I come now to the final point of my letter to you. Jesse Jackson made the point that the uprising of South Central L.A. “was a spontaneous combustion - this time not of discarded material but of discarded people.” As is the case with the also hitherto discard-able environment, its ongoing pollution, and ozone layer depletion, the reality of the throwaway lives, both at the global socio-human level, of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the “favela/shanty town” of the globe and their jobless archipelagoes, as well, at the national level, of Baldwin’s “captive population” in the urban inner cities, (and on the Indian Reservations of the United States), have not been hitherto easily perceivable within the classificatory logic of our “inner eyes.” In other words, the two phenomena, that of the physical and that of the global socio-human environments, have been hidden costs which necessarily remained invisible to the “inner eyes” of the mode of subjective understanding,” generated from our present disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities. And therefore, within the mode of “truth” or epistemological order based upon the representation of the human as if it were a natural organism.

My proposal here is that both of these “hidden costs” cannot be normally seen as costs within the terms of the hegemonic economic categories, and therefore of the absolutism of its related economic ethic (as the analogues of the theological categories/Absolutism of the Scholastic order of knowledge of feudal-Christian Europe). That furthermore it is by this ethic, and its supraordinate goal of higher and higher “standards of living” (i.e. the goal of Material Redemption, whereas in the feudal order the behaviour-orienting goal was that of Spiritual Redemption), which now sets the limits of our culture-specific “inner eyes” - the limits therefore of how we can see, know and behave upon our present global and national order; the limits therefore of our “Truth.”

That it sets these limits (as the now purely secularized form of the original Judaeo-Christian theological ethic in its feudal form), as rule-governedly as that ethic had set “limits,” before the revolution of lay humanism, with respect to how the subjects of its then order could see, know and behave upon the world. In the same way also, as before the intellectual revolution which took place from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the political ethic (with which the humanists had replaced the theological), had itself set the limits of how the then sociocultural reality of Pre-Industrial Europe could be seen, known and behaved upon; within the terms there- fore of what Foucault defined as the Classical episteme.

Keith Tribe points out in his book Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (1978) that it was only with Adam Smith’s partial, and with David Ricardo’s completed, putting in place of new “economic categories,” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the earlier order of knowledge based on the hegemony of political categories was finally displaced; and that the emergent centrality of the processes of Industrial production, over against the earlier hegemony of agricultural production, was given epistemological, and therefore, optimally behaviour-prescriptive status.

Black Americans are the only population group of the post-1492 Americas who had been legitimately owned, i.e. enslaved, over several centuries. Their owned and enslaved status had been systemically perceived within the “inner eyes” and the classificatory logic of the earlier episteme, its hegemonic political categories and behaviour-orienting political ethic, to be legitimate and just. The frequent slave revolts as well as the Abolition Movement, together with the Haitian Revolution and the Civil War in the United States, fundamentally broke the military power which had sustained that perception. Nevertheless, the displacement of that earlier “Truth” had been only verified at the level of the cognitive models of the society, when “heretical” thinkers like Smith and Ricardo had been able to “marry their thought” to the cause of the emergent forces of the Industrial world - i.e. to the cause of “free trade” (against “protection” for agricultural producers) and of the activity of the Industrial bourgeoisie - forces that were then blocked in their emergence, not only by the restrictive laws, but also, by the behaviour-prescriptive categories of the earlier episteme in whose logic the “hidden costs” of protectionist policies for agricultural produce (including products grown by forced slave labor), could not be seen as costs.

This is the central point that Bauman makes with respect to the now global category of the New Poor. Consequently, the central issue that confronts us here, is whether we too will be able to move beyond the epistemic limits of our present “inner eyes” in order, in Bauman’s words, to “marry our thought” to the emergent post-Industrial plights of both the planetary as well as the global sociohuman environment. Specifically with the “captive population” and, jobless category of South Central Los Angeles, who can have no peaceful way of imposing their will upon a city and State, whose ordered hierarchies, and everyday behaviours are legitimated in the last instance by the world view encoded by our present order of knowledge. Zygmunt Bauman points out that the emergence of the category of the New Poor is due to a systemic factor. Capital, with the rise of the global processes of technological automation, has increasingly freed itself from its dependence on labor. The organized working class, in consequence, which had been seen as the potential agent of social transformation during the phase of capital accumulation, one that had been primarily based on production, no longer has enough clout, to put a stop to the process of expanding job erosion, now that consumption has displaced production as the primary medium of capital accumulation. During the production phase, the category of the jobless Poor, both in the First as well as in the reserve “native” Third worlds, had a function. This function had been that of providing an excess of labor supply over demand, in order to put a brake on wage costs. In this new consumption phase of capital accumulation, it has no function.

Illiterate, unskilled and without job experiences, as the more and more low-skilled jobs dwindle with the acceleration of automated work processes, the jobless New Poor are without the wherewithal to serve as a reserve army of consumption. Where they receive welfare checks, (as in Britain and the United States), as part of an internal “pacification program,” the neighborhood shops, (as we have seen in the case of South Central Los Angeles, where these shops are owned by new immigrant groups such as Iranian, Taiwanese, Korean, Mexican, most of whom maintain a protected labor market by employing their own “ethnic” kin, see Time, May 18, 1992) serve as the mechanism to siphon what little wealth there is, out of the ghettos; to thereby lock the New Poor into their discardable throwaway status at the same time as the shop owners (including the Black owners) realize the American Dream, represented as social mobility out of the ghettos. As successful “bread-winners,” their Conceptual Others are those who make possible their accelerated enrichment; that is, the members of the captive population” of the ghettoes (and of the global jobless archipelagoes) who are like the environment, the negative systemic costs, that are not perceivable within the logic of our present “inner eyes” and behaviour-regulating ethic, and its mode of hegemonic economic (rather than ecosystemic or human) reason.

