Transcript for:
No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues

no humans involved an open letter to my colleagues dear colleagues you may have heard a radio news report which aired briefly during the days after the jury's equital of the policeman in the Rodney King beating case the report stated that public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely use the acronym nhi to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos nhi means no humans involved Steph J gold argues that systems of classification direct our thinking and order our behaviors by classifying this category as nhi these public officials would have given the police of Los Angeles the green light to deal with its members in any way they pleased you may remember too that in the earlier case of the numerous deaths of young black males caused by a specific choke hold used by Los Angeles police officers to arrest young black males the police chief Daryl Gates explained away these judicial murders by arguing that black Mills had something abnormal with their wind pipes that they had to be classified and thereby treated differently from all other North Americans except to a secondary degree the darkest skinn Latinos for in this classificatory schema too all minorities are equal except one category that of the peoples of African and of afrox descent who as Andrew hacker points out in his recent book are the least equal of all certainly hacker writes in two Nations black and white separate hostile unequal 1992 all persons deemed to be other than white can detail how they have suffered discrimination at the hands of White America any Illusions to racist attitudes and actions will find Cherokees and Chinese and Cubans ARG agreeing with great Vigor yet members of all these intermediate groups have been allowed to put a visible distance between themselves and black Americans the Vietnamese Richard prior equipped have learned how to be good Americans they can now say [ __ ] where did the classification come from the point of my letter to you yet where did this system of classification come from one that was held both by the officers involved in this specific case of the routine [ __ ] breaking of black Mills as well as by the mainly white middle class Suburban SEI Valley jurors most of all and this is the point of my letter to you why should the classifying acronym nhi with its reflex anti-black male Behavior prescriptions have been so actively held and deployed by the judicial offices of Los Angeles and therefore by the quote the brightest and the best graduates of both the professional and nonprofessional schools of the University system of the United States by Those whom we are eles would have educated how did they come to perceive conceive of what it means to be both human and North American in the kinds of terms I.E to be white of euroamerican culture and descent middle class college educated and Suburban within whose Logic the jobless and usually School drop out or push out category of young black males can be perceived and therefore be behave towards only as the lack of the human the conceptual other to being North American the same way as Zigman Bowman has pointed out that all Germans of Jewish descent were made into and behaved towards as the conceptual other to German identity in its then pan Aran and Nazi form if as Ralph Allison alerted to us us to in his The Invisible Man we see each other only through the inner eyes with which we look with our physical Eyes Upon reality the question we must confront in the wake of the Rodney King event becomes what is our responsibility for the making of those inner eyes once in which humanness and North americanness are always already defined not only in optimally wide terms but also in optimally middle class I I.E both Simi Valley and secondary Cosby hux TV family variance of these terms what have we had to do and still have to do with the putting in place of the classifying logic of that shared mode of subjective understanding in whose inner eyes young black males can be perceived as being justly shut out from what Helen FEI calls the universe of moral obligation that bonds the interest s of the Simi Valley jurors as whites and non-blacks one Asian one Hispanic to the interest of the white policemen and the Los Angeles judicial officer office holders who are our graduates in her book on the 1915 genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish pan nationalists and on the Jews by the pan Arian racialist in the 1930s and 1940s Helen fi points out that in both both cases there was a common causal Factor this Factor was that over the Millennium which preceded their group Annihilation quote both Jews and Armenians had been decreed by the dominant group that was to perpetuate in the crime to be outside the Sanctified Universe of obligation that circle of people which with reciprocal obligations to protect each other whose bonds arose from their relation to a or a sacred sort of source of authority end quote in both cases although the genocides were inflicted in the secular name of a now sacred national identity based in the case of the Turks on the discourse of a historical pentanisia stock both groups have been defined quote within recent memory similar L to Paras outside the Sanctified social order end quote it was this discourse of classification that had enabled them to be misrecognized as aliens as strangers who were as if it were of a different species strangers not because they were aliens but because the dominant group was alienated from them by a traditional antipathy this is the same case of course with the nhi acronym for the social effects to which This Acronym and its placing outside the quote Sanctified Universe of obligation and quote of the category of young black males to which it refers leads whilst not overly genocidal are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young black males by ostensibly normal and everyday means statistics with respect to this empirical fact have been cited over and over again Andrew Hacker's recent book documents the systematic white black differential with respect to life opportunity on which our present North American order is based nevertheless this differential is replicated and transracially so between on the one hand the classes upper middle middle lower middle and working where the capital owners or job holders who are therefore classified within the universe of obligation integrating of our present World system and its nation state subunits and on the other hand the category of the non-owning jobless young of the inner cities primarily black with Latino and increasingly