This work, using a structurationist approach to consciousness
constitution, focuses on how and why the purposive - rationality
of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou
diametrically opposes that of the African American Civil Rights
movement and the desires of the Affranchis of Haiti. The author
concludes that the antidialectical intent of the originating moments
of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for
equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with
whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the
African American civil rights movement under the purposiverationality
of liberal bourgeois black Protestant men. Instead, it was a clarion
call, which emerges out of Vilokan/Haitian Idealism,
for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure
“enframed” by an African linguistic and spiritual community,
Vodou and kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and “enframing,” liberty
and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits
that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois
Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism,
on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of
color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for
equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only
threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and
Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because
of its economic growth and accumulative logic within the finite
space and resources of the earth.
Keywords: African-Americanization; phenomenological structuralism; Vodou; Religiosity; Black Diaspora; Dialectical; Antidialectical;
Haitian Epistemology; Vilokan/Haitian Idealism
Introduction
The dialectical integration of black Americans into the Protestant
Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the West via slavery, the African
American civil rights movement, and globalization marks the end of
black American history as a distinct African worldview manifesting
itself onto the world. A black/African practical consciousness as
represented in Haitian Vodou and Kreyol, for example, manifesting
itself in praxis and the annals of history via the nation-state of
Ayiti/
Haiti is slowly being supplanted by a universal Protestant Ethic
and the spirit of capitalism phenotypically dressed in multiethnic,
multiracial, and multisexual skins speaking for the world. This
latter worldview has not only erased a distinct African practical
consciousness among black Americans, but via the African-
Americanization of the black diaspora in globalization through
the hip-hop culture of the black American underclass, on the one
hand, and the prosperity gospel of the black American church and
bourgeoisie on the other is seeking to do the same among blacks
globally in the diaspora while simultaneously destroying all life
on earth [1]. This work focuses on how and why the purposiverationality,
antidialectics, of the originating moments of the Haitian
Revolution and Vodou diametrically opposes that of the African
American Civil Rights movement. The author concludes that the
intent of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at
Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity,
distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their
norms and structure, as in the case of the African American
civil rights movement under the purposive-rationality of liberal
bourgeois black Protestant men, but for the reconstitution of a
new world order or structuring structure (libertarian communism)
“enframed” by an African linguistic and spiritual community, Vodou and
kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and “enframing,” liberty
and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits
that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois
Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism,
on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons
of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for
equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only
threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol,
contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of
its dialectical economic growth and accumulative logic within the
finite space and resources of the earth.
Background of the problem
Traditional interpretations of the Haitian Revolution and
the black American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s attempt
to understand the two sociohistorical phenomena within the
dialectical logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic [2-4]. Concluding
that both events represent a dialectical struggle by the enslaved
Africans, who have internalized the rules of their masters, for
equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within and
using the metaphysical discourse of their former white masters to
convict them of not identifying with their norms, rules, and values
as recursively organized and reproduced by blacks. This traditional
liberal bourgeois interpretation of the Haitian revolution attempts
to understand its denouement through the sociopolitical effects of
the French Revolution when the National Constituent Assembly
(Assemblée Nationale Constituante) of France passed la Déclaration
des droits de l’homme et du citoyen or the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen in August of 1789. The understanding from this
perspective is that the slaves, many of whom could not read or
write French, understood the principles, philosophical and political
principles of the Age of Enlightenment, set forth in the declaration
and therefore yearned to be like their white masters, i.e., freemen
seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity, the rallying cry of the
French Revolution [4-16].
