Society must not be defended?

Cetshwayo Mabhena

Scholars as readers, writers, teachers and, now and again, social and political activists, always have their minds on knowledge and power. 

The scholarly mind, whether at simple academic or intellectual level, somehow cannot avoid pondering power and its workings. Power and knowledge have their own complex relationship that makes those who seek knowledge and those that seek power come into another complex relationship of conflict here and complicity there, depending on historical other circumstances. 

To confront power or to be complicit with it is a choice that the scholarly communities of the world have to make on a daily if not more frequent basis. Power itself always, wherever it is found, is carrying a stick on the right hand and a carrot on the left, for purposes of dealing with the thinking and the knowing tribe, be they academics, intellectuals and or political and social activists. 

Power is as interested in knowledge and knowledge makers as knowledge makers are interested in power and those individuals and organisations that hold power or are seeking to hold it. 

That has been so for centuries and it shall continue to be so for as far in the future as our limited minds can possibly imagine. For the reason that the conflict and the complicity between power and knowledge will be with us for another long time, it is intellectually profitable to continue to think just how scholars can work to discipline power and think and “speak truth to power” as Edward Said canonically stated. 

Knowledge and thought are better used in the service of ensuring that power works for liberation and not for domination. 

This short article is illustrative in form and in content as I seek to use pictures of real scholars to demonstrate the not so simple liasons of hegemonic power and liberatory thought.

The Temptation to defend power

I have noted before in this column that every form of knowledge, or idea, no matter how brilliant and novel, is a kind of ignorance. To know one big idea, to love it and defend it is also to be ignorant of many other ideas and to be guilty of attacking them. 

That is exactly why certainty, being sure about the ultimate truth of a loved and chosen idea, is the very beginning of political extremism and intellectual fundamentalism. It is much safer and more liberating to believe an idea while questioning it and to question ideas while valuing and using their merits. 

Truth cannot be total or can it be absolute unless it has become an article of religious faith and that way a kind of fundamentalism. Few philosophers have expressed the slippery relationship between knowledge and power the way Michel Foucault did, especially in his series of lectures at College de France in 1976. 

Far before Foucault, such philosophers as Thomas Hobbes forcefully argued how knowledge and the social contract as its fruit and furniture could take society from a state of nature of brutality, cruelty and disorder to a state of law and order, and hopefully peace. Foucault, however, pumped new blood and gave new oxygen to thinking about knowledge and power in society.  Even if society was not at war or in a state of nature where life is short and brutal, there is always a war going on, Foucault argued. The war between ideas and practices of war and those of peace is unending. 

There might be no swords or guns at large but thoughts of battle are always circulating and navigating otherwise established and desired ideas, laws and regulations for peace and order. Foucault’s lectures were tellingly titled: Society Must be Defended. Even as he brilliantly condemned hegemonic power and used thought and knowledge to unmask the evils of power, Foucault was determined to defend the social status quo.

In the otherwise deep ruminations Foucault made on the subject of civilisation he did think and talk about the so called civilised peoples and the so called barbarians of the colonised world. 

He insisted that the so called barbarians could teach the civilised a lot because they had histories, knowledges and sensibilities, only that their knowledges were subjugated and marginalised by hegemonic epistemologies of their conquerors. Further than that, Foucault never went anywhere to reflect on the injustice of conquest and colonialism.

One of the most vigorous defences of law, order and peace in western philosophy is an essay of 1795 appropriately titled: Perpetual Peace, by Immanuel Kant. The brilliance and depth of the essay is dazzling and its intellectual profundity dizzying. 

Readers of the essay that are not Europeans would surely love it as a classic until they get to that point when Kant boldly claims that even though European conquests of overseas territories, places of the Global South, were unjust the nations of the world must accept those conquests as natural fruits of history and do nothing to repair the damage, only celebrate the benefits. In that way Kant, a lover of peace, defended European violence and barbarism.

Edmund Burke was that stubborn critic of the French Revolution that also became a staunch critic of despotic colonial governors such as Warren Hastings in India. He mourned the destruction of the Indian civilisation by colonisers. 

When it came to the colonial and evil dispossession and displacement of the Indians by British imperialists and colonisers Burke said: “There is a secret veil to be drawn over the beginning of all governments” and there are “some matters that had as good be covered by obscurity.” 

The brave and brilliant thinker was willing to suspend rigorous critique just to keep in “obscurity” the barbarism of the British in India. Brilliant and courageous scholars and intellectuals frequently defend the status quo by their statements and also their silence and avoidance. As sharp and with an eye on power, hungry for justice as Foucault was, he still had some forgetfulnesses and silences on how Europe was barbaric and evil in its dealing with the enslaved and colonised of what is today called the Global South.

Thinkers think from what decolonial philosophers call a “locus of enunciation.” They think from some places and from their bodies and histories. Geography and biography combine to shape the vision and sensibility of thinkers. 

Epistemology is not insulated from body, place and time. Even the most knowledgeable can become blind and deaf, conditioned by their loci of enunciation. 

Thinking from the side of power and its privileges can condition some blindnesses and deafnesses in, even the most brilliant of minds, that is why Foucault’s monstrous mind and eyes could not see clearly the colonial problem and the problems of the colonised. He was located geographically and epistemically on the side of power and privilege. Even his razor-sharp mind could not escape being blunted by power.

How society must not be defended

In thinking about intellectuals defending the status quo, knowingly or unknowingly, I do not refer to opportunistic flatterers, sycophants and sophists, no. No, those are easy and cheap singers for breakfast and supper combined, I mean thinkers that fail to overcome shadows and decoys that power sets up around itself. 

I mean the way even philosophers of liberation may be beguiled by forces of domination and defend power and domination or avoid to confront them.

As a black man located in France, and at once being a parliamentarian for the French Communists Party in the 1950s, Aime Cesaire could see what Michel Foucault and Immanuel Kant could not see. Cesaire might have been physically located in France but he was geographically thinking and speaking from black Africa. In his reference to the conquering, enslaving and colonising western civilisation, in the essay: Discourse on Colonialism, Cesaire could say: “A civilisation that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilisation, a civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilisation, a civilisation that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilisation.” Cesaire called out the stupidity of power. 

He saw how power and the powerful most times spend time trying to solve problems and do not realise that they are the first and biggest problem. Cesaire called Europe indefensible, evil and barbaric for its conquest, colonisation and domination of the Global South. 

For Cesaire as a thinker and subject of the Global South, there was nothing to defend or support in decadent, world order. Seeing through power and observing its blindness and barbarism became Cesaire’s decolonial gesture. 

The scholarly and intellectual vocation are always at that slippery slope where power can very easily be defended when it should be confronted.

Cetshwayo Mabhena writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria: [email protected]