants, he does
mean man as a universal person to be actional. And this is the really the key point in Fanon’s
entire writing oeuvre.
I mean he wants activity, he wants action, he wants real praxis. So you know he does not want
someone. He is not the kind of philosopher who deals with theory, a very reified rhetorical
theory alone. He wants the theory to be executed in a real space, to be actional. To be out there
dealing with real things in a real world, okay. So this reality of Fanon, this real engagement with
real human situation in Fanon is what makes him a real important philosopher for us today, okay.
So this introduction as you see is a very important introduction because it, what it does it gives
you an idea of what Fanon aspires in this particular book, what Fanon’s writing aspires, etc. Now
we come to the next introduction by Homi K. Bhabha. This is a foreword actually and he talks
about, so this was Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha talking about Fanon.
And you know if you remember a reading of Bhabha and what we looked at in the other question
the politics of production of the other, so it is a very important text because you can read Fanon
very interestingly with that kind of a theory. Now if you come to the you know Bhabha’s sort of
foreword, the way he looks at Fanon as a profound, as an important philosopher of the colonial
condition.
Again, he sort of orients your attention, directs your attention to Fanon’s psychiatric you know
training and how the psychiatric training is important in terms of looking at the deconstructing
the collusion between medicine and racism that Fanon sets out to attack.
(Refer Slide Time: 16:29)
So you know this is Bhabha quoting Fanon up in your screen and Fanon says if psychiatry is the
medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it
to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country lives in a state of
absolute depersonalization. The social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to
put the individual back where he belonged.
So his idea of de-personalization becomes very important to Fanon. It is related to a large extent
with the idea of alienation. You are alienating yourself from your own world. So you do not
really exist as a person. You exist only as a mimetic category, you are an Arab, you are an
Algerian, you are an African, you are a black man. So all this become hollow mimetic categories
you know just shallow signifiers, an entire narrative of racism, right.
And that the shallowness, the hollowness of this mimetic categories makes the entire process
depersonalized. So you take away the human element. You take away the human agency. You
take away the human complexity. Just brand the person according to the race, according to the
skin color, according to the anatomy, according to you know certain kinds of racialised
categories.
So that obviously makes it an act of dehumanization and depersonalization which is related to
reification and which in turn produces a sense of alienation. So the Arab is alienated form his
own country. The social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the
individual back where he belongs. So this is what I mean when I say you know when Fanon
mentions dignity he actually talks about ownership; to reclaim ownership over your body over
yourself, over your society, over your ethnicity, over your race etc.
So that ownership is denied which is a basic condition, a basic aspiration, a basic privilege is
denied to the Arab, is denied to the Algerian, is denied to the African in general who is
subjugated you know instead to you know to white imperialist’s control, white imperialist’s
discrimination, okay. So this, it becomes an example of extreme alienation. So as Bhabha goes
on to say, the extremity of this colonial alienation of the person, this end of the idea of the
individual. So the individual becomes an idea, a hollow idea as it were.
He does not really mean anything beyond the level of idea, beyond the level of a mimetic
category. So he just behaves in a particular way which makes it you know shallow mimetic sort
of signifier, nothing more than that. There is no human complexity or human agency which is
accorded to this mimetic signifier. So it produces a restless urgency in Fanon’s search for a
conceptual form appropriate to the social antagonism of the colonial relation.
The body of his works splits between a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, a phenomenological
affirmation of self and other and the psychoanalytic ambivalence of the unconscious, its turning
from love to hate, mastery to servitude. So you know it is a very interesting Hegelian-Marxist
kind of a dialectic happening over here because he talks about a self and the spirit of the self
which is Hegelian.
But he also talks about reification and alienation which are Marxist terms and the entire idea of
Fanon is bringing in psychoanalysis to study the ambivalence, ambivalence of the unconscious,
ambivalence of you know this internalized idea of inferiority.
So how is that a grand success of racism, how is that a grand success of you know imperialism
you know because once we can as I mentioned in the previous lecture, once we can affirm the
inferiority through a discursive process which includes medicine, which includes medical science
then you essentially consolidate mastery you know of the white race, of the you know
imperialist, okay and that is something that Fanon examines and deconstructs in his works.
(Refer Slide Time: 20:20)
So the whole idea of what Bhabha the reason why Bhabha looks at Fanon with such respect, with
such significance is because he looks at Fanon as someone who questions ambivalence and if
you remember Bhabha himself has said the ambivalence and examine the ambivalence you know
which is operative in a colonial condition and he relates ambivalence to mimicry, with hybridity
all these the other categories, other sort of experientialities which come with colonialism.
