The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
That all human beings think, even if they don’t think the same, is a truism that cannot be easily disputed. Scientific racists and Calvinist theologians combined have failed to prove that black people in general have less capacity of thought than white people.
The alleged intellectual inferiority of black peoples has remained what it is, a racist and colonial stereotype. So, thinking is a human quality in general. Some even believe that thinking itself defines the human being and separates man from beast. It is for that reason that Rene Descartes’ dictum “I think therefore I am” has held so much currency and purchase in modern thinking in spite of all the political and intellectual baggage that it has carried.
If thinking is a natural human quality how have the philosophers managed over generations to present themselves as special and professional thinkers? How have they managed to turn a normal day to day human attribute into a speciality of theirs and for most of them a real claim to fame. In that regard, philosophers are similar to porn stars that have turned the natural and normal human activity of sex into a spectacular profession.
Pornography makes public and spectacular what everyone indulges in privately and even secretly. In western philosophy, from Socrates in ancient Athens to Slavoj Zizek in present Europe, the philosopher has always carried himself as a special and also a public thinker who has the ability to see and know things on behalf of society.
The philosopher has in many ways pretended to be a kind of prophet who is able to see things beyond the eye-shot of the rest. It is from that habit of the intellectuals that the profession and occupation of the public intellectual also emerged.
The public intellectual is that scholar that positions himself or herself as the social justice icon that is the eyes and ears of society.
The public intellectual translates and interprets specialised knowledge into information and knowledge that can be publicly understood and usable, that professor who distils theory for the consumption of the peasants. My focus today is not on the important vocation of the public intellectual but the intellectual pornography of the philosophers which is part of the coloniality of knowledge.
Pornographic Performances of the Philosophers
Socrates, classically, walked the streets of Athens in tattered clothes and bare feet. He stopped learned judges and teachers in the streets and asked them difficult questions that they could not answer. He publicly boasted that he was the poor man who had the ability to make small arguments overcome big ones, and in that way Socrates stupefied the courts of Athens and made a fool out of famous scholars of the time.
For Socrates philosophy became a mission and a vocation as he, unlike the sophists of the time, did not charge a fee for the free education that he went around donating in the streets. Like all successful missionaries and messiahs Socrates like the Christ died in a kind of crucifixion.
He was publicly tried and convicted for “irreligion” and “corrupting the youth.” For that he was forced to drink the poison that killed him. Socrates made famous the teaching and learning method of “interrogation” or “dialectics” where answers to questions are probed through a rigorous and careful process of questioning. There is a lot of clever talk today even, concerning Socratic methods of teaching and legal cross-examinations in the courts.
Slavoj Zizek has been called “the most dangerous philosopher in the West” and the “Rockster of philosophy” who is also the “pop-star of philosophy” and Elvis Presley of the Academy, a true intellectual celebrity.
While Zizek is knowably one of the most highly paid scholars under the sun he moves around in dirty T-shirts that he collects from the many conferences he addresses.
In some documentary about his life and work he made sure that cameras capture the images of his dirty underclothes that are kept in the same enclosure with his cups, plates and spoons. An interesting picture of Zizek sleeping on his single bed has publicly circulated.
Above the headboard of the modest bed, on the wall, is a picture of Joseph Stalin. I am not about to write of the picture of Zizek on a toilet seat that has also trended, it’s too much.
Zizek boasts of being a “card carrying Lacanian,” that is a follower of the works of Jacques Lacan. In 1975, after realising that Lacan was playing with the minds of audiences, an irritated Noam Chomsky asked him a question on thought. The answer was “we think we think with our brains”, Lacan said. “Personally, I think with my feet, that’s the only way I really come into contact with anything, solid.
I do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something. But I’ve seen enough electroencephalograms to know there’s not the slightest trace of a thought in the brain.” In response Chomsky dutifully told Lacan that he was “an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan.” Chomsky, a public intellectual, has told Zizek the same, a dramatic performer, rather than a helpful thinker.
Most western philosophers have made their names not by the novelty of their ideas or the uses of their ideas to mankind but their performances and eccentricities. Most of these intellectual celebrities are who they are not for what they have said but what they have done.
A close look at both Zizek and Socrates shows that they performed to audiences. Socrates’ tattered clothes were a kind of a costume and the streets of Athens a stage on which he dramatised his philosophy. When Zizek comes out to publicly condemn “evil” rumours to the effect that he is having a sexual relationship with Lady Gaga he is actually performing his name and image as an entertainer rather than a thinker, he is deliberately promoting the rumours, if he did not create them in the first place, for his image and brand as a Rockster philosopher.