Although, historically this understanding holds true for the
mulattoes and free petit-bourgeois blacks or Affranchis who
used the language of the declaration to push forth their efforts to
gain liberty, equality, fraternity with their white counterparts as
slaveholders and masters as brilliantly highlighted by Laurent Du
Bois [3]. This position, I posit here, is not an accurate representation
for the Africans who met at Bois Caïman, the originating moments
of the Haitian Revolution. The Affranchis, embodied in the person
of Toussaint Louverture, for example, like their black American
middle class counterparts, dialectically pushed for liberty, equality,
and fraternity with their white counterparts at the expense of the
Vodou discourse and Kreyol language of the pep, the majority of
the enslaved Africans who were not only discriminated against by
whites but by the mulattoes and free blacks as well who sought to
reproduce the French language, culture, religion, and laws of their
former slavemasters on the island [5]. Toussaint believed that the
technical and governing skills of the Blancs (whites) and Affranchis
would be sorely needed to rebuild the country, along the lines of
white civilization, after the revolution and the end of white rule
on the island. In fact, Toussaint was not seeking to make Haiti
an independent country; but sought to have the island remain a
French plantation colony, like Martinique and Guadeloupe, without
slavery [3]. Although Dessalines’s nationalistic position, which was
similar to Toussaint’s, would become dominant after the capture
of Toussaint in 1802, his (Dessalines’s) assassination by a plot
between the mulatto, Alexandre Pétion, and Henri Christophe,
would see to it that the Affranchis’s purposive-rationality would
come to historically represent the ideals of the Haitian quest for
independence. This purposive-rationality of the Affranchis, to
adopt the ontological and epistemological positions of whites by
recursively organizing and reproducing their language and ways
of being-in-the-world is, however, a Western liberal dialectical
understanding of the events and their desire to be like their white
counterparts, which stands against the anti-dialectical purposive
rationality, which emerged out of the African/Haitian Epistemology,
Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, of Boukman Dutty, Cecile Fatiman, the
rest of the maroon Africans who congregated for the Petwo Vodou
ceremony at Bois Caïman/ Bwa Kayiman. The difference between
what the Africans at Bois Caïman wanted and the aspirations of the
mulattoes or Affranchis can be summed up through a parallel or
complimentary analysis of the dialectical master/slave relationship
of the black American experience with their white masters in
America [17-31].
Using a structurationist approach to practical consciousness
constitution, what Paul C Mocombe [6] calls phenomenological
structuralism, this work compares and contrasts the purposive
rationality of the black American civil rights movement with
that of the originating moments of the ceremony of Bois Caiman.
In keeping with the tenets of phenomenological structuralism,
the emphasis is on the ideals of structures that social actors
internalize and recursively organize and reproduce as their praxis
in the material world. In this case, the argument is that two distinct
forms of system and social integration would characterize black
American and Haitian life, which made their approaches to slavery
and colonialism totally distinct: dialectical on the one hand; and
antidialectical on the other [31-48].
Theory and Method
Beginning in the sixteenth century, Africans were introduced
into the emerging global Protestant capitalist world social
structure as slaves. Given their economic material conditions,
their African practical consciousnesses, i.e., bodies, languages,
ideologies, etc., were dialectically represented by European whites
as primitive forms of being-in-the-world to that of the dominant
white Protestant bourgeois social order with the ever-declining
significance of Catholicism following the Protestant Reformation
[7]. From this sociohistorical perspective, under the “contradictory
principles of marginality and integration” [7] the majority of African
consciousness in America especially was reshaped as a “racial classin-
itself” (blacks), a “caste in class,” forced to embody the structural
terms (bourgeois ideals in the guise of the protestant ethic) of
the dominant global (capitalist) social relations of production,
over all other “alternative” African adaptive responses to its then
organizational form, slavery [48-64].
This embodiment or internalization of bourgeois ideals, in
the guise of the Protestant Ethic, by the majority of Africans in
America amidst their poor material conditions created by the social
relations of Protestant capitalist organization, in keeping with
traditional readings of the black American struggle for freedom,
eventually made the struggle to obtain equality of opportunity,
distribution, and recognition with their white Protestant bourgeois
counterparts amidst racial and class discrimination their goal. This
goal, brilliantly captured by W.E.B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of
Black Folk, progressively crept into their African based spiritualism,
which dialectically subsequently became synthesized with the
Protestant Ethic of the global capitalist Protestant social structure
leading to the ever-increasing materialization of black American
faiths and practical consciousness along the lines of their former
white slave masters. Hence, the subsequent aim of the majority of
black Americans, as embodied in the black American civil rights
movement, became a movement for equality of opportunity,
distribution, and recognition led by liberal black Protestant
bourgeois male preachers (hybrid simulacrum of their white
colonizers) like Martin Luther King Jr. against alternative responses
to enslavement by convicting the society of not identifying with
their norms and values, which black Americans embodied and
recursively organized and reproduced in their practices [8].