But Fanon is important over here because to Bhabha he really enacts what Bhabha theorizes. He
you know he talks about the real action, the real activity which happens in the colonial condition
and that becomes a very important you know condition which you know prioritizes human
activity, which prioritizes human agency, which prioritizes human experientiality you know
above any dry discursive theory, okay.
So and then Bhabha talks about the distinctive quality of Fanon’s vision, the uniqueness of
Fanon’s vision, the thinker of the colonial condition and what is that vision. So what is this
distinct force of Fanon’s vision that has been forming even as I write about the division, the
displacement, the cutting edge of the thought. It comes to believe from the tradition of the
oppressed as Walter Benjamin suggests it is the language of a revolutionary awareness that the
state of emergency is what we live, in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this insight. And the state of
emergency is also always a state of emergence. So this is a very Benjaminian tradition of looking
at emergency and emergence together. So we emerge out of an emergency and the articulation
that you do from a state of emergency is a very you know complex commentary of a situation
where emergency is a norm and not the exception right.
So if emergency becomes a norm, if possession becomes a norm, if territorialization becomes a
norm then obviously that would create its own kind of rhetoric, will create its own kind of
retaliation and Fanon is a thinker of this tradition of retaliation. Fanon is a philosopher of this
traditional retaliation, traditional angry retaliation you know resentment and retaliation, resentful
retaliation and therein lies Fanon’s freshness as a thinker.
Therein lies Fanon’s brilliance as a writer, as a commentator, as a philosopher because he talks
about displacement, he talks about division, he talks about alienation, but you know what is more
important than that is that he talks about how the human self is subjugated in a state of
emergency and in the state of emergency the human emerges as an articulator, as someone who
articulates the pain, the suppression, the oppression that goes on in the colonial times and therein
lies the quality of Fanon which makes him so directly universal as a thinker.
So he is more of an insider individual, insider philosopher who is not concerned so much about
the empirical or the discursive attractiveness of his theory but rather he is talking he is more
interested in the experiential evidence, the experiential truth of this theory and the fact that it is
really born out of experiential quality, experiential conditions which makes Fanon’s writings
really important to us today, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 23:48)
So then Bhabha talks about how Fanon is someone as a thinker who brings in the idea of history
and Psyche together in a very interesting way. So there is no master narrative as Bhabha says.
There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a background of social, historical
facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective Psyche.
Such a traditional sociological alignment of self and society or history and Psyche is rendered
questionable in Fanon’s identification of the colonial subject who is historicized as it comes to be
heterogeneously inscribed in the texts of history, literature, science, and myth. So this is a very
important gift of Fanon as you might say which Fanon says, the subjectivity of the colonized
subject is actually a product of a very complex form of historicization which includes myth,
which includes medicine, which includes science, which includes literature, which includes
history.
So the colonial subject is always overdetermined from without. So overdetermination is over
influence from without. From without means the discursive apparatus outside him. So discursive
apparatus outside him you know overdetermines the colonial subject formation. So again we
have this limit in the outside and the inside. So the inside begins to become you know a medical
condition from the pressure from the outside.
So the outside world, the discursive world outside which is obviously this entire architectural
racism, the architectural imperialism it bombards the human subject. It overdetermines human
subject with this knowledge of his inferiority, the knowledge of his savageness, the knowledge of
his you know unfitness to be sovereign self etc.
And that knowledge is constantly supplied to him and constantly injected to him through
discursive parameters and that becomes a medical condition at some point of time. So it is
through image and fantasy those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and
the conscious and the unconscious that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition. So
it works through an entanglement of history and the unconscious.
It works through an entanglement of image and fantasy, right. So as I mentioned it is the fantasy
of the colonizer to you know create this myth of inferiority of the colonized subject and this
fantasy is consumed by the colonized subject at some point of time who becomes, the colonized
subject becomes a hollow image, right. So again we have a combination of image and fantasy,
right.
And this image and fantasy you know is something which comes together and Fanon
deconstructs this collusion between image and fantasy in his book on the colonial condition, The
Wretched of the Earth. And this concludes the lecture today. So what we see in Fanon is a very
compelling study of the psychological condition of colonialism and the psychological condition
obviously includes fantasy, obviously includes a very twisted form of history.
It includes erasure of history. So the colonizer’s you know history becomes a dominant history.
The colonizer’s knowledge system the knowledge narrative of the colonizer becomes a dominant
narrative and what that does away with completely, what that erases completely is the original
identity of the colonized. So we never get to know the original identity of the colonized.
