Imagination, Candles and Epistemologies of the Sout
October 5, 2024, Mary Layoun
We must change the world by constantly reinterpreting it; As much as change itself, reinterpreting the world is a collective enterprise. . . . The imagination of the end [of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy] is being corrupted by the end of the imagination.
(Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2018: viii, x)
وأنت تفكر بالآخرين البعيدين، فكِّر بنفسكقُلْ: ليتني شمعةُ في الظلام
[And when you think of others who are far away,
think about yourself. Say: I would like to be a candle in the darkness]
(Mahmoud Darwish, 2005)
The decades of prolific and influential work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos can hardly be summarized in a short essay. Activist, intellectual, poet and academic, Professor de Sousa Santos is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Jurist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as Director Emeritus of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Internationally known and frequently cited, Santos has published numerous works on the sociology of law, globalization, participatory democracy, State and reform, epistemology, social movements, World Social Forum and higher education. Santos' numerous books, as well as those co-authored with his colleagues, and his even more numerous articles and essays have been translated into Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Polish, Arabic, Korean and Greek. His achievements also include periodical articles and essays, interviews, videos, poetry books and even rap lyrics. Boaventura Santos has received a long list of prestigious awards, including the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2022. In granting him that honor, the Caribbean Philosophical Association characterized the person and work of Boaventura Santos:
An intellectual proud of his humble origins among the Portuguese peasantry and a good connoisseur of what the fight against fascism entails, Professor de Santos has dedicated his life to combating all forms of oppression and fighting for the affirmation of a habitable life. His work on the epistemologies of the South responds directly to the Caribbean Philosophical Association's project to change the geography of reason and to Fanon's call to construct new concepts in the struggle to launch a better world.
So, no, a short essay can do little justice to that long, diverse and illustrious career. Instead, I will focus on three central critical formulations of Santos that speak most to the urgent demands of our day. The ones that talk the most about reinterpreting the world while striving to change it. Which speak to the work of paying attention to the stories, practices and understandings of others and imagining otherwise. They are a story of the effort to think beyond oneself and think about other groups. (Darwish' فكِّر بغيركَ / "Think of Others [those who are not you]"which, curiously, in the final lines of his poem becomes the most familiar تفكر بالآخرين ). Which point to what we could call a "collective effort" of "participatory seeing and listening and doing." Thus, the three central critical concepts of the work of Boaventura Santos that concern us here are those of "epistemologies of the south", "abyssal line" and "sociology of absences". Deeply intertwined, all three have resonated far beyond the borders of their native Portugal or, indeed, Europe. They are addressed in work carried out in India, in Latin America, in South Africa, Senegal and Mozambique, in other parts of Africa and in Western Asia. His careful and detailed critique of the interdependent oppressions of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy and his pointing out the resistances to them with their alternative ways of knowing and explaining and changing the world are fierce lines that run through these three formulations, as, in fact , all his work. The concept of "epistemologies of the South" that inspires much of Santos's work is neither a simple geographical indicator of divisions and oppositions, nor a simple dualistic construction. Rather, as Santos formulated in a speech just before the 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, the epistemologies of the South point to a South:
...which is not geographical, but metaphorical: the anti-imperial South. It is the metaphor of the systematic suffering produced by capitalism and colonialism, as well as by other forms that have relied on them, such as patriarchy. It is also the South that exists in the North, what we used to call the inner third world or the fourth world: the oppressed and marginalized groups of Europe and North America. there is also a global north in the South; It is the local elites who benefit from global capitalism (2010: 16).
Nor is the specification of the "epistemologies of the South" a sign of ignorance of the historical efforts - although, Santos maintains, largely exhausted - of the North to theorize and enact not only bourgeois liberal change, but also revolutionary change. This change, called universal, had two potential purposes in the North: one regulatory and the other emancipatory. But it was a vision and a practice that was always local, localized and imperial.
...for the epistemologies of the South, European universalism is a particularism that, through forms of power, often military, managed to transform all other cultures into particulars (2010: 20)...in the conditions of the system- Western capitalist world. "What we call globalization is always the successful globalization of a certain localism" (2015: 89, emphasis added).
Attending to the epistemologies of the South calls for the deliberate and careful recognition of the ways in which already existing alternatives can be seen and heard, are already in dialogue - even with Europe or the North. They offer a formidable antidote to the ignorance and ignorance of our time and places.
