Joshua Myers - Cedric Robinson

The point is that the construction of periods of time is only a sort of catchment for events. Their limited utility, though, is often abused when we turn from the ordering of things, that is chronological sequencings, to the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations. Increments of time contoured to abstract measure rarely match the rhythms of human action. 9

“Significances, meanings, and relations” are deeper than the order of time and are the points of departure that this text will take in thinking with the life of Cedric Robinson. As an intellectual biography, it speaks to and with the larger themes and considerations of his work, while thinking through the contexts that made the work, the moments that made the worker. It is chronological but also thematic. The first few chapters look at the foundation of Cedric’s relations. They are followed by chapters that consider the meanings of his work. And a final chapter considers the significance of it all. This book is imagined as a contribution to the larger constellation of that work, an offering to future workers, an entry into Cedric’s roll of life.

Western time was constructed to do more than serve as a “catchment” for events – it was an attempt to impose order on the rhythms of human action, rather than simply understand them. And, as such, intellectuals operating under these assumptions have maintained the useful fiction that Black Radicalism is at best derivative of western thought or western temporal systems. This is, as Cedric has maintained, an ordering conceit that made liberation from the terms of order unimaginable. But it had been imagined. As a tradition of seeking otherwise than what is assumed to be attainable or even desired – indeed as a tradition that calls into question normative assumptions around what liberation even entails – the Black Radical tradition emanates from thought that is “unthinkable.” 10

What is “thinkable” is that which is reasonable. The meaning of time as “measurable movement” in western civilization is a product of the conceptual architecture of Enlightenment, premised as it was on knowledge as the preserve of Man. 11Though borrowing from such “classical” sources as Aristotle and St Augustine, much of what enters the western intellectual tradition owes its birth to the need to develop a form of measuring time that is ultimately about how patterns of human relationships with the natural environment can be understood. After all, if knowing through reason is a specifically human practice, then any attempt to naturalize humanity would have to also naturalize the environment in which such reasoning occurs. It is through a conception of human nature as naturally occurring that time as mathematical precision is assumed. But none of this is actually natural; it, too, is a conceit. Time’s meaning is not given in nature, it is given in the human understanding of nature. It is a social affair. The attempt to naturalize time is the practice of “temporalizing,” which requires also that human relationships to the past be imagined and narrated. And thus came the emergence of history as a conception for measuring and living with change. 12

In order to understand what made human experiences significant, conceptions of change that had existed prior to the elevation of reason as the foundation of knowing had to be extinguished. Cedric’s work shows how incomplete this transition was, while also revealing that western thought attempted to achieve such a hegemonic disruption by imposing a logic of time, a historiographical tradition that imposed order on imagination, on the fantastic. The result was not only a theory of history but a theory of politics – a theory of reality that rendered the temporal scope of western civilization as the very meaning of what it is to be on and in time. From such distillations, notions of progress, momentum, and potential emanated to mark the physics and state of being. And it was this very arrangement of consciousness that could not incorporate “others” and their various accounts of what it means to live. 13

This conception of time was also spatialized. Beyond the shifting time zones that mark different geographical locations, there also exist presumptions that “time is slower there,” or “time is frozen there,” which describe encounters with those who exist outside of “normal” time. These are, of course, premised upon colonial confrontations that gave birth to time-bound accounts of non-western life that sought to make their notions of life legible by presenting their ways of relating to each other as exotic or primitive. Much of this knowledge enters our consciousness through the domain of the social sciences, fabricated in often naive ways upon the philosophical assumptions of the natural sciences. Western time reads differences and imposes certain arrangements of other times and spaces, not necessarily to produce an account of universality or sameness, but to erect a knowledge useful for containing a threatening otherness. Time constructs a cartography of control. 14

Part of what makes Cedric’s work significant is that it is premised on not only understanding these arrangements but excavating the existence of these other arrangements – or even ways of being against arrangement – that characterize the lived histories of western thought’s assumed others. It is work that covered an array of disciplines and deployed “what Michel Foucault called the ‘counter-sciences,’” but it was not interdisciplinary as much as it was an attempt to think beyond discipline, toward the ways in which the disciplines of knowledge were in fact responsible for establishing order, establishing time. 15Two of Cedric’s collaborators in England, A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, capture the relationship precisely when they write that it was Cedric who asked a “question that scarcely even occurs within the academy.” He questioned how our understandings of social “transformation” and “social justice” change when we acknowledge that the assumed foundations of knowledge of the world found in western thought – history, philosophy, and rhetoric – are themselves “stunted at birth, diminished in their capacities, crammed into spaces too small to contain them?” 16Perhaps an answer lies in Black Study, a practice within Black Studies, a tradition Cedric would acknowledge as a “critique of western civilization.” 17But it was not an internal critique, one that sought to rescue that tradition. For it was not about its improvement as much as it was about “subverting” its particular ways “of realizing ourselves” – those ways practiced not only in the domains of the academy, but tantamount to the nature of western thought itself. 18Such is one conception of Black Study, the practice of denaturalizing western disciplinary knowledges so that knowledges – ways of thinking and being – necessarily obscured by those projects can operate in spaces cleared of this debris. Though it was the original intent in many ways of the Black Studies movement, the existence of this approach to knowledge was never guaranteed, even in those spaces. In that sense, Cedric’s work speaks to the ongoing crisis of Black Studies. 19

In Cedric’s practice of Black Study, we are offered the gift of seeing how those peoples who were excluded from history, and thus excluded from time, found ways to realize themselves. All time is not closure or management, reducible to spatial logics of colonialism and exploitation – all time is not order. As Sojoyner writes, time can be full of life, a shared construct of communal possibility; it is the collapse of the relationship to measurement as heard in the sounds of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler or Tyshawn Sorey and Esperanza Spalding, in the dance and play of Black girls around the diaspora, in the spaces created in the aisles of sanctuaries and the middle of the cipher – in the movements of cycles of life where we relate to each other, in, out, and around each other. 20This is the Black Radical tradition, living beyond the order of time, finding ways to live again.