What we have is the imposed identity of the you know colonized which is obviously imposed by
the colonizer. And so in the process that I mentioned the colonized becomes more of a mimetic
category, more of a moving signifier you know a machine which reveals certain attributes,
certain selective attributes, certain racialized attributes rather than a complex human self.
So the sense of self, the ownership on your own self goes away and the dignity attached to the
ownership goes away and in the process the colonized subject becomes you know a hysterical
subject, becomes a nervous subject, becomes a pathological subject, becomes a sick subject and
therein lies Fanon’s psychiatric training. Therein lies Fanon’s sort of glimpse into the entire idea
of colonialism from medical perspective.
So again we are sort of coming back to this originality of Fanon as a thinker who combines
medicine and racism and uses his own psychiatric training to reveal to deconstruct this
constructed collusion between racism and medicine. I will continue with this study in the next
lecture. Thank you for your attention.
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Dr. Avishek Parui
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras
Lecture - 15
Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks (Part - III)
Hello and welcome to this Introduction to Cultural Studies NPTEL Course where we are reading
Frantz Fanon. We have already started with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. We talked
about the introduction in the last couple of lectures, Sardar’s introduction and Bhabha’s
introduction. So what we will do today, we will dive right into the text.
So we have in front of us on your screen, the first chapter of this particular book entitled The
Negro and Language where he talks about the discursive significance of language, the political
significance of language and more importantly the relationship between language and agency in
colonial conditions. So to what extent does language offer agency, to what extent is language
invested in the entire politics of agency and embodiment in the colonial condition where
obviously identities are inequal, identities are hierarchized and identities are sort of played out
across different political and racial parameters.
(Refer Slide Time: 01:14)
As Fanon says and this is on your screen, I ascribe the basic importance to the phenomenon of
language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject which should provide us with
one of the elements in the colored man’s comprehension of the dimensions of the other. For it is
implicit that he speaks, that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. The black man has 2
dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with this white man.
A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is
a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question. No one would no one would dream
of doubting that its major artery is fed from the heart of those various theories that have tried to
prove that the Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey into man. So at the very outset
we have the tone on this particular book.
It is a provocative tone, it is a very angry tone. It is a tone which does not want to sort of conceal
its resentment. So fanon obviously uses his very resentful rhetoric in terms of looking at how
colonial politics plays out and relationship between language and agency sort of is dramatized in
a colonial scene, in a colonial agony if you will. So at the very outset he talks about the
phenomenon of language and then he talks about how the behavior of the black man changes
depending on his location. The location of culture becomes important.
So when he in a company of other black man and he is in the company of the white man the
language changes, embodiment changes and this change of embodiment, this change of language
this change of behavior is obviously a result of violence and violence stems from a systematic
subjugation which happened during colonialism during the time of colonial control.
The subjugation of identities and violence epistemic violence on identities epistemic violence on
ethnicities on racial locations and racial knowledge etc. So we talked about how we read Bhabha
for instance. We saw how knowledge can be extremely racialized, knowledge can be
bipoliticised and that obviously has a major replication psychologically speaking on the behavior
of the black man.
And you know just to reiterate what we have and what we said, Fanon is important for us today
because he is one of the first philosophers really who looks at the collusion between medicine
and race and how this racialization of medicine or the medicalization of race whichever way you
look at it was a very hand instrument, a very important instrument in colonial control and that
obviously had its repercussions in the way the black man spoke to the other black man and to the
white men, okay.
And the last bit of this highlighted section is obviously very provocative where he says that his
entire idea of the subjugation of black men, the inferiority, the supposed inferiority of the black
men you know comes from the you know the entire politics of theories which you know which
included the theory that the black man and the Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey
to man.
So you know classifying the Negro as a half human being as a half man and someone who is
more sort of approximating humanity and someone who is closer really you know to the monkey
is obviously one of the dominant theories of racism especially the way it is allied to imperialism.
And that was obviously part of the plan in terms of you know theorizing the inferiority of the
black man which is a very handy theorization in colonial conditions.
(Refer Slide Time: 04:43)
So and then fanon talks about the politics of speaking you know so to what extent is speaking a
political activity especially in a colonial condition when different languages are in conflict with
each other. So you have this idea of hegemonic and dominant language which obviously more
often than not belongs to the colonizer the colonial master if you will and we have the other
language which belongs to the natives which gets more and more violated, which gets more and
more you know delegitimized in terms of its proximity to knowledge.
