In a 1984 essay, I had proposed that the task of Black Studies, together with those of all the other New Studies that had also entered academia in the wake of the Sixties uprisings, should be that of rewriting knowledge. I had proposed then that we should attempt to do so in the terms of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela's new insights into the rules which govern the ways in which humans can and do know the social reality of which they are always already socialized subjects [Frantz Fanon, 1963]. I had then cited Sir Stafford Beer's argument (who wrote the introduction to their book) to this effect. Beer, as I wrote then had argued that "contemporary scholarship is trapped in its present organization of knowledge" in which, anyone "who can lay claim to knowledge about some categorized bit of the world, however tiny, which is greater than anyone else's knowledge of that bit, is safe for life." As a result, "while papers increase exponentially, and knowledge grows by infinitesimals, our understanding of the world actually recedes." Consequently, "because our world is an interacting system in dynamic change, our system of scholarship rooted in its own sanctified categories, is in a large part, unavailing to the needs of mankind." If, Beer concluded, "we are to understand a newer and still evolving world; fi we are to educate people to live in that world; if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to a vanished world as it is well nigh desperate that we should. then knowledge must be rewritten."
My proposal did not get very far then. After Los Angeles, however, both the times and the situation have changed. Hence my open letter to you. St. Clair Drake, one of the founders of the Afro-American Studies Program at Stanford, always pointed out to students that there were "street tasks" and intellectual tasks. To extrapolate from Drake, there is street speech and intellectual speech. It is not unfair to say that the recent Los Angeles example of the street tasks and street speech of a"captive population" imposing its will upon the city and the State by the only means it had available, took place in the absence of that new Post-Industrial and post nation-state speech or order of knowledge which it was the collective task of al the New "lay" Studies to have effected in the wake of the Sixties; in the wake of those first urban uprisings therefore which challenged the "Truth" of our present episteme.
The eruption of the N.H.I./liminal category in South Central Los Angeles has again opened a horizon from which to spearhead the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us toward a new, correlated human species, and eco-systemic, ethic. Such a new horizon, I propose, will also find itself convergent with other horizons being opened up, at all levels of learning - as for example in the case of the new sciences of complexity related to the rise of the computer as Heinz Pagels points out in his 1988 book The Dreams of Reason. It is this convergence that will make it possible for us to understand the rules governing our human modes of perception and the behaviors to which they lead - as in the case of the misrecognition of human kinship expressed in the N.H.I. acronym, in the beating, and the verdict, as well as in the systemic condemnation of all the Rodney Kings, and of the global Poor and Jobless, to the futility and misery of the lives they live, as the price paid for our well-being. It is only by this mutation of knowledge that we shall be able to secure, as a species, the full dimensions of our human autonomy with respect to the systemic and always narratively instituted purposes that have hitherto governed us - hitherto outside of our conscious awareness and consensual intentionality.
"I believe," Pagels wrote at the end of his book, "that the most dramatic impact of the new sciences will be to narrow the gap between the natural and the human world. For as we come to grasp the management of complexity, the rich structures of symbols, and perhaps consciousness itself, it is clear that the traditional barriers - barriers erected on both sides - between natural science and the humanities cannot forever be maintained. The narrative order of culturally constructed worlds, the order of human feeling and beliefs, will become subject to scientific description in a new way. Just as it did during the Italian Renaissance, a new image of humanity will emerge in the future as science and art interact in the complementary spheres... I continue to believe that the distant day will come when the order of human affairs is not entirely established by domination" [Pagels, 1988].
The point of this letter is to propose that the coming of that distant day, and the end, therefore, of the need for the violent speech of the inner city streets, is up to us.
The starving fellah, (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global New Poor or les damnes), Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. He is, they are, the Truth. It is we who institute this "Truth." We must now undo their narratively condemned status.