also white assimilated to its underclass category in the wake of the Civil Rights movements and of the affirmative action programs which Incorporated a Now new black middle class into the American dream the jobless category has been made to Bear the weight of the Deviant status that before the 60s have been imposed on all Americans of African and afro mixed descent by the nation state order of the us as an imperative condition of its own systematic functioning indeed it may be said that it is this category of the jobless young black Mills who have been made to pay the sacrificial costs in the terms of Renee girard's the scapegoat 1986 for the relatively impr improved conditions since the 1960s that have impelled many black Americans out of the ghettos and into the suburbs that made possible therefore the universal acclamation for the Cosby hustable TV family who proved that some black Americans could aspire to and even be drawn inside the Sanctified category of Americans just like us if still secondarily so behind women and the other minorities the price paid by the Jess black male category for this social transformation is inescapably clear with respect to the judicial apparatus itself statistics show that whilst black men constitute 6% of the US population they have come to make up 47 of the prison population whilst in the entire prison population in the wake of the mandatory sentences for drug offenses imposed by largely white and middle class drug Roar officials both afro black young males and Latino brown ones are to be found out of all proportion to their numbers in the society the May 7 1992 New York Times editorial which gives if these statistics also point out that it costs $225,000 a year to quote to keep a kid in prison which is more than the job corpse or college end quote however for Society at large to choose the latter option in place of the former would mean that the kids in question could no longer be perceived in nhi terms as they are now perceived by all nor could they continue to be induced to so perceive themselves Within These same terms as they now do fracti Del turning upon themselves killing each other off in gang wars or by other violent methods what does this inner eye which leads the society to choose the foral option in dealing with the North American varant of the jobless category of the post-industrial new poor the category to which at the global level France Fon has has given the name leam The Condemned come from why is this ey so intricately bound up with that code so determine of our Collective behaviors to which we have given the name race it seems sociology Professor Christopher JS points out in the wake of the LA that we're trying to reduce race to something else yet out there on the street race does not reduce to something else end quote I have come to believe after struggling with this issue from the lay perspective of black studies which was itself able to enter Academia only in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement the wats urban riots and the protest which erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King not only that race cannot be reduced as an issue to anything else but that it is we in Academia who alone hold the key to race and therefore to the classificatory logic of the acronym nhi my major proposal is that both the issue of race and its classificatory logic as in David Duke's belief that the Negro is an evolutionarily lower level than the Caucasian lies in the founding premise on which our present order of knowledge or Epis and its rigorously elaborated disciplinary paradigms are base taking the map for the territory the fallacy of supra culturalism what is this premise Michelle Fuko traces the processes by which our present major disciplines came to be put in place at the end of the 18th century by European thinkers to a central representation by means of which the human would come to perceive and know itself as if it were a purely natural organism in complete continuity with Organic life for if in the terms specific to the local culture of Western Europe and therefore to its founding judeo-christian Narrative of human emancipation the human have been represented as a Divine divinely created being in the terms of the biblical Genesis account of Origins the new conception of the human that would be based during the 19th century on the new Narrative of evolution would be that of an evolutionary selected being in this conception the human was held to pre-exist the local cultures including ours by means of which alone human forms of life can come to exist as the Hy brittly biological bios and narrative discursive Logos level of existence as they are that they are that is as they are outside the mode of subjective understanding or inner eyes constituted by the prescriptive categories of the Native cultural model which is itself rigorously elaborated by the present dis lary paradigms of the humanities and the social sciences the arrian Anthropologist asarum lez points out that our present organization of knowled knowledge is pre premised on what he terms the technocultural fallacy this fallacy he asserts quote deres from the failure of anthropology and the other disciplines as well to distinguish the purpose purposive aspects of human behavior and the unconscious structure in human culture as reflected in language and the cognitive basis of life from the non-conscious empirical processes that link men directly to animal societies and the ecosystem to in effect economic processes end quote it is this fallacy which underlies the Prem premise of the discipline of Economics as the present Master discipline in the place of theology that our human behaviors are motivated primarily by the imperative common to all organic species of securing the material basis of their existence rather than by imperative of securing the overall conditions of existence cultural religious representational and through their mediation material of each local cultures represented conception of the self viken Stein's form of life in this context history falls into the Trap of taking its narration of what happened in the past a narration clearly oriented by our present culture specific conception of the human as if indeed it were what actually happened when seen from a transcultural perspective the recent controversy over the Californian school textbook America will be which imagines the United States as a nation of immigrants provides an instructive example of the historical paradigms conflation of narrative history with history as what happened this classificatory logic of the acronym nhi as well as the belief system of David