So the language of power, the language of knowledge, the language of politics becomes by
default the white man’s language and then Fanon says over here in the highlighted section, to
speak means to be in a position to use certain syntax to grasp the morphology of this or that
language but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. So
every language comes with a weight of civilization.
Every language comes with a certain culture and obviously I just saw as we see already having
so looking at this particular text which we are covering in this course that culture is a very loaded
term. Culture includes material apparatus. Culture includes things like economy, finance etc. but
also includes abstract apparatus which are obviously in collusion with the material apparatus. So
to speak is to assume a certain culture, to appropriate a certain culture, right.
So the language in which you are speaking, the language which you are using to communicate
yourself that becomes very important marker of your identity, marker of your embodiment, of
your race of your privilege etc. So and then he comes to this point where he says, the Negro of
the Antilles will be proportionately whiter that is he will come closer to being a real human being
in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.
So we come to this very provocative section where Fanon actually says there is a linear direct
correlation between your mastery, your skill with the colonizer’s language and your you know
you being considered as a human being. So a direct relationship is established over here by
Fanon between language and agencies.
So you become more agentic in the colonial condition depending on your mastery of the English
language or the French language in this particular case because you are talking about the FrenchAlgerian condition, the colonial condition of course. So it is directly proportion to his mastery of
the French language. So you know the more you master the French language the closer you get
in terms of looking at you know how you embody yourself.
(Refer Slide Time: 07:06)
And so obviously related to this idea of language, related to the idea of embodiment is the innate
idea of inferiority, the supposed idea of inferiority and again we battle the same question of
looking at psychology and politics, psychology and political identities because you know this
idea of inferiority is obviously a construct, is obviously a very useful and successful construct
which was created by series of material and abstract apparatus during colonialism including
language including knowledge, including law, including medicine etc.
And we just saw how you know and Fanon would give more examples for how medicine was
very conveniently used to racialize knowledge, to talk about racial divisions, racial hierarchies in
terms of you know conferring the superiority to certain races and subjugating certain other races
as inferior etc.
And then he goes on to say in this highlighted section over here that, every colonized people, in
other words every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and
burial of its local cultural originality finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing
nation. That is with the culture of the mother country the colonized is elevated to do above this
jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.
So the more you appropriate the more you approximate the cultural standards of the colonizer,
colonizing country which is the mother country, the culture or the cultural parameters of that
country become the gold standard really that you aspire to appropriate and the more you
appropriate that the more successful you are in terms of appropriating that the better you are as a
human being. The more holistic human being you are then you find yourself elevated, you find
yourself liberated.
So there is a liberation quotient there, there is an agency quotient there, there is a privilege
quotient there which are all allied to this idea of appropriating culture. The mother country’s
culture you know and we are elevated from the jungle. So the word jungle over here is important
because the black man and the black man society is described very conveniently as a jungle, as a
as a space where civilization does not exist because we are obviously looking at civilization from
very Eurocentric perspective which becomes a universal perspective by default, right.
So he becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness. So you know we are looking at blackness
and whiteness not just as racism, not just as skin color we just mentioned epidermalization
yesterday in the last lecture where we saw how the idea of the skin color becomes discursive
category, right. So blackness or whiteness become discursive categories over here in a very
interesting way.
So blackness is obviously related to inferiority, related to lack of civilization, related to anarchy,
related to savagery and everything that comes with that kind of assumption whereas whiteness
over here is just the opposite, it is an ontological opposite. It is civilization, it is order, it is logic,
it is something which is you know which is worth aspiring for, which is privilege etc. So the
black man’s whiteness depends on the extent to which the black man approximates the white
man’s culture, the white man’s language.
So we are talking about a very performative approximation over here, a very performative
appropriation over here which is something that happens a lot in colonial conditions. So in a
French colonial army and particularly in the Senegalese regiments, Senegalese regiment sorry,
the black officers serve first of all as interpreters. They are used to convey the master’s orders to
their fellows and they do enjoy certain position of honor.
So he talks about the subcategories inside space of this army, the military for instance which is
supposedly a mixed kind of people where people from all kinds of backgrounds come. Now he
says in a French colonial army the Senegalese people who know French they have positional
agency because they are then used by the French officers to be the sort of interpreters between
them and the people who do not know French.
Something similar happened in Indian context if you remember the very famous Macaulay's
Minutes on Education which is published or which is first presented in British Parliament in
February 1835 which had this proposal we should create this you know men who were go
between you know in between who would service go between us and the natives which we you
know whom we desire to control.