Conversely, the Haitian Revolution as initiated on August 14th,
1791 at Bois Caïman by Boukman Dutty and Mambo Cecile Fatiman
was led by various representatives of African nations seeking
to recursively reorganize and reproduce their African practicalconsciousness/
thesis, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism,
which emerges out of their African ontology and epistemology,
Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, in the world against the bourgeois
liberalism of whites and the mulatto or Affranchis class of Haiti,
who would subsequently, with the assassination of the houngan,
Vodou priest, Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, undermine that
attempt for a more liberal purposive-rationale, similar to that of
the black American civil-rights movement, that would reintroduce
wage-slavery and peonage on the island [64-70].
Haitians celebrate Bois Caïman as the beginning of the Haitian
Revolution in August of 1791. At Bois Caïman/Bwa Kay Iman (near
Boukman’s house), the Jamaican-born houngan, Vodou priest,
Boukman Dutty, initiated the Haitian Revolution on August 14,
1791 when he presided over a Petwo Vodou ceremony in Kreyol in
the area, which is located in the mountainous Northern corridors of
the island. Accompanied by a woman, the mambo Vodou priestess
Cecile Fatiman, taken by the spirits of the lwa/loas, Ezili Danto/
Erzulie Danthor, they cut the throat of a black pig and had all the
participants in attendance drink the blood. According to Haitian
traditions, Boukman and the participants, via Boukman’s prayer,
swore two things to the lwa Ezili Danto, the Goddess of the Haitian
nation, present in Fatiman if she would grant them success in
their quest for liberty against the French. First, they would never
allow for inequality on the island; second, they would serve bondye/
Gran-Met (their good god) and its 401 manifestations, lwaes
of Vodou and not the white man’s god “which inspires him with
crime:”
Bon Dje ki fè la tè. Ki fè soley ki klere nou enro. Bon Dje ki soulve
lanmè. Ki fè gronde loray. Bon Dje nou ki gen zorey pou tande. Ou ki
kache nan niaj. Kap gade nou kote ou ye la. Ou we tout sa blan fè nou
sibi. Dje blan yo mande krim. Bon Dje ki nan nou an vle byen fè. Bon
Dje nou an ki si bon, ki si jis, li ordone vanjans. Se li kap kondui branou
pou nou ranpote la viktwa. Se li kap ba nou asistans. Nou tout fet pou
nou jete potre dje Blan yo ki swaf dlo lan zye. Koute vwa la libète k ap
chante lan kè nou.
The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses
the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he
watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the
white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to
do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our
wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol
of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and
listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all
[71-75].
That night the slaves revolted first at Gallifet Plantation, then
across the Northern Plains. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques
Dessalines would join the rebellion after Boukman was captured
and beheaded by the French. And as the proverbial saying goes, the
rest is history. Under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who crowned himself
emperor for life, Haiti became the first free black nation-state in
the world in 1804, the only successful slave rebellion in recorded
history, the first democratic nation, and the second republic after
the United States of America in the Western Hemisphere [75-79].
The centering of Vodou and Kreyol are the divergent paths
against slavery and liberal bourgeois Protestantism that sets the
originating moments of the Haitian Revolution apart, as a distinct
phenomenon, from the desires and purposive-rationale of an elite
liberal hybrid group, the mulatto elite and black petit-bourgeois
class or Affranchis in Haiti and liberal black Protestant bourgeois
male preachers of America, seeking to serve as the bearers of
ideological and linguistic domination for the black masses in both
countries by recursively (re) organizing and reproducing the
agential moments of their former colonizers within the logical
constraints of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. To only highlight
the latter, liberal bourgeois Protestant initiative, over the former,
originating moments of the Haitian revolution, under the purview of a
Hegelian master/slave universal dialectic, as so many theorists,
including the work, Black Jacobins, of CLR James, and Susan Buck-
Morss’s [4], Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, is to deny the
existence of the African practical-consciousness, Haitian Idealism
as expressed through the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism,
that has been seeking to institute its practical consciousness in the
world since the beginning of the slave trade in favor of the liberal
bourgeois Protestantism of whites and the mulatto and black
petitbourgeois
elites who have yet to be able to stamp out, as was done
to the black American, the African linguistic system, Kreyol, and
practical-consciousness, Vodou, of the Haitian masses, by which
Haiti’s provinces have been constituted [79-90].
