A Critique of Frantz Fanon's 'The Fact of Blackness'

 

“For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”

-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (1952)

As described by Homi Bhaba in his foreword to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth,

“Fanon’s singular contribution to the theoretical understanding of the black consciousness movement lay in his extension of the economistic theories of Marxism toward a greater emphasis on the importance of psychological and cultural liberation – the psycho-affective realm of revolutionary activism and emancipation.” (Bhaba 2008: XXXIV in Fanon 1952)

These two realms, psychological and cultural liberation, and their interplay will be discussed in this essay with a focus on the contradiction created as part of the framework of social and political dependency on legitimation.

In the fifth chapter of his book Black Skin, White Masks, titled The Fact of Blackness, Frantz Fanon, among other commentary, responds to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black Orpheus. In his introductory words, Sartre explains his base intention for writing Black Orpheus, which was conceptualized as the foreword of a négritude poetry anthology:

“Here, in this anthology, are black men standing, black men who examine us; and I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen.” (Sartre 1976a: 7)

Sartre hereby attempts to support and validate the négritude writers by imploring his fellow white readers to stand back and let them express their perspective. However, the text is frequently discussed as an example of a contradictory political agenda – namely Black liberation. Fanon’s response to Sartre’s validation of négritude writers reads as follows:

“[Black Orpheus] is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black. And Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source […]” (Fanon 1952: 102)

He explains that by legitimizing him in his blackness, Sartre took away the power of the movement as a force of self-expression and an artistic and creative approach to black psychological and cultural liberation: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (103).

As I continued reading the essays, the question I kept returning to was: How can this be solved? Does it really take away the power of the movement or is The Fact of Blackness merely a moment in Fanon’s personal struggle? What I found was a contradiction between psychological and cultural liberation. At the core of this differentiation lies the issue of felt legitimacy. This essay is an attempt to underline, both, the psychological and sociopolitical dependency on legitimation as a root cause of systemic oppression and that which prevents psychological and cultural liberation from taking place and offer a concluding perspective on the need to prioritize cultural liberation over psychological liberation, if the establishment of infrastructure is the main aim of the movement.

Theoretical Framework

To make my argument I will attempt to provide a brief framework for the dialectic of Fanon’s perception: Psychological and cultural liberation. The first dimension of that framework pertains to psychoanalytical processes related to the individual, to lay out a groundwork for the first question I ask: Is there an essential foundation of legitimation, and if so, what is it and how could it be abused? The second dimension then looks at cultural liberation in terms of sociopolitical legitimation. How is the dependence on legitimation interwoven into the system to stagnate cultural liberation on a conscious and subconscious level?

The Desire for Legitimation and Psychological Liberation

The first question which I continuously asked myself when reading The Fact of Blackness was why it seems that we, thinking individuals, tend to engage in this behavior of voicing our thoughts in the first place. Now, it is important to clarify that I am, by no means, trying to invalidate Fanon’s thoughts. I personally agree with the notion that individual empowerment follows a psychic program which involves the external protest Fanon manages to invoke. However, I believe there is a level of introspection regarding psychological processes which is commonly ignored. And it is this level of focus which ends up assisting state forces in stagnating or avoiding cultural liberation for specific cultural groups. What I found was that it involves the evocation and assessment of our psychological desire for legitimation.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud describes his concept of the pleasure principle:

“As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. […] There is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it.” (Freud 1929: 23)

So, essentially, existing means desiring. This constant state of repetitive dissatisfaction and striving for something is further categorized in Freud’s text The Unconscious. Freud explains that at the ground level of desire lies the drive, which is subject to an aim and an object: “The aim of the drive is always satisfaction, which can be achieved only by removing the state of stimulation at the source of the drive” (Freud 2005: 17). The object of the drive, according to Freud, is “that upon which or through which the drive is able to achieve its aim” (17). This reproduction of aim and object, which Lacan later refers to as repetition in his lecture series The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, therefore seems, at first glance, to resemble a neurotic cycle. However, Lacan explains that “what the unconscious does is show us the gap through which neurosis recreates harmony with a real – a real that may well not be determined” (Lacan 1973: 22). What can certainly be viewed as neurosis, is simply the fundamental language of the psychic apparatus.