So in other words we create certain creed of people who are Indians in race Indians in plot,
Indians in color, but British in temperament and something similar is happening over here in a
more micro category. We have a Senegalese army, French Senegalese army obviously French
being the colonizing nation over here and in the army the Senegalese people who know French
who happen to know French they are the ones who enjoy certain degree of privilege.
Because they are used conveniently by the French officers and they are given certain honors
certain privileges in return of being interpretors you know between them and the other people
who do not know French, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 12:03)
So, so we are looking at the relationship between language and culture, language and agency
over here and it is a very important relationship because you know it directly relates to
embodiment it directly relates to identity. So what kind of identity are we talking about over
here? What kind of idea of embodiment are we talking about over here? So embodiment over
here is the way in which it is obviously a very psychological phenomenon, embodiment.
It is a it is something to do with the body, it is something to do with the nerves, your muscles,
your arteries, etc. But also it is quite discursive in quality. It is how you navigate yourself with
the environment around you and environment over here being the colonial condition, it is but
obvious that embodiement which include will include and will be invested with the with your
mastery of language, with your control of language with the way you manoeuvre with language
in a colonial condition.
So you know and then Fanon goes on to say, on the basis of certain studies and my own personal
observations, I want to try to show why the Negro adopts such a position, peculiar to him, with
respect to the European languages. Let me point out that once more that the conclusions I have
reached pertain to the French Antilles. At the same time, I am not unaware that the same
behavior pattern obtain in every race, patterns obtained in every race that has been subjected to
colonization.
So Fanon over here makes a claim that he is talking about obviously the French Antilles
condition but he is quite confident that you know this kind of a condition this kind of a sense of
inferiority which is projected which is injected into a certain population with obviously a
strategic motive, a discursive motive, a political motive is something which is true for every race
who has been that has suffered colonialism or colonization by another race, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 13:47)
And then he goes on to say, I have known and unfortunately I still know people born in
Dahomey or the Congo who pretend to be natives of the Antilles. I have known and I still know,
Antilles Negroes who are annoyed when they were suspected of being Senegalese and this is
because the Antille Negro, Antilles Negro is more civilized than the African that is he is closer to
the white man.
And this difference prevails not only in black streets, in Boulevards but also in the public service
and the army. So this idea of being close to the colonizer, this idea of having some kind of a
discursive proximity to the colonizer with the use of language through the use of language
because you know you have the mastery of the language so you know language becomes the
instrument which makes you know closer which gets you closer, which gets you certain agentic
status.
And it becomes very important in a colonial condition because that is why the Antilles Negro,
the Antilles black man as Fanon describes him they seem to have a certain privileged section
inside that you know entire demography of the colonized people, okay. So even inside the
colonized people there is this hierarchisation that happens because depending on the proximity to
the master narrative, the language of the colonizer, okay.
So again we are back to this idea of privilege of agency, of identity and how everything comes
together in terms of elevating yourself from your supposed inferiority. So again inferiority over
here becomes an ideology you know. It becomes a projected ideology which is used confidently
to consolidate the superiority of the white man of the colonizer, okay.
(Refer Slide Time: 15:21)
And now Fanon would go on to say and go on to give a series of examples of people who have
published medical articles, medical journals, you know medical text which corroborate really this
supposed inferiority of the African you know where the people actually say that the African
suffers from inferiority or inferiority complex and dependency complex. They have some kind of
a need for you know a master. Someone who would come and rescue them etc.
But obviously we know that this is a very strategic kind of a discursive formation using
medicine, drawing on medicine, using a medical vocabulary with the purpose of legitimizing
colonialism, legitimizing racism or racialization of you know knowledge, racialization of
difference, etc. So if you can medicalize it, if you can use the medical metaphor, if you can get
published in a medical journal you obviously empirically prove it through a “scientific method”.
So science, medicine, medical knowledge all become very discursive in colonial conditions.
And Fanon is one of the first people one of the first thinkers who actually dramatize this
discursivity of medicine, discursivity of knowledge. So he is a really profound and important
philosopher for his day, okay. So he mentions someone called Dr. H.L. Gordon who attending
physician at the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi to declare in an article entitled the East
African Medical Journal in 1943.
A highly technical and skilled examination of a series of 100 brains of normal natives has found
naked eye and microscopic facts indicative of inherent new brain inferiority. Quantitatively he
added the inferiority amounts to 14.8 percent. So this is really outrageously racist but obviously
you know it is racist today because we know this is perhaps bogus knowledge etc. But mind you
this was used as a very handy, convenient and respectable knowledge in 1943 when this was
originally published in this particular journal where someone is actually quantifying the
inferiority of the African.