Duke for whom whilst the Caucasian incarnates the ostensively most highly evolved and selected mode of normal human being the lower non-white races and most ultimately the Negro incarnate the most atavistic nonevolved lack of the human derives therefore from a second fallacy related to the above one which underlies our present disciplinary paradigms and the hegemonic mode of economic rationality this second fallacy that of supra culturalism mistakes are present local cultures representation of the human as a natural organism as if it were the human in itself mistakes the representation for the reality the map for the territory for whilst the human species is bio evolutionarily programmed to be human on the basis of the unique nature of its capacity for speech it realizes itself as human only by coming to regulate its behaviors no longer primarily by the genetic program specific to its genome but by means of its narratively instituted conception of itself and therefore by the culture specific discursive programs to which these conceptions give rise as an case of our present scholarly elaboration of the natural organism idea of the human and of its representation as a form of life regulated in his behaviors by the same imperatives of material food production and of procreation that also regulate the lives of purely organic species rather than I propose here by the narratively instituted G trees or purposes proposes specific to each local culture including our own it is only within terms of our present local culture in which the earlier fudal Christian religious ethic and its goal of spiritual Redemption and eternal salvation has been inverted and replaced by the goal of material Redemption and therefore by the transcendental imperative of securing the economic well-being of the now bio iiz body of the nation and of National Security that the human can at all be conceived of as if it were a mode of being which cons exists in a relation of pure continuity with the that of organic life whilst it is only within these terms that the NH acronym and its classificatory logic this is to be UND stood as part of the genetic status organizing principle of which the phenomenon that we have come to know as race is the expression the feudal Christian order of Europe had conceived of the cast Noble birth and descent organizing principle of its order as being divinely ordained theocentric Paradigm equally it's only on the Bas of our present conception of a genetic status organizing principle based on evolutionarily pre-selected degrees of biological value as iconized in the white black invariant invariant differential that our present World system and its Nation stap sub subunits can be hierarchically allocated on the basis of each category's ostensible pre-election for higher and lower degrees of genetic worth biocentric Paradigm one ostensibly verified by the individual or categories placed on the social letter letter the problem of the 20th century web du predicted in 1903 would be the problem of the color line this line is made fixed and invar invariance by the institutionally determined differential between whites as the bearers of the ensi higher degrees of eugenic descent and blacks as the bearers of the ostensibly lowest degree of the lack of this descent by its highest degree of its [ __ ] dis genosity as the extreme form of the Native within the logic of the man/ nonwhite native code decied by Fon and satra consequently the white black in invariant absolute serves to provide the status organizing principle that the Caribbean historian Elsa Goa identified as being based on the superiority SL inferiority ranking rule According to which all other nonwhite groups as intermediate categories Place themselves and are assessed on their relative worth according to their nearness to the one and distance from the other at the same time as it also enables the middle classes to institutionally legitimate their own ostensible analogically selected genetic superiority as a group category over the non-middle classes most of all under over the underclass of South Central Los Angeles and its Global extensions from Noble to eugenic descent cast to race white black to owners job holders non-owning job holders differential before the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s the institutionally secured white black segregation served to absolutize as the icon of an ostensibly pre-selected genetic value differential between human hereditary variations the representation representation of eugenic descent on Whose basis the global middle classes legitimate their ontological hegemonic social status in the same way as in the earlier feudal order of Europe the noble peasant in Varian States differential had recursively served to verify the truth of the Divine finally ordered hemony of the aristocracy based on its Noble line of descent one which legitimated their cast dominance this earliest truth had only been brought to an end by the intellectual revolution of humanism of 14th and 15th century Europe when the lay humanists had challenged and displaced the absolutism of the theological categories of the main of the 10 of the then mainstream scholis order of knowledge presided over by the clergy categories whose primary primary function was to verify the ostensibly divinely ordained status principles of the order and its code of cost equally the code of race can only be brought to an end with the bringing to an end of the our present mode of Truth together with the absolutism of economic categories both web du and Elsa Goa have emphasized the way in which the code of rays or the color line functions to systematically predetermine the sharply unequal redistribution of the collectively produced global resources and therefore the correlation of the racial ranking rule with the rich poor rule Goa pointed out that all American societies are integrated on the basis of a central cultural belief in which all share this belief that of the genetic racial inferiority of black people to all others functions to enable our social hierarchies including those of rich and poor determined directly by the economic system to be perceived as having been as predetermined by that great great CRA crap game called life as have also ostensibly been the invariant hierarchy between white and black consequently in the Caribbean and Latin America within the C terms of this social symbolic calculus to be rich was also to be white to be poor was also to be black where the segregation system of the United States Varan had made the white black in varant into the absolute and primarily in varant with the Civil Rights struggle