Psycurity by Rachel Jane Liebert

Author:Rachel Jane Liebert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Legacy

Desire to Know

Coloniality is dependent on a hierarchy of Knowing, Knowers, Knowledge. As documented by Trinh Minh-ha (1989), Gayatri Spivak (1988), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), among many others, those who colonized established themselves as those who had access to the Truth and the colonized as, quite simply, those who did not. Fooled by their ‘savage’ beliefs, they needed guidance-cum-violence – even, or perhaps especially, if they did not ‘know’ this themselves. For Sylvia Wynter (2003) this relation of power is based on an “ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man” (p. 260); one that bought the world of modernity into existence from the fifteenth century onwards, is now at the center of this world, and demands the subordination of the “empirical human world” (p. 262) – those peoples whose gender, sexuality, nation, ethnicity, race, class, and/or disability exist to the side of Man.

This shift from human to Man began when Western intellectuals began what Wynter calls the de-supernaturalizing of modes of being the former. Prior to this collision, societies explicitly mapped ideas about being human onto ideas about the cosmos, experiencing them as a supernatural, extrahuman ‘objective set of facts’ that gave rise to, demanded a particular social order. These worlds-cum-directives – what Wynter calls ‘adaptive truth-fors’ – were thus both absolute and particular. In contrast, the West’s intellectuals mapped the idea of order onto ‘natural laws’ – freeing the ‘objective set of facts’ into something ‘out there,’ repressing any recognition of social reality being locally, collectively produced. Now seen in universal terms, the world as an entirety became Knowable. Bringing with it a “drive to final mastery” that fortified the expansionist exploration and attempted colonization of the globe (Sandoval, 2000). To Know was and is to capture, own, control – whether ideas, plants, peoples, or lands.

Wynter (2003) describes how this de-supernaturalization led to the description of two kinds of human-as-Man. First, the human of the evangelizing mission of the Church, or ‘Man1,’ a Christian subject who dominated from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century; second, the human of the imperializing mission of the state, or ‘Man2,’ a political subject who accompanied the ensuing territorial expansion and conquest. This move from Man1 to Man2 marked a shift of the idea of order away from spiritual toward rational im/perfection. As Wynter summarizes, “if God made everything for mankind then he would have had to make it according to rational, nonarbitrary rules that could be knowable by the beings that He made it for” (p. 278). Going from supernatural to natural causation, emancipating Man as one who can Know, thus prepared the ground for Science. This new mode of Knowing required the making, disregarding, and exterminating of a physical referent for its irrational or sub-rational other – whether the ‘witches’ of Europe (Federici, 2014) or the ‘barbarians’ of the New World (Kelley, 2000). Such making, disregarding, and exterminating was facilitated in particular by ‘social’ Science (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), thrusting ‘objects’ of inquiry into categories, and spinning them into a hierarchy;

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