You can see the extent to which this collusion between medicine and racism happens over here.
So this quantifiability of inferiority becomes to Fanon in itself a discursive you know a tradition
where he can actually quantify he can put a number to the inferiority, he can put an index to the
inferiority of the African. So you know this is actually a published article in 1943 which says that
inferiority complex amounts to 14.8 percentage, right.
So this is really how racism was medicalized and legitimized through the use of medical
vocabulary. And the Fanon comes back and says again, it has been said that the Negro is the link
between monkey and man meaning of course white man. So you know man over here is the
white man, man over here is the desirable man, the desirable humanity which obviously is
localized entirely in the white man.
Because the white man obviously becomes the symbol the epitome really of civilization, of
order, of logic, of rationality, of everything that’s lofty in humanity. So the white man becomes
by default the aspired figure, the figure the signifier that people aspire for and on page on your
page 108 of this book this Alan Burns come to the conclusion that and I quote Fanon quotes over
here we are unable to accept as scientifically proved the theory that the black man is inherently
inferior to the white or that he comes from a different stock.
So this is the book that is referred to is alluded to over here, a book by Sir Alan Burns and only
in page 108, it takes 107 pages to come to the conclusion that there is actually no scientific
evidence which proves once and for all that inferiority of the black man or you know the black
man comes from a different stock from the white man. So again we are looking at how racism
was legitimized using medicine and how there were sophisticated publications which were used
in order to corroborate really, consolidate and corroborate the discursive formation of the black
man.
(Refer Slide Time: 19:16)
The black man as inferior, the black man as the inferior by default as someone who does not
deserve civilization, as someone who needs to be civilized, as someone who needs to be rescued
from his anarchy, from his wildness, from his savagery etc. Now next Fanon moves on to a very
interesting example of how language or your skill of language becomes you know it can be
racialized as well.
Because your inability to speak a certain language can obviously come does definitely come
from the ignorance of the language. Now Fanon looks at how this ignorance is racialized. So he
talks about how if a German or Russian cannot speak French then obviously that is a different
kind of issue as different from the way black man cannot speak French because we assume that
the German and Russian has a language.
They have a language. They have their own respective languages and you know it is difficult for
them to come out of the language and speak French but the assumption that comes to the African
or the black man is that the black man has no language at all. So the black man does not speak
French. That means black man actually does not have a language or cannot speak human
language, right.
So again the ignorance over here the ignorance of particular languages immediately racialized in
this kind of a racist rhetoric that Fanon critiques in imperialism and racism and the collusion
between racism and you know colonialism and he actually says over here it is on your screen, I
meet a Russian or a German who speaks French badly with gestures I try to give him information
that he requests so you know Fanon says so Fanon speaks French and he meets the Russian or a
German who cannot speak French at all you know very badly if any at all.
And so Fanon would have to give information using gestures using body language but at the
same time I can hardly forget that he has a language of his own, a country, and that perhaps he is
a lawyer or an engineer there. So not being able to speak French does not automatically make
you agencyless does not automatically make you identity-less. You still retain your identity as
the Russian or a German or an Englishman or a Scottish or an Irish whatever.
And you cannot speak French at the same time and can be a respectable citizen in your own
country. You can be an engineer, a doctor, someone who has a decent job someone who has
looked up to you socially speaking with social status. In any case he is foreign to my group and
his standards must be different. So the question of relativity comes in you know very
conveniently when it comes to another white man who cannot speak French.
So if a German cannot speak French the automatic assumption is that the German does not know
French but he has a culture he has his own language. It is just a question of not being able to
acclimatize to the French language. However, there is no standard at all there is no question of
assuming language at all if a black man cannot speak French. If a black man cannot speak
French that means the black man cannot speak his own really human or not really civilized as a
person.
So when it comes to the case of the Negro nothing of the kind. He has no culture, no civilization,
no historical past.
(Refer Slide Time: 22:08)
So the point is, this is what we call in colonial studies and postcolonial studies as erasure. So
erasure is an act of obliterating any kind of civilization, any kind of culture which existed before
colonialism. So you know by saying that and the black man does not have any language or black
man does not have any culture or any civilization you are essentially enacting an erasure, an
epistemic erasure.
