Black Mythologies
coffee & conversation, courtesy of substantive material — ”a moment on how we live in symbiosis as mushrooms, mycelium networks, and organized bodies of overcomplication”.
I have been thinking a great deal about an essay by Jacques Derrida titled “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”. In this essay, Derrida speaks of a coin so old that the images stamped on its heads and tails have worn away. This coin still has some currency, but its provenance is uncertain and, as a result, its value is considered increasingly suspect by those who give it and take it in turns. Derrida holds that philosophical concepts that do not bear any mark of their cultural provenance or any mark of the facticity of their issuers are similar to such coins: such concepts may have currency but their value is rather suspect.
Derrida goes on to chide White European philosophers for believing the opposite. White European philosophers have tended to believe that a concept that bears no mark of its provenance is better than a concept that does bear such marks, and Derrida holds that White European philosophers have worked hard to obscure the provenance of their concepts. Actually, they have done far worse: White European philosophers have held that the concept that bears no mark of its provenance and no mark of its issuer’s facticity is one that has "universal currency", and White European philosophers have worked to erase all marks of provenance and facticity from their concepts so as to deal in universals. Derrida tells us that these White European philosophers are like money dealers who maintain that coins whose faces have been worn away are coins of "universal currency" and, thus, these money dealers work to erase the faces from all of the coins in their possession, believing that this will enable their coins circulate anywhere and everywhere they go.
Derrida’s wager is, and here is the rub, that the primary marks of a concept’s provenance are the metaphors that precede, exceed, and succeed the concept’s articulation. The White European philosopher who disdains “mere metaphors” is disdainful of the matter from which concepts are made. Creating a concept without having respect for metaphors, is like knitting a wool sweater without having any respect for wool.
As I reflected upon the conversation documented in the video embedded above, I imagined myself writing a response or sequel to Derrida’s essay. I gave this essay the title “Black Mythologies: Grasping for Metaphors as a Subtext for Black Study”.
In a previous dispatch, Blackness and Primitiveness, I wrote about how the “fabrication of the Negro” — “and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the policing of racial boundaries that came with it” — is a fabrication effected by and though the erasure of the marks of cultural provenance and facticity of those who are made Negro. This is to say, in other words, that the Negro is fabricated in the very same manner that the White European philosopher fabricates their philosophical concepts: the Negro was made by erasing the provenance and facticity of persons. Indeed, taking a page from Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s book, X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, the making of the Negro is, in many ways, the making of the most exemplary of all White European philosophical concepts: the concept of a people whose cultural provenance and facticity are of no concern, being without historical significance.
In affirming that which is Negro or Black, the thinkers of the black radical tradition have not in any way affirmed the defaced concept of the Negro that the White European philosopher has scoured of metaphor. Rather, the thinkers of the black radical tradition have affirmed the metaphor from which the concept of the Negro was made, the metaphor which the White European philosopher wants erased. Etymologically, the Negro comes from Spanish or Portuguese negro "black," from Latin nigrum "black, dark, sable, dusky" (applied to the night sky, a storm, the complexion), which is perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *nekw-t- "night." The Negro, metaphorically speaking, could be thought of as people(s) who, surviving in spite of the ethnocidal machinations of Imperialist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, must grasp for metaphors in the dark if they are comprehend their own cultural provenance and facticity.
In the coffee and conversation video above, we found ourselves grasping for metaphors in the dark, engaged in what Fred Moten calls “black study” or what RA Judy calls “thinking-in-disorder”. Black study assembles and dissembles the hard-learned lessons that have enabled people(s) to become adept not only at finding metaphors in the dark but also at finding movements and musics in the dark. Movements and musics mark our provenance and our facticity just as much as metaphors do, and White European philosophy subject the movements and musics that condition concepts to erasure alongside metaphors that condition concepts. In this ways black study and thinking-in-disorder — which embraces black dance, black music, and black poetry — are practices in and through which we may learn to search for movements, musics, and metaphors in the dark, so that we may comprehend our cultural provenance and our facticity in spite of the ethnocidal machinations of Imperialist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.
