Starting Places
Let’s start with a truism: We all consider ideas, events, and narratives from a specific perspective. We don’t assess as ahistorical creatures inhabiting a view from nowhere. We are situated knowers, placed examiners.
Cedric Robinson insightfully reflects on the situatedness of human knowing while writing about social theorists. Robinson writes:
Yet the work of any theorist—the selection, integration, and interpretation of events—is not separate from his subject. Social theorists are embedded in sociohistorical matrices. It is imperative, then, that they acquire consciousness of the significances which their objects of study possess. This is not a simple task, for many obstacles mediate against it, the most important of which, perhaps, is the ideological integument of the very analytical, intellectual, and conceptual tools they have in hand. Thus the analyst must not only be concerned with the “objective” form in which the subject “presents itself,” but must also come to a realization that his or her conceptual set may be in part a result of the “subject’s” social and ideational impact.
Moreover, the difficulties multiply when the theorist must pass beyond his or her situating culture or, alternatively, when the analyst possesses a disparate psychosocial identity or cultural heritage from the subject. Without a keen sense of the historical and ideological trappings in mind, much distortion may result. Indeed, the total deflection of the intentionality of the theorist may ensue. When the Black American scholar reviews and reconstructs the events which make up the dispersions, exploitations, adaptations, and reactions of Black people, he or she must do so consciously. Scholasticism, that is, the addition of new “facts” or the challenge to old ones (revision), is insufficient in itself.
Robinson notes that everyone examines from within a sociohistoric space, from a psychosocial identity, and from an ideologically shaped mode of operation. The accuracy of our social analysis will likely correlate with the extent to which we are conscious of these truths while evaluating an idea, event, or narrative.
Robinson’s insights remind me of a decades-old exchange between Charles Taylor and Cornel West. In Taylor’s “Hegel’s Ambiguous Legacy for Modern Liberalism,” Taylor advances the importance of a public sphere for social deliberation, common bonds and allegiances, and self-realization of citizens. Here reciprocal recognition—seeing and being seen by others—is paramount.
But West notices a fundamental problem with Taylor’s position: it fails to account for how “pervasive structures of racism, sexism, and class” truncate actual public spheres and “circumscribe the cultures of [liberal] societies.” West concludes his essay by pressing this point. “I start precisely where Taylor never arrives, namely with the way in which structures of racism, patriarchy, and class delimit the very public sphere Taylor wants.” A survey of Taylor’s recent work reveals he still hasn’t reached where West begins. Taylor, for example, offers monumental accounts of secularization and self-formation that never treat their ties to racialization. If this is true of a scholar like Taylor, how much more should we learn from him and act on Robinsons’ insight.
