I had a feeling after writing my comments that I had done more to conceal my point than to reveal it. Thanks for calling me out on it. My point is that Kenn's argument seems to reaffirm the problematic view of Negritudist philosophers and intellectuals regarding progress. Their response to and critique of the technological modernity of Europe was to argue that Africans/blacks are different from Europeans and have been conditioned by geography, culture, and socialization to value and express emotion, intuition, and artistic creativity above reason, verifiability, investigation, science, technology, and other markers of progress valued and posited as universal standards by Europeans. My point is that by positing an alternative African standard of progress, one founded not on science and reason but on artistic and humanistic excellence, this Negritudist notion concedes and surrenders the realm of reason, science, and technology to Europe or Euro-America. Why would one do that when one can narrate Africa and Africans as capable of appreciating and producing scientific/technological knowledge and progress, as in fact a center of scientific and technological progress, even if this technological culture may have some distinctly African flavors? Further, I stated that I prefer the revised Negritudist notion that Africa and Europe are not just separate spheres of progress, separated by the dichotomy of science/technology and arts/humanism, but also zones of complementarity that complement each other, together driving human progress. Technological progress cannot be sustained, the argument goes, without humanistic developments, and qualitative societal progress stagnates when a society relies solely on humanistic and artistic pursuits. I prefer this argument but I also recognize that it, too, is problematic in that it leaves intact the Eurocentric claim that technological and scientific progress defined by European notions of reason is a universal or that it should be. The notion of complementarity does not challenge the hegemony of European technological and scientific modernity. I realize that I have not resolved the problem but I didn't set out to do so. I set out to point out the problem I see with Kenn's argument in response to your query, especially the paragraph you quoted admiringly.
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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
-- On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:27 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tvade3@gmail.com> wrote:
Oga Moses,Your English is really big here.Can you explain, please?toyinOn Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 7:02 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Beautiful words, but for me Kenn's idea in those words comes dangerously close to the highly problematic Negritudist attitude to notions of scientific and technological progress, and their concomitant veneration of alternative cultural and "intuitive" premises of progress, arguments which ultimately serve to unintentionally underscore and reify the equally problematic dichotomous view of progress and lag inherent in the paradigmatic Eurocentric ideas that the Negritudist intellectuals set out to challenge in the first place. I prefer the idea of complementarity, which revisionist rereadings of Negritude, like Messay Kebede's, stress above the idea of a separate cultural baseline of progress for "emotional" African peoples. The idea of complementary, too, has its own blindspots, to be sure, since it does nothing to fundamentally challenge and in fact leaves intact the paradigmatic, universalist claims of Western technicist modernity and the ideas of progress that flow from these claims.
On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 12:22 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tvade3@gmail.com> wrote:i really like this-
...or we can imagine that the notion of progress is totally bound up in cultural values disseminated by dominant structures, and that independence means not only resistance to those structures which privilege the way wealth and power are constructed in the global north, but rethinking the received wisdoms that link notions of progress to scientific rationalism.On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:18 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
or we can imagine that the notion of progress is totally bound up in cultural values disseminated by dominant structures, and that independence means not only resistance to those structures which privilege the way wealth and power are constructed in the global north, but rethinking the received wisdoms that link notions of progress to scientific rationalism.--
CompcrosComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
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CompcrosComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
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