In the entire westernised universities intellectuals have perfected certain rituals and performances that set them apart as real thinkers. The academic dress and academic titles seem to all have been invented to give rank and identity to thinking.
Scholars, be they academics or intellectuals, are invested is performing and ritualising their thinking to pornographically make an exclusive tribe out of their profession.
Almost all of us have stories of the eccentricities of our teachers and professor who did strange things and performed bizarre activities when they came under the spell and trance of thinking. Back to the Ancients in the West, Aristotle started a whole philosophical movement called the “peripatetics” based on his habit of walking and talking while deep in thought. In class and outside he walked as if chasing ideas that were attempting to run out of his brain.
Enter the Philosophy of Liberation
I have made the claim that all human beings think, even if they don’t think the same and for the same reasons. The thoughts of different peoples from different parts of the world cannot be, at the same time, occupied by the same issues. Enrique Dussel, an Argentinean philosopher of liberation put it well when he said western philosophers can afford the luxury of clowning and making entertaining games with language and delivery because, after all they are the court-jesters of Empire.
Philosophers of domination and conquest who think from the right hand side of Empire have the luxury and privilege to play with ideas, put up all sorts of performances and turn philosophy into the stuff of Hollywood, even.
Describing how the African writer as a thinker is part of his society and not an alien from it, Chinua Achebe laughed off the lesson from Europe where writers perform acts of estrangements from their societies. Achebe noted how the European writer will wear a peculiar beard, wear strange clothes and act in strange and unpredictable ways in order to live up to the name and identity of a writer.
Africans, in the view of Achebe, did not have that luxury of dramatising their creativity and using performed eccentricity to attract public attention but they had the duty to engage with the colonial and other human problems in Africa. Most followers of African literature did not miss the point that Achebe was actually throwing a jibe at another titan of Africa, Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, now popularly known simply as Wole Soyinka, a performer of dramatic and spectacular proportions.
Achebe and others felt that Soyinka was taking art too far in the way he spoke, dressed and frequently carried out outlandish one-man demonstrations, literally courting arrest and persecution by successive military juntas and tyrants that ruled Nigeria.
In short, the philosophy of liberation in its gravitas and preoccupation with liberation finds no time for intellectual gamesmanship. It expends its intellectual and political resources on the vocation to resist and fight oppression. It has no time for fireworks and displays. It does not have those self-loving and self-eating tendencies of philosophers of domination and court-jesters of Empire.
Infections and intoxications
Scholarly and intellectual habits are infectious and also intoxicating, the good ones and bad ones alike, I think. All of us go around now carrying the thinking and speaking mannerisms of our teachers and mentors, and we carry these most times unconsciously. Good teachers and influential mentors can be infectious and intoxicating individuals whose mannerisms become a kind of vogue. I remember how the legend of Dambudzo Marechera haunted us at the University of Zimbabwe.
There is a number of fellows I know that stopped bathing and really started acting the Marechera way, disorderly and disastrously. To be intelligent for some of the fellows was to do things the Marechera way, breaking all rules and acting irresponsibly, shouting out vulgarities and profanities, performing the insane writer syndrome. Some quickly outgrew the insanity, I doubt if others totally recovered.
In many ways, scholars and other thinkers of the South have in this infectious and intoxicating way adopted performances of the thinkers of the West. That is not necessarily a crime. Important, however, is not to fall for the luxuries and privileges of western thinkers that have the opportunity to clown and jest. As long as we keep to critical consciousness and not start believing and acting like one cannot be a thinker if one is not a Slavoj Zizek or a Judith Butler, we should find our way.
Western philosophers have the privilege to scratch where there is no itch and answer questions that no one has really asked, and it is not that there are no problems of the human condition in the West; it is just that our problems are multiplied and complicated by the colonial and imperial condition.
The celebration and enjoyment of exemplary thinkers cannot otherwise be wrong especially if the intellectual agenda of the said scholars has not been toxic. All kinds of philosophies and theories have their own intellectual and political agendas, merely reproducing and performing them without due care can only take us back to where we thought we had escaped.
Thinking that liberates and changes the world can perfectly take place without all the pornography, especially the self-pleasing type where a Zizek can literally self-enjoy himself in the intellectual platform.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (Adern). He writes from Esselin Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria: [email protected].
