From Gramsci to Fanon - The Emancipatory Project of Limited Pluralism

• In Event: Logics of Colonialism and Practices of Emancipation

Abstract

The image of pluralism as inherently opposed to oppression and subjugation especially along cleavages of race, gender, sexuality, and religion has become firmly established in academic and even political life over the last few years. Building primarily on the Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge as well as on the latent long-term effects of poststructural philosophy since the 1960s, political thinkers across the spectrum have embraced the value of pluralism on conceptual grounds as well as on the historical evidence of “monist” belief systems underlying authoritarian and totalitarian politics, both in the so-called West and the rest of the world.

In “left” political theory, much of post-colonial and radical-democratic theory relies on the legacy of two thinkers with complicated relationship to the “Western” tradition, Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. The former’s place in the pluralist canon has been assured both by his prominent position in much of Chantal Mouffe’s work and in his foundational analysis of ideology and the “soft” paralysis of opposition through hegemonic discourses and the institutions that perpetuate them. Similarly, Fanon has undergone an intellectual form of posthumous relocation, and is today known primarily for a myriad of post-colonial approaches and critical race study that he helped inspire. In the process, original ascriptions of Marxism or Existentialism have all but disappeared.

This paper challenges approaches intended to generously read a full-scale commitment to pluralism back into the work of these writers. I posit that Gramsci and Fanon understand diverse experiences of suffering and exclusion to be important components of a greater project of understanding and radically changing the world; at the same time, however, both remain committed to the essentially monistic assumptions and methods of historical materialism and, more broadly, continental philosophy since the 18th century. Rather than consider these commitments unfortunate lapses or regrettable “signs of the times”, I argue that the firm, and, by contemporary standards, almost conservative insistence on limiting pluralism remains an important facet of their work.

In a first step, I show that both Gramsci and Fanon value the experience of the subaltern, but they do so with strong connotations of pity, frustration, and indeed furor, directed against the institutions that have created them. In the suffering of the wretched of the earth, they saw reflections of the social and political world that challenged the self-image of the West and its ruling classes: the pathologies and shortcomings they found in colonial subjects and the peasantry were to be taken seriously, but also to be bemoaned rather than celebrated. To Gramsci and Fanon, the existing pluralism of knowledge and beliefs was to be overcome and be replaced by a different pluralism, that is, one whose sources was the natural diversity among free human beings rather than a result of injuries incurred in systems of oppression.

In a second step, I show that both writers rely on essentially monistic conceptions of truth and, to a lesser extent, the good life. When Gramsci speaks of local dialect and Fanon of superstitious ritual, they contrast what they see with the full life of the autonomous human being promised by Enlightenment philosophy and either hindered or destroyed by the crimes of European colonization and capitalism. Furthermore, both writers insist that this "empirical" diversity served as one primary obstacle to self-understanding and self-liberation. I argue that their revolutionary ambitions can be explained most convincingly as an attempt to democratize and universalize the strictly limited pluralism of a philosophic tradition that in its home of Western academia had lost its vigor and allowed its original emancipatory intent to be turned into a bastion of reaction. Gramsci and Fanon show no sign of serious skepticism toward the quasi-metaphysical “grand narratives” that have become the target of pluralism in recent decades. For these writers and activists, the original project remains valid - with one crucial caveat: while they still may diagnose "immaturity", they certainly did not consider it self-incurred.

In a final step, I argue that this limitation of pluralism has more than retained its importance: in a world where pluralism has finally become an at least ostensibly accepted and celebrated value, the nuanced voices of two of the strongest critics of hegemonic ideology deserve to be heard rather than appropriated.

Author

• Volker Schmitz, Texas Tech University