What sort of difference is primitivity? To think this question of primitive difference already involves an unhinging of the “here” and “now” of one’s relation to a knowledge-claim of what was, what is, and what can be. Articulated otherwise, to think postcoloniality is to think of a non-comparative, non-developmental notion of difference. More than simply a signifier of cultural difference, primitivity as engaged by postcoloniality is an activity of unhinging, an opening up, a displacing of places and times that makes possible another subject that seems always prior to and even in excess of the present, that is to say, a subject whose habitation in time is by definition problematic. It is in this sense we read the “post-” in the register of what Derrida calls the dis-jointure of time. The historical violence of colonialism bears witness to the material consequences of this act of spatial and temporal unbinding, which exhibit themselves as the world-historical disjointing of time that imperil the native colonies. But it is also the promise of political decolonization, which holds forth the power of this unbinding as a thinking and rendering of what is merely given into something other, a subversion of the tyranny of a given present, which seems inexorably presented to the subaltern as the emergency of the “now.” This is why primitivity is less a restitution of a sullied, violated past: in decolonizing politics, primitivity becomes transformed and engaged as a possibility of another time.
To think postcolonial primitivity, then, has something to do with a kind of spatial and temporal unbinding, whose striving is toward a beyond of a radical future, to which postcolonial culture lives and endures. My suggestion here is that postcoloniality translates primitivity as a form of knowledge and power in this sense. As a striving at the edges of History’s movement, this beyond of postcolonial culture, as Bhabha thematizes it, throws into relief “the temporal, social differences that interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity.” What is this cultural interruption if not the effect and force of postcolonial primitivity? If postcoloniality is understood as the tide and force that undermines the sense-immediacy and certainty of any “here” and “now,” what tarries at the barriers of normative intelligibility if not the primitivity of postcoloniality? Difference is produced, always present, not as essence, but as ground and necessary remainder of an historical past.
The concept of primitivity has multiple valences in postcoloniality. Postcolonial primitivity will have something to do less with cultural difference than this mode of spatial and temporal unhinging: a disjoining of time and space that displaces any ground of comparison and basis of truth-claims. In what sense can we read postcolonial culture and critique as inscribing primitivity within a non-comparative concept of difference? Fanon, writing in the midst of decolonization, defines the revolutionary task of decolonization as making the “last” into the “first,” while Bhabha, writing at the close of the millennium, sets the task of postcolonial cultural critique as a thinking and reading “outside the sentence.” What connects Bhabha’s injunction to Fanon’s decolonizing praxis is the call for imagining and putting into practice the unbinding of time that primitivity calls forth. We will see how both presuppose and set forth a critical concept of primitivity that seeks to grasp the afterlives of colonialism, which is understood also as an activity of striving the beyond of a radical future.
The subject of primitivity is the primitive. Associations with savagery, barbarism, technological backwardness, and tribalism have historically cast the primitive as the inhuman. As savage, as backward, the primitive is interpellated as an obstinate figure of the past, the inhuman other within the humanistic project of Enlightenment modernity. The object of modernity, we know, is double, the modern and the primitive, a doubling or diremption of time into two: the primitive past and the future modern. The latter’s stranglehold on the time of the present is done in the name of a future, which can only realize itself through a refusal of a past that problematically exists in the present “now.” This vilified past is the specter of the primitive that is excised in the historical realization of modernity, which seeks to constrict this doubling into a singularity. As an inhuman past, the primitive is posited as that which needs to be negated for history’s progressive march to a properly modern future. Colonialism is the historicizing force of realizing this linear time of modernity. The “here” and “now” become singularized in the modernizing force-field of colonialism. No wonder the primitive is pinned as something frozen to the past, no coincidence then that anthropology, comparative anatomy, and evolutionarism emerge as so many ideological convections for the imperial discourse on the primitive, as so many narratives of the development of mankind from primitive barbarism to the modernly human. The temporal syntax of modernity thereby endows world-time a grammar of imperial developmental comparativity.
The developmental time of modernity moves through the negative force of comparison. Causality and the law of non-contradiction become the logical and discursive basis for the annihilation of the primitive. For what is taken as a logical causality is understood as standing in relations of time, a metaphysics of presence. The basic causal relationship, if A then B, for example, makes sense only if one presupposes that the difference that arises between these two states, A and B, is temporal. The movement of change and its apprehension is possible only if placed contiguously within a time-series of continuous moments under the law of natural causality. The primitive becomes an inescapable figure in modernity insofar as it becomes a stand-in for a point of historical time to which modernization and colonialism posits, negates, and overcomes. This is how modernity understands itself as a historical movement of logical necessity, as itself a form of time-consciousness. Colonialism’s global spread is the realization of a rational world-spirit. Positing itself as a rational force, modernity understands the co-presence of the primitive in the “here” and “now” as something that threatens its logical consistency and integrity. Because the principle of temporal sequence under the law of causality understands time as succession, the “now” becomes reduced to the negation of the past. The future is thereby understood as the present “now” overcoming the past through comparative negation. The constellation of past, primitive, and colonized becomes reduced to that which is always belatedly last.
The ordering of the colonial world is informed by this developmental structure of modern time, which in Fanon’s writings is characterized in terms of violence. The violence that presides over the constitution of the colonial world, Fanon writes in the Wretched of the Eart, “has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life.” The native social forms, which Fanon speaks of, are forms of life understood by the colonizers as the set of cultural and social differences of the primitive. They are violently sundered because they stand in contradiction to the “here” and “now” of modernity. The destruction of native social forms becomes part and parcel of the historical movement of modernity, indeed it is what is understood as History. Again, Fanon is insightful:
The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: “This land was created by us”; he is the unceasing cause: “If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages.” […] The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates the he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.