and the ra rise of the post industrial consumer-driven e economy the primary focus has shifted to a variance of the old differential this differential is one between the Suburban category of the owners and job holders on the one hand of all Races including the Cosby hugable and eight different world black Americans and the black non-owners and non-job holders on the other consequently since the 60s this new variant of the eugenic dis genic status organizing principle has been expressed primarily by the growing lifestyle style differential between the Suburban middle classes who are metonymically white and the inner city category of the PO industrial jobless who are metonymically young black black milles where the category of the owners job holders are of whatever race assimilated to the category of whites the opposed categories of the non-owners and the non-job holders are assimilated to the category of the young black males this analogy the analogy I want to make here is this that if the ostensibly divinely ordained cost organizing principle of the Europe's feudal Christian order was fundamentally secured by the absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge including its pre-columbus geography of the earth and its pre Copernicus Christian toic astronomy the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our liberal humanist own as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class together with the kind of gender rule allocation between men and women needed to keep these systematic hierarchies in place is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the humanities and social sciences given that once the physical and the biological sciences had after long struggles freed human knowledge of the physical and biological level lels of reality from having to verify as they still did in feudal European and all other pre 16th century human cultures the truth or mode of subjective understanding or inner eyes on Whose basis the role at location system of each order can alone be perceived as having been extra humanly determined and therefore as just only the truth with respect to our knowledge of the so social reality of which we are subjects and therefore always have already subjected and socialized agents or observers could now be deployed to verify the ostensible extra human because bio evolutionary determined nature of our present status organizing principle based on the code of race as the liberal analog therefore of the feudal code of CA my proposal here therefore is that it is only on the basis of the classificatory logic of our present Humanities and social sciences sciences and its related mode of subjective understanding or inner eyes generated from the representation of the human as an evolutionarily selected organism and who can therefore be more or less human even totally lacking in humanness as in the case of the nhi that we can be induced to see all those outside our present Sanctified Universe of obligation whether as racial or as jbless other as having been plac in their inferior inferiorization mechanisms but rather by extra human order ing of Bio evolutionary natural selection that our Global and nation state social systemic hierarchies are therefore the expression not of the prescriptive categories of our now globalized cultural epistemological model but of the in the last instance evolutionarily pre-selected degree of henic worth between human groups at the level of race culture religion class ethnicity sexuality and sex the new question from Woodson to wiel to or what is wrong with our education the central institutional mechanisms which integrate and regulate our present World System I propose here are the prescriptive categories of our present order of knowledge as disseminated in our present Global University system and its correlated textbook industry how and why is this so Paul rer has based himself on the thesis of Clifford gears that ideology is a function of human cultural systems to propose that the systems of knowledge by which human orders know themselves must serve to provide a generalized hor Horizon of understanding able to induce the collective behavior of each other's subjects since these are the behaviors by means of which each other each order is integrated and made stably replicable as such an order without such Horizons of understanding or inner eyes no human order could exist Legas further suggest suggests that all mainstream Scholars necessarily function as the grammarians of our order that is as men and women who are well vered in the techniques of ordering a select body of facts within a framework that is completely consistent with the system of values the W on sh and above all the cognitive model of the society to which they belong it is only by the trained skills which we bring to the ordering of such facts that intellectuals as a category are able to ensure the existence of each ERS conceptual framework which we rework and elaborate in order to provide the inner Eyes by whose mode of subjective understanding each order subjects regulate their behaviors for both enormous good and evil so so what are we to do as the garans by means of who R rigorous elaboration of the prescriptive catgories of our present epistemological order and therefore of our local culture inner eyes the collective behaviors which bring the present nation state order of the United States into being as such as specific order of reality are oriented now that we are confronted with the prize PID for the putting in place of this order of reality as in the case of Rodney King beaing or jurri aqual or South Central Los Angeles Uprising event what are we specifically as black intellectuals to do for we as black intellectuals owe our group presence in the University system rather then as pre-60s where our exceptionality as a token black scholar verified the rules which excluded our ostensibly IQ lacking population group to the call for a new intellectual order of knowledge that was originally made in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement this call that had been reinforced and made powerful then too by the burning cities of wats of other ghos as well as the uprisings after Martin Luther King Jr's assassination of captive population who as James Baldwin wrote normally have no means of enforcing their will upon the city or state given this situation are we then to recycle the same old pities should we continue to settle for the bantus bans in which as David Bradley wrote in 1982 we have been trapped Bradley had first pointed to the systematic nature of the curriculum exclusion imposed on all black Americans as the function