Two basic ideas underpin Southern epistemologies: understanding of the world far exceeds Western understanding of the world; The cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse, and the monopoly on rigorous knowledge granted to modern science has led to massive epistemicide (the destruction of rival knowledge considered unscientific) that now demands redress. Consequently, there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice (2023: 114).
The intellectual and political foundations of the concept of epistemologies of the South date back to Santos's early work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s. And, while not in the foreground, they are present in his later work on the law, the State and a "new common sense" (1995). What Santos came to call "epistemologies of the South" in the early years of this century emerged, by his own account, despite a deep earlier skepticism about the role of law and the state. His recognition of the possibilities - no, of already existing alternatives - of seeing, living and thinking differently changed with the development of the World Social Forum (in which Santos was a central figure), just as it changed with his work in Europe, but also in Brazil, Colombia, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Bolivia and Ecuador. As Santos listened, observed, and engaged with other ways of knowing, understanding, and acting in relation to human beings and other beings in the world, as he wrote and co-wrote with others a series of books and articles, he crafted and engaged with increasing inclusivity and care with the epistemologies of the South. His work can be considered a kind of political and intellectual performance of commitment to these epistemologies. As Santos expresses in his recent Law and the Epistemologies of the South:
The epistemologies of the South aim to demonstrate that, by not recognizing the validity of other types of knowledge other than those produced by modern science, the dominant criterion of valid knowledge in Western modernity has been responsible for a massive epistemicide, that is, the destruction of an immense variety of ways of knowing that prevail mainly on the other side of the abyssal line in colonial societies and sociability. Such destruction disempowered these societies, making them unable to represent the world as their own, on their own terms, and therefore to consider that the world could be changed by their own power and for their own purposes. In this situation, it is not possible to promote social justice without promoting justice between different types of knowledge (2023: 96).
To pay attention to the rich capacity of the epistemologies of the South is, at the same time, to recognize what Santos calls the abyssal division, or the abyssal lines that mark that division. Is:
...the radical division between forms of metropolitan sociability and forms of colonial sociability that has characterized the modern Western world since the 16th century. This division creates two worlds of domination, the metropolitan and the colonial, which are presented as incommensurable (2023: 98-99).
It signals the imperial designation of the irrevocable and inexorably hierarchical separation of metropolitan societies from colonial societies, creating categories of the human, the less-than-human, the non-human. Continuing with this division, what is valid on the metropolitan side of that abyssal line is not conceivable for the North as valid on the colonial side. There can be no dialogue or equal exchange across that line.
This division was such that the realities and practices existing on the other side of the line, that is, in the colonies, could not question the universality of the theories and practices in force on the metropolitan side of the line. As such, they were made invisible (If God Were a Human Rights Activist, 2015: 2).
To recognize, to see, the work of the abyssal lines - because they are plural and not singular - is to not see or unlearn what was proposed as singularly universal. However, understanding the abyssal line includes the proposition that, however fierce that abyssal division may be, it can be interrupted, scaled, folded in on itself, wrinkled, and crossed. (Much of Santos's work in recent years is concerned precisely of the post-abyssal). By attending to the destructive work of the abyssal line, a "sociology of absences" emerges. That is, a sociology that:
...will be able to elucidate the limits of representation that operate in each situation. In the first situation, in which the alternatives did not occur, these are silences and unpronounceable aspirations; In the second situation, in which the alternatives did occur, they involved silencing, epistemicide and garbage campaigns (2014: 244).
(To this last list could be added what is more recently called "cancel culture", with all the contradictions of that concept and that practice.) The sociology of absences, therefore, can be characterized by addressing what did not happen or could not happen, what was not said or done, or what could not be said or done. It also addresses the silencing of what was said, the denigration of what was understood and thought, the violent reformulation of what happened. This proposal to attend to absences and silences is neither ephemeral nor poetic, although it has its own poetry. Absences and silences "speak" in the language of bodies, the gaps in texts, stories and current practices that gather around specific places and practices. If only we saw and heard them. Santos summarizes a recent book but, I believe, a lifetime of work on the epistemologies of the South. The long intellectual and scientific journey narrated in this book reflects the impact of these vast developing processes and seeks to extract from them a renewed critical and constructive energy (2023: 673). And he advises in a previous work:
...those who fight against domination cannot trust in the light at the end of the tunnel. They must carry with them a portable light, a light which, however wavering or weak, provides sufficient light to recognize the path as their own and avoid fatal disasters. Such is the type of light that the epistemologies of the South aim to generate (2018: ix).
Say: I wish I were a candle in the darkness (Darwish).
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