Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

232 Okwui Enwezor
cultures. To say this much is not to be beholden to the relativism that governs
what passes today as cultural exchange, but to point to the difWculties
that reproduce dichotomies that ground themselves in the discourse of power.
In its attempt to arrest the African social imaginary, one could
impute that the denotative idea behind the construct of authenticity is its
primordialism, that is, as an a priori concept that determines and structures
the bonds of the self to the other; the other as always unchanging, arrested,
bound to tradition, tethered to the supernatural forces of nature; the other
whose social temporality is governed by an innate world and its systems of
kinship, beliefs, and symbols, all of which remain beyond the reach of any
structural or material transformation of reason and progress, except in super-
Wcial circumstances, after which he/she returns back to an originary state.
Therefore authenticity as primordialism conceives of the other in a vacuum
of history, locates him/her in the twilight of origin, Wxed in the constancy
of the unchanging same. Or on the other hand it conceives of the other as
an excess and spectacle of history, as a cycle of repetition, mimicry, demonstration,
performance, habitation, expression, and practice.
This latter idea of authenticity as primordialism in Michael Taussig’s
terms could be called part of its mimetic faculties, 16 that is, in its tendency
to quote, copy, and imitate that which is believed to be the original.
So in a paradoxical sense, the authentic is always false. According to such a
logic, the mimetic faculty allows for the inexhaustible permutations of quoting,
copying, and imitating an idea of African authenticity: for example,
real Africa is traditional rather than modern; rural rather than urban; tribal
and collective rather than individual and subjective; black rather than hybrid;
timeless rather than contingent. 17 Taken to its most absurd level these meaningless
binarisms and conjectures take on a facticity and truth that then
govern and aid all relations of production in art, literature, Wlm, music, and
other spheres of modern knowledge production. Yet in the same logic we
witness the contingency of the destiny of the African artist in the face of
various instruments of modern subjectivity, one of which concerns his/her
liberation from the determinism of race. We may pause here to pay attention
to the full emergence of a crisis: the crisis of the subject. 18 The politics
of the subject 19 is an important one in relation to how this crisis is critically
engaged. For the African subject, this crisis is paradoxically engaged through
the instrumental rationalization of the idea of free will. Achille Mbembe captures
this succinctly:
The triumph of the principle of free will (in the sense of the right to criticize and the right
to accept as valid only what appears justiWed), as well as the individual’s acquired capacity
to self-refer, to block any attempt at absolutism and to achieve self-realization through
art are seen as key attributes of modern consciousness. 20