of the United States continuing to conceive of itself as a white and euroamerican nation of immigrants he then argued that in the wake of the 60s and 70s social movements black American intellectuals had been trapped by their refusal to confront a central question this question was that of the systematic nature of the rules which governed their exclusion from the mainstream conception of the United States states and which erased their centrality to the existential reality of North America Bradley wrote quote as a result of rallies we got courses in black literature and black history and a specific black advisor for black students and a black Cultural Center rotting whitewashed house on neither edge of Campus reachable by way of a scramble up a muddy bank and all those new courses did was exempt the Departments from the unsettling necessity of altering existing ones so they could write advertising of course in American fiction that explicitly includes Hawthorne Clemens James Wharton Hemingway Fitzgerald and implicitly exclude Chestnut Hurston Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison end quote the issue here was that of deconstructing the curriculum mechanisms which expelled the black conceptual other outside the universe of obligation that therefore of Def redefining White America as simply America the issue therefore of a curriculum freed from the coding of race on which it is at present instituted and one that would have necessarily led to the asking of a central question that of the validity of our present order of knowledge itself this question has been raised by the Black American editor Carter G Woodson as early as 1933 in his book The miseducation of the Negro and has been reased in somewhat different but still related terms by Ellie weasel a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust as well as by David or an environmentalist educator Woodson had asked then what was wrong with our present system of Education one whose scholarly curriculum not only served to strongly demotivate black students and to lead to their dropping out but which also socialized white students to be the lynchers and policemen beaters of black Americans when they became adults s woodston then used his analysis of the 1933 School curriculum to argue that the demotivated and inferior intellectual performance of black students as a category should be s in the same Source from which the Deep seated anti-black phobia shared in by white students as well as by the students of all other intermediate non-white groups was also generated these effects he proposed should be s for neither in the IQ deficiency of blacks as an ostensibly evolutionarily [ __ ] population group not in the innately racist psyche of the white lynchers nor in the innately racist psyche of the white lynchers instead both were to be seen as psychosocial responses that were regularly induced by the systematic nature of the cognitive distortions with with respect to the North Americans as well as to the human past and present that were everywhere present in 1933 curriculum or textbooks these distortions he went on served as extra cognitive function this function was that of inducing the white students to believe that their ancestors had done everything worth doing in both the past and at the same time to induce the black students to believe that their ancestors had done nothing worth doing whether in the human or in the American past one of the clues to this extra cognitive function was that all nonwhites were not equally stigmatized whilst the past of all other groups was stigmatized they were never the less left with certain threats of human dignity this was not so with respect to the 1933 curriculums Mis representation of the afroamerican past as well as his present Woodson epistemological break at this juncture was to see that the function of these white black misrepresentations what was that of differentially motivating the respective categories of white and black in order to ensure that stable replication of the invariant relation of dominance subordination between the two social categories as the empirical embodiment of the social symbolic analogy from which the genetic status organized principle about which our present global national order institutes itself as an autopoetic or self-organizing living system can alone be generated it was therefore the role of these systematic cognitive distortions to provide the mode of Truth able to induce the white students as the potential enforces of their totemic group differential status Visa the black category whether as adult lyncher policeman beer or semi Val Valley juror to perceive it as their just legitimate duty to keep the order's conceptual other in its systematic Place why not Woodson asked exploit and slave or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior there would be he further pointed out no lynching if it did not start in the classroom why not J ially lynched those who have been made perceivable as no humans involved this all the more so in the case of Rodney Kings who since the 60s have come to occupy a doubled paria status no longer that of only being black but of also belonging to the rapidly accelerating post-industrial category of the poor and jobless as the category which defined by the sociologist Sigman Bowman as that of of the new poor embodies plight which like that of the ongoing degradation of the planetary environment is not even possible not to say resolvable within the conceptual framework of our present order of knowledge which is of course where we come in and the new form of the question what is wrong with our education environmental educator David or pointed out in 1990 comment commencement address that the blame for the environmental destruction of a planet on which we are losing 116 square miles of rain forest on an acre a second and on which at the same time we send up 2,700 tons of chloro fluro flurocarbon into the atmosphere as well as other behaviors destructive of our ecosystem life support system ecosystemic life support system should be placed where it belongs all of these effects he argues are the results of decisions taken not by ignorant and unlearned people rather they were and are decisions taken by the best and brightest products of our present system of Education of its highest levels of learning of universities like ours here at Stanford or then cited in this context a point made by a weel to a global forum held in Moscow in the winter of 1989 the designers and per perpetrators of the Holocaust visel pointed out were the hairs of cant and go although in most respects the Germans were the best