Lacan opens up a space for the important relation between self and other, which Freud had alluded to – the dependence of self on the other for the construction of subjective reality. He turns the idea of the pleasure principle into the principle of desire (31) and locates the aim of desire in the Other as the ultimate creator of reality to the self. He explains that the subject is created in “the interval that separates them, in which the place of the Other is situated” (45). This is a place which is located between perception and consciousness, or, as described by Lacan as the place where thought and the real meet (49).

A further aspect which needs to be discussed when attempting to analyze any subject is the subject’s behavior in constructing a subjective field of reality. Lacan explains the inherent ambivalence of truth in this relation, by discussing the relationship of Cartesian logic to Freudian analysis:

“[W]hat the I think is directed towards, in so far as it lurches into the I am, is a real. But the true remains so much outside that Descartes then has to re-assure himself—of what, if not of an Other that is not deceptive, and which shall, into the bargain, guarantee by its very existence the bases of truth, guarantee him that there are in his own objective reason the necessary foundations for the very real, about whose existence he has just re-assured himself, to find the dimension of truth. I can do no more than suggest the extraordinary consequences that have stemmed from this handing back of truth into the hands of the Other […]” (36)

In brief, the unconscious is not bound by differentiations between truth and non-truth. It seeks truth as part of a basic mechanism of desire which sees its goal in establishing some kind of subjectively experienced reality which can only be found in the differentiation between self and other.

The act of turning ideas into the Lacanian Real is haunted by a desire for legitimation. As Zizek describes, "[…] desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire” (Zizek 1997: 39). What this means, essentially, is that the act of sharing information involves a necessary connection to the other where the end goal, for something to become truly real, cannot be reached because of the constant reproduction of desire. So, what this brief summary concludes is that there is a fundamental cycle of repetition based on the necessity to constitute a field of reality which can only exist through its relation to the other – or in other words, reality has to be legitimized to be real, and it is not bound by any limit of objective truth.

What are Fanon’s thoughts without the words on the pages? They are merely contained entities within his mind – perhaps impossible to differentiate from the imaginary, lacking in symbolic consistency, and certainly not capable of projecting a real other, or engaging in cultural liberation. Ideas are not valid and cannot change anything until they are spoken.

In brief, and pertaining to the first leading question, conscious existence (as in the ability to experience subjectively and objectively), is tied to a fundamental drive for legitimation and self and other are determined by their relation to and validation of one another.

The Desire for Legitimation & Cultural Liberation

The second question I asked myself when reading the text was: Has this desire for legitimation in the formation of self become somehow entangled with the political and social power mechanisms?

At the root level of this process lies the notion that without legitimation, freedom and power and their interplay are meaningless to the individual. David Beetham describes this predicament in his book The Legitimation of Power:

“Power and freedom are closely related, but not identical, concepts. Without freedom, even the strongest individual may be rendered powerless […]; but without resources of personal or material kind even the most free person will remain impotent (the physically incapacitated in an open space, the penniless in a free market). Freedom is necessary if we are to utilize our powers to achieve our purposes but without such powers in the first place, freedom will be worthless to us.” (Beetham 1991: 43)

I claim, that this described impotence – the fear over powerlessness, on an individual scale, which is connected to the dependence on state authority, is also exactly that which produces the very felt legitimacy which continues to validate state action countering individual freedom. A cycle of individual, psychological oppression is created and maintained within a seemingly organic system surrounding the avoidance of powerlessness.

According to Elizabeth Anker, the affectual relation to legitimacy itself, alongside actual explicit state authority, implicitly expands state power:

“What I call felt legitimacy refers to an affective experience of authorizing state power. […] Felt legitimacy is as powerful and meaningful as any formal consent even when nothing procedural or deliberate has occurred to instantiate that feeling.” (Anker 2014: 111)

Anker explains that, aside from legitimacy enforced through means of polity, political discourse evokes a second layer of legitimacy which she describes as felt legitimacy. Felt legitimacy is perceived as validated state action through what she refers to as political melodrama surrounding questions of freedom and agency.

The question which the evocation of felt legitimacy attempts to respond to is who and what determines and produces legitimacy which subsequently becomes state polity. Max Weber and Michel Foucault both alluded to and discussed felt legitimacy in other words: “Weber argues that legitimacy is an effect of subjectivity […] and Foucault suggests that discourses cultivate subjectivities that produce legitimacy as their effect” (Anker 2014: 113). Anker extends these suggestions by exploring how this is done, finding that “melodramatic political discourse’s moral imperative and narrative expectation for vast state actions cultivate the feeling that these actions are legitimate” (113).

