Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Heart of Violence: Binaries Under Fanon's Eyes

Fanon’s intense, indeed vitriolic text “On Violence” predicates itself upon the setting up of dualistic binaries that come into antagonistic conflict: he envisages colonial society upon a Hobbesian atmosphere of perpetual war and violence between the colonizer and the colonized; and a Hegelian master-slave dialectic where the colonizer’s entire “validity” (2) is derived from the economic and social superiority that he has qua the colonized, and where the violent and intense counter-resistance that the colonized offer can only make sense against the antithetical backdrop the colonial machinery affords. Indeed, Fanon states that colonial reality is a compartmentalized one, drawn around boundaries and binaries that cut across social, economic, political and cultural lines and modes of identification. However, these boundaries, while serving the purpose of classifying and ordering reality also sediment forms of oppression and violence that Fanon cries out against: in this world, “the colonized subject is always presumed guilty” (16), and he is always “dehumanized” (7) as such.

I feel however, that just as Fanon’s text illustrates how violence, in its myriad forms, is enacted upon the body and reality of the colonized subject, Fanon’s own analysis does its own violence upon the people whom he is writing about: he seems to want to reduce all levels of colonial reality and indigenous forms of expression into a violent response towards colonial repression. Thus, he codes the “ecstasy of dance” (19) in terms of the “supercharged libido” and the “stifled aggressiveness” (20) that suggests repressed violence that only make sense within the context of the Manichean struggle against the colonizer. Using this overtly Freudian terminology, Fanon reduces and thematizes all of the colonized into vectors of unconscious forces that one day will overwhelm the establishment with an unprecedented show of force. Is there not something chilling in Fanon’s frequent references to the positive value of the violence of the oppressed as “praxis” (21), and as the only means through which colonial authority can be destroyed, without essentially speaking a different language from that of the oppressors, and thus essentially replicating and repeating the ideological structures that have been foisted upon them?

Fanon’s text also, in its translatability, enacts the ambiguity of the above position: in its readability, it partakes of European discourse through translation no matter how much its own themes give voice to resistance against colonial hegemonic values. I suggest that a better alternative can be provided by the critical resources afforded by deconstruction, where the notion of established binaries itself carry from within the seeds of its own dismantling. Reading this into Forster’s novel, we see how the institution of the court, as an apparatus of the English and thus a means of entrenching these fixed binaries that Fanon talks about, must inherently have a degree of instability and undecidability if it is to function as an institution: Aziz’s acquittal is an example of this. The indianization of Mrs. Moore’s name into “Esmiss Esmoor” (250) becomes an illustration of how the dominant language can turn into its Other as such. Can we then appropriate Fanon’s notion of violence by thinking of modernism as doing violence to established modes of aesthetic representation and language; where language now enacts its own failures in totalizing a form of reality that is objectively stable and (in Fanon) hierarchal, as in the radical linguistic experimentation of something like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?

1 comment:

akoh said...

Check/check plus
Interesting ideas but too many -- it makes the post difficult to follow. Maybe pick one next time and expand on it?