Discussion
As in the case of CLR James’s work, Black Jacobins, Susan Buck
Morss [4] in her work, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History attempts
to understand the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution
metaphorically through Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Suggesting,
in fact, that it is the case of Haiti that Hegel utilized to constitute the
metaphor:
Given the facility with which this dialectic of lordship and
bondage lends itself to such a reading, one wonders why the topic
Hegel and Haiti has for so long been ignored. Not only have Hegel
scholars failed to answer this question; they have failed, for the past
two hundred years, even to ask it (2009, p. 56).
My position here is that James’s and Morss’s conclusions do not
hold true for the Africans who met at Bois Caïman, and only holds
true for the case of the Affranchis of Haiti-who usurped, following
their assassination of Dessalines, the originating moments of the
Revolution from the Africans who met at Bois Caïman-and the black
Americans who, in choosing to rebel against their former masters,
were not risking death to avoid subjugation, but in rebelling were
choosing life in order to be like the master and subjugate.
In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as Morss explains,
Hegel understands the position of the master in both political
and economic terms. In the System der Sittlichkeit (1803):
“The master is in possession of an overabundance of physical
necessities generally, and the other [the slave] in the lack thereof.”
At first consideration the master’s situation is “independent, and
its essential nature is to be for itself”; whereas “the other,” the
slave’s position, “is dependent, and its essence is life or existence
for another.” The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition
he receives. He is viewed as “a thing”; “thinghood” is the essence
of slave consciousness-as it was the essence of his legal status
under the Code Noir. But as the dialectic develops, the apparent
dominance of the master reverses itself with his awareness that he
is in fact totally dependent on the slave. One has only to collectivize
the figure of the master in order to see the descriptive pertinence
of Hegel’s analysis: the slaveholding class is indeed totally
dependent on the institution of slavery for the “overabundance”
that constitutes its wealth. This class is thus incapable of being the
agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence.
But then the slaves (again, collectivizing the figure) achieve selfconsciousness
by demonstrating that they are not things, not
objects, but subjects who transform material nature. Hegel’s
text becomes obscure and falls silent at this point of realization.
But given the historical events that provided the context for The
Phenomenology of Mind, the inference is clear. Those who once
acquiesced to slavery demonstrate their humanity when they are
willing to risk death rather than remain subjugated. The law (the
Code Noir!) that acknowledges them merely as “a thing” can no
longer be considered binding, although before, according to Hegel,
it was the slave himself who was responsible for his lack of freedom
by initially choosing life over liberty, mere self-preservation. In
The Phenomenology of mind, Hegel insists that freedom cannot
be granted to slaves from above. The self-liberation of the slave is
required through a “trial by death”: “And it is solely by risking life
that freedom is obtained…The individual, who has not staked his
life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person [the agenda of the
abolitionists!]; but he has not attained the truth of his recognition
as an independent self-consciousness.” The goal of this liberation,
out of slavery, cannot be subjugation of the master in turn, which
would be merely to repeat the master’s “existential impasse,” but,
rather, elimination of the institution of slavery altogether (53-56).
The Africans at Bois Caïman, given that they were already
recursively reproducing their African practical consciousness in
the maroon community of Bois Caïman away from the master/slave
dialectic of whites neither cared for the master, nor his structuring
metaphysics, but instead wanted to be free to exercise their African
practical consciousness, which would be precarious, given the
possibility of their re-enslavement if captured, by whites and the
Affranchis, who also practiced slavery, remained on the island. In
essence, the events at Bois Caïman represented an attempt by the
Africans to exercise their already determining independent African
self-consciousness against the whites and Affranchis’s dependent
self-consciousness which sought to repeat the masters’ “existential
impasse.” The liberal Affranchis and the black Americans, in other
words, who would lead the civil rights movement, wanted, given
that their very practical consciousness was determined by their
relations to, and yearning to be like, their masters, rebelled in
order to themselves be “free” masters and not an “independent
self-consciousness.” In essence, the Affranchis, like their black
American counterparts, merely rebelled in order to be like their
masters, and sought neither to subjugate the master nor eliminate
“the institution of slavery altogether,” since their consciousness as
slaves was from the onset revealed to them only through the eyes of
the master. Hence, the only other consciousness they had, outside
of their slave consciousness, “thinghood,” was that of the master,
whose position they desired, and that of the African masses whose
practical consciousness they abhorred. But Boukman, Fatiman,
and the other maroon Africans of Bois Caïman had their abhorred African
Consciousness, which to revert to. The Affranchis, like their
black American counterparts did not. Be that as it may, whereas
the former sought to institute a new historical/universal, Absolute,
order onto the material resource framework of Haiti by invoking
the aid of their lwaes/loas to assist them in rooting out the whites
and their gods, the latter, like their black American counterparts,
wanted to maintain the status quo, the master/slave relationship by
which their practical consciousness was constituted, in a national
position of their own [91-116].