In brief, and pertaining to the second leading question, sociopolitical authority not only explicitly produces the individual’s dependence on established infrastructures in order to legitimate freedom for the individual, but it is also functions implicitly as a signifier of popularized affect which is commonly spread through melodramatic political discourse. In terms of decolonization and the evocation of a Western cultural agenda to subordinate groups of people based on race, class or gender (in this case focusing on race), some scholars have promoted the idea that only strategic essentialism can loosen the hold of these processes to produce new infrastructures for those who are oppressed by them.

Frantz Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness

The Fact of Blackness is the fifth chapter in his first book, titled Black Skin, White Masks. It is an auto-theoretical text which elaborates Fanon’s experiences and feelings as part of his struggle with dehumanization based on his race. It outlines the way in which the psyche constructs identity based on narratives of cultural superiority and inferiority. In contrast to The Wretched of the Earth, a later text by Fanon which promotes empowerment through decolonization based on many of the effects of colonization outlined in Black Skin, White Masks, it does not go beyond self-reflection.

At the very beginning of the 5^th chapter of his book, Fanon creates a differentiation between himself and the other, as well as black and non-black consciousness. We learn that his work is largely a subjective summary of the difficulty to accept ascriptions of meaning by external sources, in this case being “the white man”:

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. (Fanon 1952: 82)

However, right away we encounter the limitation of his psychological liberation, in his own words:

“Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.” (Fanon 1952: 82)

Fanon describes a feeling of powerlessness in regard to his freedom of self-determination. His subjectivity is perceived as a freedom, one which is taken from him by the ascription of meaning from others he is supposed to endure. He feels trapped in a system of legitimation by the other, because legitimation within himself or his ethnic environment does not yield the same results as the legitimation by white people:

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others (82)

According to Fanon, this is the fault of the white man, who has seized his power over self-determination. The white man and his produced knowledge have failed to include a narrative of self-ascription for the black man, therefore psychological and cultural legitimation are connected in this version of Fanon’s perspective:

In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. (82)

However, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon represents a different position – one which seems to be less subjective and more interested in looking past individual needs to establish a platform for cultural liberation:

“Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.” (Fanon 1963: 235)

Here, Fanon describes the need to let go of the world view of the white man in order to become decolonized. It is less about psychological freedom than about cultural liberation.

In, The Fact of Blackness Fanon later explains why the relationship of psychological and cultural legitimation exists for black people, and not white people:

“The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other.” (Fanon 1952: 83)

According to this perspective, due to the controlling narrative of white superiority, the black man has no ability to see himself as adequate or superior based on the common standard even if his own environment does not support this notion or simply does not discuss the matter. The other is a vessel which provides a grand narrative the black man cannot escape by any means. The means by which the narrative is controlled is the body:

“The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity.” (Fanon 1952: 83)

He continues to explain how bodily integrity should be perceived – with freedom:

“A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.” (Fanon 1952: 83)

But this dialectic only applies until one realizes that there are external ascriptions being made: “Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema” (84). Fanon, then, describes the internal battle to be fought which perfectly outlines the psychological need to be defined and legitimated by the other:

“I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is? Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of m1y being. I was about to be angry.” (Fanon 1952: 86)

The psychological dependence on the other becomes blatantly obvious.

As I have mentioned in the background chapter, Fanon would have two options left to him – to ignore the ascriptions of the other even if they leave him challenged in his agency and social mobility and fight for a future which has the potential of providing an environment not influenced by those very ascriptions, or to accept and submit to them. However, according to Freud and Lacan, the truth remains, that desire cannot be satisfied, rendering psychological liberation and its need to free the self from its dependence on the other impossible. And furthermore, connecting here psychological and cultural legitimation processes, this is where the cycle begins. As Beetham describes, “[…] without resources of personal or material kind even the most free person will remain impotent […]” (Beetham 1991: 43). The powerlessness Fanon describes is a reality which cannot be escaped. So, when Sartre analyzed the experience of being black, Fanon choose to lose even the possibility of acceptance and coping with his powerlessness through creative expression:

“When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, “The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.” Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being.” (Fanon 1952: 102)