So you are doing away all kinds of knowledge which may have existed before this the colonial
people came in, before the white man came in right. So Willy-nilly this is page 22 on your
screen, Willy-nilly, the Negro has to wear the livery that the white man has sewed for him. Look
at the children’s picture magazines. Out of every Negro mouth comes the ritual “Yassuh, boss.”
And it is even more remarkable that in motion pictures.
Most of the American films for which the French language is dubbed in offer the type-Negro
“Sho good!” So you know the Negro in popular culture, the representation of Negro in popular
culture is always you know depicted as someone speaking in very poor language you know half
chopped language someone who does not have any sophistication of expression, cannot master
the European language.
Either speaks pidgin, either speaks some kind of a broken English or broken French and that is
something which is circulated and consumed across media in films, in popular magazines etc.,
right. So this is the image of the white man as orchestrated for the Negro, for the black man and
again we are back to Edward Said’s way of looking at Orientalism and the way the projection is
happening over here, inferiority is projected on to the black man and it becomes a very
convenient projection because that determines or over determines to a great extent the identity of
the black man.
(Refer Slide Time: 23:49)
So the black man is imprisoned in his inferiority which is actually a construct, a fantasy of the of
the European of the white man. So this idea of fantasy and imprisonment and inferiority all come
together in Fanon’s study over here when he examines the colonial condition in Algeria. So and
he goes on to say and you know he will now compare very interestingly anti-Semitism and
racism, right.
He talks about the racism directed against the black man and the anti-Semitism directed against
the Jew and how both create and construct stereotypes using certain kind of linguistic strategies,
certain kind of racial strategy, certain kind of you know epidermal strategy in the case of the
black man is more explicit because the black man is black and so there is an immediate
epidermalization that happens which leads on to racism and the next natural step is racism etc.
And then he goes on to say, yes the black man is supposed to be a good nigger. Once this has
been laid down the rest follows of itself. To make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of
him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which
he is not responsible. So the whole idea of making the black man speak in pidgin French broken
French is to imprison him anxiety of inferiority that a black man cannot speak in sophisticated
language.
So you know to make a mummification of him, to mummify him, to completely reify him to
commodity him in his inferiority you know he becomes an eternal victim of an essence, a
stereotype. He becomes victim of a stereotype, a permanent victim of an appearance for which
he is not responsible. So again he becomes more of a mimetic image, more of a mimetic signifier
rather than a real human being who is complex, who is ambivalence.
So black man becomes just a shallow mimetic signifier in appearance for which he is not
responsible. It is conferred to him, it is projected on to him and he has to enact it by default and
that is how he is represented in popular cultures now. And naturally just as the Jew who spends
money without thinking about it is suspect, a black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be
watched.
So again this very racist stereotype of the Jew as being miserly, the Jew as being someone who is
very very stingy with money, someone who does not spend at all, someone who goads money, as
someone who basically steals other people’s money and makes an empire out of it which was a
rhetoric used against the Jews by the Germans by the Nazi party really during Second World
War. They had essentially stolen all the German money by sort of pilfering it with their really
dark businesses, with their really dodgy businesses.
So the Jew is never known to spend any money. The Jew is always known to hoard money, right.
So a Jew who spends money without thinking is automatically suspicious because that sort of
goes against stereotype of the Jew. So naturally and similarly the black man who quotes
Montesquieu had better be watched. So you know if the black man is philosophizing something,
is quoting something elegantly that is something that needs to be watched out.
Needs to be sort of you know guard yourself against. That is not natural that is not the
stereotypical representation of the black man at all. So that is something which goes against the
grain.
(Refer Slide Time: 26:57)
And then he goes on to say, what I am asserting is that the European has a fixed concept of the
Negro. So again this backs Bhabha’s idea of fixity right so it is fixated and at the same this fixity
needs to be replicated over and over again ad infinitum and therein lies the ambivalence. So it is
fixated as permanent, you cannot change it, the inferiority of the Negro. But at the same time that
inferiority needs to be replayed over and over again across the media, across the skills, across
languages etc. just to hammer home the point, just to make it more and more permanent.
So therein lies the ambivalence of representation. So what I am asserting is that the European has
a fixed concept of the Negro and there is nothing more exasperating than to be asked, how long
have you been in France? You speak French so well. So you know this is obviously an example
of covert racism. So there are different kinds of racism. There is overt racism where someone is
attacked racially in a very direct explicit manner.
There is also covert racism where racism operates the most surreptitious, the most sophisticated
kind of ways where you ask the black person, how come you speak French so well and how long
have you been in France? So the automatic assumption is that the black man should not be able
to speak French well you know the black man should just speak in broken French, just speak in
pidgin French because sophisticated French is beyond they can beyond the realm of the black
man’s abilities, his neurotic abilities, his motor abilities because of his supposed inferiority.