educated on Earth their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity what was wrong with their education and Quote The issue that confronts us to marry our thoughts to the plight of the new poor and the environment I come now to the final point of my lesson to you Jesse jackon made the point that the uprising of South Central LA quote was a spontaneous combustion this time not of discarded material but of discarded people end quote as is the case with the also HTO discardable environment its ongoing pollution and ozone layer depletion the reality of the throw away lives both at the global social human level of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the faella or shanty town of the globe and their jobless archipelagos as well at the national level of bald wind's captive population in the urban inner cities and on the Indian reservations of the United States have not be hitto easily perceivable within the classificatory logic of our inner eyes in other words the two phenomena that of the physical and that of the global social human environments have been hidden costs which necessarily remained invisible to the inner eyes of the mode of subjective understanding generated from our present disciplines of the social sciences and Humanities and therefore within the mode of Truth or epistemological order based upon the representation of the human as if it were a natural organism my proposal is here that both of these hidden costs cannot be normally seen as costs within the terms of the hegemonic economic categories and therefore of the absolutism of its related economic ethic as the analogus of the theological categories or absolutism of the Scholastic order of knowledge of fuo Christian Europe that furthermore It Is by this e ethic and its supraordinate goal of higher and higher standards of living I.E the goal of material Redemption whereas in the feudal order the behavior orienting goal was that of spiritual Redemption which now sets the limits of our culture specific inner eyes the limits therefore of how we can see know and behave upon our present goal Global and National order the limits therefore of our truth that it sets these limits as the now purely secularized form of the original Deo Christian theological ethics in its fudal form as rule goly as that ethic ethic had set limits before the Revolution of lay humanism with respect to how the subject of its then order could see know and behave upon the world in the same way also so as before the intellectual Revolution which took place from the end of the 18th century onwards the political ethic with which the humanists had replaced the theological had itself set the limits of how the then social cultural reality of pre-industrial Europe could be seen known and behaved upon within the terms therefore of what Fuko defined as the classical aistin Keith tribes tribe points out in his book land labor and economic disc discourse that it was only with Adam Smith's partial and with David Ricardo's completed putting in place of New Economic categories at the beginning of the 19th century that the earlier order of knowledge based on the hegemony of political categories was finally displaced and that the emergent centrality of the processes of industrial production over against the earlier hemony of agricultural production was given epistemological and therefore optim optimally Behavior prescriptive status black Americans are the only population group of the post 1492 Americas who had been legitimately owned I.E enslaved over several centuries their owned and enslaved status had been systematically pered received within the inner eye and the classificator Lo logic of the earlier epis team its hegemonic political categories and behavior orienting political ethic to be legitimate and just the frequent slave revolts as well as the abolition movement together with the Haitian revolution and the Civil War in the United States fundamentally broke the military power which had sustained their perception that perception nevertheless the displacement of the that earlier truth had been only verified at the level of the cognitive models of the society when heretical thinkers like Smith and Ricardo have been able to marry their thought to the cause of the emerging forces of the industrial World I.E the cause of free trade against protection for agricultural producers and of the activity of the industrial Bourgeois forces that were then blocked in their emergence not only by the restrictive laws but also by the behavior descriptive prescriptive categories of the earlier aeam in whose Logic the hidden cost of protectionist policies for agricultural produce including products grown by forced slave labor could not be seen as costs this is a central point that b makes with respect to the now global category of the new poor consequently the central issue that confronts us here is whether we too will be able to move beyond the epistemic limits of our present inner eyes in order in Bowman's words to marry our thought to the emergent post-industrial plights of both the planetary as well as the global social human environment specifically with the captive population and jobless category of South Central Los Angeles who can have no peaceful way of imposing their will upon a city and state whose ordered hierarchies and everyday behaviors are limited legitimated in the last instance by the world view encoded by our present order of knowledge Sigman Balman points out that the emergence of the category of the new poor is due to a systematic Factor Capital with the rise of the global processes of technological automation has increased recently freed itself from its dependence on labor the organized working class in consequence which has been seen as the potential agent of social transformation during the phase of capital accumulation one that had been primarily based on production no longer has enough Cloud to put a stop to the process of expanding job erosion now that consumption has displaced production as the primary medium of capital accumulation during the produ ction phase the category of the jobless poor both in the first as well as in the reserve native third worlds had a function this function had been that of providing an excess of Labor Supply over demand in order to put a break on wage costs in this new consumption phase of capital accumulation it has no function illiterate unskilled and without job experiences as the more and more low-skilled jobs dwindle with the acceleration of aultimate ated work processes the jobless new poor are without the wherewithal to serve as a reserve Army of consumption where they receive welfare