Yet, I claim that the truth still remains that his choice to accept that powerlessness as a legitimate state of being, in that moment, dominates the desire for cultural liberation. And even in his challenge to Sartre’s dialectic, he focuses on his own desire, drastically rejecting any ascription made by external sources:

“The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower.” (Fanon 1952: 103)

He then reflects on the difficulty of refusing the dialectic of his being:

“Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.” (Fanon 1952: 108)

Were these feelings purely emotional expression in search of self-empowerment or were they words to be shared with others which were supposed to aid another suffering person in their own self-empowerment? Homi K. Bhaba, in his foreword to The Wretched of the Earth explains that Fanon’s approach is “part of a struggle for psycho-affective survival and a search for human agency in the midst of the agony of oppression” (Bhaba 2008: XXXVI in Fanon 1963). I agree with this claim, yet I propose that Fanon struggled with his ability to separate his own desire for personal liberation from his desire for cultural liberation.

Felt legitimacy comes into play in two different ways. On a psychological level, he himself feels the need to be legitimated by the ascriptions of an ethic group of individuals who belong to the race which most people in the world would claim to have privilege over others, as their narrative was written by their own. His very own internal legitimation process is not questioned. He externalizes his self-understanding as being based on the narratives written for him by “the white man”, yet he very much expresses his ability to choose to lay down their ascriptions and reject their narrative as part of his cultural agenda. In The Fact of Blackness, he shows helplessness and speaks of a lack of agency, whereas in The Wretched of the Earth, he proclaims his ability to make himself whole by means of cultural liberation. In other words, it could be claimed that, in one expression he chooses to accept the felt legitimacy of the other whereas in the other he rejects it. This, in itself, is an expression of agency.

I claim also, that the discourse created by Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness, works to counteract his focus on cultural liberation in The Wretched of the Earth. The Fact of Blackness is a moment of melodrama which has the potential to downgrade any act of cultural liberation through its very own creation of felt legitimacy. Fanon’s personal agony, which is thematized here, creates a political discourse which holds a moral imperative which establishes a line of thought which produces subjectivities which promote the legitimacy of his discourse.

The Contradiction & Conclusion

The conflict created by the inherent psychological and cultural dependence on legitimation, either by the other or by authority, can be summarized as follows: In psychological liberation, the need to voice thoughts can be interpreted as a fundamental function of the psychic apparatus, connected to the pleasure principle and directly related to the need to be heard. This need connects to the desire of removing stimulation from the drive by utilizing the other as a source of legitimation. This process is in constant repetitive motion. Yet, it is possible to choose the Other. While the repetition will never pass, the object can be chosen. And, in my opinion, this is the source of human agency.

Legitimation in relation to cultural liberation holds two basic dimensions: The perception of real and felt legitimacy. It is insofar connected to the psyche in that, as described by Lacan, truth is not an indicator of legitimacy in the first place. The inherent contradiction between power and freedom which reproduces the desire to avoid powerlessness creates the need for felt legitimacy which is often indicated by melodramatic and ideological political discourse which includes another cycle of legitimation which is based on authority and its discursive narratives.

In terms of being in the position of writing cultural narratives, cultural liberation cannot be made possible through personal liberation. In relation to being in the position of writing one’s own narrative, personal liberation is only possible through the rejection of the ‘master-narrative’. However, it cannot bring cultural liberation. This is the contradiction at the heart of Fanon’s expression. The choice for the oppressed to fight for power or to reject power, and between personal emancipation and cultural empowerment.

I feel that the personal melodrama of the political discourse created in Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness, counteracts his agenda for cultural liberation by establishing a political discourse and thereby a felt legitimacy of personal empowerment which dominates cultural empowerment. In terms of decolonization, The Fact of Blackness contradicts Fanon’s former approach.

Bibliography

Anker, Elizabeth R. (2014): Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Beetham, David (1991): The Legitimation of Power. New York: Palgrave.

Fanon, Frantz (2004; 1963): The Wretches of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz (2008;1952): Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1930; 1962): Civilization and its Discontents. James Strachey (ed.): New York: WW Norton & Company.

Freud, Sigmund (2005): The Unconscious. Graham Frankland (ed.): London/New York: Penguin Books. 3-10.

Lacan, Jacques (1973; 2018): The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Routledge.

Sartre, J.-P. (1976a): Black Orpheus, translated by Samuel W. Allen. Paris: Presence Africaine.

Žižek, Slavoj (1997): The Plague of Fantasies London: Verso.