In other words, black Americans subjectified/objectified in
the “Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism” of American
society were completely subjectified and subjugated on account
of race and class position [8,9]. They were subjectified objects, i.e.,
slaves, things, whose initial practical consciousness prior to their
enslavement was used dialectically by the master, by presenting
the practical consciousness of the slave as backwards and damned
within the metaphysics of the master’s practical consciousness,
against the slave to objectify them as a thing. W.E.B Du Bois, for
example, relying on the racial and national ideology of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century theoretically, en framed
by Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, conceived of the ambivalence
that arose in him as a self-conscious thing, as a result of the “class
racism” (Étienne Balibar’s term) of American society, as a double
consciousness: “two souls,” “two thoughts,” in the Negro whose aim
is to merge these two thoughts into one distinct way of being, i.e., to
be whole again [117-125].
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton
and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,
and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -a world which
yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of
a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels
his twoness, -an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,
-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double
self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither
of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for
America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not
bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows
that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes
to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,
without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having
the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then, is
the end of his striving: to be a coworker in the kingdom of culture,
to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best
powers and his latent genius [3].
This double-consciousness resulting from his thingness in
relation to the master’s consciousness, Du Bois alludes to, in
this famous passage of his work The Souls of Black Folk, is not a
metaphor for the racial duality of black American life in America
[8,9]. Instead, it speaks to Du Bois’s, as a black liberal bourgeois
Protestant man, ambivalence about the society because it prevents
him from exercising, not his initial African practical consciousness
which is “looked on in amused contempt and pity,” but his true
(master) American consciousness because of the society’s antiliberal
and discriminatory practices, which made him a thing,
i.e., slave. Although over time his “thinghood” forced Du Bois to
adopt “pan-African communism” against his early beliefs in liberal
bourgeois Protestantism, i.e., his desire to be like the masters,
whites. Du Bois, in this passage, like the many black Americans who
would share his class position and liberal bourgeois Protestant
worldview, does not want an independent self-consciousness that
is not the masters since the only other consciousness he is familiar
with is that of the slaves, but simply wants to be like the collective
dependent masters, whites, “without being cursed and spit upon by
his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly
in his face.” His later pan-African communist message simply turns
this desire, the attempt to be a master, into a desire to constitute
the master/slave dialectic in a national position of his own. But
contrary to this later “pan-African communist” message against
assimilation for a nationalist position of his own, however, to make
themselves whole the majority of black Americans of the civil rights
movement, especially, did not yearn for or establish (by averting
their gaze away from the eye of power or their white masters) a
new independent object formation or totality, based on the initial
“message” of their people prior to their encounter with the master,
which spoke against racial and class stratification and would have
produced heterogeneity into the American capitalist bourgeois
world-system; instead, since there was no other “message” but
that of the society which turned and represented the “original”
African message of their people into inarticulate, animalistic
backward gibberish, they (blacks) turned their gaze back upon
the eye of power (through protest and success in their endeavors)
for recognition as “speaking subjects” of the society seeking not
to subjugate the master in a national position of their own but for
equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their
white counterparts. Power hesitantly responded by allowing some
of them (the hybrid modern “other” liberal bourgeois Protestant)
to partake in the order of things, which gave rise to the black
American identity, the liberal black bourgeoisie or hybrids, which
delimits the desired agential moments of the social structure for all
blacks [8-13].
Thus black American protest as a structurally differentiated
“class-in-itself” (subjectified/objectified thing) led by this liberal
black bourgeoisie within the American protestant bourgeois
master/slave order did not reconstitute American society, but
integrated the black subjects, whose ideals and practices (acquired in
ideological apparatuses, i.e., schools, law, churches (black and
white)), as speaking subjects, were that of the larger society, i.e.,
the
protestant ethic, into its exploitative and oppressive order-an order
which promotes a debilitating performance principle actualized
through calculating rationality, which may result in economic
gain for its own sake for a few predestined individuals. The black
American, like the early Du Bois of the Souls prior to his conversion
to pan-African communism, in a word, became like their masters
within the master/slave dialectic, which constituted their historical
experiences.
