Homi K Bhabha, 'Day by Day... With Frantz Fanon [1]
In: The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of international Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 186-205.
for Stuart Hall
The springing wolf which wanted to devour everything at sight, and the rising gust of wind which was to have brought about a real revolution run the risk of becoming unrecognisable if the struggle continues: and continues it does.
Frantz Fanon. Spontaneity: its Strength and Weakness [2]
Why invoke Frantz Fanon today, quite out of historical context? Why invoke Fanon when the ardour of emancipatory discourse has seemingly yielded to fervent, ferocious pleas for the 'end of history', the end of struggle? Why invoke Fanon who spoke most pertinently and passionately at that historical moment when, as he argued, it was a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man? No useful answer can be made to these questions by simply pointing to historical parallels, or by asking, accusingly, or self-righteously, 'who carries the torch of struggle now? Where is the springing wolf in sheep's clothing?' Such piety misses the subtlety and the power of Fanon's rhetorical emphasis on the singularity of the day-to-day - the diurnal measure - in both struggle and survival. In Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness, the understated phrase 'the struggle continues' offers an elusive attempt to distinguish between what he calls 'the historical law', [3] and his sense of the performance of the politics of the day-to-day: 'the struggle for national liberation does not consist in spanning the gap at one stride: the drama has to be played out in all its difficulty every day... Day after day goes by'. [4] 'Historic examples', or what Fanon calls the knowledge of the history of societies (his example is the masquerade of the British granting colonial concessions in Kenya) occupy the pedagogical realm of the political - a kind of organisational 'ought' that is most useful in initiating insurrection against the colonising forces, constituting a necessary bi-polar antagonism. But the continuance of the struggle, the 'day-to-day', the contingency of historical temporality and causality produce 'truths that are only partial, limited, unstable... shades of meaning [that] constitute dangers and drive wedges into the solid block of popular opinion'. [5] It is this historical temporality that I would call the emergency of the (insurgent) everyday, and Fanon associates it with political subjects who are somehow outside the 'official' discourses of the nationalist struggle. What is particularly salient about the temporality of everyday emergency is that it represents the agency of insurgency and constitutes a counter-force to historical examplarity. The temporality of the 'day-to-day' is what Fanon calls the 'knowledge of the practice of action'. [6]
The people will thus come to understand that national independence sheds light upon many facts that are sometimes divergent and antagonistic. Such a taking stock of the situation at this precise moment of the struggle is decisive, for it allows the people to pass from total, undiscriminating nationalism to social and economic awareness... [7]
Such a subaltern consciousness is constituted in three significant ways. Firstly, the day-to-day articulates the historical continuum of struggle as it takes place; takes stock of the situation as it straddles a temporality of transience, from which it seeks to formulate the knowledge of strategic political action. Secondly, the day-to-day is addressed to the heterogeneous, differential conditions and internal disjunctions - class, race, peasantry, the economy, oppression, exploitation, ethicality, generational difference - that constitute the liminal 'subject' or body of the colonised people in the performative act of insurgency; and, as such, it is less concerned with what I earlier described as the bi-polar antagonism between coloniser and colonised. Finally, the emergent everyday breaks down any utopian or 'essentialist' notion of a linear, continual development from a colonised person to a self-governing citizen. The (dis)illusion of such an organic, progressive transformation is, in Fanon's view, no more than the colonised desperately 'grasping the mirage of his muscles' own immediacy'. [8] Fanon insists, at least theoretically, on the need to posit a moment of caesura or negation in the recognition of historical freedom that cannot be sublated in emancipatory ardour.
[1] This paper is a work-in-progress.
[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth ed. Constance Farrington (Grove Weidenfeld, New York 1991) p 140.
[3] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth, ibid p 142.
[4] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth, ibid p 141.
[5] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth, ibid p 146.
[6] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth, ibid p 147.
[7] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth, ibid p 144.
[8] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth, ibid p 138.