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The Production of Social Space as Artwork 233
For those Africans who disavow the Wction of authenticity—the
mimetic excess par excellence—what choice do they have beyond the violence
of the dichotomy between the fake and real, 21 authentic and inauthentic,
primordialism (backwardness) and modernity (progress), the universal
and the particular? If we are to hypothesize authenticity what else could it
mean beyond its interpretation as an act of constant self-repetition, selfmimicry,
and self-abasement in the stew of origin? Shouldn’t we begin the
quest for the authentic in African cultural discourse Wrst by ridding ourselves
of all illusions that it can be conjured by a simple appeal to the past and tradition?
Second, should we not be insisting that the most meaningful place
to seek the Wgure of the authentic is not in the swamp of fantasies in which
Africa has been caught as the true historical opposition between reason and
unreason, between the West and the rest, but elsewhere: in the politics of
the subject? The quest for the authentic it seems to me is in the search to
locate the African subject, not simply as African (for that is already a given),
but as a universal subject endowed with capacities far beyond the lure of
authenticity. Such a subject is neither a mere fantasy of overdetermined cultural
theory nor a fanciful postmodern caricature. We can therefore present
the case of the African subject in the following manner:
the constitution of the African self as a reXexive subject . . . involves doing, seeing, hearing,
tasting, feeling, and touching. In the eyes of all involved in the production of that self
and subject, these practices constitute what might be called meaningful human expressions.
Thus the African subject is like any other human being: he or she engages in meaningful
acts. . . . the African subject does not exist apart from the acts that produce social reality,
or apart from the process by which those practices, are so to speak, imbued with meaning. 22
If the speech of the African subject is imbued with meaning at the
moment he/she speaks (whether as an artist or not), cultural subjectivity for
the modern African artist opposes itself to the binary violence of either/or,
universalism/particularism. The complexity of such a speech extrudes from
the dynamism of multiple traditions and is transformed in the aleatory patterns
of juxtaposition, mixing, and creolizations that deWne the contact zone
of culture, especially after colonialism.
As I have tried to show, the discourse of crisis 23 is not only endemic to the
political and social formation in Africa, it also concerns the crisis evident
in the processes of subjectivization, that is, the ability to constitute a speech
not marked by the failure of intelligibility and communicability. The process
of subjectivization, which I will also deWne as the ability for a given subject
to articulate an autonomous position, to acquire the tools and power of
speech (be it in art, writing, or other expressive and reXexive actions), is
connected to the idea of sovereignty. This sovereignty operates around the