Preface

This expression, “honor to the work,” is, inimitably and unforgettably, Eusi Kwayana’s. He used it with me once in reference to the work of Small Axe. And for almost two decades now I’ve turned it around and around in my head, gratified not only by its attentiveness and its generosity and the esteem it bestows upon Small Axe but also by the intriguing value it assigns to honor in connection with the intellectual project—the thinking work—we have been engaged in these past twenty-five years within the Small Axe Project. For at first sight, the word honor seems incongruous here, seems to belong to another—perhaps vanished—form of life in which social and personal relations were not so completely instrumentalized, not so reduced to the measure of exchange and the petrified values of the market. Honor seems to call upon a whole other cosmology of virtues. Certainly, Small Axe would not have had the wherewithal to survive all these twenty-five years had we not been able to depend upon the honor of so many supportive participants. Whatever Kwayana meant exactly by saluting Small Axe in this way, the relation he evokes between honor and the work of criticism—or anyway, the work of thinking—merits serious reflection.To begin with, though, who is Eusi Kwayana? Born in 1925 and formerly known, in almost another lifetime, as Sidney King, Kwayana is a legendary figure in the landscape of modern Guyanese politics and culture. This “sage of Buxton,” as he is fondly called, is a Caribbean pathfinder across many domains and many decades. He was a founding member of the radical People’s Progressive Party (PPP), led by Cheddi Jagan. When the party won the first British Guiana elections under adult suffrage in 1953, Kwayana left teaching to take up a cabinet post in the PPP government. Infamously, in an early manifestation of Cold War politics in the region, the British colonial government intervened militarily and suspended the constitution in order, so it claimed, to save the empire from communism.1 Kwayana and others were thrown in jail. He later left the PPP and, in the 1960s, founded ASCRIA, the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa, a Pan-African and cultural-nationalist organization that, at one point, was closely aligned with the People’s National Congress, led by Forbes Burnham. Eventually, in the early 1970s, Kwayana broke with Burnham, and in 1974 he merged ASCRIA with other organizations (the Working People’s Vanguard Party, the Indian Political Revolutionary Associates, and Ratoon) to found the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). Marking Kwayana’s ninety-sixth birthday earlier this year, David Hinds writes, “Any political leader who has trod the political terrain for eight decades cannot escape the perception and reality of miss-steps and mistakes. This is especially true in a society like Guyana where political reality is interpreted through hyper-subjective lenses. Kwayana’s career has attracted its fair share of controversy in a country steeped in controversy. But when all is said and done, he emerges as an embodiment of what is virtuous, uplifting and transformative in political practice.”2 This sounds exactly right to me. I don’t recount Kwayana’s itinerary here to draw a picture of an intellectual-political inconsistency; rather, I want to highlight a profound intellectual honesty, an example of a commitment not to fixed or dogmatic first principles but to precisely the virtues that belong to the universe of honor.I’ve met Eusi Kwayana just once. In 2002, while in Georgetown preparing the groundwork for my interview with Andaiye (which would take place the following year), I was able to sit down with Kwayana at the offices of the WPA. In my usual overenthusiastic zeal, I immediately fell to asking him question after question about his complex intellectual-political journey, the consequential people and places and events, the most challenging moments, and of course the painful experiences. He spoke in his quiet, fluid, reflective way, and I listened. I got the impression of a man not only of vast integrity but also of enormous courage and self-sacrifice, a man who had managed somehow to remain uncorrupted by arrogance, by the vice of vanity. He had made mistakes, clearly, too many perhaps for him to not recognize the elementary virtue of humility and modesty in any political vocation. Suddenly, though, without notice, he got up and left the room—not visibly upset or angry, it seemed to me, but overcome or shaken in some way by the burden of the past he carried. After a short while, he returned, offering gracious apologies, and we resumed the conversation. But the rhythm was broken. It was time for me to go. When the issue of Small Axe devoted to Guyana was published in March 2004, I sent Kwayana a copy.3 He was then living in San Diego with his wife, Tchaiko. I must have emailed him several times seeking his views on the journal issue. Eventually, he sent me a short note with some comments on various aspects of the contributions. But most important, he closed these remarks with that vivid and enigmatic phrase, “Honor to the work.”In his book The Honor of Thinking, Rodolphe Gasché invites us into a discussion about the senses in which the activity of thinking might deserve the title honor.4 What could it mean, he asks, to speak of the distinctive “honor of thinking”? Moreover, channeling Jean-François Lyotard, the subject of two chapters and the inspiration for the book’s project, Gasché asks