4.1.12 Political Education for the Furious and Sick at Heart: Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Introduction

It is an understatement to say that the world was troubled when, in 1961, Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth.[i] The political and social climates in so-called “developing” nations were coming to terms with an expansive global neo-colonial wave of military and economic imperialism stemming from the Cold War.[ii] Dictating the text from his deathbed prior to succumbing to leukemia, Fanon addressed the plight of native insurgents against colonization one last time.  As Fanon notes, circumstances were dire for indigenous resistance cells in Africa and Latin America.  Amidst all their efforts, these forces routinely encountered the burgeoning, highly organized military and economic forces produced by the United States, European nations, and their allies – those countries that were in the process of forming the Western bloc. Rather remarkably, and by what seems almost out of sheer critical will, amidst that climate Fanon was able to diverge from mainstream intellectual and social rhetoric by transforming the resources of post-Enlightenment intellectualism toward a foundational post-colonial intervention.  Unlike many allegedly radical turns in public discourse and social theory, Fanon’s work violated central taboos about the authority of analysis.  In this critique, I offer both praise and questions about Fanon’s provocations with the goal of showing the relevance and limitations to applying Fanon’s ideas of praxis and theory in the contemporary world.

I provide a glimpse at Fanon’s scholarship in this text, my aim being to emphasize the implications of his thinking for scholars, researchers, and practitioners engaged in various aspects of political discourse.  While I acknowledge that theorizing was not Fanon’s primary concern, I direct my comments about his contributions to scholars and activists engaged in discourse around theory, methodology, epistemology, ethnography, and so forth.  To that end, this critique will likely speak more directly to an audience of scholars who are interested in liberatory features of contemporary scholarship and scholar-activism, though it is also my hope to appeal to broader interests as well.  It warrants saying explicitly that to accurately read my analysis and Fanon’s original text, one must acknowledge and respect Fanon’s intentions and commitments related to liberation.  It is not to professionally trained academics that Fanon primarily writes, but instead his audience more broadly includes activists, political figures, and public intellectuals.  Readers of Fanon would do well to consider his intellectual, theoretical and discursive projects as secondary to his insurgent-activist agenda (1963, p. 141).

Fanon on Violence

In the opening section titled “Concerning Violence” Fanon grounds his discussion on an axiomatic idea: a program of decolonization will come to terms with the matter of violence.  A surface reading would seem to show Fanon assertively arguing for the use of violent tactics.  Such a reading however would risk marginalizing Fanon as a terrorist fanatic.  Rather, in engaging the inevitability of violence, there is an important and not necessarily problematic ambiguity in his discussion.  Fanon is not exactly clear about which seemingly contradictory position he intends to defend.  At times, he appears to be asking whether decolonization is necessarily violent.  At other times Fanon seems to affirm that violence is the only means to decolonization.  If violence is the only means for natives to decolonize, then that sets out a particular program.  However, if violence is not necessarily the only means, but rather an inevitable feature of a clash between colonial forces and natives, then the eventuality of violence indicates the need for programs of decolonization to tell a very different story from what would be found in the first hypothesis.

By posing an unresolved breach between violence-as-inevitability and violence-as-necessity, Fanon rejects the trend of pacification in action and thought that he argues is endemic to westernized intellectual cultures and practices (1963, pp. 49, 52).[iii] This is the first moment of guerilla thought within which he believes an audience must learn to think (1963, p. 51). Whether or not a reader agrees with Fanon overall, taking this breach seriously ought to provoke passion.  From this passion one might be inclined to read ahead intently in search of impetus toward political actions of resistance.  Understanding how Fanon introduces the matter of violence does not mean one will be satisfied with his the author’s answer to the issues.  For native insurgents, the breach is familiar and Fanon’s articulation of the issue serves as homage to their dilemma.  For scholars and those relatively sheltered from (and likely unfairly advantaged by) colonial oppression Fanon’s intervention is an invitation to consider thinking and re-thinking materialist political resistance in terms of action amidst the realities of violence native insurgents navigate.

Guerilla Action, Guerilla Thought

Given the complexities of oppression and violence, what are scholars and activists to make of the implications of guerilla tactics?  Here I name certain features of guerilla thought that emerge early in the text and remain Fanon’s faithful resources as the discussion progresses.  Fanon argues that little good can come from agents who are repressed.  Moreover, Western thought must be understood as a network of projects circling about in narcissistic self-dialogue that shut subjects up into their own subjectivity (1963, pp. 37-38).  This intellectual narcissism, the obsessive aggrandizement of the recognition-obsessed self through theoretical abstractions ought to, he argues, be replaced with a self-criticism quite distinct from petty individualism (Fanon, 1963, pp. 38-39).[iv] Instead of narcissistic pontifications that immobilize and sterilize actionable passions, thinking as a guerilla native produces dreams of action (Fanon, 1963, pp. 55, 141).[v]

In the section on “Spontaneity: It’s Strength and Weakness” Fanon emphasizes “programmes of change intended to intercede and counter forms of constructed dependencies (1963, pp. 75-76, 81).  In states of dependency natives experience themselves only through the colonial mode of thought.  For programmes of liberation to be possible – to set out against poverty, illiteracy, social under-development, and so forth – natives must come up with their own methods and values (Fanon, 1963, pp. 78, 82).[vi] Otherwise, Fanon posits, programmes developed out of the provincialities of colonial thought will only continue asking for handouts, expressing gratitude, and advancing servility.  Worse still, the abstract analytical ruminations will continue to feed colonial and post-colonial, imperial agendas.  Fanon is quite clear about the ways in which colonial praxis and theory have failed and injured natives.  He also carefully articulates why natives would benefit from creating their own strategies.

Fanon is both convincing and passionate in his proposal for natives to develop their own intellectual consciousness and resources for engaging in criticism.  His interventions against colonial thought are poignant, though his limitation to the practical sphere may leave theorists dissatisfied with this initial assertion.  The ideas, however, appear predicated on imagining ideal-state situations without also positing developmental-state modes for achieving the ideals.  Since, as Fanon says, colonial thought so pervasively encroaches into native thought, the task of breaking entirely from “Europe” deserves its own attention.  Until this point in the text, violence seems to be the pivotal conceptual resource (or marker of a radical break) that Fanon discusses assertively.  Indeed, it is nonsensical to assume Fanon believes natives ought to do violence to themselves as the means of achieving cognitive and praxical liberation.  The conditions that make possible a leap from colonial thought to guerilla thought and action remain unresolved to an extent.  However, Fanon’s educational programme is robust.

Political Education

The centerpiece project of the text begins in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” where Fanon begins to develop with more complexity the idea of “political education.”  For natives to achieve post-colonial liberation, there must be a distinct change in the habits of mind (p. 114).  The tactical and intellectual methods that enabled natives to endure original forms of coloniality will not suffice for decolonizing and then recreating social life given the ways that neo-colonial imperialism have changed and broadened in scope (Fanon, 1963, p. 107).  There must be another way.

In Fanon’s words, ‎”to educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen” (1963, p. 159).  At its inception, political education extends out of locality and temporality.  Fanon predicts that people in rural settings, those outside cities and towns, on the margins, physically dislocated from centralized authority that will activate such an education (1963, pp. 101, 105).  The entire project of political education will also be mobilized temporally, involving a longer-term strategy of sequential actions.  Agents of education will continue in motion throughout the process.  If this momentum is not maintained, repressive forces from the colonial center will intervene and corrupt the movement (Fanon, 1963, p. 101).  There is little in the way of an explicit phenomenology here, only cursory mention of these features.  That said, the project did continue after Fanon’s passing.  For example, during the 1970’s Enrique Dussel advanced Fanon’s ideas in Philosophy of Liberation (Dussel, 2003) in order to provide an expansive critique of the entire pre- and post-Enlightenment ego cogito.[vii] The ego cogito, Dussel explains, is beholden to a historically valorized ego conquiro through which intellectual thought is narrowly performed as the violent pursuit and domination of concepts as if they are some sort of prey.  By following Fanon in affirming action as the central purposes of theory, Dussel’s contributions remain pivotal in Latin American politics and intellectual discourse.

Readers may notice that even though Fanon is clear about the spatio-temporal contexts of the project of political education, the theoretical substratum of thought is understated (at least in comparison with political rhetoric of the time).  For Fanon this lack of phenomenological pontification is not likely an accident.  Nor is it a central issue since he assumes that natives will broadly, perhaps intuitively, be able to understand the project best without the phenomenological baggage.  There is a tension between this assertion and his proposals elsewhere in the text that natives need to be brought out of assimilation into political consciousness.  One is left to wonder about the need for a more complex articulation of different populations of natives and their correspondingly complex experiences of assimilation and consciousness.

Restating the conditions of contemporary oppression, Fanon contextualizes and emboldens his visionary philosophy of political education.  He explains, “the struggle no longer concerns the place where you are, but the place where you are going” (1963, p. 107).  To go up against an enemy who knows your ideological weaknesses – because that enemy constructed the cultural enclosures around natives to foster and reward such weaknesses – means that one must forget the methods learned in the past.  Instead it is necessary to turn to the alcoves of ruralism where some vestiges of pre-colonial resistance might remain intact (Fanon, 1963, p. 109).

Fanon’s Programmes: When Guerillas Meet Party Politics

Fanon is critically suspicious of conventional party politics that reify authoritarian governmental control as political parties become the voice of the center.  His vision reverses the conventional political chains of authority.  Political parties and governments subsume authority only as tools of the people, not vice-versa.[viii] This shift away from paternalism and toward liberation initiates Fanon’s prescription for programmes of social change that can result from political education.  Yet, in a somewhat unusual move, readers will notice that Fanon leaves notions of nationalism and the political state relatively intact (1963, 131).[ix] Indeed, he does little in the way of critiquing stateism and nationalism directly.  Instead Fanon prefers to focus more intently on the ideological norms of domination that govern states and nations.

Annihilating Culture?

One such norm with which Fanon takes direct issue in “On National Culture” is the notion of culture itself as a praxis-neutral and value-neutral concept.  Although conventional modes of resistance posit changes in culture as potentially liberatory, Fanon rejects this hypothesis.  Instead, he refutes the inherent demands that culture imports.  He does so on the grounds that culture is always a method of domestication and/or exclusion of outcasts that propagates through a normative model of so-called “civilization” (Fanon, 1963, pp. 171-172).  In this turn against culture, Fanon introduces what seems to be analogous to much later post-modern intellectual developments.  For instance, queering  race by instructing natives (particularly Negroes) to go back against culture, to become the most uncultured being: “going back to your own people means to become a dirty wog, to go native as much as you can, to become unrecognisable, and to cut off those wings that before you had to grow” (1963, p. 178).  The activist aspects of this rejection have practical import for casting off the performativity of colonization in one’s daily life.  However, Fanon is not sensitive to individuals and groups who have found culture to be less problematic.  Indeed, Fanon is critical of those who successfully make use of culture by turning it upon itself in different ways without necessarily worrying about the more esoteric ontological claims.  I suggest that Fanon’s rejection of culture does not constitute a radical break to the extent that he claims, but continues to abide the use of some conceptions of culture at a deeper level.  One instance includes his background assumptions about culture in order to construct the laundry list of bad habits one might use when mocking so-called civilized culture (Fanon, 1963, p. 178).[x]

Constructions of Criminality

It is surprising that Fanon, who seems to apply an unstated, yet extensive theoretical polemics, concludes the text with a section on “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” which surveys clinical and juridical case studies.  Why this seemingly unusual turn toward such research?  Trained in psychoanalysis and medicine, Fanon matches the introductory bookend of violence with the concluding bookend of hegemonic domination, showing how the allegedly neutral sciences have been warped to make categorization of mental illness and procedural (juridical) criminalization into a unified political project.  He asserts the virtues of analyzing such case studies, and explains, “the important theoretical problem is that it is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind [sic] that exists in oneself” (Fanon, 1963, p. 246).  Ahead of Michel Foucault’s work on similar themes, Fanon exposes the cultural constructions of allegedly humane diagnostic and procedural practices as potentially illegitimate and highly questionable (Foucault, 1995).[xi]

Conclusions

Fanon’s polemical style emerges out of his fury, is directed at the sickness of heart, and in the end poses something inspiring for outcasts.  According to Fanon, no dignity can be achieved through a model of imitation that presents natives to the world as caricatures of humans (1963, p. 255). He concludes by advocating a futurism in which natives flourish as inventors of humanity’s fate, refusing to wait for the failed leadership of Europeans to lead global civilization further into oblivion (Fanon, 1963, 253-255).

As mentioned earlier, Fanon’s will to reinvent thought and expressions of thought through action is admirable.  At the time when he wrote The Wretched of the Earth, there were relatively few theoretical and intellectual resources upon which to build his proposals for programmes of action and thought.  However, it is a mistake to assume there were no resources at all.  To be sure, traditional intellectual discourse at the time was limited.  However, Fanon’s interventions began in the world of action, among insurgent natives and rebellious movements who were making use of resources that intellectual elites, particularly those in academia, were (and may still be) failing to comprehend.  Only by affirming and advancing resistance from the margins, giving voice to the dispossessed, was he able to recreate the use of models such as psychoanalysis.  In doing so, Fanon revealed forgotten resources and created new pathways for post-colonial studies, critical race theory, the body of work generally called Latin American thought, among other areas of intervention.