It is within the “Truth” of our present epistemological order, and therefore within the terms of its related “grand narrative of human emancipation” [Lyotard, 1989], whose supraordinate goal or purpose, rather than being as it had been in the case of the earlier Classical episteme that of the expansion of the state, is now that of securing the material well being of the biologized Body of the Nation, and therefore of its optimal middle class mode of the subject, Foucault’s Man, that, as Bauman points out, we cannot as intellectuals, whether Liberal Positivist or Marxist-Leninist, marry our thought to the plight of the New Poor; cannot marry our thought to the well-being of the human, rather than only to that of “Man,” i.e. our present middle class mode of the subject (or of sociogeny) [Fanon, 1963].

The poor and the oppressed, Bauman notes, have therefore come to lose all attractions for the intellectuals. This category, unlike the working class jobholders cannot be seen, within the economic logic of our present organization of knowledge, as contributors to the process of production who have been unjustly deprived of the “full value of their labor power.” Moreover, the fact that this New Poor, seduced too, like all of us, by the clamor of advertisements which urge them to consume, so that frustrated in their consumption goals, they turn on one another, mutilate and kill each other, or “damage themselves with alcohol and drugs” convinced of their own worthlessness, or in brief episodes of eruption, “fire the ghettoes, riot, looting whatever they can lay their hands on,” means that today’s intellectuals, whilst they feel and express their pity, refrain from proposing to marry their thought with this particular variety of human suffering.

If, as Legesse suggests, because of our role as the grammarians of our order, we must ourselves, normally, and as the condition of our order’s integration and stable replication, remain imprisoned in the “structural models” that we ourselves put in place, then how are we to be enabled to break out of one cultural specific native model of reality (one variant of our “inner eyes”) and make the transition from one Foucauldian episteme, from one founding and behaviour-regulating narrative, to another? In other words, how can we marry our thought so that we can now pose the questions whose answers can resolve the plight of the Jobless archipelagoes, the N.H.I. categories, and the environment?

The answer to both will necessarily call for us to move beyond the Absolutism of our present economic categories, as in the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries the lay humanists of Europe moved beyond that of the theological categories of Scholasticism; and the nineteenth century Classical economists moved beyond that of the political categories of the earlier epistemological order. For Legesse defines his explanatory key in the new terms of culture-systemic categories which move outside the logic of our present mode of subjective understanding, based on the concept of the human as a purely natural organism which can pre-exist the culturally instituted and “sanctified universe of obligation” by means of which we are alone “socialized” as inter-altruistically bonded mode of symbolic “kin;” and therefore as specific modes of the sociogenic subject [Fanon, 1964] and of systemic sociality [Campbell, 1982].

Legesse suggests that the cognitive escape hatch is always to be found in the category of the liminal. This is the category whose rule-governed negation, institutes a principle of difference from which both the optimal criterion of being and the “fake” mode of similarity or of unanimity [Girard, 1986], on which each order can alone institute itself as a living system, are dynamically generated. Whether that of the “fallen” lay humanists of medieval Europe, who were negatively represented as being “enslaved to Original Sin” unlike the celibate Clergy who were as such, the guardians of the mainstream system of Scholastic knowledge, or, in the case of the peoples of African and Afro-mixed descent as the category of the Human Other, represented as enslaved to its dysselected evolutionary origins and whose physiognomic distance from “normal” being, provides the genetic principle of difference and similarity which bonds all Whites, and increasingly non-Blacks, non-Whites at the level of race, and of all middle class subjects at the level of class. Most crucially of course, since the Sixties the liminal category of les damnés, i.e. the N.H.I. category of South Central Los Angeles whose doubled pariah status as Poor/Jobless and Black, has come to serve a central systemic function for the now Post-Industrial nation-state order of the United States. Because the negative proscription of the liminal category, is the very condition of each human order’s functioning as an organizationally and cognitively closed self-regulating or autopoetic system [Maturana and Varela, 1980], the premise of this category’s proscription is central to the “ground” from which the “regimes of truth” of each epistemological order and its disciplinary paradigms are rule-governedly generated. The liminal category’s empirical exclusion, like that of the exclusion of the inner city ghetto of South Central Los Angeles, is therefore a condition of each order’s “truth.”

For it is precisely, Legesse argues, out of the field of dynamic interaction between “the generalized horizon of understanding” or “inner eyes” put in place by the prescriptive categories of all culture-specific orders of knowledge, and the empirical on-the- ground process to which the collective behaviours of each order’s subjects, as oriented by these prescriptive categories, give rise, that there emerges the liminal category which, in its thrust towards emancipation from its systemic role can serve to “remind us that we need not forever remain prisoners of our prescriptions.” Since by its very movement out of its proscribed place, as in the uprising that followed on the Simi Valley jurors’ acquittal of the policemen “Nigger-breakers” - such a category generates conscious change in all subjects, by exposing all the injustices inherent in structure; and again, like the N.H.I. category of South Central Los Angeles, in two days of rage, “by creating a real contradiction between structure and anti-structure, social order and man-made anarchy,” epistemological orders and new modes of knowing.

NO HUMANS INVOLVED: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY COLLEAGUES

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