The same can be said for the Affranchis of Haiti, who sought for
equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their
blanc counterparts at the expense of the agential initiatives of the
Bois Caïman African participants. The Affranchis, like Toussaint,
for example, who owned African slaves, rebelled not to eliminate
slavery or subjugate the master, but to be a master, like their liberal
black American counterparts, through their dialectical claim for
equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition. Their slave
status only revealed to them the “other” consciousness in the
dialectic, i.e., the master consciousness. Therefore, their desire
was not to be slaves, who had no other consciousness to look to
but that of the newly arrived Africans and the maroon Africans,
but masters who enslaved the other slaves, i.e., the newly arrived
Africans and the marooned Africans, who were not like themselves.
This desire of Toussaint, for example, to be like the master, however,
was not the aim of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Boukman, Cecile
Fatiman, and the other participants at Bois Caïman. The former,
Affranchis, like their black American counterpart, wanted equality
of opportunity and recognition from, and with, their former white
masters by recursively organizing and reproducing their (the slave
masters) liberal agential moments; the latter, Boukman, Fatiman,
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the Africans of Bois Caïman did not,
but instead sought to anti-dialectically reify and practice their
traditional African ways of life against the purposive-rationality of
their former white masters. The slaves at Bois Caïman were already
an independent self-consciousness in their maroon communities.
They did not share in the “existential impasse” of their masters. The
originating Vodou and Kreyol moments of the Revolution was an
attempt to get rid of the whites and Affranchis, who desired to be
whites, in order that they may recursively organize and reproduce
their practical consciousness, not to be like their white masters as
Toussaint and the rest of the Affranchis desired. That the Affranchis
would come to direct the Revolution after the death of Dessalines
October, 17th, 1806, would give rise to their purposive-rationality,
their desire for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition
within the global capitalist social structure, at the expense of the
agential moments of Boukman, Fatiman, and the other participants
of Bois Caïman who sought to anti-dialectically manifest their selfconsciousness
onto the stage of history by evoking the aid of their
own Gods to fight against the Gods and metaphysics of the whites
and Affranchis who had adopted the purposive-rationality of their
white masters [126-133].
Conclusion
Essentially, the Frankfurt school’s “Negative Dialectics”
represents the means by which the Du Bois of The Souls, the
majority of liberal bourgeois black Americans, and the Affranchis of
Haiti confronted their historical situation. The difference between
the “negative dialectics” of Du Bois of The Souls, the majority of
liberal bourgeois black Americans, the Affranchis, and the discourse
or purposive rationality of the enslaved Africans of Bois Caïman
is subtle, but the consequences are enormously obvious. For the
Frankfurt school, “[t]o proceed dialectically means to think in
contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction once experienced
in the thing, and against that contradiction. A contradiction in
reality, it is a contradiction against reality” (Adorno, 1973 [1966]:
145). This is the ongoing dialectic they call “Negative Dialectics:”
Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with
itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept.
Negative dialectics is thus tied to the supreme categories of
identitarian philosophy as its point of departure. Thus, too, it
remains false according to identitarian logic: it remains the thing
against which it is conceived. It must correct itself in its critical
course-a course affecting concepts which in negative dialectics are
formally treated as if they came “first” for it, too (Adorno, 1973
[1966]: 147).
This position, as Adorno points out, is problematic in that
the identitarian class convicting the totality of which it is apart
remains the thing against which it is conceived. As in the case of
black Americans and the Affranchis, their “negative dialectics,”
their awareness of the contradictions of the heteronomous racial
capitalist order did not foster a reconstitution of that order but a
request that the order rid itself of a particular contradiction and
allow their participation in the order, devoid of that particular
contradiction, which prevented them from identifying with the
Hegelian totality, i.e., that all men are created equal except the
enslaved black American or the mulatto. The end result of this
particular protest was in the reconfiguration of society (or the
totality) in which those who exercised its reified consciousness,
irrespective of skin-color, could partake in its order. In essence,
the contradiction, as interpreted by the black Americans, and
just the same the Affranchis, was not in the “pure” identity of the
heteronomous order, which is reified as reality and existence as
such, but in the praxis (as though praxis and structure are distinct)
of the individuals, i.e., institutional regulators or power elites,
who only allowed the participation of blacks within the order of
things because they were “speaking subjects” (i.e., hybrids, who
recursively organized and reproduced the agential moments of the
social structure) as opposed to “silent natives” (i.e., the enslaved
Africans of Bois Caïman). And herein rests the problem with
attempting to reestablish an order simply based on what appears
to be the contradictory practices of a reified consciousness. For in
essence the totality is not “opposed by convicting it of nonidentity
with itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept,” but on the contrary, the particular is opposed by the
constitutive subjects for not exercising its total identity. In the case
of liberal black bourgeois America, the totality, American racial
capitalist society, was opposed through a particularity, i.e., racism,
which stood against their bourgeois identification with the whole.
