Slow thought.
Rocky Mountains, Colorado 8.2022
In 1952, Frantz Fanon published Peau Noire, Maske Blancs (translated in 1967 as Black Skin, White Masks). It is hard to downplay the significance of this book as it probed the structures of racism within colonial France as well as the dehumanising trappings of racialisation within which Black men and women are captured. Even today, Fanon’s critical rereading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic continuous to facilitate critical readings of white supremacy around the world. Particularly Fanon’s concept of sociogenesis - which stipulates how social phenomena are attributed to particular groups as if they were natural - has allowed for an important critique of the naturalisation of race as ultimately a racist fiction. However, two things tend to be overlooked whenever Black Skin, White Masks is brought up. Firstly, it explicitly takes as its point of departure an event wherein Fanon himself was exposed to the everyday violence of racialisation when he met a white child and its mother on a train. As a clear counterpart to Immanuel Kant’s anthropological equation of whiteness to humanity in Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764), Fanon demonstrates that thinking about race in the world is always directly tied to the racialisation of one’s very being in that world. The other thing that is often overlooked is that, when publishing Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon was 26.
I often think about the conditions that caused Fanon to write this particular book at that particular age and it always seems to invoke a two-pronged reflection. Firstly, the argument is unprecedented in its conceptualisation of the psychological effects of racial subjugation through the very reality of this subjugation to which Fanon was himself exposed. Fanon by no means reflected on the structures of racism as an abstract or theoretical problem yet his philosophical and conceptual innovation produced groundbreaking insights into these structures that have shown a lasting influence ever since. Steeped in his experience of racial violence during the Vichy regime in Martinique and France during the Second World War, the book’s discussion of racism’s psychopathology was very much a product of Fanon’s lifelong experiences and therefore provides more context to the young age at which he published this book.
However, and this is the second part of my reflection, as the book was initially published as a doctoral thesis entitled Écrits sur l'aliénation et la liberté, it was also a scholarly work that marked the culmination of Fanon’s psychiatric studies in Lyon. Considering the book’s scholarly contribution, Fanon’s age at the time of publishing is nothing shy of extraordinary. And yet, when considering the fact Fanon published three more books (two of which posthumously after his death in 1961) in the 12 years following Black Skin, White Masks, the extraordinary nature of this intellectual output shows a striking comparison to the industry of academic knowledge workers today. Whilst one might be quick to draw parallels between the pace at which Fanon published his work and the impact hysteria of the so called publish-or-perish mantra, it is important to understand just how different we now think… about thought. In fact, the notion of thinking itself has been radically reconstituted over the last 150 years into a product that can be accumulated, manufactured, traded, and sold just like any other capitalist commodity. This is why we no longer talk about it as thought but rather as knowledge production. In Muße und Kult (1948, English translation: Leisure: The Basis of Culture), the German theologian and philosopher Josef Pieper argues that knowledge production is indeed a very modern term. In Western philosophy, acquiring knowledge had always been regarded an activity that required contemplation, which Pieper referred to as “an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm.” Knowledge is therefore something more than merely the product of our hard, intellectual labour (another term that reflects the subordination of thought to Capitalist ideology).
So what is thought, if not merely the production of knowledge? The scientific answer to that question argues that it is the firing of neurons in the brain, an answer that seems to defy the popular image of thinking as a conscious and isolated experience. The brain is namely always actively processing external information, even when we are not consciously and effortfully producing knowledge. In fact, our most creative thoughts are often sparked in states that are unconscious and effortless. As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues in Rest, our brains are almost always working at full speed but they are “just not bothering to bring our conscious self along.” So even from a neurological perspective, the idea of thought as the production of knowledge is simply a fiction. Thought cannot be commodified and it also cannot be compartmentalised by capitalism’s stifling conception of time. The speed of thought can therefore not be determined as it reflects the way we make sense of the world around us. In this sense, thought is always effortless. At 26, Fanon was thinking and its speed was dictated by the speed with which Blackness is suffocated in a white society. Or how his words from Les Damnés de la Terre (1961, English translation: The Wretched of the Earth) - “I am choking in your bonds” - echo in the dying words of Eric Garner, killed by a New York City Police Officer in 2014: “I can’t breathe.” Fanon was not producing knowledge, even if it was the materialisation of his doctoral research. It was indeed his very experience of white supremacy that propelled his thinking about sociogenisis and the structures of whiteness. The urgency with which he analysed these structures and advocated the need for their dismantling are not to be conflated with the industry of producing knowledge as a commodity.