There are reasons to question the overall coherence of Fanon’s theoretical approaches.  There is ambiguity throughout the text as Fanon vacillates between radical visionary ideas and historical examples.  Fanon seems to imagine one or a few hypothetical alternatives alongside references to particular historical events and case studies, but then blends them into one vision without differentiating between the new, the old, or the status quo.  This can leave readers suspicious about remnants of constructionism and determinism that Fanon may or may not be able to resolve within the overall project of attempting a radical break from colonialism.

At many points throughout the text, there are relevant and applicable lessons for contemporary scholars and activists.  Many are explicitly stated.  If nothing else, Fanon is forthright in giving clarity to his agenda.  One can read the text with contemporary global problems in mind and find Fanon’s urgency only magnified and even more pressing.  There are also other lessons that may be taken by panning out a bit from the text and more wholly considering its implications. Fanon’s interventions call into question the normalized and difficult-to-notice privileging of particular discourse populations.  Whether in terms of intellectual research or direct-action social change, Fanon prompts us to reconsider the veins of isolation within which we may be carrying out our own activist and/or scholarly work.  Fanon may deem such isolation a kind of tribalism.  To take Fanon seriously, it is important to ask what one must sacrifice, with what sorts of unsettling moments one must struggle in order to conceive of the possibility of becoming politically educated.  Even more pressing, it seems Fanon intends for those in positions of particular epistemic and institutional privilege to think and continuously, furiously, rethink oneself into the guerilla life of a political educator.

References

Cherki, Alice. (2006). Frantz Fanon : a portrait. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of liberation.(2003). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

Fanon, Frantz. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1995). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.

[i]. The reference to being “furious and sick at heart” in title of this essay is taken from Fanon himself (1963, P. 128).

[ii] References regarding Fanon’s biography and some of the key historical contexts surrounding him were drawn from: Cherki, Alice. (2006). Frantz Fanon : a portrait. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

[iii] For the sake of his critical project, Fanon seems to take advantage to the openness of this ambiguity.

[iv] This may be a conscientious rejection of the predominance of Hegelian “recognition” as the necessary and/or normative justification for political rhetoric such as “dignity,” “equal protection under the law,” “equal rights,” etc. as if the mode of fulfilling desires for recognition is necessarily liberatory.  I do not see evidence that Fanon would endorse that kind of idealism.

[v] This form of “dreaming” is bodily, somatic, inasmuch as it is cognitive.  Fanon argues that muscularity is a site of the origin of the impulses toward liberatory action and this must be acknowledged to fully understand anti-colonial movements among natives.

[vi] Fanon argues that only by starting “anew” will it be possible to conceive of the kinds of reparations and transformations that one can legitimately consider decolonial.

[vii] Central to Dussel’s philosophy of liberation is his analysis of the ancient biases underlying the “ego cogito,” the “I think” that he believes is prevalent in western colonial and post-colonial thought.  Dussel proposes that the ego cogito most notably attributed to the ponderings of René Descartes is preceded and driven by the underlying ancient “ego conquiro” – “I conquer.” (Dussel, 2003, p. 3)  That is, modern and Enlightenment obsession with notions of certifiable “certainty” and refutable “doubt” direct intellectual projects in a manner that are ultimately projects of conquest – conquering and colonizing under the banner of knowledge.  The search for and production of knowledge is, if Dussel’s proposal holds, persistently invasive and violent to “subjects” on the margins – “the Other.” (2003).  Drawing from his work as a historian of ancient Eastern [sic] thought (Arabic and Judaica), Dussel argues that theorists must revise this historically situated, resilient cultural framing of how to pursue knowledge.

[viii] Enrique Dussel would later explain this in terms of the conditions of legitimate power.  According to Dussel all political legitimacy subsumes from alterity. This is developed throughout chapters 1-3 of Philosophy of Liberation, cited above.

[ix] Fanon is adamantly opposed to any worldview that is condescending toward natives.

[x] Fanon mentions taking an inventory of such bad habits

[xi] Foucault, Michel. 1995.  Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.