In such a case, the whole remains superior to its particularity, and
it functions as such. The same holds true for the Affranchis of Haiti,
but not for Boukman, the other participants of Bois Caïman, and
Dessalines who went beyond the master/slave dialectic.
In order to go beyond this “mechanical” dichotomy, i.e.,
whole/part, subject/object, master/slave, universal/particular,
society/individual, etc., by which society or more specifically
the object formation of modernity up till this point in the human
archaeological record has been constituted, so that society can be
reconstituted wherein “Being” (Dasein, Martin Heidegger’s term)
is nonsubjective and nonobjective, “organic” in the Habermasian
sense, it is necessary, as Adorno points out, that the totality (which
is not a “thing in itself”) be opposed, not however, as he sees it,
“by convicting it of nonidentity with itself” as in the case of black
America and the Affranchis or mulattoes, but by identifying it as a
nonidentity identity that does not have the “natural right” to dictate
identity in an absurd world with no inherent meaning or purpose
except those which are constructed, via their bodies, language,
ideology, and ideological apparatuses, by social actors operating
within a reified sacred metaphysic. This is not what happened in
black America or with the Affranchis or mulattoes of Haiti, but I am
suggesting that this is what took place with the participants of Bois
Caïman within the eighteenth century Enlightenment discourse of
the whites and Affranchis.
The liberal black American and the Affranchis by identifying
with the totality, which Adorno rightly argues is a result of the
“universal rule of forms,” the idea that “a consciousness that
feels impotent, that has lost confidence in its ability to change
the institutions and their mental images, will reverse the conflict
into identification with the aggressor” (Adorno, 1973 [1966], pg.
94), reconciled their double consciousness, i.e., the ambivalence
that arises as a result of the conflict between subjectivity and
forms (objectivity), by becoming “hybrid” Americans or mulattoes
desiring to exercise the “pure” identity of the American and French
totality and reject the contempt to which they were and are subject.
The contradiction of slavery in the face of equality-the totality not
identifying with itself-was seen as a manifestation of individual
practices, since subjectively they were part of the totality, and not
an absurd way of life inherent in the logic of the totality. Hence,
their protest was against the practices of the totality, not the totality
itself, since that would mean denouncing the consciousness that
made them whole. On the contrary, Boukman, the participants at
Bois Caïman, and Dessalines decentered or “convicted” the totality
of French modernity not for not identifying with itself, but as an
adverse “sacred-profaned” cultural possibility against their own
“God-ordained” possibility (alternative object formation), Haitian/
Vilokan Idealism, which they were attempting to exercise in the
world. This was the pact the participants of Bois Caïman made
with their loas/lwa, Ezili Danto, when they swore to neither allow
inequality on the island, nor worship the god’s of the whites “who
has so often caused us to weep.” In fact, according to Haitian
folklore, the lwa, Ezili Danto, who embodied Faitman, or Mambo
Fatiman, descended from the heavens and joined the participants
of Bois Caïman when they initially set-off to burn the plantations
in 1791, but her tongue was subsequently removed by the other
participants so that she would not reveal their secrets should she
be captured by the whites. Haiti has never been able to live out this
pact the participants of Bois Caïman made to Ezili Danto, given the
liberal bourgeois Affranchis’s, backed by their former colonizers,
America and France, claims to positions of economic and political
power positions, which have resulted in the passage of modern
rules and laws grounded in the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of
capitalism that have caused the majority of the people to weep in
dire poverty as wage-laborers in an American dominated Protestant
postindustrial capitalist world-system wherein the African masses
are constantly being forced via ideological apparatuses such as
Protestant missionary churches, industrial parks, tourism, and
athletics, for examples, to adopt the liberal bourgeois Protestant
ethos of the Affranchis and the black Americans against the Vodou
ideology and its ideological apparatuses.
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