The Demise of the Inhuman: Afrocentricity, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Chapter Five: The Paradigmatic Rupture: Critical Africology

157 5 THE PARADIGMATIC RUPTURE Critical Africology In more than one sense this discourse represents the journey of an intellectual moving from an epistemological location in Western postmodernism to become an Afrocentric scholar. It is the expression of the process of my quest to defeat the inhuman, my search for a more humanistic and ideologically less polluted mind and a more favorable approach to human possibilities. In my pursuit for agency in advancing ideas of freedom from any sort of oppression and dehumanization in society by constantly pushing the limits of my thought, an epistemological question has always underlain my approach to understanding the world as a Western postmodern thinking subject: Is it possible for the subject of knowledge to escape ideology? The dyadic relationship between the object of knowledge and Western rationality requires identification, that is, the achievement of harmony between what is perceived and the ideology that informs that perception. The ideologies that assailed the world as we see it today, disseminated from a Eurocentric grand narrative , have germinated into rough individualism, fratricide wars, spoliation of cultures and resources, of peoples and environment, demand from humanity to vehemently overturn identification with such ideologies. 158 THE DEMISE OF THE INHUMAN With the postmodern paradigm, dissonance, différance, and interpellation are the deconstructive tools of the postmodern thinker in order to break the chain of identifications and the foundational standards upon which the Western construction of knowledge is produced. However, as we have seen in previous discussions, not even postmodernism could bring a consistent transformation of the paradigms that sustain the thought of the West and its ideologies. Therefore, it is important to know what are we talking about when we refer to ideology. In cognitive philosophy Weltanschauung (worldview/worldsense /ideology/perspective) is the sum total of the individual common experiences within a particular social order, ranging from geographical/environmental conditions to economic resources available, sociocultural systems and linguistic families. It emerges as an integrated representation of the way in which individuals perceive and conceive the world and is organized around ontological and cosmological dimensions, ethical and aesthetical values and moral behaviors. Weltanschauung is therefore the frame of reference for the construction of the subject through the various dimensions of human perception and experience; a framework that is crystallized in the political, economic, religious, cultural, and social institutions of power. Louis Althusser (2001), however, transcends this concept of ideology based on our individual perceptions of the world when, using a Marxist metaphor, he introduces the notion of superstructure , of the mode of production of concepts as the ultimate and determining instance in the abstract relations created between individuals and the objects, places, and times. What becomes essential then, is to be aware of the fact that the categories and concepts through which we think the real are not themselves the same as immediate reality. They are mediated by operations of association, worked out in and framed by the social institutions and the state apparatuses, whose levels of operation and the way in which they induce responses are crucial to understand. In fact, this is also Fredric Jameson’s reading of Althusser’s theory of ideology that he considers to be a deep epistemological shift from his predecessors: The Paradigmatic Rupture 159 [W]hat we normally think of as ideological positions— thoughts, opinions, worldviews, with all their political implications and consequences—never exist only in the mind or in the individual experience and consciousness; they are always supported and reinforced, indeed reproduced , by social institutions and apparatuses, whether those are state based, like the army or the judicial instance, or seemingly as private as the family and the school, the art museum and the institutions of media, the church and the small-claims court. Ideology is institutional first and foremost and only later on to be considered a matter of consciousness. (Jameson, 2001: xii) For Althusser, however, this symbolic order—or ideology—is a corpus of ideal (idealized and fabricated) relationships organized in a structure whose function and intent is to reproduce the very conditions of survival of the productive system from whose social and economic dynamics they evolve. This is the process through which the individual is carried, within this relationship, to the level of subject, that is, to the point where an individual is endowed with a consciousness of the ideological conceptual dispositive that determines his or her condition of existing in the world. This amounts to...