checks as in Britain and the United States as part of an internal pacification program the neighborhood shops as we have seen in the case of South Central Los Angeles where these shops are owned by new immigrant groups such as Iranian tyrane Korean Mexican most of whom maintain a protected labor market by employing their own ethnic King serve as the mechanism to siphon what little wealth there is out of the ghettos to thereby lock the new poor into their discardable throwaway status at the same time as the shop owners including the black owners realize the American dream represented as social Mobility out of the ghettos as successful Breadwinners their conceptual others are those who make possible their accelerated enrichment that is the members of the captive populations of the ghettos and of the global jobless archipelagos who are like the environment the negative systematic costs that are not perceivable within the logic of our present inner eye and behavior regulating ethic and its mode of hegemonic economic rather than ecosy systematic ecosystemic or human reason it is within the truth of our present Epis olical order and therefore within the terms of its related Grand Narrative of human emancipation whose supraordinate goal or purpose rather than being as it had been in the case of the earlier classical apist that of the expansion of the state is now that of securing the material well-being of the biologized body of the nation and therefore of its optimal middle class mode of the subject Fuko man that as Bowman points out we cannot as intellectuals whether liberal positivists or Marxist leninists marry our thought to the plight of the new poor cannot marry our thought to the well-being of the human rather than only to that of man I.E our present middle class mode of the subject the poor and the oppressed Balman nodes have therefore come to lose all attraction for the intellectuals this category unlike the working class job holders cannot be seen within the economic logic of our present organization of knowledge as contributors to the process of production who have been unjustly deprived of the full value of their labor power moreover the fact that this new poor is seduced too like all of us by the clamor of advertisements which urge them to consume so that frustrated in their consumption goals they turn on one another mutilate and kill each other or damage themselves with alcohol and drugs convinced of their own worthlessness or in brief episodes of eruption fire the ghettos Riot looting whatever they can lay their hands on means that today's intellectuals whilst they feel and express their pity refrain from proposing to marry their thoughts with this particular variety of human suffering they fear B Bowman rights the reason for their reluctance Hamas would say that the new poor are not exploited ofer would add that they are politically ineffective as having no labor to withdraw they are deprived of bargaining power the new porn needs help on Humane grounds they are unfit for grooming as the future remakers of the world how then did they change the course of North American history in two days how did they the prescribed category of the nhi Baldwins captive population Fon Les D come to not only impose their will upon the city and the state but to also directly challenge the truth the mode of Truth in whose logic they applied like that of the environments is neither possible nor resolvable if leas suggest because of our role as the grammarians of our order we must ourselves normally and as the condition of our ord's integration and stable replication remain imprison in the structural models that we ourselves put in place then how are we to be unable to break out of one cultural specific native model of reality one variant of our inner eyes and make the transition from one F codian episte from one founding and behavior regulating narrative to another in other words how can we marry our thought so that we can now pose the questions whose answers can resolve the plight of the jobless archipelagos the nhi categories and the environment the answer to both will necessarily call for us to move beyond the absolutism of our present economic categories as in the 14th to the 15th centuries the lay humanist of Europe moved beyond that of the theological categories of scholasticism and the 19th century classical economics economists move beyond that of the political categories of the earlier epistemological order for lez defines his explanatory key in the new term terms of culture systemic categories which move outside the logic of our present mode of subjective understanding based on the concept of the human as a purely natural organism which can pre-exist the culturally instituted and Sanctified Universe of obligation by means of which we are alone socialized as inter altruistically bonded mode of symbolic kin and therefore as specific modes of the sociogenic subject and of systematic sociality leest suggest that the cognitive escape hatch is always to be find to be found in the category of the lional this is the category whose rule governed negation institutes a principle of difference from which both the optimal Criterion of being and the fake mode of similarity or of anonymity on which each order can alone Institute itself as a living system are dynamically generated whether that of the Fallen lay humanists of medieval Europe who were negatively represented as being enslaved to Original Sin unlike the celibate clergy who were as such the Guardians of the mainstream system of Scholastic knowledge or in the case of the peoples of African and afro mixed descent as the category of the human other represented as enslaves to his dis selected evolutionary origins and whose physiognomic distance from normal being provides the genetic principle of difference and similarity which bonds all whites and increasingly non blacks nonwhites at the level of race and of all middle class subjects at the level of class most crucially of course since the 60s the Lial category of Les D I.E the nhi category of South Central Los Angeles whose doubled paria status as poor or jobless and black has come to serve a central system systemic function for the now post industrial nation state order of the United States because the negative prescription of the lional category is the very condition of each human order function as an organizationally and cognitively close self-regulating or autopoetic system the premise of this categories prescription is Central to the ground from which the regimes of truth of each epistemological order and its disciplinary paradigms are rule goly generated the lional categories