Jalin’s Reviews > Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument > Status Update

Edward Said's more in-depth elaboration of Césaires thesis with respect to
Orientalism, the same linkage can also be made several centuries backward to Las Casas s profound challenges to what he called the "slandering" of the indigenous peoples as a function of the legitimating not only of the expropriation of their lands, but also of their expulsion, as "such a large part of God s creation," from human status.

It is this new master code, one that would function at all
levels of the social order -including that of class, gender, sexual orientation, superior/inferior ethnicities, Investor/Breadwinners vs criminalized jobless Poor (Nas's "black and latino faces"), & most totally between the represented-to-be superior/inferior races and cultures -that would function as the status-organizing & integrating principle of US societ

Enslavement here is no longer to Original Sin, or to one's irrational nature. Rather, enslavement is now to the threat of Malthusian overpopulation...

...the law of self regulation that follows logically calls for the state s noninterference with the ostensibly extrahuman regulatory effect of the supposed "law of nature" - a law that also calls for the category of the Poor to be left by themselves, unaided by any measures taken by the state, in order that its members can be weeded out by the "iron laws" of nature

[Katrina / Haiti]

The Argument here redefines Marx s class struggle in the terms of a "politics of being": that is, one waged over what is to be the descriptive statement of the human, about whose master code of symbolic life and death each human order organizes itself.

With the result that as Christian becomes Man (as political subject), then as Man becomes Man (as a bio-economic subject), from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, each of these new descriptive statements will nevertheless remain inscribed within the frame work of a specific secularizing reformulation of that matrix Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative

With this genre of the human being one in the terms of whose biogenetic and economic notions of freedom people of African descent and people who comprise the Poor, jobless, homeless, "underdeveloped" must be sacrificed as a function of our continuing to project our collective authorship of our contemporary order onto the imagined agency of Evolution & Natural Selection & onto the "Invisible Hand" of the "Free Market"

It is in this context that the Negro, the Native, the Colonial ? s,
and postcolonially the "Underdeveloped" or 3rd/4th-Worlds ? can be clearly seen to be the issue of the ongoing production and reproduction of this answer [] our present biocentric ethnoclass genre of the human, of which our present techno-industrial, capitalist mode of production is an indispensable & irreplaceable, but only a proximate function

It can be seen in hindsight that the "space of Otherness" which had been projected both upon the heavens as well as upon organic life, had been a central function of the mechanisms by means of which, as humans, we keep our own authorship and agency opaque to ourselves, in that the respective codes that had been mapped upon them had both played a central analogical status-ordering and thereby system-maintaining role

"...as in the order of knowledge of pre-Newtonian Europe, all knowledge of the astronomy of the universe had had, however technically sophisticated and whatever its predictive power, to remain couched in ethno-astronomical terms, so all pre-Darwinian knowledge of organic life had had to be conceptualized in the terms of a (so to speak) proto- or ethno-biology."