The writing of history from the vantage point of the colonizer presupposes that the colonizer is the “absolute beginning,” of being endowed by the power of origination and spontaneity, and therefore of legitimized right and might. The terms of comparison is fixed at the outset, in which all that is outside of the world-view of the settler or colonizer is anachronistic to any “now” of the present. Its domain becomes not only the domain of the time proper or coincident to the present—that is to say, History. It is also the domain of human freedom that the writing of History presupposes. In other words, if the writing of History is itself a form of narrative exposition that records the developmental progression of time, and man’s activity in historical time, then the rational necessity of the temporal movement of modernity marks the colonizer as the first and the primitive native as the last.
Fanon reinscribes primitivity into a concept of decolonization by enacting a reversal in this narrative scheme: primitivity becomes not a marker of a vilified past, but something constitutively primary or, in Fanon’s phrase, the instance in which the last becomes first. It is in this sense that decolonization becomes a violent act of freeing oneself from a prior condition of unfreedom. He writes,
In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish o describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first and the first last.’ Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.
By reading his call to actualize the meaning of the sentence “the last shall be first and the first last,” Fanon imbues the process of decolonization with a political force that seeks to dislodge the time of modernity, by unleashing within it what had been suppressed or rendered illegitimate under the tyranny of colonization and its developmental and comparative logic. The word “primitive,” one recalls, derives from the Latin word primitivus which designates what comes first or earliest of its kind, on the one hand, and what is originary, non-derivative and primary, on the other. The topos of violence emerges in Fanon’s writing because of the ways in which colonialism has suppressed this dimension of the primitive as primary and originary. Negritude, as the political assertion of African consciousness, worked towards recuperating this originary sense of the primitive by denuding the influences of coloniality. In Fanon, what is set forth in the resurgence of primitivity in decolonial praxis entails the act of re-writing History and the undoing of the developmental structure of colonial modernity.
Postcoloniality proceeds as a mode of re-writing history and an unhinging of time by orienting itself toward a beyond behind which lies the potentiality of a radical future. What is being suggested here is that, following Fanon, the extension of decolonization as a political program to postcoloniality involves the undoing of the colonization of time (History), in which primitivity is dislodged out of the reign of a cultural comparativism. After decolonization, if there can be an “after,” how does one begin to understand the present “here” and “now” of postcoloniality? How does one understand the difference of the postcolonial? One of the elemental task of postcolonial cultural critique is a thinking through of the ways in which the historical past of colonialism continues to inform and determine the contemporary present. This mode of critical inquiry furnishes the conceptual means by which to better grasp the actualities that constitute the postcolonial world. The condition of postcoloniality is often thought in terms of both cause and effect. Cause because, on the one hand, the supposed end of colonialism brought with it the massive migrations of the Third World—the literal displacement of populations in time and space—and the new forms of power and inequality after decolonization. Also as effect because these new conditions continue to persist over time. The sovereign rule of the present thus seems to haunt postcoloniality. Indeed, postcoloniality seems as though unable to escape the present. It is relentlessly defined and conditioned by the violence and tyranny of the present as such. Circumscribed by the “now,” the postcolonial subject cannot, as it were, close its eyes, it cannot stop its ears or withdraw itself entirely from the senses; it must instead stare steadfastly at the image of the Real that informs the interiority of one’s thought. It does so because this attending to the emergency of the present is made necessary because of the given conditions for life in the postcolonial world to persist and flourish. The postcolonial seems, prima facie, unable to sanction a phenomenological negation of the present that would effect its autonomy or independence from the material conditions imposed on it from the social world. The problem of the present poses the following problem: if postcoloniality is that which is relentlessly conditioned by the present, a “here” and “now” that bears within itself the violence of colonialism’s historical past, how then does one think the future of postcolonialism?
Bhabha presents this problematic of time for postcolonial cultural critique. In search of another temporality of writing and reading that will inscribe the problematic modern experience of the postcolonial, Bhabha attempts to conceptualize another ordering of time, which “questions the teleological traditions of past and present.” This other ordering of time is what we have been defining as the temporal modality of the primitivity, which postcolonial cultural critique brings to bear in order to highlight the discontinuities of the historical dispensation of modernization. Primitivity defies the logic of any teleological claims, and questions the rational necessity of the historical force of modernization. This non-teleological form of temporality can be gleaned from the method of postcolonial reading Bhabha presents: he argues that in order to grasp what is beyond the merely linear and chronological, one reads “outside the sentence.” It is a reading that acknowledges that this space of the non-sentence is neither a negative ontology nor some kind of “pure contingency.” Like the notion of primitivity we have been elaborating upon, reading “outside of the sentence” is akin to the critical unhinging of the “here” and “now.” Bhabha writes, “this discourse is indeed one of indeterminism, unexpectability, on that is neither ‘pure’ contingency or negativity nor endless deferral… ‘Outside the sentence’ is not to be opposed to the inner voice; the non-sentence does not relate to the sentence as a polarity.”
Bhabha’s injunction to read outside the sentence enjoins us to think of an experience of time that is prior to any positing of the “here” and “now,” a primitive non-space in which relations between things need not be ordered in comparative or evaluative terms. It is an imagining and a limning of a future potential, a radical visioning of what can be in excess of any “here” and “now.” The resonance of the post- in postcoloniality and the trope of the beyond implied in the notion of being “outside the sentence” poses the constitutive problem behind any futural politics of the postcolonial subject. Primitivity, as a shoring up of the differences that seems always in excess of the “here” and “now,” suggests the always immanent possible futures that can emerge from tracing the overlapping of historical temporalities, futures that are emancipatory because they are radically unconditioned and uncertain.
— P.N.
Image: Ronald Ventura, Natural Lies, oil on canvas, 2010. Courtesy of Tyler Rollins Fine Art (NY)
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