empirical exclusion like that of the exclusion of the inner city ghetto of South Central Los Angeles is therefore a a condition of each 's truth it is only when such a category moves out of its negated Place therefore that the grammarians of an order as in the case where the lay humanists intelligencia refuse their Lial role in the scholis system of knowledge can be freed from their system maintaining structural models and prescriptive categories for it is precisely Legas argues out of the field of dynamic interaction between the generalized Horizon of understanding or inner eyes put in place by the prescriptive categories of all culture specific orders of knowledge and the empirical under theground process to which the collective behaviors of each order's subjects as oriented by these prescriptive categories give rise that there emerges the Lial category which in it its thrust towards emancipation from its systematic role can serve to remind us that we need not forever remain prisoners of our prescriptions since by its very movement out of his prescribed place as in the uprising that followed on the Simi Valley juror aital of the policeman [ __ ] Breakers such a category generates conscious change in all subjects by exposing all the injustices inherent in structure and again like the nhi category South Central Los Angeles in two days of Rage by creating a real contradiction between structure and anti-structure social order and manmade Anarchy epistemological orders and new modes of knowing the speech of the street or the speech of a scientific humanism towards the rewriting of knowledge in a 1984 essay I had proposed that the task of black studies together with those of all the other new studies that had also entered Academia in the wake of the 60s uprisings should be that of rewriting knowledge I had proposed that we should attempt to do so in the terms of the Chilean biologist maturana and Vera's new insights into the rules which govern the ways in which humans can and do know the social reality of which they are always already sub socialized subjects I had then cited Stafford Beer's argument who wrote introduction to their book to this effect beer as I wrote then had argued that contemporary scholarship is trapped in its present organization of knowledge in which anyone who can lay claim to knowledge about some categorized bit of the world however tiny which is greater than anyone else's knowledge of that bit is safe for Life as a result while papers increase exponentially and knowledge Grows by infinitesimals our understanding of the world actually recedes consequently because our world is an interacting system in Dynamic change our system of scholarship rooted in its own Sanctified categories is in a large part unavailing to the needs of you mankind if beer concluded we are to understand a newer and still evolving world if we are to educate people to live in that world if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to a vanished world as it is well nigh desperate that we should then knowledge must be Rewritten my proposal did not get very for then after Los Angeles however both the times and the situation have changed hence my open letter to you Sinclair Drake one of the founders of the afroamerican studies program at Stanford always pointed out to students that there were Street tasks and intellectual tasks to extrapolate from Drake there is Street speech speech and intellectual speech it is not unfair to say that the recent Los Angeles example of the street tasks and streets speech of a captive population imposing its will upon the city and the state by the only means it had available took place in the absence of that new post industrial and post nation state speech or order of knowledge which it was the collective task of all the new lay studies to have affected in the wake of the 60s in the wake of those first urban uprisings therefore which challenged the truth of our present episte the eruption of the nhi liino category in South Central Los Angeles has again opened a horizon from which to spare had the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us toward a new correlated human species and ecosystemic ethic such a New Horizon I propose will also find itself convergent with other Horizons being opened up at all levels of learning as for example in the case of the new Sciences of of complexity related to the rise of the computer as hin pagles points out in his 1988 book the dreams of reason if it is this convergence that will make it possible for us to understand the rules governing our human modes of perception and the behaviors to which they lead as in the case of the misrecognition of human kinship expressed in the nhi acronym in the beating and the verdict as well as the systematic systemic condemnation of all the roty kings and of the global poor and jobless to the futility and misery of the lives they live as a price paid for our well-being it is only by this mut mutation of knowledge that we shall be able to secure as a species the full dimensions of our human autonomy with respect to the systematic and always narratively instituted purposes that have his to governed us hitherto outside of our conscious awareness and consensual [Music] intentionality quotes I believe pagil wrote at the end of his book that the most dramatic impact of the new Sciences will be too narrow it will be to narrow the gap between the natural and the human world for as we come to grasp the management of complexity the rich structures of symbols and perhap perhaps Consciousness itself it is clear that the traditional barriers barriers erected on both sides between Natural Science and the humanities cannot forever be maintained The Narrative order of culturally constructive World constructed Worlds the order of human feeling and beliefs will become subject to scientific description in a new way just as it did during the Italian Renaissance a new image of humanity will emerge in the future as science and art interact in the complimentary sphere I continue to believe that a distant day will come when the order of human Affairs is not entirely established by domination end quote the point of this letter is to propose that the coming of that distant day and the end therefore of the need for the violent speech of the inner city streets is up to us the starving fella or the jobless inner city nhi the the global newor or Les D phom pointed out does not have to inquire into the truth he is they are the truth it is we who constitute this truth we must now undo their narratively condemned status I am sincerely yours Sylvia winter Professor afroamerican studies May 1992