And you know and he goes on to say it does become sort of darkly humorous and he gives an
example over here. You are on a train and you ask another passenger, I beg your pardon sir,
would you mind telling me where the dining-car is? Suppose you are the black man travelling in
a train and you ask a fellow passenger I beg your pardon sir, would you mind telling me where
the dining-car is.
And look at the response that Fanon gives over here which is what the response that he gets as a
black man travelling across France and this response is something along these lines. Sure fella.
You go out door, see, go corridor, you go straight, go one car, go two car, go three car, you there.
So the automatic assumption is the black man would not understand sophisticated French, would
not understand you know polite French.
So the obvious thing to do is to reply to him in a way which is broken, which is more befitting of
the linguistic abilities of the black man. So this presupposition is obviously racial, is obviously
part of this racist rhetoric that the black man is inferior knowledge wise, linguistically the black
man cannot handle language, cannot manoeuvre language. So you better speak to him in a way
which is understandable, broken, slurred and you know unmetaphoric, unfigurative right.
(Refer Slide Time: 29:28)
So and Fanon goes on to say, No speaking pidgin-nigger closes off the black man, right. So it
perpetuates a state of conflict in which the white man injects the black with extremely dangerous
foreign bodies. So again he is using medical metaphors over here and this is very interesting. It is
almost like an injection which pathologises the black man, an injection of foreign bodies into the
body of the black man; the sense of inferiority, the sense of linguistic inability, the sense of
linguistic inadequacy etc.
So nothing is more astonishing that to hear a black man express himself properly for then in truth
he is putting on the white world. So the black man express himself properly then obviously he is
becoming white, he has not become black man anymore because the black man by default cannot
should not express himself properly or elegantly. Elegance is in a domain of the white man, the
whiteness and elegance are equated over here in a very unproblematic kind of a way.
I have had occasion to talk to students of foreign origin. They speak French badly. Little Crusoe,
alias Prospero is at ease then. So he uses the metaphor of Crusoe and Prospero, two archetypal
figures in white English literature of colonizers who come and control and “rescue” the original
natives, give them language, give them knowledge etc. So Crusoe and Prospero over here
become metaphors of the archetypal white colonizer who comes and territorializes the non-white
space.
Who comes and you know enacts epistemic violence on the non-white space you know gives
violence in terms of language that confers language, imposes language, imposes civilization,
imposes culture etc. Now those Crusoes and Prosperos they are metaphors used by Fanon over
here by the way. Those Crusoes and Prosperos are at ease completely where the black men speak
badly because you know they are meant to speak badly because that is how you know black men
are supposed to represent themselves, because the white man has given them the language.
So obviously language is something that they have got from the white man. So they cannot
possibly speak a language or speak in a language which is as elegant as the white man. So the
black man can only speak in very stuttered, a very pidgin kind of a language; pidgin French or
pidgin English. So as long as they speak in that kind of a language, broken, stuttered,
fragmented, grammatically incorrect etc. the Crusoes and Prosperos are completely at ease okay.
He explains, interprets, informs, helps them with their studies. So he becomes a benevolent
colonizer. He is unthreatened and hence benevolence comes. So benevolence comes from not
being threatened. So he is like completely at ease and the black man speaks like the black man
should you know fragmented, broken etc. So the white man out of kindness out of racialized
kindness, the superiority, this knowledge of superiority helps the black man.
But with the Negro he is completely baffled. The Negro has made himself just as knowledgeable.
With him the game cannot be played. He is a complete replica of the white man. So there is
nothing to do but to give in. So when it comes to foreign students, when it comes to other
European students the French and the French white man is completely at ease when they speak
bad French. They are absolute at ease as well when the black man speaks bad French.
However, when the black man speaks perfect French, when the black man speaks French which
is elegant and polite and sophisticated then the problem comes. Then there is nothing to be done
because it totally goes against the grain, totally goes against the stereotype of the black man
which is obviously a construct of the white man’s fantasy. So we just conclude this lecture today.
But I think we are getting into this, the heart of the matter over here is that how language is
obviously agentic, how language is discursive in quality, how language comes with
presuppositions of privilege, how language comes with performances of privilege and how
language comes with performances in racism really and all these presuppositions of language is
heavily racialized, is something which Fanon examines throughout this particular book and we
will continue with that study in the next lectures. Thank you for your attention.