whether there is a sense in which the honor of thinking is now imperiled, or at least embattled, and stands consequently in need of saving from its adversaries.5 Needless to say, I am not going to offer anything like an account of Gasché’s complex and admirable book; I only want to briefly register some of the ways the book helps illuminate the possible connection between the title of honor and the activity of thinking and ultimately offers us a way to think about what Kwayana might have meant by his appreciative salutation.It is a matter of some interest that Gasché’s book aims to distinguish thinking from three other cognitive-linguistic modes with perhaps more lofty credentials and that might feel more worthy of honor (or if not honor, then at least recognition) than mere thinking—namely, critique, theory, and philosophy. These three cognitive-linguistic modes (by no means identical or reducible to each other, of course) often take themselves to represent higher, more competent, more dependable, more accomplished, and therefore more valuable forms of reason than thinking. They are what thinking proper should strive for. In their various ways these modes purport to be more rigorous, more analytical, and, as a result, more universal. They are more readily given to institutional forms, to pedagogical exercises, to methodology, to the iterative and reiterative administrative demands of disciplinary imperatives. Notably, Gasché is too circumspect (perhaps too honorable) to simply want to condemn philosophy, theory, and critique out of hand. With all due respect to their individual identities, he wants only to diminish somewhat their overbearing pretensions, their relentless will to power, their chronic inability to see much beyond themselves; in so doing, he hopes to release thinking from their authorizing and legitimating dominion.For Gasché, thinking’s honor resides in its modesty and reserve, in its observance of a certain reticence, and in the cultivation of the decorousness and decency that allow it to move in the world, and among others, with a sense of propriety and proportion. By contrast with philosophy, critique, and theory, thinking inhabits a different epistemological and ontological universe. Thinking is more worldly, closer to the ordinary and the everyday, articulated often in an idiom of belonging and identity. Thinking is at once a more embedded and embodied process, drawing its resources as much from experience and from traditions and forms of life as from the abstract figurations of reason. Thinking, therefore, is always-already relational, dialogical, constituted in and through the plurality and difference that is the human condition. And because it is relational in this way, thinking lives in a historical world of asymmetrical powers and institutions and structures, and is obliged to make its reflexive and implicated way among them. Therefore, from this perspective, what is important about thinking is less what thinking is about, the objects to which thinking addresses itself, the concrete topics it takes up, and more the reflexive mode of its engagement, the movement of its journey, the internal integrity of its character, and its fallibilistic openness to revision. What thinking hopes for is not (to paraphrase Wittgenstein) to spare others the “trouble of thinking” but to stimulate them to “thoughts of their own.”6 Considered in this way, thinking is less concerned with such titles as Truth or Authenticity, which seem to foreclose rather than encourage dialogue, and more interested in Honor and Wisdom as signs of its virtue.Those who practice the arts of thinking as opposed to the disciplines of philosophy or critique or theory have a lot to teach us. They are usually good listeners, as I’ve said of Stuart Hall.7 They practice responsiveness as much as engagement, they know how to receive as well as how to give, they know that receiving is itself a kind of giving. This is the universe, I believe, to which Eusi Kwayana’s remark belongs, that universe in which something like honor can be attached to or bestowed upon something like thinking.This year, the twenty-fifth year of Small Axe, has been marked by the relentless assault of COVID-19 and its mutating variants on virtually every area of our lives. Few have been spared its ravaging impact. Many have suffered, sometimes as much from the result of the economic fallout as from infection, especially of course those in underserved communities. The regional Caribbean has been among the worse affected, not surprisingly given the porous structure of these externally driven economies and their relatively weak public health institutions. As a consequence, for many, travel has been restricted, events postponed or cancelled, the round of ordinary life massively disrupted. The pandemic adds to and compounds the catastrophes to which the Caribbean is already susceptible—hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. There is already considerable work that aims to reconsider the way we process and understand these phenomena, work that not only pushes but also transforms the boundaries of our very modes of comprehension. Such work often resembles thinking, as I have sketched it here, more so than the conventional academic disciplines. Honor to that work too.New YorkSeptember 2021

Honor · Internet privacy · Sociology · Work (physics) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Engineering · Mechanical Engineering · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies