“the system will change because our very long-term project for democracy has made the system obsolete.”
Professor Mark Purcell has new book, Discovering Democracy in the Work of Frantz Fanon. It is both a close examination of Fanon’s work and a continuation of my ongoing project to imagine a radical democratic alternative to the current world. He kindly agreed to an interview (below). But first, more about the book.
In the book he argues that we on the Left, broadly speaking, are sick. We suffer from what Nietzsche called ressentiment, which is to say that we are only able to think reactively. Our self-image is as anticolonialists, anticapitalists, antiracists, abolitionists, and so on. We consider only how we can destroy what we hate. Our actions are to oppose, resist, decolonize, unsettle, defund, abolish, cancel. As a result, we are beset by affects, in Spinoza’s sense, that weaken us: sadness, rage, indignation, grievance, and so on. Trapped in our obsession with destruction, we rarely think in terms of production, of how we might imagine and create new lives in common. We forget to examine our own power, and we don’t practice using it. He argues that we need to cultivate affects that make us stronger: joy, delight, gaiety, gladness, wonder, love. We need to stop thinking in terms of resistance to dominant systems of oppression. We need to turn our attention, instead, to our own strength, to realize what we are capable of, and start using our power to create the world we want.
In much of Fanon’s work, he suffers acutely from ressentiment. He can think only in terms of destroying racism and colonialism. Purcell call this Fanon “the major Fanon,” and he worries this is the one we have taken up into our own thinking. But his examination of Fanon’s work revealed another Fanon, one he call “the minor Fanon.” This Fanon thinks in terms of action and creation. He notices and affirms the power of Black people and the colonized, and he tells us of the many ways they are using that power to create new lives in common. The book ends by urging us to leave aside the major Fanon, and to discover what it might be like to think, instead, with the minor Fanon.
(That text above is from Purcell himself). Here’s the interview, conducted via email.
1 A little bit about yourself, where you grew up, your academic career.
I grew up outside Washington DC, went to Duke for undergrad, then UCLA for my Ph.D. in Geography in 1998. I have been at the University of Washington, in first Geography and then Planning, since 1999.
2. First of, for the benefit of people who don’t know – who was Frantz Fanon, how has his work been put to use in the past and why does he “matter” to us now? How does he fit in with your “ongoing project to imagine a radical democratic alternative to the current world.”
Fanon was a Martiniquan psychiatrist and political thinker-and-activist who produced foundational analyses of both racism in France and colonialism in Algeria (and Africa). My argument in the book is that the way he matters to us now is as an anti-racist and anti-colonial thinker. That is, we follow him in taking our agenda to be: destroy racism and destroy colonialism. But this is, I argue, the wrong way for us to think. We should, instead, devote all our attention to our own power, learn what we are capable of, and begin using our power to produce the world we want.
3. When was the book conceived, how long did it take to write? What were the easiest and hardest parts of the writing process?
The book was conceived when re-reading The Wretched of the Earth, where Fanon has some vibrant passages that resonate with my conception of democracy. That inspired me to investigate the rest of his work for more of the same. But I found much less than I had hoped.
Once I completed the reading and the thinking, the writing of the book was pretty quick, it took something like a summer. The easiest part of the writing was the writing itself. It says what I needed to say, and it all came out of me pretty smoothly. The hardest part was finding a publisher for the book, because I wrote it on its own terms, without any advance contact with publishers. Then I presented them a fully finished product, and so it was hard to find a ‘fit’ with publishers’ lists.
4. In the email announcing the book you write “As a result, we are beset by affects, in Spinoza’s sense, that weaken us: sadness, rage, indignation, grievance, and so on. Trapped in our obsession with destruction, we rarely think in terms of production, of how we might imagine and create new lives in common. We forget to examine our own power, and we don’t practice using it. I argue that we need to cultivate affects that make us stronger: joy, delight, gaiety, gladness, wonder, love. We need to stop thinking in terms of resistance to dominant systems of oppression. We need to turn our attention, instead, to our own strength, to realize what we are capable of, and start using our power to create the world we want.”
I was struck by that and then got to thinking about how you might tell whether doing what felt good might not lead into a “smugosphere” – where we keep on doing things because we can (we know how to do them, they give us status tokens within our subcultures) but they don’t really change “the system” and are in fact a consolation prize. What would ‘minor Fanon’ – or yourself – say in response?
I think that negative scenario is a pretty good description of the ressentiment we are trapped in today. Smugness is a negative affect. It opposes “the system,” defines it as wrong, and then, secondarily, defines oneself as right, but only because one is anti-system. Then one stands around and virtue signals to other anti-systemers, which amounts to nothing other than incanting the wrongness of the system. This makes us feel strong, but that is a chimera. It makes us weak. The project of democracy I argue for in the book produces positive affects. It is not at all something easy, something we ‘know how to do.’ It is precisely a project in which we do what we are inexpert at — managing our affairs ourselves — that we learn as we go, that affirms itself (rather than negating the system). It orients itself to itself; it does not orient itself to the system. The system will not change because we opposed it, smashed it, overcame it. 200 years of “anti” politics is enough evidence of that. It will change because our very long-term project for democracy has made the system obsolete.
5. Who do you hope will read the book, and what do you hope they will get out of it.
First, those who intuit that radical democracy is the right way forward, so we can find each other, and augment each other’s strength. Second, those trapped in ressentiment, so they might see the need to let go of their ruinous mode of thinking.
6. What next for you?
A book on what I am calling the “black genius” of Zora Neale Hurston.