Summary
… genealogy … [or the genealogical line] … [traces] the paths of human life from their ancestral sources or roots to their contemporary manifestations … No other kind of line has exercised such a hold on the disciplinary imagination.
TIM INGOLD Lines: A Brief History, 2007… sociogeny is … grounded in the commitment to liberation, not of the people or the citizen, but … of the condemned of the earth and of everyone inhabiting that modern/colonial world. Fanon there advances a particular conception of the self (the I for the sub-other), an orienting attitude (a de-colonial attitude), a proposal for human study (sociogenesis), and a new idea of conviviality (de-colonial humanism).
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES ‘Rousseau and Fanon on inequality and the human sciences’, 2009THE WORK OF ISABEL Stengers (2005) leads me to think about how we might come to ‘do the world’ with other questions, with other words. Tim Ingold reminds that Henri Bergson's critique of Euro-modernity's forms of rationality was trumped by the idea of the gene. Although Bergson did not trouble this modernity's racialised geo-politics of knowledge, in the early twentieth century he did conceive of life as a creative unfolding. Ingold avers that the conception of the gene as that micro-chip which ‘magically inserts itself into the organism-to-be before its life in the world has even begun … [was key to] the triumph of the genealogical model’ across disciplines (2007: 116, my emphasis). This style of reasoning is at the heart of the mutual processes of classification and genealogical thought, and of their implications for becoming-in-the-world. Ingold suggests that we return to Bergson's idea that ‘life is lived not at points but along lines’ and that we begin with his conception that
every being is instantiated in the world not as a bounded entity but as a thoroughfare, along the line of its own movement and activity. This is not a lateral movement ‘point to point’, as in transport, but a continual ‘moving around’ or coming and going, as in wayfaring. How then would we depict the passage of generations, where each, far from following the previous ones in a connected sequence of synchronic ‘slices’, leans over, as Bergson put it, and touches the next? (2007: 117)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race OtherwiseForging a New Humanism for South Africa, pp. 133 - 144Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2017